An Apple Core, a Toilet: Misadventures of a 1970s Childhood (8 page)

The 1970s was the Evel Knievel era, you see.

Knievel became famous jumping his motorcycle over cars and buses — and, by revving his throttle hard and lifting his front wheel off the ground, riding “wheelies.” Every kid with a bicycle sought to emulate him.

We built ramps from scraps of warped plywood set on uneven blocks. We took our bikes to the top of Marilynn Drive — so steep it might as well have been a cliff — and roared downhill, made a hard left onto Janet Drive, then pedaled like mad until liftoff.

There was always an adrenalin surge as your front wheel crossed the lip of the plywood board. It was a grand feeling — your bike pushing upward and floating through the air 20 or 30 feet before your back wheel hit the hard pavement, frequently causing a tremendous crash, which involved scraping metal, bones and skin, and subsequent moaning.

Our parents didn’t make us wear helmets or pads then. The average kid was covered with more scrapes and bruises than an NFL player. When a landing went totally wrong — when a kid went down especially hard and wouldn’t get up — his mom was alerted, a wood-paneled station wagon would arrive and the moaning kid would be carted off to St. Clair Hospital for stitches or a cast.

Despite the risk, our love affair with our spider bikes was common to every kid in every community across America during those years.

There were three reasons.

First, we were surrounded by wide-open roads and a county park — we had plenty of places to ride.

Second, parents weren’t yet terrified to let their kids out of their sight — this was before 24-hour cable news reports began scaring the bejesus out of them. We were permitted to go on long bike hikes, so long as we were home by supper. (Though we
always
rode miles farther than we told our moms we were going to.)

Third, as the post-World War II economy continued to blossom, our parents had just enough excess dough to buy us bikes — something their parents could never afford to do for them.

And none of us had any idea how lucky we were to have bikes.

***
 

From its inception in the 1800s, the bicycle had been produced mostly for adults. In the 1900s, the bike offered an inexpensive way for working-class folks, living in urban areas, to get to and from work. Bike sales were brisk in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

But as America prospered — as the automobile became the chief mode of travel — bike sales plummeted. Sales wouldn’t begin to grow again until millions of baby boomer kids, living in wide-open suburbs, drove up demand.

Schwinn was the first bike maker to tap the youth market.

In the 1950s, the standard bike had been the cruiser design, a gargantuan fender-covered machine built exclusively for adults. There was only one speed (slow) and you stopped the bike by reversing the pedals and pressing down hard.

In 1962, however, Schwinn designer Al Fritz had an idea. He’d heard about a new youth trend centered in California: retrofitting bicycles with drag-racing motorcycle accoutrements. “Choppers” — custom motorcycles with long handlebars — were all the rage. Fritz introduced chopper elements into his new design.

The Schwinn Stingray was born.

It had smaller, 20-inch tires — with flat racing treads — and high handlebars and a banana seat. Sales were initially disappointing — parents didn’t want their children riding such an odd looking bike — but as the Stingray began making its way into America’s neighborhoods, every kid had to have one.

And every bike manufacturer began manufacturing bikes just like it — a style we referred to as the “spider” bike.

***

I got my first spider bike for Christmas in 1970 when I was 8 years old. It was a red Murray one-speed with chrome fenders and a black banana seat.

I rode that bike hard from the start — I rode it all day every day during the summer — and in a few years, it was scratched and dented and wobbly.

As Christmas 1972 approached, I dreamed of the bike every kid dreamed of in the early ‘70s: the Schwinn Orange Krate, the greatest bike in the history of kid-dom.

The Orange Krate was painted bright neon orange. It had a fat white-letter rear tire and a small front tire with a real, working shock absorber. It had five gears — a big stick shift — and dual handbrakes.

Such a bike sold for $95 when it was introduced in 1968, but there was no way my family could afford one on a single income. That would be the equivalent of $530 today!

Still, I was plenty blessed on Christmas morning. I got a neon green Huffy spider bike, a color that made it one of the cooler bikes in my neighborhood. And for my birthday the following spring, my godmother Shirley gave me an incredible gift: a speedometer!

It wasn’t one of the cheap ones you bolted onto the fork next to the wheel. No, this one bolted onto the handlebars. It had a real display that measured both mileage and speed. I spent hours seeing how fast I could get the bike to go (I hit 34 mph one day while pedaling like mad down a long hill in the county park). I spent hours more trying to rack up miles, because mileage equaled prestige.

Though my lust for racking up mileage would be my undoing.

***

One beautiful summer day, my older sister Kris and her best friend Debbie wanted to go on a bike hike to the county park. Their goal was to meet boys, no doubt, but they needed both my bikes to do it.

Being the more clever sex — they knew I’d never part with my beloved neon-green Huffy with the real, working speedometer just so they could go meet boys — they exploited my chief weakness.

“We plan to go for a long ride and we’ll surely rack up a lot of mileage on your speedometer,” said Kris.

I started licking my chops. No sane kid would lend his most prized possession to his sister. But then again, I had 80 some miles on my odometer. I dreamt of hitting the 100 mile mark. I could see the numbers turning over in my mind — see the look of marvel on so many kids’ faces who saw three full digits of mileage on my speedometer’s display.

I lent them both bikes.

As they pedaled down Horning Road they quickly got bored. They turned around and rode to Murphy Mart, the Wal-Mart of its time, instead. They parked the bikes outside the store. They parked my neon-green Huffy with the incredible speedometer WITHOUT LOCKING EITHER!

Even in the “good old days” of the ‘70s there was crime, and so it was that, while Kris and her friend were inside the store, some dirty rotten slimy kid stole my bike.

I was heartsick for weeks. My parents felt bad for me, but there was no way we could afford another new bike.

My father kept a close watch over the want ads though and one day, in the Pennysaver classifieds, there it was: a two-year old Murray five-speed spider bike with dual hand brakes for 25 bucks!

My father made arrangements one night and met the family that was selling it. Aside from the stick shift being broken — the shifter had been snapped in half and moving the shifter up and down was tough on the hand — it was in perfect shape.

My dad brought it home on a Monday night. It was dark, and I wasn’t permitted to ride it, but he rolled it into the garage where we could examine it. It was gold-colored with chrome fenders and a nice fat racing slick on the rear wheel. It wasn’t a Schwinn Orange Krate, but it was a far nicer bike than I ever expected to own.

I nearly fell asleep next to it in the garage before my mother finally made to go to bed — and could barely sleep as I dreamt of shifting seamlessly from first to fifth and back again as I coasted along the back roads in our county park.

The next morning, I looked at it in the bright sun and still couldn’t believe my good fortune. I was just about to jump on the bike and take it for a spin when my mother stopped me and made me head off to school.

It would prove to be the longest, most restless day of my life.

All I could think about was my bike — about roaring around under God’s great open spaces with dual handbrakes and five speeds. I’d pop it into first gear and roar up the steepest hills with ease. Once at the top, I’d pop it into fifth gear and roar down the hill as fast as lightning.

I didn’t know yet that the fifth gear would give me a speed advantage over all the other kids on my block.

I didn’t know that I’d soon break the record for the longest bike jump in our neighborhood, but break it I would.

***
 

At first, I babied my five-speed Murray spider bike. I polished it every day. I rode it slowly and carefully. The last thing I wanted to do with it, initially, was jump it off a rickety wooden ramp.

I sat by idly while watching a dozen or more other kids attempt to jump their bikes on the ramp we’d built on Janet Drive. Kids came from all over to try out our ramp — they came on every kind of bike.

The kids whose parents had more money over in Georgetown mostly rode Schwinns and other expensive bikes and I marveled at how the shock absorber on the front of Mike Landy’s Orange Krate absorbed the energy as his bike landed on the hard pavement.

Most kids showed up riding the lower-cost Huffy and Murray brands, most of them of the single-speed variety. They pedaled as hard as they could but never could attain a speed great enough to give them a high liftoff. Rather than floating through the air after they hit the ramp, gravity pulled down their front tires as soon as they passed the edge of the ramp, causing their front tires to hit the pavement hard — and their rear tires to hit it even harder.

Many a kid was thrown headfirst into the pavement that way, always painful to watch.

Another class of kids was those whose parents couldn’t, or wouldn’t, buy them a new spider bike. Some kids would show up on their sister’s bike — its frame had a low, curved center bar that was originally designed to allow a girl with a dress to pedal without her dress getting caught on the bar, which could do a real number on a boy’s private area.

When I was 8 I was riding a “girl’s bike” when my foot slipped off the pedal. My crotch roared downward, just shy of the speed of light, to be stopped by the low curved bar, which caused a black-and-blue bruise in an area where no boy ever wants to be black and blue.

Other kids who lacked new bikes showed up riding every kind of contraption — bikes pieced together from parts of other bikes people had dragged to the curb on garbage pickup day.

The typical homemade bike would have a 2- inch frame, a 26-inch rear wheel, a 20-inch front wheel — giving the thing a drag-racing look — and handlebars and a seat that were off-center and clearly sourced from another bike.

We took guilty pleasure in watching such kids race toward the ramp because their bikes were likely to explode back into their individual parts — often in mid air — and bike parts and kid parts would rain onto the hard pavement, making a spectacular symphonic sound as grunts and groans were accentuated by metal clanking .

In any event, I rode my five-speed Murray up to Janet Drive to watch the others jump, not to jump myself. And I would have been content with that had not one of the kids — he’d just had a tremendous wipeout and was sore — told me I was a sissy who was afraid to even try.

Finally, after much ribbing, I saw little choice but to jump myself — something I’d done a million times on my prior two bikes . But this time, as I raced down Marilynn and cut onto Janet in fifth gear, I was shocked at the distance I was able to fly — some 25 feet or more — and was hooked instantly on the adrenalin rush.

I soon had the neighborhood record easily in hand and held it, barely even trying, for several weeks — until a stranger from another neighborhood arrived. He was older than I — probably 14 or so and nearly the size of a grown man, much bigger and stronger than I.

Worse, he arrived on a brand new 26-inch 10-speed spider bike. He broke my record by 5 feet with his first jump. His second extended his record another 2 feet — he flew some 32 feet through the air!

I was determined to get my record back.

***

A dozen kids stood on either side of the ramp on Janet Drive as I sat atop Marilynn Drive, ready to begin my descent.

I started off in first and pedaled as hard as I could, banging through the gears until I locked into fifth. I was still pedaling as hard as I could when I made the left on Janet — and kept pedaling hard as I lined up my front wheel with the center of the plywood ramp.

I could feel the wind whipping through my hair as I approached the ramp — I could see the other kids, their jaws agape, as my superior gearing helped me attain superior speed.

As I approached the ramp, as I had so many times before, everything went into slow motion. I’d never gone that fast before hitting the ramp. I’d never experienced the jolt I experienced that day — a jolt that caused my sweaty hands to let go of the handlebars.

Everything shifted into even slower motion then. I remember floating through the air like some kind of missile or rocket. I remember the awkwardness I felt as my hands began flapping wildly, trying to give my body balance. I remember being up there for a long time before my back wheel hit the pavement and my bike, now making its own decisions, began wobbling wildly.

I was heading directly for a telephone pole — a big, old, wooden, splintered telephone pole — and I was too dumb to realize that I was about to have the last experience of my young life.