</font><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr />
Was it a balloon tire bicycle Bird?
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Of course. In the days when I used a bicycle I had never even heard of one having gears or hand brakes, so I didn't know anyone who had such. And those little skinny tires a lot of them use now wouldn't be worth a hoot in sand, mud, or even grass. And in the summer of 1956, in Marietta, OK, the mechanic who owned the shop in the back of my dad's service station had one of the antique high wheeled bicycles. I was 16 at the time and had just gotten my drivers license and first car (1946 Chevy), but riding that high wheeled bike was a blast. I never really got the hang of getting on it properly, but I could get on the soda box and hop on it. [img]/forums/images/icons/laugh.gif[/img]
[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Here is my best "bike story": In the summer of 1983, while on vacation in the Pacific Northwest, we visited with some folks who lived on an island in Puget Sound. While I was enjoying a cuppa coffee on the deck of their home, one of my kids ran up and blurted out: "Look, Dad; they're throwing some bikes away. Can we get them?" Sure enough, the next door neighbor had just brought out three bicycles and set them out for trash pickup. The bikes were good quality stuff but had flat tires and had been left outdoors a time or two in the moist Seattle weather; chains were rusty, but not much else was ruined. Sooo... we asked the guy and he gave us the bikes which were eventually made like new and so forth, but that isn't the real story. I asked our host what his neighbor did for a living since he drove a Jag and a Mercedes Benz, could afford to toss perfectly good bikes, and never seemed to leave home. "Oh." he said, ""He is a MOLD DESIGNER." "Hmmm....?" I asked, "Can he stay busy doing that?" Well." said our host, "He has income from molds that he designed years ago; sort of a royalties type of thing. A company called him some years back and said that they had a product that was sure to be a big seller, but they had NO IDEA how to mold it. He told them to send a drawing and he would see what he could do. So a few weeks later he called the company and told them the mold was ready and they said that was great; how much was it? He said that the mold was free, just give him seven cents for every part that they made. The company was fine with that so the deal was inked and the mold went to work. That company was the WHAMO Corporation, and the mold was for the FRISBEE. Thousands, and thousands, and thousands, and thousands of frisbees. And that was just ONE mold; he had many more out there cranking out money for him. [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]
Egon, it's hard for me to describe without a picture and I don't have any pictures of it. But you know how boy's bikes have either one bar or two bars or pipes running from just below the handle bars back to just under the seat. If they have 2 bars, one is above the over. However, on my bike, the 2 bars were welded to the frame, just below the handle bars, at the same height. They angled outward for a couple of inches, then turned (actually cut and welded), so they ran back to just under the seat, but the bars were side by side, gradually getting closer together as they neared the seat, then started spreading apart as they went down on either side of the rear wheel. I have never seen another bicycle, or even a picture of one, like it. I don't know what it weighed, but no one I knew back then had one that was as heavy as it was. For all I know, it may have been homemade, but I doubt it. My dad was working for a multi-millionaire auto parts store (several stores) owner who was not too popular with most of his emplyees, but for some reason he took a liking to my Dad and to me. He had a couple of boys older than me and he was always giving dad something for me that he'd say his boys had outgrown or didn't want anymore.
Part of it may have been because he knew about my polio and frequent visits to the Crippled Children's Hospital in Oklahoma City, and part of it may have been because dad was one of the few people who were simply not scared of him. Someone he could talk to and whom he knew would actually tell him what he was thinking.
[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] Bird, I remember those frames. Schwinn called their version a "cantilevered frame" but I never actually knew why they called it that, since nothing was overhung as the term implies. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] They were first made in the early fifties I think. I had a heavyweight Schwinn that had the conventional frame, a springer front end, and a "fuel tank" bolted inbetween the upper and lower frame tubes. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img]
Dave, you could certainly be right, since I have no idea who made it. But as for first being made in the early '50s . . . well, like I said, it was used, have no idea how old it was when I got it, but I got it for Christmas of 1947 or 1948. I suppose the oddest thing, to me, is just the fact that I've neve seen another one, or even a picture of another one, like it.
[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] The Schwinn models came out in the early fifties, but yours could have been a different make, like a Columbia for example. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] Hmmm... you could ride a full-size bike in '48? Let's see..... that was about a year or two before I attempted any such thing. I started skool in '49. My first grade teacher had two sons who were part of the occuption forces in Japan, and my best friend in the second grade in 1950 was a kid named Ronnie Yamamura who had, of course been born behind the fences of Manzanar internment camp. Little kids are so racially blind that I didn't realize that Ronnie was "the enemy" until some older kid told me a year or two later. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img]
Dave, I didn't know you were such an old fellow. Apparently you're only about 3 years younger than me. I started in the first grade (no such thing as kindergarten in those days) in 1946. My first grade teacher at Plainview School (all 12 grades in one building) was Mrs. Croom. It's an odd thing that she, who taught first grade in Plainview at Ardmore, OK, and Mrs. Skaggs, who taught junior and senior English in Plano, Texas, are the only two teachers whose names I can remember.
[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] I can remember all of the teacher's names up until we began switching rooms and even then I can remember most of them. High Skool is about the same, some stand out more than others. We had 287 kids in my H.S. senior class and I made it a point to know every one of them by name before we graduated. It took a little cramming in the final weeks of school, but I actually made it; I knew every graduate's name. [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img] I've done some substitute teaching and when you have five or six periods of twenty-something kids per period it is a real struggle to put the names with the faces. I find that if I hand out the corrected papers myself it helps me learn the names, The most consecutive days I have taught in one spot was about ten; two complete school weeks. After that amount of time I was getting to know who was who pretty well. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] Yeah, I'm kind of an "older" dog; I hesitate to say "old" dog. [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img]
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