...and though I still miss my Ross 3-speed, here's the rest of the story...

What do you do when you produce a poorly written weekly blog that’s faithfully (but unexplainably) read by a loyal group of followers but you have nothing fresh to share? Well, what you shouldn’t do is be like the chap that begins by acknowledging they have nothing of value to say, and then spends the next 15 minutes proving it. But the reality is that on days like today, I really am drawing a blank.  I woke up at 3:55am, stumbled down the stairs, brushed my teeth, turned on the lights in the basement gym and flipped open the laptop…but there was nothing there. The rule of this blog is to write whatever is on my mind in the wee hours of a Friday, but some days, probably even most days, there really isn’t much there (in some ways, I guess this site is actually a weekly validation of that point).

So…what do you do the times you have nothing? Well, in looking over the blog’s most popular posts, I came across this one from about 18 months ago. It’s one of the few that appeared here that received a significant number of pageviews that didn’t have anything to do with bad television or infomercials. I’m not sure what was behind the popularity, but there must have been something about it that resonated. So…consider this part of the summer re-run series…with a couple of edits (removed the word “literally” from several places where it literally added nothing) and a Paul Harvey like “rest of the story” added at the end. With any bad luck, I’ll be back next week with an original thought.

It’s Friday…and I miss my Ross 3 Speed

It was a genuine thing of beauty…forest green paint with bright chrome wheels and shiny handle bars that exceeded my wildest expectations for a new bike. It was Christmas Eve 1969, and after being coaxed outside for a game of catch by my beloved uncle Ted (he was on a Battleship in Pearl Harbor on December 7^th, 1941 and could give you a blow-by-blow account of the attack), I returned inside to the living room of our West Los Angeles home to find a brand new, sparkling Ross 3-speed bicycle parked right next to the fireplace. There are not a lot of vivid holiday images stored in my memory banks, but the picture of that glistening new 3-speed is etched in my brain with crystal-clear clarity.

It had to be a pretty heavy lift at the time for my electrician father and stay-at-home mom. With a car payment, house note, I can’t imagine the purchase was particularly easy for my conservative Depression era parents. But like a lot of things it was the quintessential testament to the value of collectively bargained wages that allowed hard-working union construction workers like my dad to provide a quality middle-class life for his family, As I rolled the bike outside and hopped on for the inaugural ride, I remember my father telling me to take good care of my new prized possession. As I careened up and down Esther Ave that night in our late 60's Wonder Years neighborhood (this was long before helmets or even illuminated bicycle lights), I remember thinking life couldn’t possibly get any better.

A couple of weeks later I was riding my new wheels back from my friend Stanley Carmack’s house who lived in Cheviot Hills about two-miles from our place in Rancho Park (at that time, an eight year-old could travel 2 miles to a friend’s house alone on a bike…I still think that’s true…but that’s a whole other subject). Just as I passed the bridge that went over the old railroad tracks into the east end of Palms Park, I notice two shady young teenagers walking toward the middle of Northvale Ave. I probably should have turned around, but I proceeded ahead and as I came upon the two, one of them held up is hand and indicated I should stop.

Not really knowing any better, I slowed to a halt to see what the two needed. When I did, the eldest of the two (I’m guessing they were about 16) put his hand on my handlebars and asked me where I lived. Not thinking, I said simply “oh…a ways away from here” and with that he instructed me to get off the bike. The other teenager looked scared, but he moved behind me and grabbed onto the bike rack to prevent me from pulling backward. The kid again told me to get off the bike, but I said I would not. The thug then jerked the handlebars and implored me to get off. He held an object I had not seen before to my stomach, and as he pushed a button, a platinum colored blade swung out. I’m guessing it wasn’t more than a four inches long, but at age 8, it looked to me like a machete.

Well, to be honest, I pretty much froze. I thought about my possible courses of action, but at the end-of-the-day, all I could figure out to do was reluctantly hop off the bike and give it up. I remember the kid climbing on my new bike and riding away with his accomplice sitting on the bike rack. It was a sobering experience that played out over-and-over in my young life, and for a long time, I was haunted by all of the things I could have done. I could have picked up a rock and clocked the guy in the head as he rode away, or ran to the nearest house (literally 50 yards away) to call the cops. I could have chased after them screaming and trying to draw attention to them (they really couldn’t ride too fast). However instead of doing any of those things, I ran home the entire two miles sobbing, and I was such a basket case when I finally arrived at the house that it took a good 20 minutes for me to convey to my mother what had transpired.

Aside from losing that beautiful new bicycle, I was probably pretty petrified about what my dad would likely do. He had grown up in a rough-n-tumble neighborhood with little in the way of excess, and I suppose I feared he would be disgusted with the way I handled the situation…and the fact that I didn’t fight for my prized bike. In retrospect, I think he probably was a little disappointed. He’d spent hours teaching me how to fight and how to defend myself, and I’m sure he thought there was little chance they would have actually stabbed me just to get my bicycle. To his credit though, if he felt any shame or disappointment he did not show it…not even a hint. I remember him trying to calm me down…and saying “it’s only a bicycle…you did the right thing.”  There are few things I can be so sure of, but one difference between me and father was he would have never given up his bike without a fight. Actually, I’m pretty sure if they’d have jumped my dad when he was 8, the guy with the switchblade would have had to go to St. Johns to have it removed from his sigmoid colon.  

That was the last I ever saw of that bicycle…or those two criminals. I was hoping to hear they’d been broadsided later that day by a car on Manning Ave, or hit by the Southern Pacific freight train as they crossed the tracks on Motor Ave by the old Tootsie Roll factory, but we never heard anything. There are stretches of years that pass between the times I recall that story now, but when I do I try to derive some sense of peace by telling myself those two delinquents are doing hard time at Folsom with huge unwashed cellmates that have leprosy. Sometimes, I fantasize that they got the chair…and that maybe when I did electrical work I wired the substation that delivered the voltage that ridded the world of their pitiful existence. (For the record…I’m not bitter).

The rest of the story…

I don’t recall the timeline really. I suspect he waited a week or two to see if the stolen bike ever showed up…but the cops never called. One evening when I returned home from school, I walked up the driveway and heard the unmistakable rhythm of my father hitting the speed bag in the garage. He could hit that bag like a prize fighter, and when I turned to walk up the steps to the back door, he stopped and abruptly said… “hey…don’t you have some chores to do? Get out the mower and get busy on the front lawn.”

Unlike the highly evolved Ivy League educated parents of today that get into discussions with kids about such things, there wasn’t any kind of negotiation when my WWII era dad barked out a command…it was just a whole lot easier to suck it up and mow...you were going to end up doing it (and probably more) even if you argued, so you may as well get started.  When I dropped my bag and walked into the garage to fetch the push mower (I was the motor), there was a brand new silver Schwinn 10-speed parked right behind our 65’ black Thunderbird.

If the Ross was a high-end Chevy Impala, the new American made Schwinn was a Cadillac Coup De Ville. My dad bought it from Russ at the Schwinn bicycle store on West Pico boulevard…and man…when I jumped on that beauty I was cooking with gas for the next 8 or 9 years. Sometime later my dad inherited that bike when I moved onto my red 72’ Ford Pinto in 1979 (actually…he inherited it earlier but that’s a whole other Friday story). As a matter of fact, that same bicycle, well over 30 years old, hung in the garage of my parent’s home in Santa Paula, CA until my dad passed away a few years ago…and he continued to ride it well into his 80s, until the cruelty of old-age robbed in of that pleasure. Like a lot of things my father purchased with IBEW wages, his diligence around the upkeep (it was my diligence for the first nine years) of that bicycle meant it didn’t look markedly different in 2000 than it did in the garage the day he brought it home in 1969. Just thinking it about it now, I remember sitting on a small wood stool in the garage, listening to Vin Scully on the transistor while polishing the chrome wheels to a mirrored finish.

Have a fantastic weekend, and if you can, spend some time with the people you love and make some memories that will last long after much of the work-related stuff you might be focusing on too much now fades with added years to the mere trivial. And because it is Friday, start today with a song. If you take the time to listen to this tune you might even find yourself smiling…and that really isn’t such a bad way to kick off the weekend.

Sukiyaki Succotash?