Our bikes

   In 1967 Saturdays were the best. Between the hours of 9am and about 6pm on a Saturday (and all summer), my parents never knew where I was, not because they didn’t care, but because the “worry about your kids” factor had not been really invented yet……..they knew we were going to “goof” around with are buddies, and they knew when we were really hungry we would come home. It was so radical. Cutting edge parenting.
 We went everywhere on our feet, or our bikes….no matter how far, didn’t seem to matter. Our bikes were the best. Banana seats, high handle bars, and you were the coolest man around….and if you really wanted to step it up a notch you would put hockey cards in the spokes. Davey Keon rookie card, Gordie Howe, Tim Horton card…….these cards today would be worth thousands of dollars, oh well, they sounded cool rattling in the spokes of your bike, and that is all that mattered to us. Our bikes were unstoppable, you could go anywhere, no exception….they were the original “mountain bikes” simply because we were not smart enough to ‘not’ go somewhere with them….we just kept rolling. I remember my friend Kim, had no bike one day so we made him ride my sister’s bike, a “girl’s bike” of all things, but to toughen it up a bit, we nicknamed the bike…..we called it the “Harley Girly Bike” and that never changed…..any time Kim needed a bike, he would say “is the Harley Girly Bike available”? There was a huge steep hill near our place that in this day and age you wouldn’t go down this hill under any circumstance, but we took our bikes down it, how else would we know it was not a good idea. I will never forget the day Kim took the Harley girly bike down that hill, no helmet (they didn’t exist), he must have gone head over heels at least four times that day, we thought he was done for. He popped up, we laughed hysterically…..straightened out the wheels, the seat, the handle bars and away we went. Good times.
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