My first ten speed, a crappy department store bike

It must have been 1976 when I bought my first ten speed. It was pretty crappy, but then again, I bought it with my newspaper money and was very proud. It was bright yellow and looked a bit like this machine. It was heavy and didn't shift that well, but it was my ticket to personal liberation. That bike allowed me to go on many long adventures with the Southern Tier Bicycle Club, which I will elaborate on in later posts, and I didn't buy a new bike until around '84.

I had a pretty big newspaper route with about 76 customers, and every day except for the snowiest of days, I biked to the garage where the newspapers were stored, stuffed my bags across both shoulders and pedaled off to the first house along my route. I perfected this really cool stunt where I ditched my bike on the yard and jumped off the bike. The poor bike endured all sorts of abuse, but I also taught myself rudimentary bike mechanics, thanks to a fantastic book called Anybody's Bike Book.

With this bike I started going on longer adventures, often with my friend Ted. My favorite destination was the Broome County Airport (now called Greater Binghamton Airport) and the Tri-Cities airport. Cars and airplanes were two of my biggest obsessions, and I loved to go to the airport and watch planes take off and land. I particularly liked hanging out at Tri-Cities, since there were exclusively small private propeller planes like Cessnas, and I could often get really close to the planes. The trip to Broome County Airport was longer, hillier and more challenging, and it was my introduction to hill climbing on a larger scale. The rolling hills in the Southern Tier and the Finger Lakes makes for some really challenging cycling and this is when I first started developing my cycling legs.

The most dramatic ride with Ted was a trip to the Broome County Airport happened on a day when my mother was scheduled for minor surgery. On the return trip from the airport, Ted was just ahead of me when he was suddenly chased by a dog. In his panic, he ended up kicking the dog, which resulted in the dog chasing after me instead and biting me in the ankle! I ended up in the same hospital as my mom with stitches and a tetanus shot. This was the second of my third (to date) cycling accidents, but it did little to dissuade me from biking. After that incident, I always carried a can of Halt with me and successfully used it to ward off dog challenges a number of times until I learned about the swinging bike pump technique.