Tell Them Groucho Sent You

When I was a kid, we thought Rambler was a car old people drove.

Such a conclusion was based on the impeccable powers of observation children have:  Everyone we saw driving a car with the "R" was old enough to be one of our grandparents.  Also, everything about it just seemed like it was meant to be driven by someone who would have fit the demographic of Brezhnev's last Politburo.  The word for it--which I didn't know at the time, because it wasn't used in my blue-collar milieu--was stodgy.

Thus, when the brand died, one could, perhaps, have been forgiven for thinking that its demise came because all of its potential customers had gone to the Great Golf Course In The Sky.

I was just short of eleven years old at the time.  Not only had I seen what we would, in more politically correct times, call "senior citizens" driving Ramblers, I also noticed some cars--also, as often as not, driven by members of the same age group--bearing a brand that wasn't advertised on TV.

Several years earlier, that brand--named for the first known European to cross the Mississippi River--crossed the Rubicon, or the River Styx, or whatever body of water separates us from The End.  I am referring, of course, to De Soto.

Now, I don't recall the passing of De Soto--the car or the explorer (in spite of what some of my students might have you believe!).  The brand died around the time I was passing through a "terrible" age.  Aside from seeing  some of their cars--which, by the time of Rambler's end, were about a decade old--the only other reference I saw to the brand was in re-runs of You Bet Your Life.  The popular game show's host would urge viewers to go to their nearest De Soto dealers and tell them "Groucho sent you."   

Hmm...If you did utter that magic phrase, did you get a free duck on your dashboard?

Or, perhaps, if you bought one of their cars, you'd get this as a bonus:

I tried to find information on De Soto bicycles.  I don't know whether they were made by any company connected with the automobiles.   It wouldn't surprise me if they were, or at least if someone in the auto company had a hand in designing them.  After all, you can see some of the same "aerodynamic" features--which, on both the bike and the car, were probably more design flourishes than engineering innovations.  And, at the time of the ad (probably the 1950s), bicycle makers marketed their wares to appeal to the fantasies children--boys, mainly--had about the cars they would drive when they were of age.

From what little information I can find, I think I can safely assume that the De Soto bicycles of that time have no more relation to today's De Soto adult tricycles than the bikes today sold as "Motobecane", "Windsor", "Mercier" and "Dawes" have to the classic marques of the Bike Boom and earlier.  

Now They'll Know I Rode To Work Today!

Many, many years ago, I attended Catholic school.  Like my classmates, I went to confession every Friday and mass on Sunday. 

You weren't supposed to receive Holy Communion unless you'd confessed your sins.  Of course, that meant just about all of us who went to the Catholic school partook of that most important (by the Church's reckoning, anyway) sacrament. I always wanted to ask how God saw whatever sins you might've committed between the time you went to confession and mass.

Not that I was so worried about receiving communion.  After all, how many kids look forward to having  flat, flavorless wafers put in their mouths and having to kneel, with eyes shut, and pray (or pretend to, anyway) silently as long as those wafers are in their mouths?  Most kids probably wonder--as I did--why the wafer couldn't at least taste like chocolate or something?

Then there was something else we received from the church, if once a year:  ashes.  I know that having charcoal or whatever rubbed on your forehead is supposed to symbolize that to which we return, or some such thing.  On Ash Wednesday, we were all supposed to be so marked.  The nuns treated us juuust a little better (they were nuns, after all!) if we were. 

Some people--usually old (or, at least, they seemed that way to us)--used to walk a little prouder--or, perhaps, just a little more smugly--with the smudges on their foreheads in full view.  It was as if they had to show the world--God?--that they were indeed devout Catholics.  Because they were older, I used to wonder whether that mark would help them if they fell down dead.  Would God recognize them that much sooner and whisk them into their eternal reward?

I got to thinking about this, oddly, because today is Ride Your Bike To Work Day. Now, those of us who normally ride to work don't give it a second thought.  About the only thing I did differently was to stop at the Transportation Alternatives table on the Bronx side of the Willis Avenue Bridge for their free coffee (which was pretty good, actually) and Kind bars. (I like the Blueberry Almond and Honey Oat!)  And, oh yeah, to renew my membership.

Since I normally ride to work and my co-workers and friends know it, I don't feel the need to show it.  But I got to thinking about how I might show off my concern for the environment and all of those other things that commuting by bike are supposed to signify, if I were so inclined.

Here's one way:

 

Spinning Your Wheels To Make A Wheel

Two and a half years ago, I wrote a post about a bicycle wheel that looked as if it could have been drawn with a Spirograph set.

 

If you're of my generation, you might have had one.  It consisted of toothed wheels and bars used to draw various kinds of roulette curves.  The drawings that came out of it looked like some "dream catchers", wind chimes, stained-glass windows--and, yes, bicycle wheels--you've seen.

I don't remember whether I (or my brothers and I) got the Spirograph or the Etch-a-Sketch first.  But, for a time, we had both--that is, until the screen broke on the Etch-a-Sketch. (I still miss it sometimes!) I don't know what happened to the Spirograph set, but as I recall, we had it for a long time.  If memory serves, my brothers were still using it when I went away to college.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, not only some bicycles and wheels, but various accessories and art installations made from them, look like they could have been drawn with one of my favorite toys.

Here is another:

The Wheelie Bar

The eve of the 1970s North American Bike Boom was, interestingly, the heyday of "muscle" cars and "chopper" races.  So, it's no surprise that bicycles were made to evoke, in every way possible, the roaring engines and screeching tires of Daytona, Indy, LeMans and other motorized races.

The best-known of those bicycles were probably the Schwinn "Krate" series and Raleigh "Chopper".  Sometimes I think the latter name referred to what happened to bones when we attempted some of the stunts we saw on "Wide World of Sports".

Whatever our skill (or stupidity) levels, we all could do "wheelies".  We didn't need "training wheels", as we derisively called this item:

Today, After Sunset

Time was when urban parks were places where old people sat on benches and, perhaps, fed squirrels or pigeons or watched grandchildren run, jump, climb and swing.  

At least, my earliest memories of a park--specifically, Sunset Park in Brooklyn--are like that.  Yes, my grandparents were the "old" people on the benches, though I now realize that my grandmother, then, was younger than I am now.  Sometimes I was one of the grandchildren in the scene I described; other times, I was sitting between my grandmother and grandfather, or in the lap of one of them.

Sunset Park covers a hill that rises from the surrounding neighborhood that shares its name.  Standing in that park, even on the murkiest of days, we had a better-than-postcard panaromic view of the steel and cobalt water, the gray tanks and white ship hulls that--as I could not know at the time--would soon start turning to rust, and the stone loft buildings and concrete piers where some of my relatives worked. Neither they, it seemed, nor I nor anyone else could see the gray bubbles dissolving or the cracks between them, whether they were bathed in sun or swept by shadows.

It occured to me today, as I rode along the Brooklyn waterfront, that if I had followed one of those shadows, one of those rays of the sun or the wing of one of the pigeons that often alighted from the park, I would have ended up at the water, in a spot not far from this:

The park, between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, brackets a neighborhood called DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass).  Nobody called it that when my grandparents and I spent afternoons in Sunset Park; in fact, nobody (at least in my milieu) ever imagined spending time there except to work.  People didn't live, or even make art, in lofts back then--even if those lofts had the best views of the harbor and the Manhattan skyline.

In fact, the waterfront itself was a place to which someone went only if he worked there.  And, yes, almost anyone who worked there--including the relatives I mentioned--was male.  A woman by the waterfront was questionable or worse according to all of those unwritten, unspoken rules we learned; no responsible adult brought a child--his or her own, or anyone else's--to the river, to the harbor, to the bay.

Back then, you looked at the waters of New York Bay and the Hudson River only from a place like Sunset Park, high on a hill.   You certainly didn't ride a bike to, or along, the waterfront.  Actually, if you were an adult--especially an older one who sat on park benches and fed pigeons and squirrels--you probably didn't ride a bike.

Today I rode along the river and the bay, under the bridges and past piers that stand, and have long since been swept away.  I would not change anything about the ride or the park or the waterfront, any more than I would change the park where I spent those afternoons with my grandparents.  The funny thing is that, even at my rather advanced age, the hill doesn't seem as steep as it did then.  And the water--like the park--seems so much closer.

Nonpareil: Nothing Like It, Ever

For many years, my favorite candy was the chocolate nonpareil.  During my childhood, they usually came on waxed-paper sheets.  I think part of the appeal (pun intended) of the nonpareil was peeling it off the sheet.  It was sort of like pulling a button off a shirt.

I haven't eaten those candies in years.  Now I see they're sold in little bags for about five dollars.  I'd probably like them if they were made from really good dark chocolate, which would be a nice counterpoint to the sugar pearls that coat them.

(I've often wondered whether I'd like some of my other favorites from childhood--like Nestle's Crunch and Kit Kat--if they were made with high-quality dark chocolate. The dark-chocolate Kit Kat that's sometimes sold in the US seems to be just a Hershey bittersweet bar with wafers in it.)

Back when my grandmother was bringing those sheets of nonpareils, I didn't know any French.  Later, I'd learn that "nonpareil" means "without parallel"--or, if you like, "There's nothing like it", which is how I probably described my favorite candy at one time or another.

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that this is also called "nonpareil":

 

The Classic Cycle website describes it as "the missing link in the evolution of the bicycle".  Apparently, it was built around 1890, after bike makers moved away from the "hobby horse" design and had been making "penny farthings" (high-wheelers) for a decade or so.  

The Nonpareil seems to have been one of the first bikes with wheels of equal size.  Most likely, it's also one of the first chain-driven bikes.  I must say, though, there's nothing remotely like its chain on modern bikes:

 

For that matter, there's nothing like that frame, either.  Given that everything that's been done (in bike design, anyway) gets done again,  I have to wonder whether someone's designing a frame with a single tube that slopes from the front to the rear stays.  It eliminates the top or down tube, depending on how you look at it.  Can you imagine how much weight that saves?  I'd bet that, rendered in carbon fiber, such a frame could be built into a complete bike that weighs less than 5 kilograms.

Of course, unless the UCI changes its rules, no racer could use such a bike in competition.  But someone would want it anyway just because it's, well, nonpareil.

 

P.S.  I'd love to find the oil lamp that fit on the fork.  There's definitely nothing like it made today! 

Riding The Flag

Today is Flag Day here in the US.

There has been no shortage of bike accessories--and whole bikes--with the Stars and Stripes in their design.  Too many are, quite frankly, garish or simply corny.  However, there is one that, I must admit, makes me a little sentimental.

 

Many of us had American flag bells on our bikes as kids.  Somehow a Schwinn cruiser or lowrider from a certain era doesn't seem complete without one.  I'm not sure that the Chicago bike-maker's vast line of accessories ever included such a bell, though.  All of the Schwinn (actually, Schwinn-Approved) bells I ever saw had the company's seal on them.

I'll admit that I rather like this handlebar bag:

 

Now, it's not the sort of thing you'd use on an Audax or Brevet, let alone a cross-continental tour.  But it could be fun to have on a town or shopping bike.  Plus, if it's handmade and sold on Etsy, it can't be all bad, right?

The Fourth of July--US Independence Day--features parades that almost invariably include bicycles decorated with the colors of Old Glory.  Many are tacky or simply silly.  However, I've seen a few that use the red, white and blue in interesting ways.  Here is one:

From Or So She Says

Of course, I'm not going to ride those wheels on my next century.  Then again, I wouldn't ride this wheel, either:

 

 unless, of course, I could ride it with one of these tires: ;-)

 

Not Lost, Only Moved

In previous posts, I've said that I've never regretted going on a bike ride.  I've also said that I never felt worse after a ride than I did when I started it.  Oh, I've felt tired, in pain and had other physical maladies. But they all healed, probably because riding my bike relieves me, at least for a time, of mental and emotional stresses.

Although I've never wished I hadn't gone on a ride or felt less happy than I was before I took the ride, that's not to say that I don't experience things that make me sad.  I've gone to favorite cafes, bookstores and even bike shops, only to find they'd closed. I've also ridden to some place or another only to find that a lovely, or simply tranquil, piece of land has been turned into a shopping mall or tract housing, or that some other place has been changed beyond recognition.

Of course, some changes--like the closure of a deli or restaurant--are inevitable.  Actually, in the grand scheme of things, change is the only thing you can count on.  As Lao Tsu wrote, "Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes.  Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow."

Well, while riding late this afternoon, I saw a change that I simply can't resist.  It's something that's been done, and there's no turning back.  So, according to Lao, I won't create sorrow.  But I'm feeling some now.

That change involves something that was as important to my childhood as the places in which we lived.  I was pedaling up and down residential streets in Queens and Brooklyn, in and out of neighborhoods where hipsters and Hasidim and Hispanics--and people with all sorts of other identities--live.  I skirted the edges of the neighborhoods--Borough Park and Bensonhurst--in which I grew up.  I found myself on Ditmas Avenue, at East Fourth Street, where I saw this:

If you've been in that part of Brooklyn, you might think it looks like any number of catering or event halls.  As a matter of fact, that's what that building was--before I entered it.  Long before I entered it, in fact.  

By the time my family moved to Dahill Road, about half a dozen blocks away, that building had become a place where I would spend almost as much time as I spent in the house or in school.  In fact, during the summer, I would spend hours there that, during the rest of the year, I would have passed in school.

It was the Kensington Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.  Everyone knew how much I loved to read, but in my family (immediate and extended) there weren't many books nor much money for them.  (Also, I think that the strains of blue-collar jobs and child-rearing didn't leave my parents, or other adults in our circle, with much energy for reading, to themselves or with kids.)  But that library, it seemed, had an endless supply.  And the librarians were happy to see a kid whose reading didn't consist only of school assignments.

Plus, going to the library was one thing neither my mother nor anyone else questioned.  If I wanted to go anywhere else, I had to say what I planned to do there, who would be there and who would go with me.  When I went to the library, she said only, "Just be home for supper."

Usually, I would take a few books--story or poetry collections, histories or books about exotic and faraway places--and browse them at one of the tables.  Most days, I succeeded in getting a seat at the table by the center window:

Now, from that window, one could see only up and down Ditmas Avenue, East Fourth Street and a few nearby streets--and over the rows of houses.  But I could see far enough that all of those things eventually faded into a scrim of cirrus clouds, a wall of rain or a vista of twilight.  The world opened out in front of that window, just as world opened with the books I took from the shelves of the Kensington Branch.

Seeing it closed, I feared the worst, since the library budget seems not to have increased since the days when I was using that branch.  But, in riding along, I found out that the Kensington Branch had merely moved to another location, about the same distance--though in another direction--from the house in which I lived.  In other words, I could have walked there just as easily.  And my mother probably would have told me just to remember to be home in time for supper.

The World's Fastest Bicycle

At this time of year, it's hard not to think about children, whether or not we have any of our own.  After all, we were all kids once, and most of us have memories--for better or worse, or both--of this time of year.

For some of us, those memories might involve a bicycle, specifically finding one under the tree.  "The Retrogrouch" wrote a nice post about that last week.  I responded with a comment about the time I got a Royce-Union three-speed bike when I was seven years old.  The bike was much too big for me; I wouldn't be able to ride it for another couple of years.  That bike also holds a special memory because it was the last gift my grandfather gave me.  In fact, that Christmas was the last day I spent time with him:  He died the following March.

But whatever the circumstances, I think any bicycle found under a tree on Christmas morning always holds a special place in a kid's heart, even long after he or she is no longer a kid.  Even if it's made from gaspipes, nothing can be prettier or shinier or faster than that bike left by "Santa"; if we can't ride our new steeds that day, nothing seems more worth the wait, whether for snow to melt or, in my case, to grow into the bike.



I think children's author Ken Nesbitt captured that feeling nicely in his poem, "The World's Fastest Bicycle."

My bicycle's the fastest
that the world has ever seen;
it has supersonic engines
and a flame-retardant sheen.

My bicycle will travel
a gazillion miles an hour --
it has rockets on the handlebars
for supplemental power.

The pedals both are jet-propelled
to help you pedal faster,
and the shifter is equipped
with an electric turbo-blaster.

The fender has a parachute
in case you need to brake.
Yes, my bike is undeniably
the fastest one they make.

My bicycle's incredible!
I love the way it feels,
and I'll like it even more
when Dad removes the training wheels.

(From The Aliens Have Landed At Our School. a book of children's poems by Ken Nesbitt)

Fifty Years, And Still No Bike Lane

"Are we there yet?"

Just about every kid who's ever gone anywhere with an adult has whined that line.  I include yours truly.

"Is it done yet?"

Just about every kid has moaned that one when his or her mother or grandmother (or the equivalent in the kid's life) was cooking or baking something.  As adults, we intone it when we're waiting for a repair, a project, or something else to be finished.

(Asking that question is also the easiest way to annoy an artist--or to reveal yourself as a philistine to the artist.)

The first time I uttered the question the way an adult would was in my childhood. (Was I a precocious child?)  In my early years, I witnessed the building  of what I still consider to be one of the most beautiful--and exasperating-- manmade structures in the world.  

It opened to the public fifty years ago today.  By now, you might have figured out that I'm talking about a bridge. I am:  specifically, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, which opened to traffic fifty years ago today.

The span, photographed by the Wurts Brothers when it opened fifty years ago today.  (From the collection of the Museum of the City of New York,)

At the time it opened, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. It's still in the top ten, I think.  It's so long that engineers actually had to take the curvature of the Earth into account in designing it.

Please indulge me for a moment if I sound like a sexist male.  (Some things aren't cured even with years of hormone therapy and surgery!)  I have long thought its towers looked like long, elegant goddesses rising from the waves of the inlet of the Atlantic Ocean for which the bridge is named.  The lady is serene on days when sunshine refracted through high cirrus clouds glints on waves; she is looks dramatic, even stern, but still beautiful as clouds gather and storms brew in those waves.

All right:  Some of you are might think I'm more guilty of bad poetry than sexism in that passage. Fair enough. My talents, such as they are, can only accomplish so much.

Anyway, I have pedaled (and, on occasion, walked) under the bridge any number of times and have never grown jaded to its majesty.  Monsieur Verrazano (He was Fiorentino but sailed for le Roi Francois I.) would be honored to have the bridge, and the body of water it spans, named for him.  But the fact that I'm always pedaling underneath the bridge is precisely what exasperates me about it.

You see, the bridge has never had a bike or pedestrian lane.  In a way, it's not surprising, given that the bridge was the last major work of Robert Moses, whose mistakes have been replicated by urban planners all over the world for decades.  Through most of his career, he showed a complete disdain for anything that didn't have an internal combustion engine.  It's especially odd when you consider that he built the Kissena Velodrome near the World's Fair site just a few thousand pedal spins from my apartment--and that he himself never had a driver's license. 

There has been a movement (in which I am playing a small role) to have a bicycle-pedestrian lane added to the bridge.  Many people say it would encourage them to use their bicycles to commute or simply travel between Brooklyn and Staten Island, and would link a number of already-existing bike routes in the two boroughs, which in turn would make parts of New Jersey more accessible to cyclists in the Big Apple.

I would like to have the same thrill I knew as a child when I saw the bridge under construction.  I would also like to experience the same thrill I had when I rode across the bridge the only times it was possible:  during the Five Boro Bike Tour, when the lower deck of the Verrazano is closed to traffic. 

Note:  The "Verrazano Narrows Bridge" link in my seventh  paragraph will take you to an excellent article on The Bowery Boys, one of my favorite non-bike blogs.

Cycling To School

Yesterday I wrote about a sight I saw on my way to school.  To work, actually, but since I was teaching, I guess I could say I was going to school on my bike.

Which is kind of ironic, in a way.  You see, when I was going to school--at least, in the way most people think of it--I didn't ride my bike there.  

From Department of Transport  (UK)

All through my years in elementary school, and into junior high, I lived in Brooklyn.  I was never more than four blocks, or about a third of a kilometer, from any school I attended.  The same was true for just about every one of my peers.  So, nearly all of us walked; a few--believe it or not--were driven.  There weren't any bike racks or other storage facilities where I learned (well, where someone tried to teach me, anyway) reading, writing, 'ritmetic and religion.  

In those days, one almost never saw bikes parked on the street:  When any of us rode, we brought our wheels into the park or into our homes (actually, the basements of our houses or apartment buildings). If we went into a candy store, we propped our bikes by the store; I don't recall anyone's bike being stolen.  (Yes, that was in Brooklyn!)

Even after we moved to New Jersey, we never had to travel far to sit in classes in which I daydreamed about being a girl while my male classmates were thinking about girls.  Maybe a few other kids rode bikes; you knew they were freshmen or sophomores because when they became juniors, they got their drivers' permits and didn't touch their bikes again.

So, I grew up thinking that all of the kids who rode their bikes to school were fresh-scrubbed, blue-eyed Midwesterners  (or, perhaps, Southerners) with blonde pigtails or crewcuts.  Of course, they all rode Schwinns that they got for their birthdays or Christmas and, even when after their bikes were passed on to younger siblings, they looked like they just came out of the showroom.

I didn't pedal to class until I was in college.   Even if I had a driver's license, I couldn't have driven:  Underclassmen weren't allowed to bring cars on campus.  That didn't matter, really, because if I took a class on the other side of town, or the river, I could get there faster than the students who took the campus buses.  And, most of the other things I needed were within easy walking or cycling distance.