My Biking Memoir
Harris B. McKee August 20, 2017
My earliest family bicycle memory was of my father observing that he didn’t think bicycles had much to offer. Living on a farm, one could not really contest his point. You couldn't ride a bike through the pasture to get the cows. And riding to school was also not a likely prospect. The shoulder along the highway was rough. The road to school was graveled with pea gravel, whose loose texture made any ride challenging. So I learned to ride our riding horse.
I must have had some innate curiosity that made me want to learn to ride. David Shook's sister had a bicycle that they had brought from Mansfield, Ohio when her father was called to be the minister at Scotch Ridge United Presbyterian Church. David was a fellow third grader.
The Shooks riding options were not much better than mine but there was a path beside their house that had a gentle slope. On this slope, I learned to ride. Coasting down the slope, walking the bike back up the grade and repeating the process until I finally had enough confidence to pedal was the way I learned to ride.
I could ride but the closest I came to a bicycle was studying the inventory of a shop in Des Moines where my father sometimes found implement parts. The most intriguing model was a Whizzer, a motor assisted bike that looked ideal for our Southern Iowa hills.
Whizzer Motor Assisted Bike
In the meantime, while I waited for my own bike, I discovered that I could ride the bicycle that belonged to the son of my piano teacher on the streets of Indianola while my cousin finished his lesson. This was really fun until I discovered how slippery a bit of sand could make the wonderful concrete surface. Somehow, I twisted the wheel on the sand and found my face sliding on that Sandy surface. No bones were broken but I did not have my lesson.
About a year later, I was a beneficiary of a hand-me-down Monarch bicycle from my Reel cousins. This was a special model with a double spring on the front wheel. I began to ride to Mt. Olive School, hoping for a decent path on the gravel road that made up one mile of the nearly two-mile distance. The road past the school was dirt and, though not all-weather, it made for better biking.
Somehow I got into a race down the road against Marlyn Dash. Down the slope we raced; I pumped for greater speed and was beating her when I suddenly found myself flying over the handle bars! I had hit a small bump and compressed the springs until the front tire hit the top of the fork and stopped turning. Fortunately, I landed on my shoulders and suffered no injury. My first action when I returned home was to remove the springs and rely on only the cushion provided by the tire.
My next bicycle was a very ordinary three speed that I bought when I was at Thayer School to provide a way to get to Thayer without depending on Mary's schedule as she commuted to Hartford High School in White River Junction, VT. A few months later I bought a very old Cushman motor scooter and never rode the bicycle again. (I was able to sell it before we left for California. )
Monarch Fork Showing Double Spring
Cushman Scooter
When we got to California in 1963, I discovered that the San Francisco police were having an auction of abandoned bicycles. I bought four items in various states of disrepair and was able to assemble two working bikes. We rode those bikes for 24 years until we were shamed into upgrading by fellow bikers in Cedar Rapids. In between, I rode back and forth to Stanford every day, rode for a while from Sunnyvale through the Lockheed complex to NASA Ames Research Center and rode in St. Louis. (Mary rode her SF police bike to her Stanford office until pregnant with our first child. She later participated in a bike rally in Kirkwood with both daughters who were about six and seven; one missed checkpoint made their 5-mile ride last thirteen. )
Our serious biking began in Cedar Rapids with new 10 speed Schwinn World Sport bikes. Frames were sized to correspond to our height. Mary had a seat allegedly designed for a woman's posterior. Both hers and mine required considerable toughening of our body parts.
Black Schwinn World Sport Bike circa 1987
We rode on trails in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Nearly all of this riding was on trails converted from railroad right of way. We found these especially desirable because there was never much grade.
Most of our riding was uneventful. The exception was a ride in Wisconsin with our
cousin Jim Hickman who had an annual pass for the trail west of Madison on which we were riding. We didn't see a place to buy a day pass so just got on our bikes and started down the trail. We hadn't gone far when we met a sheriff's SUV coming toward us on the trail. We thought we were about to be busted for riding without a permit but the car just passed us by. Mary said cheerfully, "They are probably looking for a body."
We learned the next day from the Hickmans that, in fact, they were looking for a body. A man dropped off the previous day by his wife had not arrived at their appointed rendezvous. The police found him in a gulley where he had ridden off the trail at a point that we passed by on our ride.
We built our stamina with increasingly lengthy rides including several 50-mile rides, one of which was on the roads of Door County as we celebrated our wedding anniversary with a bicycling vacation. With this conditioning, Mary took on an 89-mile ride on RAGBRAI, the Registers Great Bike Ride Across Iowa. (Our Son-in-Law Wiley Utterback has traversed the complete RAGBRAI route several times but Mary's one-day ride was our only adventure as part of RAGBRAI.)
Since leaving the Midwest for Arkansas our riding has been very limited and our bikes deteriorated. I had new cables installed on mine in 2016 and did a little riding on part of the 35-mile surfaced trail from Bella Vista to Fayetteville. I brought my now 30-year-old Schwinn World Sport to Chicago but we left Mary’s in our estate sale. I’ve now had a few rides on the Lakeshore trail and look forward to more.