When I was about six, my dad bought a used ladies bicycle from the thrift store at Larson Air Force Base. He gave me some greasy bearings and a cat food can full of gasoline and started teaching me about bicycles.
It wasn’t much long after that, I was reading his 1957 Motors auto repair manual. I still have it. Dad was always working on something and it was usually a car.
By the time I was 14, I was lacing old western flyer balloon wheels to English Sturmey-archer hubs, and making my own banana seats with sheet metal and rivets.
We conned some old sarge at the Duluth Air Force base hobby shop to let us use the welder, and started building weird chopper bikes about 1969. We bought some old lawnmowers and Dad told me how to rebuild small engines.
I remember dad bought another Scout just to get a larger engine, and we swapped that into his Scout. We did it in Duluth Minnesota in the winter time, in an unheated rickety garage that we rented from the old lady across the street from us.
It would’ve been done in our garage, but a garbage truck had slid on the ice and smashed it cockeyed. The guy we rented that house from didn’t seem too interested in getting it fixed in the time we lived there.
Which is too bad because I was also trying to patch up a ‘53 Pontiac sedan that dad had bought me for 50 bucks. He was able to talk the guy down from 150 bucks because the engine caught fire during the test drive it burned up the wiring. We towed that car home behind the Scout and I rewired it and patched the holes in the floor.
We got transferred to another station in the middle of winter and that car got left behind. I had to take it out of a snowbank and dad sold it. I wound up with a Ford coupe from the junkyard in Carp Minnesota. The engine was seized and it had a lot of miles on it, but I rebuilt that whole car with dad’s help and supply of spare parts.
I got my first Lambretta 150 motor scooter about 1971. It counts as owning two, because I got a parts bike with it. That was the first and last Italian machine I ever wanted to own.
It was about that time I got a job in a Volkswagen shop, rebuilding engines. They also did general mechanics, so I worked on different cars from Volkswagens to Cadillacs. I was going to engineering school and studying computer programming but in the summer I was fixing cars.
I even worked at an official American Motors (and Renault) dealership back in the days of the Javelin, the Gremlin, the AMX and the Matador.
I didn’t work on any of those new cars except to maybe glue on loose trim, but instead I was doing things like brake jobs and head gaskets on ‘59 Ramblers & changing axle boots on ‘66 Renault’s. I actually worked at the only Renault dealer that I have ever seen in my life. I have never touched another one since 1973.
Also in that time my family owned an international pick up truck, two Scouts, a Ford coupe, a Mustang, and a Yamaha 180 motorcycle. I was doing the maintenance on everything, at the hobby shop at Hill field in Ogden Utah.
Later, I would buy a Volkswagen fastback, hop it up, and race up and down coastal Highway-1 in it. That was a fun car.
In 1972, I left my Schwinn bicycle behind in Baudette Minnesota, when I graduated high school. And I didn’t buy another bicycle until I was married to my second wife in 1990.
I rebuilt it and ended up giving it to my son-in-law, and I did not start riding bicycles again seriously until last year. I did manage to buy & sell 6 different motorcycles in that time. I still have the last one.
Being retired, I have lots of time to play with these things now, and I have managed to put together a collection of seven bicycles and one motorcycle. I have to put some time and working on my old cars now but this will not be the end of the bicycles or motorcycles.
