In the middle of the journey of my life, I am--as always--a woman on a bike. Although I do not know where this road will lead, the way is not lost, for I have arrived here. And I am on my bicycle, again.
During my childhood, it seemed that every bike manufacturer was trying to appeal to boys' fantasies of driving "muscle" cars down endless stretches of highway. Examples include Schwinn's "Krate" line,and Raleigh's "Chopper." I was reminded of those bikes when I came across this:
Keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel!
When I first became a dedicated cyclist, during my teen years, I started to follow bicycle racing. In those days, before the Internet and 24-hour news cycles, it was much more difficult to do. There was little or no coverage in any of the mainstream media. Bicycling! ran stories about the Tour, the Giro and some of the classics, but that came out only once a month. You pretty much had to go to a large city to find a place like Hotaling's, where I used to find French, British and other European publications. During my rides, I would sometimes imagine myself in the peloton with Eddy Mercx or Bernard Hinault. I wondered, then, if I would have been like them--or one of their competitors--had I grown up in Brittany or Flanders or Tuscany and pedaled in the midget and youth races in the days when I was playing Babe Ruth League baseball (and high-school soccer) in New Jersey. What I would have done to ride in a Strider race! This one was just held in Fort Worth, Texas. It's part of a series of Strider races that will culminate in a Strider World Championship on 21-22 July, in Salt Lake City. I mean, really, how can you not love it? Strider, the sponsor of these races, is the leading brand of so-called "balance bikes", which have no pedals--or training wheels. Proponents of this type of bike claim that the most important skill in cycling is balance, and a kid learns it more quickly than on a bike with training wheels. Moreover, their advocates argue, because balance bikes don't have pedals, chains or sprockets, they are free of the sharp surfaces that can hurt a kid or simply snag his or her pants. If I had a kid, I don't know whether I'd choose a balance bike or training wheels. Well, maybe after watching Strider races, I might be swayed!
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.
When I was a kid, you rode a bicycle because you weren't old enough to drive a car--or a motorcycle.
Back then, it seemed that every bike maker (at least here in the US) was trying to appeal to pre-teen boys' visions of themselves astride a "Hog" or "Busa". That is why bikes came with "ape hangers", "sissy" bars, "banana" seats and stick-shifters located on the exact spot of the bike where it was most likely to impede said boys' future chances of creating a future market for Schwinn Sting-Rays and Raliegh Choppers.
But, boys being boys (I know; I was one once!), they not only wanted their bikes to look like junior motorcycles; they wanted their low-slung wheels to sound like what the "big boys" were riding.
So they'd clip a playing card onto a seat stay or chain stay so that it would catch in the spokes. Actually, they wouldn't clip a card: They'd usually attach two or three, though I saw kids who'd clip as many as they could fit on the bike. The louder the better, right?
Well, one can only attach so many cards to a bike. Apparently, some would-be inventor noticed as much and came up with the idea of amplifying the sound with a "Turbospoke":
If I had a child, I'd rather give him or her a Turbospoke rather than an electronic gadget. For one thing, it might get him or her to ride more. And it's way less expensive!
Because I've spent a lot of time teaching, I often think of how something I see might work as a prompt to students' thinking and writing.
Because I write, I often caption or narrate, in my mind, things i see.
I could see the possibilities of both in this photo, which I took--where else?--at Point Lookout:
Even though I saw the kids who left the bikes, I still think that one could construct all sorts of captions, or even stories, for this one. If you have any, I'd love to post it.
They were popular with pre-teens during the 1960's and 1970's. The bikes that were equipped with banana seats seemed to be designed for one of two purposes: doing "wheelies", or emulating motorcycles or race cars. During the banana seat's heyday, every American bicycle manufacturer offered at least one model equipped with it. Some, like the ones found on Schwinn's Sting Ray series, sported racing stripes, while other bikes--particularly those made for girls--were adorned with colorful, and even wild, flower prints. And, of course the Raleigh Chopper was a "banana" bike. More than one reason has been given for their disappearance during the 1980's. Some attribute their decline to the rise in BMX bikes. Doing wheelies had become "old hat", so kids wanted to do more original, sophisticated and riskier maneuvers. They found that the tighter geometry and lighter weight--along with the smaller seats--of BMX bikes made their stunts easier, or even possible. What a lot of people forget, though, is that the Consumer Products Safety Commission set its inspectors loose on various products (and lawyers on the companies that made those products). They took the accidents and product failures that resulted from the most unlikely or egregious examples of misuse to rationalize removing those products from the market, or forcing redesigns of them. In one of the silliest examples of mandated change, the CPSC said that Campagnolo "umbrella" pump clamps could no longer be sold in the US unless the "umbrella" cutout was closed or narrowed. Apparently, someone got his finger caught in one. I never heard about how he managed to do that. So, the importer began to retrofit the clips with a ring inside the "rose window". And so it was with banana seats. As I understand, the CPSC forced them off the market because the rear braces failed on some of them. The CPSC claimed that the design was inherently unsafe. I'm no engineer, but I would expect the braces to be structurally sound, as long they aren't made of substandard materials and the attaching hardware is properly attached. The real problem, I think, is two or more kids often rode on one seat. Even if the braces are strong enough to carry their weight, I would think they would still incur extra stress as a result of the extra twisting and swaying that would result from having two kids on the seat. Some kids may have wrecked their banana seats due to carelessness or from doing one too many wheelies or other stunts on their bikes. However, I don't think very many of them could have done so. Plus, kids on BMX bikes are performing even more stressful (to their bikes) stunts than we did back in the day on seats that make most track saddles seem plush, perched atop skinny seat posts. Lately I've seen a fair number of banana seats for sale. Some are vintage; others seem to be reproductions. I imagine that the latter are made in China or some other foreign country. But I wonder how retailers are able to sell them in the US. The CPSC still exists; I wonder whether it has relaxed or otherwise changed its policies on bicycle parts.
