Being a kid was a lot more fun then! Bear

Yeah, me too, on my bike. Those were the days, my friend!

Hell yeah,..that hand brake on the right side was a life saver...

they forgot NO Suspension....

Yes, last year when my daughter (4) at the time learned to ride her bike without training wheels my wife said should we get her a helmet, knee and elbow pads and all that?
I said no way, I survived and all my friends did too doing way worse, she'll be fine.
Couple of skinned up knees and palms is all she's had so far and she'll be just fine.

They also forgot the giant assed hill you went down BEFORE you hit the ramp.

I ended up in the street and about got hit by a car.....there were lots of "abouts" Mom never knew...

What are training wheels?

You forgot to light the ramp on fire with some gas.

Big wheels were a lot later than my childhood, but a Schwinn Stingray, ya baby

First exposure I had to the "Giant Assed Hill" was at my uncles on an unfamiliar bike. When I got to "the road" it was either hit the brakes or go across the road and into the bar ditch..

I found out about rear wheel braking, pea gravel and road rash that day.

Around the Big Wheel time,..I also enjoyed this. Would get dizzy as hell, stumble around in the front yard, and then go do it again...

I can't imagine that at one time, my whole body would fit on that thing...

had a Schwinn apple crate. the one with the shocks little tire in front and steering wheel instead of handle bars.

bet you wished you still had it, could buy a good rifle with the proceeds. They made a Cherry Bomb too

That is the toy that started the dumbing down of America

I got shoved off of a go-kart on gravel once.....talk about road rash.

And that Bactine schit burned like hell. False advertsing bastards...

You had Bactine? We had Iodine and Mecurachrome, trust me I don't feel your pain

I recall breaking a couple of bicycles trying to be Evel Knievel

Oh, I had that crap, too. But you do remember your 2 or three pairs of jeans and shirts you got a year? Mom bitched about stains enough that she wasn't going to make them....

Can you imagine how much kids would bitch today if you patched their jeans?

I had the aforementioned bigwheel and a Schwinn Stingray, too. Never had my own go kart, but I remember riding my cousin's kart though. It had a stuck throttle and no brakes and I got a big lesson about keeping my booger hooks off the spark plug when I reached back to try to choke the engine to get stopped.

I still twitch a little when I think about it.

chit patches were cool.

The patches kept your favorite jeans alive.

we got a couple of pairs of jeans, white Tee shirts and a pair of black and white sneakers from the Jupiter 5 & dime. 5 buckle overshoes and a chore jacket wrapped it up for the winter. Patches were the norm on the jeans but the holes in the shoes made for some cold wet feet

Still have the scars. We use to drink water out of the garden hose, nowadays that's probably child endangerment.

I had a three speed Apple crate.

By the time we reached high school we had a pretty good handle on "cause and effect". I learned the physics of a fulcrum on a ramp similar to that but with too much ramp beyond the log. Those handle bars in the gut felt like a prize fighter's punch. Man I was out of wind for what seemed like forever.

Mart

there were ARE lots of "abouts wife,don't know about,,why worry her more than she does now

Yes. We learned many of life's lessons at a much earlier age. Half of our entertainment back in the 50's and 60's would land our parents in jail today. Oh for the good ole days.

I remember well the Big Wheel era. I remember the envy my brother and I felt not owning a Big Wheel. I remember trading firecrackers and gum and things of that nature for a 10 minute 'rental' of a kid on the block. Ha! The Green Machine was the Viper of Big Wheels. I remember going down to the basement after Santa brought my brother and I matching model Huffy bikes, red and blue. Big banana seats, double crossbar, chrome chainguard and fenders, man, we were pumped. Waited, half-crazed, we did, for the day the old man would let us ride them, some time in the spring. Day came, brother and I flew down the back stairs, only to find that our storage area had been broken into, and the bikes were amongst those items we had stolen.

Later, we learned to be a bit more fancy. Frankenstein bicycles we cobbled together from abandoned bikes, garbage day frames, etc. One of the most eye-pleasing was when wait until dark, and at the bottom of some urban hill, we'd pour lighter fluid, gasoline, and any number of accelerants we'd procured from whatever source onto the street. Then the idea was to haul arse from the top of the hill, and just when the bike was crossing the street with the fuel, you'd lock up the real wheel. As the wheel on these specialty rides had neither tube nor tire worn, the sparks would fly. Well, you can picture the ignition, with little demons wearing wicked smiles blasting through a fireball on a Frankenstein bike. Man, if only I had a camera back then.



Thanks for the memory jar, Roger.

got a Yamaha yz 80 in 77, don't know how i survived that.

ahhh the good ol days. I used to live on a nice hilly road that I would haul ass down on my 3 wheeler and yank the bars to send it into a spin.. nice soft rubber front wheel and hard plastic rear wheels = most fun a Kid could ask for. My poor father rebuilt that damn trike more times than I can count. Then I remember when he won a go-kart at a rod run with our 49 Ford Coupe .. God that little cart could haul ass!!

you know I had forgot about the handlebar punch, made my b@lls cringe just thinking about it. What about the muffler burn from dumping a dirtbike

Every time I hear the lyrics at ~ the 30 second mark, I grin and shake my head, back for a moment of that day, and of my brother, ages 7 and 8 or so, plotting and swearing revenge (we never duid locate the thief, or the bikes, unfortunately )

Apologies for the stream of consciousness thread drift, Rog'.

Leighton mentioned thr Green Machine. Well, after I outgrew my Big Wheel I moved up to a copy of The Green Machine called The Red Baron. That thing was a riot! Anyone remember those?

My boy has strep. The whining, pissing and moaning he does to take medicine....

You guys remember after a while they came out with that pink crap that supposedly tasted like "bubble gum"?

You musta been rich!!

How many clutch and brake levers did you go thru? Seems like I was breaking one every week or two.

everyone had these too.

wasn't it called terimiacin or some sh@t like that

Some neighborhoods nearby were pretty rough. I heard of a few kids coming out of the gas station and finding the front fork of the (former) Big Wheel resting on a brick...

My grandfather got tired of hearing that clicker thing on the big wheels, he'd tell me and my brothers "come here boy, let me fix that motor for ya" then he'd cut the clicker off haha. I remember having 5-6 of those things, they didnt last long

Ya oughta seen us in the 50's. Our stuff was made out of steel. Didn't have to wait so long for the baby teeth to fall out.

... into the barbed wire fence. I also know about rear wheel braking, pea gravel and road rash.


We also played cowboys and Indians own bikes with BB guns.

Remember watching this?

Depending on your age it either scared the hell out of you or was just another lame show...

We went from big wheels right up to go karts and paintball guns. I tell ya what, nothing like playing chicken and taking a paintball in the crotch.. I dont know how i kept the kart on the road.

Remember the movies with Lon Chaney and Bela Lagossie and company

crap you guys were rich! we had to catch our own pets and build go carts............but dayum it was FUN?!

i ate lunch with Vincent Price at the airport in Lubbock had the only table with spare chairs, was 17 at the time.

bet ya didn't turn your back to the dude

I remember watching the winter Olympics and how the bobsleds inspired me to build a crude bobsled of my own. God must have been watching over me and my brother because we never managed to build and ice down a suitable run. I'm sure that sled wouldn't have held up past the first couple turns.

what struck me the most was how tall he was.

Hell, they buy em with holes in em now! And it costs more for the holes!

My mother used to put new patches on my new jeans before I even wore them. They all had plenty of cuff too. Went great with a white Tshirt, whit socks and Keds or PF flyers. I only talked them into one pair of PF's. I was not impressed, the commercials were obviously exaggerated. Went back to keds after that.

Alan

I honestly don't. What'd it look like? I hope at least it was an American knock off back then...

Anyone remember the Honda 'Kick 'n' Go'?

Now you's gettin' deep!

We had channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 27, 38, 44, 56 and 68. Saturdays it was Creature Double Feature in Boston, channel 56. 4 hours of pure awesomeness. Attack of the Killer Shrews, Gamera vs. Rodan, Dracula's Revenge (part like 11 or something). Oh snap, how about 'I Was a Teenage Werewolf'. Know who that was? Little Joe from Bonanza and the father on Little House on the Prairie! lol. Roger, you've done it now!

Can you say 'hand me down Tuff Skins'?

Badge of Honor, man.

We had 4,9, and 13 + 5 was PBS. We were more extensively entertained than at any time since!
Mark

I can vividly remember stair surfing in carboard boxes. Adam

You guys are old.



The funnest thing I had was a gas golf cart. Onetime when my brother was driving he attempted a power slide. Of course I was not paying attention nor holding on. I ended up 25 feet from where the cart turned, I could have went further but thanks to a walnut tree I did not. That hurt for a little while.

Holy shyt I just remembered what those looked like. Y'know, that was probably like the only kind of toy I wasn't jealous of. Kinda' ghetto, buddy. Your old man had something of a vicious streak in him, I now see...

lmao

Sorry kid, I been at the sauce a bit tonight.

I was before BW's. We took a trike and removed the forks/handlebar, flipped the frame over and reassembled. Never figured out a way to do a seat.

Sheeit! All that stuff was for sissies. We had Merthiolate.

I went to a local rodeo when I was about 11. Decided that bull riding looked like fun, so .... the next morning climed up top of the feeder in the bull pen and dropped an alfalfa leaf down. Over came Mr. Bull. I jumed down onto him doing a 180 in the air on my way down. Completely FORGOT the hand hold part and such. Lasted one jump or less and landed face first into the fencboard full of nails sticking out. If the bull had not been soo interested in the Alfalfa, he would have finished me off right then, easily.

That ANY young man lives to be 30 years of age is proof possitive that there is a God and he cares and watches over us more than we know, or deserve.

On the topic of bicycles and such, my best ever Christmas memory of my dad was when he bought a used Stigray and a bunch of parts, paint etc. then banned me from the garage. He then spent a lot of the month of December building me the coolest totally custom CHOPPER bicycle in the known world. Long forks, fat racing slick rear tire, metal flake paint, Apehanger handlebars, the works. I was 8 years old, and today at age 51 that memory still gets to me. Possibly because my mom and dad split up shortly after that.

A casual friend of mine had a golf cart roll on him one night in a drunken joyride on his way home one night in HS (shortcut across the course). His liver was split when the cart landed on him. He was found beneath it the next day, dead. Forever young.

I remember one winter morning it was back when I was seven or eight my granddad had refurbished an old sled and gave it to me over in Cheney,WA. One morning I got up and took that old sled down to the sleding hill the city had closed off for the kids to slide down on their sleds. I took off on the sled down the hill when I got to the bottom of the hill the city hadn't sanded the bottom of the hill yet that morning so I couldn't get stopped so I Slide across four lanes of traffic before getting stop. The street at the bottom of the hill was the main drag through town and at that time it was also Highway US 10 the main highway From Seattle to the East Coast long before the Interstate system was ever thought of it was in 1947.

Talk about one scared kid, I was lucky I didn't get killed by a car, truck or bus.

The '50's' were a comprably 'safe' pre Go Cart Era.
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `

I remember homemade 'cars' being commonly built by bigger kids, using a wide plank for the frame, with old Derby Car wheels (feet steering), and a Maytag washing machine gas motor, for (slow motion) propulsion.

No way you could possibly get 'hurt' driving one of these vehicles -

Unless you drove it ... ... ... DOWNHILL.

oh yeah we tore up many a big wheel when i was a kid. every kid always had mecurchrome (sp?) red knees. or riding a radio flyer wagon down the hill and crashing into something.

with butterfly handlebars

I had a red 'Mercury' Tricycle, a red 'Radio Flyer' Wagon, and a red two-wheel Scooter (mfg unknown) - all late '40's.

Never had those diversions. Instead I had a Benjamin pellet rifle made of brass and a H&R Topper that I hunted small game and birds with. A few years shy of 16 I was scaling cliffs, cave diving, spearing sharks for sport and making all my pocket change with the point of a spear. Oh, and free diving as deep as 80' and pilfering stuff from the carnage of the Mariannas Turkey Shoot.

I got my Stingray from my older brother. When he got his drivers license I bought it from him. We all had some kind of jobs then, cutting grass, raking leaves, delivering papers or something. The gun company catalogs (and Sears) were great motivators for work.

Ernie

we bolted a 5HP tiller engine on a '40s wooden wagon with a V belt to drive the rear axle.
Thank goodness the old hard tires just spun a lot

We never worried about brakes
and talk about horrible steering geometry!

Just sitting still it would flip over!

In the good ole days we had better gene pool cleansing!

Got a pile of stories like that.

Did 75mph on a recliner strapped to a chunk of sheet metal being pulled by a Wildcat 700.

Got tore a new one when dad found the pics of us jumping over his pick up truck with a CR250. (was his truck and 2 others parked side to side)

Hit a house on a Yamaha Phazer. Had to learn to do some siding. Course it happening in July didn't help the situation.

Problem was I was friends with access to a well stocked diesel shop (tools) and not a whole lot to do - most everything we did involved a motor of some sort.

How none of us ended up dead is beyond me.

I've googled myself silly trying to find an image of the Red Baron with no luck. I did find this old Kmart advertisement from 1977 with Green Machines or Red Barons on sale for $15.88, your choice, but I can't get it to post from my Droid.
[img:left]http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1291&dat=19770518&id=Ww9UAAAAIBAJ&sjid=rowDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6679,2859503[/img]

but did you do that standing up?

O Lordy do some of these stories bring back vivid memories. I'm from the late '40s early '50s growing up.

First introduction to pure and un-adulterated pain and suffering. Standing up and pumping hard on the bicycle when the chain broke and I landed astride the crossbar.

Some time way back there all us boy kids saw Ivanhoe. I fell in love with Liz Taylor.
There for a long while we did jousts on bicycles. Long piece of scrap lumber from the saw mill for a lance, left over WWII helmets, and garbage can lids for shields. I had what passed for a dragon on mine. MOre like a pregnant earth worm with fins.

Peddling bicycles as fast as you could while trying to manage all the stuff you were holding in your hands and coming togehter resulted in some spectacular crashes.

Yea I did the Big Wheel thing down some nasty hills, even when we got too big to get our legs under the handle bars to the peddles and had to drape 'em over the handle bars.

But for a real trip tuck two or three kids inside a big ol' tractor tire and try the same hill, when we were lucky and didn't hit anything we could make it clear to the other side of town.

Guaranteed, You'll be comin' out of the tire with head spins!

I remember a kid trying to jump a drainage ditch on his 26" bike with a sheet metal "tank"

He sliced his sack open on it and you could see his 'nads. Plain as day.
Very little blood but an impressive wound!

I can still see the scar after 40 years from my big wheel accident. A bush and a fire hydrant and six stitches. Thankfully no sack damage, gives me the hebejebes thinking about that.

lol

We did this too, but our take was that it was a team demolition derby on bikes. Most times it was pairs of brothers vs. pairs of other brothers. Those without brothers would team up to compete. Our rules allowed for implements to be used in hitting and throwing, too. Rocks, bottles, sticks, that sort of thing. The object was to either knock out the bike, or the rider. or both. One time this kid I hated, Glen T, was riding his brand-new ten speed at a high rate across the lot at us, looking to ram an opponent with his bike, and skewer someone with his broomstick. I was riding at him at an angle, and saw I wasn't going to be able to cut him off and engage him before he smashed someone on our team. So I heaved back and hurled my 'implement', a cut-off hockey stick, as hard as I could, hoping to hit him in the head with it.

I missed by ten feet easily, short and too far ahead. By the luck of the demolition derby Gods would have it, however, that stick bounded end over end, ending up sliding directly between the spokes just ahead of the fork of Glen's bike. CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK! As if in slow motion, I watched the wheel get be-spoked at around 25 mph. When maybe half of the spokes had broken, the rim folded like a taco, and of course the bike then went full curb-endo, with Glen's heels literally over his head. He ended up smashing his breastplate and face up pretty good. Advantage, team Honda!

Good times.