Raymond has an interesting blog entry on getting on bikes…
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/08/14/699522.aspx
The comments, as usual with Raymond’s blog, are quite interesting as well.
It made me recall my biking youth and it is interesting to note (at least to me) that my next oldest brother and I at the least used the Chinese-Michigan method often but we also used the US method. It depended on where we were and how much “piss and vinegar”[1] we had in us at the time.
I learned to ride a bike with an old red Firestone (I think) bike with whitewall tires and a little hood emblem and two flat tires by coasting down a little hill from the street in the front yard and trying to peddle. Unfortunately off to the side of the hill was our house and a doorwall. If I did well I would usually make it to the doorwall and bounce off of it and crash. If I did great, I would catch myself on the edge of the doorwall and stop. Usually I would get 4 feet down the hill and wipe out. That could have been due to me just having no balance or various pets jumping on me while trying to ride. Since I usually only had shorts (no shoes no socks no shirt and had no money to pay for service so it didn’t matter) on, a crash meant getting covered in bruises and bloody scratches and grease from the chain. I expect that the way my brother Mike and I looked after a day of playing (no clean Nintendo or Sega playing for us) would probably push today’s soccer mom’s over the edge. We would have to be hosed off to figure out what nationality we were or if we were even the right kids. We wouldn’t just be dirty, we would be so dirty that dirt rings would have formed on our bodies. I am not sure how dirty you have to be for that, but it is pretty dirty. By dirt rings I mean these little concentric circles radiating out like quarter size chicken poxs or something.When we got hosed off, first the layers of dirt would come off, then any layers of blood from injuries, and then we could be found.
My brother Mike had this nasty gross hand painted with a paint brush[2] cucumber green dorky looking grandma girly bike (no bar to crunch your nuts when you fell). But he had air in his tires so that was a bonus. I still wouldn’t ride his bike though because it was so goofy looking. Mine looked almost like a red and chrome spaceship in comparison.
Eventually we somehow dug up some inner tubes for my bike or got the ones in it patched. Mike and I became experts in patching tires as we did it nearly every day once we got a hold of a patch kit. I want to say our neighbor gave us a patch kit and patches because he learned that if our bikes were in functioning order, we weren’t usually in the neghborhood but peddling all over Manton Michigan and beyond. Yes… it is not like it is today… As long as we got home before it was too unreasonably dark I don’t think our mom was too worried about us[3].
Funniest bike memories
1. Mike playing chicken with my cousin Louie on our brand new orange bikes that our dad JUST bought for us… Neither one of them turned. I still can vividly picture both of them flying through the air and landing on the rough pavement. Both were bleeding and had jagged cuts, neither cried nor complained. This isn’t the nice pavement or concrete roads in the city. This is the pavement of the rural world where they take a dirt road and poor down a ton of gravel and then pour tar over it. You fall on it and you will be picking chunks of stones out of your flesh.
2. I tried to jump one bike and the ramp broke as I hit it and I hit the big concrete blocks of the ramp base and went flying over the handle bars.
3. I tried to jump a 10-speed bike over a dirt mound (this is pre-mountain bikes) and when I landed the front forks snapped and I went flying over the handle bars.
4. Going to the top of the Manton Water Tower hill (biggest hill in all of Manton) and riding down the steep side on bikes and usually wiping out a quarter way down so bouncing and rolling the rest of the way down.
 joe
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[1] As in… “Calm down, you kids are filled with piss and vinegar this morning!!!”
[2] Not completely unlike my Granddad Bilkey’s handpainted car. Though I believe that was painted a reddish/brown color and I also believe he might have used a roller for most of that. Memories play tricks on you.
[3] Map of the Manton area, note the highway and golf course were not there when we were kids… Can’t imagine the trouble we would have gotten in had they been there. http://maps.yahoo.com/maps_result?addr=409+state+street&csz=manton%2C+mi&country=us&new=1&name=&qty=Â Â — Zoom out to 6 to see how isolated we really were. Next closest city was Cadillac at 11 miles which we rarely went to. That was the closest place for fast food too. We were more likely to eat a turtle we caught than a Big Mac.
