I learned to bicycle on a big red boys bike when I was five years old. I had to shift from one side of the crossbar to the other to pedal it. I remember falling on the crossbar numerous times and I’m sure I fell to the pavement but one afternoon I rode it without falling. I think it must have been my sister Ellen holding the back of the seat until I got started and then giving me a push off.
I got my first bike when I was nine years old for the best Christmas ever, a big red three speed racer bike. From then on that’s what we did. We hung out on our bikes, we stood around on our bikes. When nothing was going pm we rode our bikes in circles. Wherever we went we did it on our bikes. And sometimes we just bicycled; often on 9th Street or coming down Orange Grove Terrace on to Sunset Canyon Drive to see how fast we could get going.
I got a paper route when I was 11 first with the Valley Times and then with the LA Mirror, I hung the double canvas sack filled with newspapers on my handlebars and pedaled up and down the hills between Olive Boulevard and Walnut Avenue six afternoons a week for nearly three years. I think my over sized calf muscles come from the hills of Burbank. Sometimes when it rained I got driven around my route by my mother or Ellen.
With my newspaper money I bought a Schwinn cruiser bike, fat tires, a tank on the crossbar, three speed, a light and a rack. It was a beautiful bike. Shortly after I got it my mother lent it to an immigrant family from Eastern Europe so their son could do his paper route. He got a flat and his father fixed the bike with a hammer. It never rode right after that. I didn’t know you could have it repaired and no one offered to make it good. After that it just sat in the garage. I still feel angry when I think about it. Maybe one day I’ll give that up.
When I was a teenager and before I was sixteen it was uncool to ride a bicycle. My last ride may have been when my friend Rick Sharp and his brother got the new 10 speeds and we borrowed his brother’s bike and rode from Burbank to Santa Monica Beach and back. It was a trip of a lifetime. It didn’t register that I could have done that all the time. It was a one time trip and we didn’t do it again. A lesson in life I didn’t get then:
IF YOU’RE A TEENAGER, GET A ROAD BIKE, ONE THAT CRUISES WELL, WITH A GOOD RANGE OF GEARS AND RIDE IT WHEREVER YOU WANT TO GO. IT CAN ENLARGE YOUR LIFE AND INDEPENDENCE BY 15 MILES OR MORE. WEAR A HELMET.
I didn’t start riding again until England when I bought a Raleigh three speed. In 1970 in England it seemed like everyone rode bikes everywhere. At a stoplight in town on a nice day there were more bicycles than cars. I rode my Raleigh all over Bedford and out to the country. When I brought it home to the US I sometimes biked from North Hollywood to my parents’ house in Burbank and I got a bike rack and would take it down to El Segundo when we went to Cathy’s parents.
Somehow it got put aside when we moved to Division Street, a steep hill, and it gathered dust until I gave it to one of Sean’s friends at St. Bernards. That would have been before 1980.
I liked bicycling but in all that time I never became a cyclist. Then in 1982 I got a perfect attendance bonus of $100 from my employer and I bought Cathy a used Schwinn Varsity and then for myself a Windsor road bike. They were 10 speeds and with my Windsor I became a cyclist. I rode it all the time and it became my preferred form of transportation. When I badly bruised my achilles tendon in mountaineering, I kept up my training for Mount Rainer by riding to work on my bike 13 miles from Eagle Rock to Beverly Hills and then back. One morning I was pedaling up Sunset and thought I needed a higher gear. When I went to shift I saw I was already in the top gear and I was going up hill. When I got sober I rode to meetings, so much they thought I had lost my driver’s license in my journey to AA. I hadn’t.
I was also a hiker in the San Gabriels and one day I borrowed Benjamin’s BMX bicycle and tried going up the Arroyo Seco behind JPL above Pasadena. As quickly as I could after that I bought a Schwinn Sierra mountain bike. I bicycled the San Gabriels, down the West Fork of the San Gabriel River, up to the top of Mount Monrovia and back down and back to the car. I routinely rode over to the Verdugo Hills and up from the streets to the fire road across the crest. Mount Lowell was also a favorite. One time I rode up Mount Baldy as far as I could and then hiked to the peak. The hours long hike back to the car was short and quick on a bicycle and I smiled as I passed my fellow hikers.
I had seen cyclists going up the Angeles Crest Highway to Mount Wilson and thought that was an amazing ride. One day in 1987 I tried it myself and was amazed that while it was hard, it was doable. I did that a few times and rode in the back of the Angeles Crest from Red Box up to Waterman a few times. I flew past a Highway Patrolman going downhill on Angeles Crest and heard from his car loudspeaker “58 miles per hour!”
In 1988 I bought a Trek road bike and put a third ring on the crankset. I bicycled to work in downtown LA sometimes and often drove my bike down to Glendale Avenue and cycled to work. It was downhill mostly and I didn’t work up a sweat and had a nice ride back. I never did touring but I thought about it. I did long rides, mostly by myself, sometimes with a club. I loved cycling. I bought an old cruiser bike and fixed it. I had a mountain bike, a road bike and a cruiser and I used all three of them. Later in Mill Valley we got a tandem. I lost the tandem in the divorce. It’s probably hanging in a garage somewhere and never used.
I used the BART and the bike to go to San Francisco Juvenile Hall from Oakland. In the 1990s I stopped mountain biking, it was too hard on my back. When I became a Ranger on Mount Diablo I enjoyed the long rides up the hill on my days off and sometimes I’d go short distances on the back roads. On Angel Island I used a bike to patrol the West side of the Island and on my own time I rode around the island frequently and taking a ferry to Tiburon and rode through Marin County on days off.
In retirement I’ve continued to cycle. I bought a Jamis Coda commuter bike when I bought Adam their first bike in 2014. I try to bicycle every day and it’s still my favorite form of getting around. My 20 mile rides in my 60s, became 15 miles and then 10 mile rides as I aged. Now days I try to ride 5 miles or thirty minutes each day, I often do 10 and 15 is doable. At 76 years old my good health and mobility is because I am a cyclist. I love it.
