The Things We Used To Do

Found this image on Facebook Marketplace. Boy! Did that remind me of something!

 Sometimes you kind of forget how things used to be. I often try reminding you all here that we didn't always have social media and smart phones. That there was a time before the Tech that has infiltrated every aspect of life these days. 

I'm not trying to say "those were the days", or that any of that was better than any of this. (It is a LOT more complex than a simple maxim could ever convey.) I am saying that we shouldn't forget our past, and the lessons learned, which could benefit us today. 

Here's one example of that and how children did some things in the past which has elements of foolishness and elements of something good wrapped up into one picture. This is an image I found on Facebook Marketplace which took me back 50 years ago when we, as elementary school-aged kids, did some "street engineering" to make our ordinary bicycles something extraordinary. Both in a good way and a bad way! 

In our example, back in Charles City, Iowa, we had experienced an F-5 level tornado in 1968 which killed 14 people and forever changed our lives. But as a kid, it created something which was a bit of a positive, in my view. That storm tore through a lot of homes, and in the process, it tossed a lot of stuff into wild corners around the town where people didn't care to look, and therefore were never cleaned up. 

Specifically, there were bicycles to be had! We children would scour the edges of town, poking around in the woods along the Cedar River, and we would pull out bicycles, almost as if we were picking strawberries in a thorny, overgrown strawberry patch. Many times these bicycles would have minor damage, or no damage at all, and be perfectly serviceable. Of course, since they did not 'belong to anyone', these prizes from the overgrown and neglected areas of the town were ripe for experimentation. This cherry picking of bicycles actually lasted well into the 70's, as I recall.  

I don't know who got the idea first, but it spread like wildfire once someone did the modification on their "Sting Ray" style bike. You would find a Schwinn, or Vista branded bike which typically had flattened steel fork blades. Cut them off with a hacksaw, and then you'd cut off your bike's drop-outs, and stuff the flattened blades into the round fork blades. Even it all up lengthwise, bolt in your wheel, and - Boom! Instant chopper bike! 

You could do this with tapered, round forks too, it was just harder and those tended to come apart! But most importantly, this tomfoolery was responsible for my interest in bicycle repair and maintenance. The flip side of this was that most of our Fathers had jobs and we couldn't get them to guide us through the steps necessary to learn stuff, (not always was this the case, but most times- yes), and therefore I had to really think my way through things. And it is why that kindled my innate sense of how mechanical things worked. 

So, while you might think that image above is a really stupid and dangerous thing to do, (and it certainly was, which was why it was so interesting and fun), it is why I got started out on this path I am on these days. 

And now you know.......