Yep, another one: THE BIKE By Wilton Strickland
In late August of '46, after tobacco harvest for the year was completed and before school started, I went to stay two weeks in Portsmouth, VA, with my brother, Jerry Linwood, and his wife, Anne. Because bicycles were not readily available around home, I had planned to buy one in Portsmouth. The first Monday morning there, Anne called and found a store with bicycles available at $50.00 each. Anne and I were going to the store by bus to make the purchase. Walking to the bus stop, Anne stopped briefly to speak to a neighbor. When Anne told the neighbor we were going downtown to buy a bike for me, the neighbor replied that she had an almost new bike for sale for $25.00. I quickly gave the lady the money for the bike and began immediately to learn to ride it. I had never been on a bike before, but by lunchtime, I was riding like a pro. By bedtime that night, my rear was so sore from the bike seat I could hardly sit. For the next several days, I got off the bike only to eat, go the restroom and to sleep. In bed at night, I felt like I was flying, leaning around curves, etc. My brother's neighborhood was an excellent place for bike riding; the streets were wide and nearly level, and the curbs were of the low, shallow type - easy to ride across, and auto traffic was very light. Back home, I immediately started riding the bike the 2 miles to school every day along the very busy highway into town and did so for 3 years or more. 'Never asked Mama or Daddy for permission to ride the bike to school - when school began, I just started riding the bike there without any discussion. Actually, about any time I wasn't working, in school or asleep, I was on the bike. My friend, Bobby Smith, and I knew only two speeds on our bikes: "stopped" and "fast." An afternoon in spring of '47, Bobby and I were leaving school going, as usual, as fast as we could down a long hill near the school. I had moved over toward the left side of the street planning to turn right at the bottom of the hill - a "T" intersection. As I approached the bottom of the hill and the cross street, Bobby behind me yelled, "Go left. Let's go left!" I leaned the bike hard to the left and went into the turn, but suddenly realized that a school bus had just made the left turn and was slowly pulling away from the intersection. As I leaned even harder to the left trying to clear the bus, my tires slipped, and the bike and I skidded up under the back of the bus banging up against the rear axle housing and the rotating rear wheels as the bus continued to pull away. The bike and I finally stopped skidding and bumping up under the bus, but the bus never stopped; the back of the bus traveled above me as I came to a stop up under it. Bobby and I were amazed that I only had a couple of minor bumps and abrasions, and the bike only had the end of one rubber handle bar grip worn away and a slightly bent pedal. Since that afternoon, I have often thought of the "trip" up under the school bus when I'm about to make a turn at an intersection - I tend to think ahead a little more and ask myself, "What's around the corner to surprise me as I'm about to roll out?" I was often hard-pressed to buy appropriate parts to properly maintain the bike. Instead, I had to be resourceful and innovative. Once, when I needed tires and, as usual, could not afford to buy new ones, I found two of the appropriate size lying by some garbage cans awaiting pickup by garbage collectors. I cut the mounting beads off the two salvaged tires and put them inside of my tires, much like World War II blowout boots. I rode the bike many miles with these double tires. When the seat cover got worn and ragged, I took it apart and re-covered it with leather from a discarded leather jacket. 'Kept the seat waxed and waterproofed with Johnson's Floor Wax. 'Did fairly well for the seat cover. 'Don't know what it did for the seat of my pants. The headlight on the bike was basically a streamlined two-cell flashlight permanently mounted on top of the front fender. It used 2 "D" cell batteries and a common flashlight bulb. Keeping the light working was quit a chore. Much of my riding was on bumpy dirt surfaces -- I constantly stayed very aware of motor-driven traffic approaching from behind and in front of me, and when cars were near me on the busy highway, I was off the pavement and onto the unpaved shoulder. The bumping easily shook the batteries loose and often caused the bulb to burn out. I wrapped the batteries in paper and tape in efforts to hold them securely, but I never did completely solve the shaking problem. I wanted to install a generator-operated light system on the bike, but I could never afford its $25 cost. This included a small 6 volt generator mounted on the front fork or a rear frame member so that a small pulley on top of it rolled against the tire to spin the generator and make electricity for the lights. The system also included a headlight mounted on the handlebars or front fender and a taillight on the rear of the back fender. A couple of days before Christmas, 1947, Mama asked me to ride my bike into town, about two miles away, to buy a coconut for her to use in making a cake. I had commuted to school in town on the bike for the past year and a half, so the trip was very routine for me, but the quest for a coconut became somewhat more than routine. I went to every one of the several grocery stores in and around the small town, but none had any coconuts. I had become determined, though - if there were a coconut within 10 miles of Nashville, I was going to find it, even if it meant riding to Rocky Mount 10 miles away. Finally, somebody in one of the stores overheard my conversation with a clerk and told me that he thought that Holland's Store, about three miles northeast of town on the Red Oak highway may have some coconuts. I don't think the store had a telephone, or if it did, it didn't occur to me to call them, possibly because I had never used a telephone. The ride out to Holland's Store was very easy - the countryside around this area is not very hilly. I enjoyed the ride along this lightly-traveled, paved road that I had not seen since we had lived down a dirt road a mile or so past the store several years earlier. The store did have some coconuts, and I bought one - I believe it cost less than a quarter. After the purchase, I rode on down the dirt road to the farm where we had lived and past the small stream where I had played using small blocks of wood and pine bark for boats when I was 7 to 9 years old. This stream was also the site of my first civil engineering project - building dams with mud, sand, sticks, leaves, etc., not very good dam building material. Also along the way, I crossed the red hill that had been so terrifying to me as a little boy in the back seat of the little Ford as we slipped and slid precariously from one side of the road to the other in the wet mud several years before. This day, in the warm sun, it was a joy to negotiate the hill with no worry about going into the ditch. My tires sang on the hard, red clay as I coasted rapidly down the far side of the hill with a cool breeze in my face. After riding the approximately seven miles or so back home, for a total trip of about 16 to 17 miles, I used a knife blade in a twisting motion to "drill" a hole through one of the "eyes" in the hard shell of the coconut and poured the "milk" out of it. Then I cracked the shell with a hammer, pried the meat from within the shell, and peeled the dark "skin" from the shell side of the "meat." All of this is not very easy to do, especially when you've never done it before and don't have proper tools for it - even the knife I used for the peeling was dull. I don't remember grating the coconut, myself - I think Mama or my sister, Joyce, took over the grating job, likely because I was eating too much of it, and Mama began to be concerned that I would make myself sick or there would not be enough of it left for the cake. Waiting for the finished cake was probably the hardest part of this entire project - - and how was the cake? Fantastic, of course, as all of Mama's cakes were! In June 1948, while I was staying with Richard, I attended Vacation Bible School for a couple of weeks at a small Baptist church nearby. There were about 8 to 10 girls in the class, ages 14 to 17. I was 14 and the only boy. We each had to make something of practical use. The girls were making aprons, simple dresses, etc. I wanted to make "what-not" shelves - a set of three small shelves to hang on a wall to hold small items, or "what-nots." I needed a small, hand-held coping saw to cut out the wood parts for the shelves. I didn't have money to buy one, but I had borrowed one from my friend, Bobby Smith, a few weeks before, but the saw was at home, 16 miles away. We didn't have phones, so that I could call Carson or W. B. to bring it to Rocky Mount on their way to work. I decided to ride my bike home early one morning to get the saw, hoping to arrive there early enough to ride back to Rocky Mount with Carson and W. B. I left Richard's house one morning about 4 AM and thoroughly enjoyed the ride home, arriving there in plenty of time to get the saw and tie the bike on the front of the car and depart for the return trip to Rocky Mount by 6 AM. My brothers put me off in downtown Rocky Mount, and I rode the bike the remaining four miles back to Richard's, arriving there before 7:30 AM, for a total bike ride of about 20 miles. Everybody was amazed that I had ridden so far to get the saw. (By the way, I still have the "what-not" shelves.
Wilton
_______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
