Good For What Ails You!

Most people associate doctors' prescriptions with pharmaceutical concoctions.  But now physicians in a Houston clinic are prescribing, in addition to medications, something else for patients with prehypertension, hypertension, diabetes and prediabetes.

What is the new "wonder drug?"  A one-year membership in Houston BCycle, the city's bike-share program. Thanks to a collaboration between Houston Bicycle, the American Heart Association and Legacy Community Health in the city's Fifth Ward, patients can take a traditional or electric bicycle for 90 minutes at any BCycle location.

Photo by Lucio Vasquez

Those organizations began to work on the collaboration more than two years ago. Then the pandemic struck.  The director of Legacy continued to talk with the AHA and Houston Bicycle and the collaboration, called Bike Rx, finally started in February.  

The collaboration also helps to fulfill a goal articulated by Houston BCycle communications manager Mary De Bauche:  improving transportation options as well as the health and well-being of people in underserved communities.   Most residents of Legacy's Fifth Ward locale are Black or Hispanic, many of whom live below the official poverty level. In such communities, hypertension and diabetes are more common than in more affluent areas, in part because of the limited transportation and recreation options, which compound the stresses of being poor and experiencing racial and ethnic bigotry.

While the "bike prescription" program is, for the moment, available only at Legacy, De Bauche and officials of the other participating organizations hope that it will expand to other sites in the city.

  

Whatever Is In The Water, She Knows More Biking Leads To Healthier Bodies

Flint, Michigan has become synonymous with its water crisis.  It's emblematic of all sorts of racial and economic divides--as well as governmental corruption--in the United States.  The city, once a kind of "mini Detroit," experienced the de-industrialisation--and resulting-- and resulting economic decline-- of the "Motor City" some 110 kilometers (68 miles) to its southeast. 

So, like many other "Rust Belt" cities large and small, its children and young adults have suffered the same kinds of inequities and truncated possiblities experienced by their peers in cities like Camden, New Jersey as well as neighborhoods like Mott Haven in the Bronx and Brownsville in Brooklyn.  One result is poor health outcomes:  Children in those places suffer from all sorts of diseases, including asthma, obesity and diabetes, that were once provinces of their parents and grandparents.  One reason for that is the lack of exercise:  Their parents or caretakers fear, often with justification, letting them stray much beyond their abodes.  Or, the kids may not have access to spaces or even the most rudimentary equipment that would allow them to not only burn off their often-poor diets, but also some of the stress and trauma of growing up in such places.

Also, in such places, young people grow up with little more than a comic-book knowledge of their cultural history. (Disclosure:  Almost all of my knowlege of the histories and cultures of non-white people has been gained through reading, experience and self-study.)  Knowing who one is, and from whom, what and where one came, is the only way to become a subject and not an object--which is to say a decider and not a victim--in one's own, and in the arc of, history. Which is also to say, the only way to claim and reclaim one's identities.  Trust me, I know a thing or two about that!

So does Angela Stamps.  That is why she founded the Kentakee Athletic & Social Clubs while she lived in Los Angeles.  She chose the name, she said, because she wanted to serve the African American community--
"specifically adolecents," she says--"and to teach them about our history prior to the slave trade." During that time, she also became a bike commuter.

Angela Stamps. Photo by Tom Travis, from the East Village Magazine

She returned to Flint, where she was raised, in 2010 to start educational and athletic programs for underserved youth.  Two years later, that purpose led her to start bicycle programs, including the Berston Bicycle Club.  It's so named because participants, aged 10 to 18, meet in the city's Berston Field House, where they discuss everything from bicycle safety to the best foods to eat while riding.  

The club also offers a bicycle and helmet loaner for participants who don't who don't have them.  Berston also has a nine-week program (the next session starts on the 12th), which includes bike safety and maintenance sessions as well as daily bike trips in all directions on the compass.  Participants aim for a goal of 270 miles (about 420 kilometers) and, upon completing the program, get a new bike, helmet and extras.

And, Ms. Stamps hopes, "healthier bodies."  That is not a minor goal in a place like Flint.

From A Eugenicist To A Bicycle Advocate: A School Is Renamed

During the past few years, all sorts of things have happened that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime.  

Here's another:  a middle school named after a bike advocate.

Really.  That school was commemorated yesterday at the ninth annual Bike Palo Alto.  

The school's namesake, Ellen Fletcher, served for many years as a councilwoman in the San Francisco Bay Area city.  Her advocacy is widely credited for making Palo Alto one of the most "welcoming" American cities for cyclists:  She campaigned, successfully, for safer bike paths and bridges in a community where over 40 percent of middle schoolers choose to pedal to school.

Ellen Fletcher, at the dedication of the bike boulevard bearing her name, in 2002.

With a role model like her, how could they not?  She owned a car--a 1964 Plymouth Valiant--but almost never used it.  In fact, she continued riding, both for transportation and recreation,until a year before she succumbed to lung cancer at age 83 in 2012.

Born in Berlin, she lived in a series of Jewish orphanages after her parents divorced. When the Nazis came to power, she and her father were deported because he was a Polish citizen.  They were slated to go to his native land, but was able to get to London through the Kindertransport program.  

A year before she died, she recalled seeing "everyone" biking in England.  She shared the enthusiasm the Brits had for cycling at that time and brought it with her to New York, where she emigrated--at age 17-- in 1946 and enrolled in Hunter College. There, she said, she was "the only one who had a bike on campus" and rode it year-round.

Shortly after graduating, she moved to the Bay Area and continued riding in one of the few areas of the US with a measurable number of adult cyclists.    Almost from the beginning, she was determined to put the bicycle on the radar of policy makers who, as she aptly noted, "were almost exclusively focused on cars." 

One of the early fruits of her labor came in 1982, when Bryant Street opened as the "Bike Boulevard."  It was renamed in her honor two decades later.

Palo Alto Bike, fittingly, followed Ellen Fletcher Bicycle Boulevard.  I don't know which Bryant was honored with the street, but the school renamed for her originally bore the name of Lewis Terman.  While his studies on giftedness and how intelligence influences health outcomes and other kinds of success made real contributions to psychology, his legacy is tainted for his advocacy of eugenics. 

Although there can be no justice for the Holocaust, I think there is some small measure of cosmic recompense in seeing a school named for him renamed for someone who might have fallen victim to beliefs he advocated.  

Conkey Cruisers Determined To Keep Going In Ra-Cha-Cha

I haven't been to Rochester in a while.  Not so long ago, photography (specifically Kodak) was to New York State's third-largest city as the auto industry was to Detroit or bicycle business to Birmingham and St. Etienne.  At one time, banks in Rochester would grant mortgages and loans to people who simply presented a Kodak employee ID.

Kodak, which didn't keep up in the shift from film to digital photography, filed for bankruptcy three and a half years ago.  But the city's decline had begun before that, when other companies and whole industries left.  Now one out of every four residents of "Ra-Cha-Cha", and two out of every five of its young people, live in poverty as it's defined by the US Government.

In such a place, there are people who are desperate enough to steal anything that might be of any monetary value or use.  A bicycle has both. So, a would-be thief who broke into a storage facility where 150 are kept would probably think he'd hit paydirt.

Some of the Conkey Cruisers

That is what happened last week.  The bikes belonged to The Conkey Cruisers.  Theresa Bowick, a registered nurse, started the organization three years ago to help city residents of all ages stay fit.  (Like other cities in which much of the population is poor, obesity, diabetes and other health problems are rampant.)  But her focus became the children--who, she says, "are children I love."  

Theresa Bowick

 She is, therefore, determined to keep the program going.  The Rochester Police Department says it has recovered 25 to 30 of the bicycles, all in pieces.  To Bowick, though, all is not lost: "[O]ur safety coordinator and our program educator decided they are going to use those pieces to teach our participants to put bicycles together."

Donations have come in from the immediate area and beyond.  Still, Bowick says, her program can use donations of bikes, parts, money or moral support.

Bicycling: An Early Ex-Gay Therapy

By now, I'm sure you've heard that Michele Bachmann is not running for re-election.

I'm going to miss her.  After all, how many other people can make Sarah Palin seem--if only momentarily--sane and, at times, relatively coherent?

I mean, it's not just anybody about whom we can say that her assertion that gays can be "cured" is one of the less wacky things she says.  After all, she consulted the most impeccable authority on the subject:  her husband, who runs an "ex-gay clinic".  

Now, why am I mentioning that crazy couple on this blog?

Well, one reason is, of course, that this blog may be the only one in the world written by a onetime boy racer who became a lady rider.  But, in reading about so-called "conversion therapies" intended to make gay people straight, I learned that this sort of thing has been going on for even longer than I'd realized.  As you may know, people have tried to "cure" lesbians and gay men with electroshock treatments, lobotomies, cold baths, physical torture and even attempts to nudge benighted boys and girls to form loving non-sexual relationships with peers of the same gender.

And, for centuries, doctors, athletes and others have claimed that they could "cure" homosexuality through lots of intensive outdoor activity and vigorous exercise.  And, as you know, bicycling falls into both categories. 

So, as you've probably guessed, a physician who was once a respected authority in his field saw bicycling as a way of exorcising same-sex desires.

Graeme M. Hammond was a New York City-based neurologist and competitive fencer.  (He appeared, at age 54, in individual fencing events of the 1912 Olympics.)  Given that he was an athlete of one sort or another for nearly his entire life, it's not surprising that he would think that exercise is "good for what ails ya'."  Nor is it unusual to find that he believed homosexuality to be a neurological disorder, as nearly every physician and scientist who thought about the matter--including Dr. Harry Benjamin--believed the same thing. 

However, what's really interesting about Dr. Hammond's work is the reason why he proposed cycling as a "cure" for homosexuality:  He believed it to be a result of "nervous exhaustion." Cycling, he said, would help to "restore health and heterosexuality" and to cure other nervous conditions.

He also advocated bicycling and other exercise for women because--to his credit--he believed we are the "fighting sex."  The good doctor/fencer thought we would make better soldiers than men 'if only they could "acquire the physical strength and mental discipline" which, he believed, had been denied us through a culture that "mollycoddled" us and promoted "overindulgent lifestyles in regard to diet and exercise."

I like to think he was right about women.  Now, about cycling:  I'm all for just about anything that will get more people to ride bikes.  But now I know one place where I draw the line.  Plus, if you're reading this blog, you have some idea of just how effective cycling is at changing a person's sexual desires--or gender identity!