It was an American-made Iver-Johnson model that Dad got second-hand, but that didn't bother me at all. It wasn't fancy like the bikes of some of my friends and it didn't have three speeds or hand operated brakes. Nope. Mine had a simple coaster brake and it was as rugged as they come. About the only problems I had were numerous flat tires. And soon I got pretty good at fixing those. My trusty air pump and inner tube patch kit were never far away.
Hillside roads in our New England area were wonderful to ride,
especially going down. Uphill was a chore, and many times I
walked that old bike up to the top before jumping back on for
the exhilarating downhill ride at breakneck speed. That term
"breakneck" was often used in my mother's cautioning pleas.
Rain, cold, wind and summer's heat didn't daunt my reliable steed. No. Only winter snows and ice proved to be too much. From late November until April my bicycle stayed in the coal shed. But even before the muddy dirt roads began to dry in the Spring, it was time to get out the bike.
It's wheel bearings, steering mechanism and chain had to be cleaned, oiled and adjusted for the tough seasons ahead. The chromed wheel-fenders were a necessity with all that mud. Their undersides needed frequent cleaning as accumulated caked dirt chafed against the tires and impeded my progress.
I had a couple of different carry baskets from time to time. An open-wire model mounted to the handlebars looked neat, but it was a simple straw type with a deeper cargo well that worked the best. It was more resilient to my frequent crashes and falls. The wire one was not nearly as forgiving. Those baskets carried everything from school books to a lunch box. And most of the time that's where my sweater or jacket rode. They were too hot to wear, as I struggled to pump the bike pedals up each hill. It was, after all, just a one-speed bicycle.
A friction-operated electrical generator powered the feeble lights supposed to make me street-legal at night. It rubbed against my front wheel and was supposed to create enough electricity to keep the headlight and a small red tail light glowing. The problem was you had to be going pretty fast to generate enough power. At slow speeds the filaments of the bulbs barely glowed. I switched to a battery-operated lights which worked at any speed, so long as the batteries were fresh.
It's a good thing that most of my bike riding took place during the 1940's, during W.W.II, when road traffic was light and I had the roads pretty much to myself. In those days folks couldn't get much gasoline and automobile tires were really scarce. It wasn't just kids who rode bicycles then. Lots of grown-ups did too, going to work and even on shopping trips. My bike and I thought nothing of 20 and 30-mile rides. Heck, it was nearly ten miles into town.
I guess it was when I turned 16 that my bike and I began to drift apart. That was about the time I started to drive Dad's old car, a green 1939 Mercury convertible with 250,000 miles on it. Yet girls were much more impressed when I appeared in that than on my bicycle.
A fellow sorta outgrows things, but he never forgets a faithful old friend. Too bad those girls didn't like my bike as much as I did.