Ode to My Bicycle

For a kid growing up in suburban Levittown, the bicycle was the key to the wider world.

If you were a Levittown kid, your bicycle was your ticket to freedom. Walking could only get you so far in a planned town with plenty of open space. While my school was right across the street, as was the pool, the ball field, the playground, and the basketball court, many of my friends lived one or two sections over. Meanwhile stores, the library, the church, and Levittown Lake (our local fishing hole) were often miles away. Every kid, it seemed, had a bike.

My bike is pictured above. It was a 26” inch, red, balloon-tired Huffy Roadster. I found it perched next to the Christmas tree on Christmas morning 1955 when I was eight years old. It had colorful streamers coming out of the handlebars and training wheels to help me ride it. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

Dad said, “Climb up there and let’s see if we need to adjust the seat.”

I did as instructed. The seat felt very high. I had never been on a bicycle this large. My feet barely touched the pedals.

“We’ll lower the seat a little.” Dad took out a wrench. Loosened the bolt holding the seat in place. Lowered it, and said, “Try that.”

I did and it was perfect. After opening some presents and waiting impatiently for my brother and little sister to open theirs, I was anxious to get the bike outside. Dad helped me out the door and down the driveway with the bike and I rode it up and down the sidewalk several times. It felt strangely high off the ground, but with the training wheels for support, I soon had the hang of it.

After just about a week, I was ready for the training wheels to come off. Dad took them off and then ran beside me for support as I weaved my wobbly way back and forth up and down the sidewalk in front of the house. After a few tries, I was ready to solo. My confidence grew with each trip down past the Crowningshield house four doors north and back up to the Eves’ house three doors south on Farmbrook Drive.

I parked my bike in the shed in the carport. The first time I took it out alone, I hopped on the bike, coasted down our steep driveway, made the sharp turn onto the sidewalk, and smacked right into the streetlight pole in front of our house. I hopped up, less concerned with the scrape on my left palm than I was about any damage to the bike. The bike escaped apparently unscathed, and I was back up and riding in a flash.

Over the years, this bike was my constant companion. I rode it to my baseball games. I rode it to the pool. I rode it to my friends’ houses in the Stonybrook and Greenbrook and Dogwood and Crabtree sections. Early on I rode it through the brand-new Kenwood section and discovered the Levittown Shop-A-Rama that was being built where the Levittown Parkway met Route 13. When my mom started walking up to the shopping center to shop, pushing the baby, I would ride my bike alongside, sometimes speeding ahead, and doubling back as we made our way from 129 Farmbrook Drive to the Penn Fruit supermarket.

On many a Saturday, I would ride my bike to the Towne Theater for the Saturday Matinee. The Towne had racks outside where you could park and lock your bike. For a quarter you could see a double feature, a cartoon, a serial like Buck Rogers, and a crazy movie race where you could win a basketball or a doll if your ticket number matched the winner.

As I got older, I would go farther and farther afield with my bike. The first McDonald’s in the area had opened on Route 413, five miles away. This was a major local event. A group of us got some lunch money together to make the pilgrimage to this fast-food Mecca for 15c hamburgers and 10c French fries. We parked our bikes and ate our first McDonald’s meal under the arches on the benches that provided outdoor seating on those first McDonald’s restaurants.

Later a Gino’s Hamburger joint opened on Route 13 across from the shopping center by the Levittown Train Station, considerably closer than the McDonald’s. I loved the Gino’s Giant hamburger. This proved to be a life saver on one occasion.

Our family always ate dinner together. One night my mom was making one of my father’s favorite’s, kidney stew. I could not stand kidney stew, even the smell of it made me want to gag. But with my dad, you ate what was served or you were banished to your room for the night. My sainted mom, of course, knew this and devised a plot to help me escape banishment.

I came home from playing ball across the street and my mother met me as I came in the door, smelling the noxious stew as I entered. “Look, Buddy, your father’s not home yet, but we’re having kidney stew tonight. I know you hate it. Here’s a dollar. Take your bike and go to Gino’s and get a hamburger. Don’t come home until after dinner. I will tell your dad you were invited to Karl’s for dinner.” Karl was my friend down the block.

“Thanks, Mom.” Dollars didn’t come easily in the Walsh household, so I knew this was a big deal, but I was not going to protest. I hopped on my bike and made a bee line for Gino’s. After having my Gino’s Giant, fries and a Coke, I had some more time to waste and some change leftover. I didn’t want to arrive home suspiciously early, and the change was “burning a hole in my pocket” as my grandfather would say. I rode over to the shopping center and went into the Eastern News store. Eastern News is what passed for a convenience store in those days. They sold newspapers, cigarettes, candy, and most relevant for me, baseball cards. I bought two packs with my change and opened them outside the store, searched to see if there were any Phillies in the stack of cards, and stuck both sticks of gum in my mouth.

I rode home and parked my bike in the shed. Dinner was over, but the smell of kidney stew lingered. My dad was in the living room, in his chair, reading the newspaper. He looked up.

“Hi. How was dinner,” he asked.

“Fine.”

“What’d you have”

“Meatloaf.” That seemed like a safe answer.

“Did you say, ‘Thank you’ to Mrs. Eves?”

“Yes, dad.”

“Good.”

“Do you have some homework to do?”

“Yes, dad.”

“Get to it, then. And wrap that gum in some paper before you throw it in the trash can.”

That was it. I went to my room to do my homework. The great kidney stew escape was a success.

Over the years, my bicycle served me loyally through newspaper routes, endless trips to friends houses, bike races through the streets, and quick rides to the Feed Bag restaurant on Route 13 with my friend Wes to play the pin ball machine.

I loved straining to pedal the bike up daunting Holly Hill on the Levittown Parkway; the effort rewarded by the thrill of coasting down the same hill, breeze rushing past my ears as I maneuvered the slightly out of control machine around the curve at the bottom. The challenge was to not hit the brakes on the way down so as to achieve maximum thrill and a mild sense of danger.

I was, alas, a not particularly careful bike owner. In time, my bike began to show the tell-tale signs of abuse. The streamers were the first to go. They just fell out of the little hole in the handlebar grips and were never found. The fenders eventually became so dented that I had to remove them because they were rubbing the tires. The chain guard, likewise, got bent and dented and had to go. The rubber handlebar grips wore out never to be replaced. The tread on the white wall tires wore thin and I replaced them with cheaper black wall tires. I learned to patch inner tubes, but flat tires were an ongoing problem.

Failing to replace the handlebar grips came back to haunt me. One day, coming home from a Brook Park swimming pool, shirtless, with a towel over my shoulders, I was speeding along and showing off with no hands on the handlebars, arms dangling at my side, trying to look cool. I hit the end of the school driveway across the street from my house and that slight bump threw me off the seat to the ground. The handlebars swung around, and the metal open end of the handlebars hit me in the upper chest, gouging a circular shaped chunk out of my skin.

I walked the bike up the driveway of my house holding the towel to my chest to stanch the bleeding. When my mother saw the wound, she said I was lucky the handlebar hadn’t gone straight into my windpipe. A few drops of mercurochrome, a bit of gauze, and some adhesive tape patched me up. Almost 70 years later, you can still see the scar.