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I'm building another bike, like I always like to do. What's different this time is that I'm gonna do it with y'all. My skateboard/punk rock buddies back in the day used to have a rule about these things - and that was that a good bike shouldn't cost more than nine dollars to get you around in style. I'm not sure I can stick to that dictum, but it served us well at the time. This was in Oklahoma where oil money made (some) people prosperous from the 1920s onward, and others more and more desperate as the years went by. It made for a vibrant thrift store and garage sale scene, and as partial as we were to skinny ties and clothing that offended hippies, we hit a lot of them back when plenty of things cost a dime at the low end and a couple of bucks at the top.
One of my first jobs was at an OTASCO store, which was a rival to Western Auto - they sold console televisions and mufflers on store credit. I unloaded hundreds of La-Z-boy recliners and then carried them out to customer's pickups in between assembling muscle bikes and huffy cruisers and crappy ten-speeds. That was the bulk of my after school job - pushing out the cheap 70s bikes that came boxed up in trucks that unloaded in the alley, and loading them back inside at six thirty when the store closed. In between came the thirty minutes I spent assembling each one. They still had alleys back then... sheesh how things change. I could tell the stuff was junk but it gave me access to purloined inner tubes and WD40 at least. Not much else there lying around that I wanted. Sometimes I changed bike tires or installed a Wald basket for customers. I was fifteen and called myself a mechanic, lol. I remember one week when the tire man had the flu they stuck me in the garage to change tires and I pretended I knew what I was doing while the manager was around and got the cool customers to show me what the heck I was supposed to be performing after. I'd been watching the real mechanic as closely as I could without giving away the impression that I was gunning for his job. That's how I learned to bust auto tires and hang exhaust pipes. In the summer I'd help the mechanic haul hay and he'd let me look in the old barns for rusted bikes.
There were a few junk men who had yards filled with old bikes I'd give my right lung to be able to peruse nowadays, but we alway just looked for something that would WORK and had a little style. My brother quickly decided that he liked the Schwinns, and I did too but to be different from him I started looking at the scrappy competitors to Schwinn, the ones not afraid to design something a little weirder or more ostentatious. The cantilever frame always seemed "safe" compared to others. Very quickly I settled on the "two top bars" style of frame and built them up until they got stolen or lost in a move, given away, you know the drill. They came and went, and I kept just shelling out another nine bucks or so to get the next one. Estate sales were easy pickings circa 1979 when I was in high school.
Fast forward a few decades and I still love these bikes, and still love to build them up and find them. I'm only marginally more talented at wrenching now than I was as a kid, but to me that was the beauty of it all. You didn't need to be any good to have fun.
One of my surfer heroes was a guy from Oceanside named Phil Edwards. Some say he was the first pro, because he had a signature model but he usually skipped contests and traveled on his rep alone. He's my hero because of his casual and cool style but also because of this one thing he said which always stuck with me: "The best surfer is the one having the most fun in the water."
Bikephoto by jeandodge67, on Flickr
Here's my latest bike, and stay tuned as I bring it back from the barn to the streets, alleys and trails of my current hometown. For those of you who actually care, it's a 1937-39 Western Auto badged Cleveland Welding co bike with a skip tooth, rear facing dropouts and a lazy 7 style seatpost. I'll be posting more about it and the donor bikes that are gonna give their lives up for it soon enough. I guess I'll enter this in whatever build-off is coming along, but the prize is already mine in my opinion since sharing is the funnest part.
And cheers to all who are keeping the tradition alive, a tradition that (like a lot of you, I bet) we thought only our mates invented just for ourselves... the assorted weirdos of a small town who were learning to appreciate the value of our own time, and anything both useful and beautiful made by union labor on American soil.
One of my first jobs was at an OTASCO store, which was a rival to Western Auto - they sold console televisions and mufflers on store credit. I unloaded hundreds of La-Z-boy recliners and then carried them out to customer's pickups in between assembling muscle bikes and huffy cruisers and crappy ten-speeds. That was the bulk of my after school job - pushing out the cheap 70s bikes that came boxed up in trucks that unloaded in the alley, and loading them back inside at six thirty when the store closed. In between came the thirty minutes I spent assembling each one. They still had alleys back then... sheesh how things change. I could tell the stuff was junk but it gave me access to purloined inner tubes and WD40 at least. Not much else there lying around that I wanted. Sometimes I changed bike tires or installed a Wald basket for customers. I was fifteen and called myself a mechanic, lol. I remember one week when the tire man had the flu they stuck me in the garage to change tires and I pretended I knew what I was doing while the manager was around and got the cool customers to show me what the heck I was supposed to be performing after. I'd been watching the real mechanic as closely as I could without giving away the impression that I was gunning for his job. That's how I learned to bust auto tires and hang exhaust pipes. In the summer I'd help the mechanic haul hay and he'd let me look in the old barns for rusted bikes.
There were a few junk men who had yards filled with old bikes I'd give my right lung to be able to peruse nowadays, but we alway just looked for something that would WORK and had a little style. My brother quickly decided that he liked the Schwinns, and I did too but to be different from him I started looking at the scrappy competitors to Schwinn, the ones not afraid to design something a little weirder or more ostentatious. The cantilever frame always seemed "safe" compared to others. Very quickly I settled on the "two top bars" style of frame and built them up until they got stolen or lost in a move, given away, you know the drill. They came and went, and I kept just shelling out another nine bucks or so to get the next one. Estate sales were easy pickings circa 1979 when I was in high school.
Fast forward a few decades and I still love these bikes, and still love to build them up and find them. I'm only marginally more talented at wrenching now than I was as a kid, but to me that was the beauty of it all. You didn't need to be any good to have fun.
One of my surfer heroes was a guy from Oceanside named Phil Edwards. Some say he was the first pro, because he had a signature model but he usually skipped contests and traveled on his rep alone. He's my hero because of his casual and cool style but also because of this one thing he said which always stuck with me: "The best surfer is the one having the most fun in the water."
Bikephoto by jeandodge67, on Flickr
Here's my latest bike, and stay tuned as I bring it back from the barn to the streets, alleys and trails of my current hometown. For those of you who actually care, it's a 1937-39 Western Auto badged Cleveland Welding co bike with a skip tooth, rear facing dropouts and a lazy 7 style seatpost. I'll be posting more about it and the donor bikes that are gonna give their lives up for it soon enough. I guess I'll enter this in whatever build-off is coming along, but the prize is already mine in my opinion since sharing is the funnest part.
And cheers to all who are keeping the tradition alive, a tradition that (like a lot of you, I bet) we thought only our mates invented just for ourselves... the assorted weirdos of a small town who were learning to appreciate the value of our own time, and anything both useful and beautiful made by union labor on American soil.
