ecib and I were talking about our first bikes today.
That's mine. (Not actually it, just a picture I found.) There is a story behind it. My dad woke my brother up early in the morning on trash days, and we would pick up the newspaper stacks people would leave at the curb, and fill up the back of his pickup. We’d take the papers to a recycling place for money. I don’t remember how long we did this. Maybe a few months? Anyway, eventually, he told my brother and I that we had earned enough to buy our first bikes. This was my selection.
I loved that bike.
This was my brother's bike. It's what I learned to ride on... and rode as much as I could. After a few years of trying to use his bike all the time, I wanted a HARO bike but couldn't afford it, so I bought this and put HARO stickers on it: several years later I saved up and bought one of these - which was one of the first mountain bikes around.
Story time! For almost all of my childhood, my dad worked at a (pedal) bike shop. A guy he knew somehow (I forget how) started it, and my dad went to work for him. It was usually just my dad, the owner, and maybe one other employee, with occasional part-time college students coming through. Sometime in the early 1990s, the owner was in California for a bike race. A day or two before he was to race, he was crossing a big road and got hit by a car. It left him in a borderline vegetative state: he was paralyzed from the neck down, could not speak, and only seemed partially aware of his surroundings. I didn't know him well, but I'd always like him. Anyway, owner's brother and the latter's two sons (the elder was a couple years older than me, so around 12-13) moved into town to deal with stuff. My dad ran the shop for them, and from what he later told me, pretty much pulled it out of borderline bankruptcy. He bought the shop outright a couple of years after that. By the late 1990s it was starting to decline again, though. The population center of Williamsburg had shifted to the other side of town. College students weren't riding as much as they used to (people going to William & Mary, which was close by, were a big source of business), and neither were tourists. Competition got more intense: it had just been my dad, one other shop in a different part of town (with whom my dad's place was always on good terms), and then K-Mart. But a couple chains moved into the other side of town where all the population growth was. He hung on to it for a few years, but finally closed down around 2005 or so. Needless to say I rode a lot as a kid. I didn't have the swankiest things, but my dad always talked shit about Huffy, so he damn sure wasn't going to have me riding around on one of those. I mostly rode Giant mountain bikes: my neighborhood and Colonial Williamsburg, which was nearby, were not really conducive to a road bike. I also got to see some really swanky stuff, as I remember he would occasionally carry Litespeed, whose big claim to fame was making their frames out of titaniun. I remember when shock-absorbing forks became a thing. My friends usually got their stuff from my dad, and it was kinda fun to have my dad be the hookup for something, even if it wasn't the most exciting thing. By middle school, so say when I was 12-14, I had a lot of time to myself, whether it was after school, weekends, or summers. One of my friends' dads was a professor at William & Mary, and they lived close to the campus. We used to go over to the building for his department and use the internet in their computer lab. True broadband around 1996-1997 felt pretty amazing. I actually bought a zip drive so I could haul stuff back and forth, since it was actually more economical than CDs when making lots of trips, especially then. Sadly I pretty much stopped riding once I could drive, since Williamsburg was really not a good bike town. There were places to ride, but you have to drive to get to them. This was especially true as I got older and began appreciating how little Williamsburg had to offer for teenagers, prompting us to start exploring farther and farther out. A few other memories. One, there was always lots of cardboard in the place. Bikes shipped from the manufacturer didn't come fully assembled, and instead came in this big cardboard box. If you haven't seen one of these, the boxes were probably about 4.5 feet long, about 2.5 high, and maybe 6 inches wide. The sides were pretty thick too. I remember in 9th grade my history class had a competition against the other where we had to build a castle out of cardboard and see if it would withstand a siege (somehow we were chucking things at the walls, but I don't remember if we built the weapons or not). My dad filled up his truck with these boxes one day and we took them to school, and they made for amazing building materials. My class killed it. This shop was the first place I worked. It was never a regular thing, but I did a little bit here and there in late elementary school before I turned 14 and could get a work permit. It was okay, although the days felt awfully long. I learned some basic retailing and could fix very minor things. An employee of the place once got a speeding ticket on his bike in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The only time I ever saw my dad really lose his temper was when he caught a guy shoplifting (especially when the kid tried to play it off). Every once in a blue moon he'd get called down because the burglar alarm went off. Overall though I don't recall theft being a significant problem. It was a big problem early on with skateboarding stuff, which is why they stopped carrying it before too long.
Now I need you to imagine that instead of electric blue, it's a faded sorta metallic purple. Kind of the color of melted bubblegum ice cream, if the Terminator were trying to be melted bubblegum ice cream. And the seat? The seat is blue. Not just any blue, though. It's translucent metalflake blue. Yeah - that kind of amazing bit of '70s materials science where they imbedded mica in vinyl. The chrome - now the chrome is pitted and rusty. The fenders are gone. And the back tire has been incongruously replaced with a drag slick. My dad had this nasty habit of putting off any "gifts" until the day before and he was drunk. this meant birthdays were skipped often. But for some reason, probably because he heard someone had a deal on it, I ended up with this "bike" at six. Now pretend you can't get up any given street without standing on the pedals because your town is sprayed across five mesa tops. When I was twelve I stole my dad's bike - he'd bought some ridiculous Sears Stumpjumper knock-off that had ten speeds, cheap shitty shifters and a frame that must have been made out of conduit it weighed so much. It did, however, have 30" wheels with 2" wide tires so at least I went from one ridiculous extreme to another. I stopped riding bikes altogether at 14, no doubt because I was sick of being mocked.
First bike: Current Bike (see Hubski sticker on frame) Never realized it, but I bet I opted for a chrome bike because of my first bike. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I love riding my bike, still.
Niiiiice! My neighbor had that Thunder Road. WOW, you just brought back a FLOOD of memories. Mostly, us crashing on the terribly maintained, steel mill days hills of Pittsburgh. Talk about crashing... potholes galore. We didn't care. I pimped the 1983 Mongoose Expert (BMX)
I don't have any pictures of my first bike - it was a cheap blue thing from Wal-Mart. I rode it until I was physically too large for it, much longer than I imagine the manufacturers could have planned for. By the time I was done with it, the paint was sun-bleached and the metal was rusty and pitted from spending so much time outside (I had a penchant for forgetting it at the playground)! That's not much of a story, but I had to contribute something before I said how much fun it is imagining all these internet personalities as pudgy-faced children. goobster's Huffy Dill Pickle is what really got me - I knew a kid with a bike like that, and he permanently had chocolate stains on his face. Sorry goob, that's probably going to stick as my mental image of you!