INTRODUCTION
Dave Wagar and I met in the fall of 1963 when I started teaching at Shorecrest High School. Already a member of the faculty, he made me feel welcome and helped me with the many adjustments a first year teacher needs to feel comfortable in a new position. We have been friends the many decades since then and have shared a variety of experiences including stories about our childhood. In all that time, I have never heard about his first bike until Victory Biking showed up on my computer screen. Delighted to read Dave’s memoir, memories of my first bike swirled in my head. Memoirs do that, They not only enrich our understanding of the memoir writer, but they motivate us to look back into our lives and understand ourselves more fully. Enjoy Dave’s Victory Biking and look forward to a retelling of Cinderella in next week’s Contributing Writers Category.
Tim Olson
I was almost 11, and it was high time I learned to ride a bike. My Dad had died a year and a half before and Mom had just gone back to work teaching, so the bike fund was barely enough for a used “victory bike.” It wasn’t my dream bike.
During World War II, which had ended less than two years before, all available steel was going into war production. The few bikes being made were not designed for children, but for defense industry workers commuting to work without using rationed gasoline. The victory bike design was simple – a lightweight adult-size frame, wheels with narrow tires (Rubber was scarce, too.) and a one-speed drive with coaster brake. No accessories — not even a bell or a chain guard. With the war over, new heavy balloon-tired bikes — today’s “cruisers”–were being built. The ultimate was a Schwinn with its signature swoosh-like frame design, loaded with accessories – even radios. But I never had a Schwinn. I just loved them from afar. I painted my victory bike royal blue with yellow trim, including a sort of swoosh on the cross bar — which did nothing to make it more Schwinn-like.
Mom, Grandma, and I were living that year in a makeshift apartment upstairs in a drafty, colonial-style farmhouse a few miles from town. The house was halfway up a steep hill where a minor road intersected a busy highway. Visibility was limited. Neither road was an option for a beginning biker. Our short, gravel driveways would have to be my training ground.
The house had been built for an affluent Episcopal minister from New York City who liked to vacation as a gentleman farmer in this Upstate rural setting. Now it was home to his widow and grown son – and us. Luckily for me, he’d had horses. A surviving relic of those days was a mounting block — concrete steps to help riders of limited agility to mount tall horses. Now it was a leg up for a boy of limited athleticism to mount a tall bike.
It took a while. I’d roll the bike up to the block, climb on, and push off. When I teetered into a foot drag or a fall, I’d walk the bike back to the block and try again. My legs weren’t quite long enough for a flat ground take-off on my tall bike, at least until I got the balancing part down. After hours of wobbles and falls over several weeks, I could ride mostly under control on our short driveways and the flat area between the house and the barn. I wanted more. Yet beyond our little yard, every direction was up or down a steep roadway. Downhill on the little-used side road seemed like the safest choice for flying out of the nest. I longed to venture out. One day I did.
I hadn’t planned to do it that day – I just suddenly found myself rolling out of the driveway — heart racing and stomach churning — out onto the blacktop – coasting cautiously down the gradual upper slope – riding the brake hard enough to skid a little – the hill suddenly steeper — pulling me down faster — gaining too much speed — panicking – swerving — tumbling into a ditch.
Fortunately, the ditch was overgrown with springy bushes. Unfortunately, they were thorn bushes.
I don’t remember how much my scratches and scrapes hurt. They weren’t serious. I do remember that a few days later I rode down that hill again. I knew what to expect and was quite sure I could handle it. That hill became my favorite ride — swooshing past the springy sticker bushes — wind in my face — a clear road ahead for me and my victory bike.
What a fun memory. It takes me back to my first bike which was also during the war my father took one wheel off a large tricycle that I had been riding and taught me how to balance on the two remaining Wheels we couldn’t afford a real to Wheeler but at least I got us good start