On Tue, 2012-10-02 at 13:46 -0500, Tim McNamara wrote: > Bicycling is safe. The general perception of bicycling now is that it > is a brain injury waiting to happen. I am old enough to well remember > when that public perception changed: when plastic bike helmets hit > the market ca. 1975. Bicycling! Magazine led the charge. It's a > great example of a meme.
I remember those days well. I remember in 1972 when my wife fainted on a bike ride, went down and hit her head. I remember driving on Rt 17 in the Catskills at 120 mph taking her to the hospital, with my daughter in the back seat, and her asking every few minutes "Are we married? Do we have a child?" and "Who is that kid in the car?" And I remember Dick Burns, an engineer from Rochester NY, visiting us in Monticello, telling us about the ride he was on when his friend and mentor crashed when he hit a dog, and how he died in his arms from a brain injury, and how Dick then designed a bike helmet and tried to persuade the helmet companies to make it commercially. I remember how my wife and I bought hockey helmets after that, and how at CoNYMA, the very first bike rally I ever attended, 1973, I was riding with Irv Weisman, technical editor of the League of American Wheelmen Bulletin, who also was wearing a hockey helmet. We got quite a bit of ribbing at the start of the ride, but about halfway through the ride we came upon a crash. A guy went down on gravel, landed on his head and peeled his scalp right off his skull. Oceans of blood everywhere, simply shocking. And I remember how after that we got all kinds of questions about where'd we get those helmets, and what were they. Eventually, in early 1975, Dick Burns convinced MSR to make a modification of their climbing helmet and turn it into a bike helmet. I recall Dick demonstrating that helmet at a workshop at GEAR 1975 that I, as workshop chairman, had set up. He brought a bowling pin with him, put on the helmet, and whacked himself on the head with it. Then he offered anyone in the workshop the chance to use the bowling pin to whack themselves over the head with a leather hairnet. I remember the skepticism in the Mid-Hudson Bike Club, that I belonged to at the time, until the strongest, most agile rider in the entire club, Jack Barnard, who had bought one, crashed on a night commute home from work. He ran over a downed tree branch that he had mistaken for a shadow, and the bike pivoted around the front wheel high-wheeler style, and he came down right on his head. I remember the drawing we made of the helmet for the club newletter (in those days, hand typed and hand drawn with a stylus on a mimeograph stencil) of the shattered helmet, and I remember Jack's comment that he had a headache, but the ER docs told him were it not for that helmet he would have been a dead man. And I remember how by the end of the month every member of the Mid-Hudson Bicycle Club had bought a helmet. Yeah, it's all a conspiracy on the part of the helmet makers and Bicycling magazine, and head injuries just don't happen. And if you're extra careful, bike crashes don't happen either. Bull$hit. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en.
