Cold Spring Afternoon

Sunday I just needed to get out for awhile. It was drizzly, too cold for the bike, so I walked. These have been tense, and busy days and each one of them seems to call out almost all the juice that I have leaving nothing in reserve. Working early. Putting in a full hard eight, and maybe a bike ride to the corner. Up at midnight. Too much computer. Too many clicks, e-mails paypals and fedexes. Try to get back to sleep. Up at four for work. It won't last forever.

I got in a good ride and a good walk on Saturday, so I wasn't up for putting out some great athletic feat on Sunday. Nonetheless, I needed to just get out, and move. So I went down to the tracks. This year we've been lucky. Despite some pretty heavy rainfall (for So. Cal.) the trail along the easement has been spared attack from the Goofballs of four wheel drive. The dirt road heading east is mostly healed of the tire track scars from last year. The foot flattened path is easy to walk on again. The mowers haven't torn through here yet, and the wild grass enclosing the path is a good three and a half, or four feet high. It smells sweet in the cold gray wind.

There is a bunch of wheat that grows in the tall grass there along the railroad easement. I have, on occasion, taken the ripe kernels home, and planted them in pots in the yard. They grow; they produce kernels which ripen in turn. They taste OK too, but I've never had the impulse to gather a bunch of it, and then cook it, or make some sort of bread. Nonetheless, watching it grow interspersed with the weeds along the tracks, you feel like you can witness the first impulse to agriculture. Eh- maybe I will try gathering a bunch of it later on. It isn't nearly ready yet.

An old creekbed turned storm channel crosses the path along the easement, and there is a low trestle where, twice a day, the freight train crosses the dirty stream. A depression in the creekbed just before the trestle has created a small, dark pond. Enough water remains there year round to support a thick stand of false bamboo and a small forest of cattails where the black, murky water spills over into the stream under the bridge. You can't tell how deep the pond is, but you can tell it's deep enough to drown in. Kids have been sitting under that trestle, sneaking cigarettes, beer, weed, and sex since long before I discovered the place in 1966. Then the trestle was bolted together from heavy, black, creosote saturated timbers, and pilings. You couldn't stand up straight underneath it. It was hairball as all hell to sit under the trestle, feeling the ground shake, and watching tanker cars lumbering over the ties barely twelve inches above your head.

You gotta' go under there stoned on acid, man. It is sooo heavy...
I went there with that chick, and we...

Thanks 1968. Glad you reminded me.
The railroad rebuilt the thing some years back. They raised it up, a good eight or ten feet above the creekbed, and, of course the trestle is no longer made of wood, but concrete, and paved all the way across. It's no big deal to be there when the train goes by now. Kids still taste their first forbidden fruits under the trestle, but rather than pad discretely behind the houses at night to meet there, they advertise their presence with spray cans and paint sticks. The city hires a full time graffiti abatement worker to paint over the tagging on that bridge, and elsewhere along the easement.

When I got to the Beach Boulevard crossing I looked up the street the half mile or so to the corner. Go get a cup? No. So I just turned around, and headed back. I just didn't feel like walking up to the corner for coffee- head's too full of stuff, and while there are people I talk to up there, there is no one I really share anything important with. You know how that is. You want to talk to someone, but there just isn't anyone to talk to. Except for old John, that is. And I don't say anything to John that I don't want well mixed, and repeated. So I re-traced my steps, but when I reached First Avenue I still didn't want to go back home. So I walked back down to Beach again. Now what? Take the sidewalk through the neighborhoods? Go up Beach? Down? Feeling like the distilled essence of indecision, I just turned around and started scuffing back along the tracks again. What is this? What's wrong? What is it that I want?

When I got back, my mother let me know that opossums had come to visit. My mother likes possums. There were two of them snuffling around in the geraniums by the block wall. The one old guy had lost a tooth, and it looked like some cat had given him a bad scratch down the snout. One lip was kind of hanging open in a sad imitation of a tough-guy sneer, but like all opossums he just couldn't even do a bad imitation of tough. They're harmless, not very bright, and so pathetically ugly that they're endearing rather than scary. An opossum usually doesn't even have the good sense to run away. The big guy with the missing tooth looked up at me like he expected me to give him a snack. I didn't have anything to give him. The smaller one hung back a little, and peered at me from under the geraniums. They decided I wasn't much of a threat, waddled back to the corner of the yard, and climbed up the shefflera trunk to the block wall. They were good enough to pose for a couple of pictures before leaving.


JWM

Parting Company

The den is a mess. It's usually disordered, and mostly messy, but now it is in total chaos. The place is a jumble of boxes, paper, tape, and bubble wrap. You have to climb in to get to the computer. This will last throughout the month of April. By the end of the first week in May, it will all be over, and my collection of Japanese die-cast robot toys will be scattered to the far corners of the globe. The old toys will have new owners. I'll have enough money to replace our crummy old cars with newer, somewhat less crummy used cars. Maybe have a few bucks in the savings account. We'll see.

I made the decision some months back. It was time to let the collection go.

It's kind of odd. I have all sorts of reasons to get nostalgic about this. I gathered the robot toys in the old collection during a wild, and eventful season of my life- first true love and serious relationship, friendships broken, trusts betrayed, fights, broken windows, lots and lots of booze, and dope.
And then the restless years- over a decade of not staying in one place for more than a few months. Apartment after apartment- the shelf going up in the living room, the collection taken out piece by piece, dusted off, and put on display.
This is it. I'm settled here. I'm done with moving...
And a few months later the room would again be full of boxes. The same boxes that held the collection after the first move. The same boxes from the Jr. High school where I worked back in the seventies. The box that held the Sony amplifier that I bought in seventy six. Those same boxes are empty now for the last time- piled on the back porch to go out with Wednesdays trash. The thirty year old robots are, one by one, being nested in crumpled newspaper, and secured in new Fed-Ex cartons, waiting to be shipped, same day delivery, to who knows where.

Like I said it's kind of odd that I don't have any sense of nostalgia over doing this. It occurred to me last night as I packed up the large, gift-box sets that will be the first to go up for sale- this is the last time I'm going to look at these things. I'll never see them again except in the pictures that are on my hard drive, or posted here on the wfb. Just like I'll never see Diane again. Diane was my first real girlfriend, the first true love in my life, and the one who gave me the silly talking Robocon that started my whole fascination with Japanese toys. Diane went on to marry well, and raise a family. She died this last year from cancer leaving behind a husband and two kids. The guy who was my closest friend back then called to let me know. I doubt I'll see, or hear from him again, and I do not care if I don't.
Anyway.
I packed up box after box last night, and it was a chore that needed to be done and nothing more. Wednesday I'll have to get out of bed at midnight to open bidding on the first, and most sought after item. That's going to be a pain. The auction will have bidders from all over the world. The best way I could come up with to ensure that people in Europe, Asia, and the Philippines all have a clear idea of when bidding opens and closes is to start the sales at midnight, and keep bidding open for a twenty four hour window. I'll survive.

Again though, what strikes me here is that I don't seem to have any palpable connection to the toys any longer. When I first bought them, each one was just a delight. For years I took great pleasure in setting up the shelves, working the transformations on the various robots, then periodically re-arranging the shelves. And when I brought the collection out of mothballs almost ten years ago that sense of delight was reawakened in me. I found Robot-Japan, the collectors' forum, on the internet, and learned for the first time, that there were thousands of people all over the world who, like myself, were just crazy over these things. I made friends on line, traded notes with people from all over the planet. It was a lot of fun.
And now it's just over- closing the door on one of the last tangible artifacts from a life I once lived, and a person I once was. It is a disturbingly easy thing to do. I'll be glad when it's all done.

JWM

Project Failure

From jwm's world famous blog

'56 Starlet with three-speed

I finished up the work on the '56 Starlet last weekend, and put the old girl on the street for the first time in almost thirty years. Of course there were some bugs to work out. Even as simple a job as putting a three-speed on an old bike can give you a world of grief. But I got lucky. The little bugs were just that- small matters of adjustment that I got worked out with a little fiddling. The shifter works fine, and the heavy old machine is just a little easier on the legs than it was before.

And completing that project bolstered my confidence, and opened the door on the big project I've been anticipating for a couple of months now- putting the big three speed hub on the chopper bike. In fact, I used the picture of the stick shift mount to head up the last post here on the wfb. I was going to wait for the weekend, but I'm working the 6:00 AM to 2:30 shift, and daylight savings gives me a long afternoon. I couldn't wait for Saturday, so I ripped into it on Tuesday after work.

Taking the bike apart is easy. Machines always come apart easily. It's getting them back together where you encounter the problems. Before having the new hub laced into the rim I figured it would be a good idea to bolt it into the frame, hook up the chain, brake and shifter, and make sure everything fit, and worked the way it was supposed to. Once I had that assurance I could get it all spoked up and then just re-mount the wheel on the bike, and go cruisin'.

And here's where everything just went horribly wrong. I'll spare you all the tedious details, and sum it up: I couldn't get anything to fit right. Within the span of an hour I made a precipitous plunge from reasonably competent backyard mechanic to being a left thumbed geek who couldn't tell a crescent wrench from a claw hammer.

This was gut drop, red lights in the rear view, weak in the knees, full body sweat, Oh my God, what have I got myself into here? An hour became two, and then three, and then Mary came home, and I hadn't eaten, and she said, "OK I'll cook dinner tonight." Sit at the table with black fingertips, I haven't had a shower, what the hell it's after eight...
And I got into bed with my self esteem in free fall, and realized I hadn't done one single thing right since 1974. I couldn't sleep. I had to get up early. What the hell am I gonna' do here? I know! Put a post on the Schwinn forum. One of those guys will know what to do. So I did. The answer came before I'd finished typing. The moment of genius came on like a soft warm light in a cold dark cave. I figured out the problem. Easy. Drill some holes; cut some metal. Go down and get a couple nuts and bolts. Sleep followed.

I woke up Wednesday morning with my self worth restored. I could do this thing. Sure it'll take some work but I can do it. At lunch I checked the Schwinn forum, and Wayne, one of the more competent guys who posts there, had given me a list of steps to resolve all the issues, and finish the project. His solutions were better than the ones I had come up with. I got home Wednesday afternoon in good spirits, and went straight into the garage. I did all the stuff that Wayne recommended. The hub went into the dropouts just fine. Then I looped the chain over the sprockets. It almost fit. And the rotor was jammed into the brake pad. And there wasn't enough axle protruding on the shifter side... OK, I could see what I needed to do. See if I can find some ultra thin washers to space out the left side. Get out the die grinder, cut into the frame right there...

No. No fucking way. The lights came on again, only it wasn't the magical soft glow of Wile E Coyote Super Genius. It was the bright epiphany of realization. I was in over my head. This seemingly simple task was, in reality, an engineering project that was just beyond my skill set. I could push forward, but I stood a much better chance of ruining the bike than improving it. The best thing to do was to leave it alone. I felt like I'd been released from jail.

I unhooked the chain, pulled the hub out of the frame, took off the rotor, and bolted it back onto the wheel. I noticed that the wheel bearings were too tight, so I re-set them a little. I put the bike back together, gathered all the parts for the three-speed hub, and put it all back in the box. Then I wheeled the chopper bike out of the garage, dusted it off a little, and took it for a cruise around the block. It worked just fine, and it felt as cool as ever. Mary drove up beside me when I was halfway down the street. I told her I'd meet her back at the house in a minute, and then we'd go get some dinner. Job finished.

JWM

U.T.O.L.'s and the Horror House

It's almost two in the morning. Too early to get out of bed, but insomnia has become my alarm clock, and when it rings my night's sleep is over. Usually it has the decency to wait until after three, so I can just call it being a very early riser, but tonight it went off without so much as a bad dream to jar me awake. Benadryl doesn't work, xanax is useless, and even Ambien gives me all the relief of a strong cup of coffee, and a couple of bennies. Do they still call them bennies? I wonder if they even exist anymore. Probably not. Seconal is, no doubt, extinct as well- all gone the way of Dylocid, replaced by newer, "safer" products that may sorta' work, but have "lower potential for abuse", or some such thing. There is still alcohol, but I haven't had a drink in twenty years, and even a night's sleep isn't worth getting back on that ride.
And I just heard my mother get up... and make it to the bathroom and back. There's a straw of gratitude to grasp. She's been in and out of the hospital over these last ten days. Bronchitis, some unspecified infection- you never get to see the actual doctor, and it's hard to get a straight answer. Mostly, just sick with age, and twenty wasted years spent sitting, and staring at television. Monday afternoon the insurance schedule dictated that she be moved from the local hospital to a convalescent facility. Yesterday morning she demanded that they release her. I wanted her out of there too, and they had to comply. I don't blame her for wanting out.

Old John said it: "Those places are a horror house." And he was right.
The smell- Ozium masking leaked urine and death. The white breathing corpses- toothless mouths hanging open in that last long delirious sleep before the breathing stops. The woman doubled over in the wheel chair, face on her knees inching her way down the hall, and the obese double amputee, legs lost up to the thigh to diabetes, uneven stumps uncovered. But the woman in the bed next to my mother. That was the worst.

The sight of that unfortunate soul is going to give me nightmares for years to come. They wouldn't say what happened to her to put her there. My guess was an auto accident, or some sort of hideous brain trauma. There was obviously no consciousness left, but the body in the bed never stopped moving. Dead eyes blinking open and shut. Her jaw rotating in some grotesque imitation of a chewing motion while the shoulders hunched and unhunched, her left arm partly raising and dropping as if endlessly reliving the final flinch before taking a blow that should have killed her. There was nothing voluntary, nothing human in the motion. It repeated and repeated and repeated each blinkchewflinchshrug blinkchewflinchshrug identical, with the mechanical cadence of a busy signal, or a car alarm. Just an endless electrical discharge snapping through what was left of a nervous system. Hanging over the bed was a square plastic bottle filled with brown stuff that looked like liquid shit that dripped down a tube planted through an incision into her stomach. That kept the body alive to keep twitching, while another machine suctioned phlegm from the lungs, and still another gurgling pump collected the foamy waste product out of the intestine and dripped it into a jar that needed to be drained every hour or so. She couldn't have been more than thirty five or forty. The nurse told my mother she'd been like that for five years now.

So I had to get my mom out of there. But my mother really isn't able to do for herself. She needs help getting on and off the pot, and the toilet in the main bathroom now has one of those big white plastic things that raises the seat by ten inches or so. She can't stand up long enough to fix herself food. This is a U.T.O.L.- a universal task of life, caring for your aging parent, and it is my task at this stage in the game. And you don't have to tell me- I know. I know all too well that it could be much, much worse. You know- there is how you're "supposed" to feel when caring for loved ones: caring, compassionate, full of filial piety and all that. And then there is the real feeling that overwhelms everything: like I've just had a very short leash put on my life. A leash that get yanked several times an hour. Let's just say my well of charity is draining faster that it is being replenished.
I managed to get out for a while this afternoon, and went down to the corner for a cup of coffee. Luckily, Old John was there alone and we spent some time talking. He's taken to gathering discarded scratch off lottery tickets, and double checking them for winners. He's been on a lucky streak. Yesterday he found one worth three bucks, and he got a card in the mail from a famous book writer who sent him twenty dollars, which came in handy. I hung around long enough to get a refill before going home to cook dinner. Maybe I shouldn't have had coffee so late in the day.

An update, and a reflection.

JWM

A Little Help From My Father

From jwm's world famous blog

I went down to Dennison's Schwinn Saturday to pick up the wheels for the Jaguar and the B-6. I mentioned before that whoever owned the B-6 before me had plundered it for parts- no doubt to use on another restoration project, and the painted wheels on the bike had surely come from some less expensive bicycle. So I took the chrome rims from the Starlet, and had the three-wing Bendix brake laced into the rear. The Jaguar wheels were out of true, and needed to be straightened up a little.
Bill Blake over at Dennison's runs what is probably the last true old-school bicycle shop in Los Angeles. I have three good bike shops within walking distance of my house, but I drive ten miles into East LA to take my business to Dennison's. Here's why. I paid up front for the re-lacing, and the true & tighten, plus tires, rim strips, and tubes for the B-6. When I got there he brought out the Jaguar wheels, and the newly re-done B-6 wheels. The new wheels didn't have tires on them, yet.
"What kind of tires do you want for these?" Bill asked.
I said that I wanted a good set of whitewalls- something as close as possible to what the bike came with.
"Something like these?" He pointed out a brand new Schwinn cruiser on the showroom. The new cruisers come with a retro-reproduction of the original Schwinn Typhoon Cord whitewalls like they used back in the day.
"Something like that would be just all kinds of cool," I said. Before I could say another word, Bill had his mechanic pop the wheels off the brand new bike, take those awesome Typhoon Cord whitewalls, and put them on my 60 year old rims. That's why I drive ten miles out of my way to take my business to Dennison's.
But as I said in The Jaguar Project I've always seemed to have this almost supernatural good fortune when it comes to my old Schwinns.

What I hadn't mentioned was how often my father has stepped in to lend a hand with this stuff. This month it will be seventeen years since I got that phone call in the morning:

John. I think I'm having a heart attack...

He called me before he called 911. I got over to his house just as the paramedics were wheeling him out the front door. I stood there in the street. He turned on the gurney, saw me, and he waved. The ambulance drove off. I stood there for a minute, and went to get some breakfast before going over to the hospital. My grandfather had had two or three heart attacks, and he always pulled through fine. He died at eighty nine, of old age. When I got to the hospital emergency room they took me straight to the chaplain's office. Dad was sixty six.

Like most fathers and sons my dad and I quarreled, and were often at odds. We had our communion, though, in project work. My dad was an inveterate tinkerer, and a world class mickey-mouse engineer. He loved ripping into lawnmowers, bicycles, anything mechanical, and I inherited that trait deep in my genes. Often I'd let him 'help' when I was working on the Harley, or any of the other motorcycles, and bicycles that passed through my hands, and just as often I'd really need his input, and sense of how to get things done. The garage, while neat, held enough junk, and crap to fix damn near anything that could break.

My dad's wife was an insufferable bitch, and I do have the potential to be a world class bastard. I got seriously aggressive with her and her parasitic offspring when it came to the stuff in that garage. I knew that her dick head son would pilfer what he could, and to this day, I'm sure he did. Dad used to have an ancient set of woodworking tools that had belonged to his grandfather. I didn't get to those in time. But I rented a big truck and I took, along with my dad's huge tool collection, every rusty, worn out, seemingly useless piece of junk that was in there, and crammed it into the garage at my mother's.

That stuff has served me well.
I can't tell you how many times I've need a doodad, or a whatchamacallit, or just the right sized screw, or a piece of rubber just so big by this wide, and found it in one of the drawers in the blue dresser that I had in my room as a kid, and that served for the main workbench in Dad's garage.
And I hadn't remembered, until starting the Jaguar Project just how much old Schwinn stuff that my dad had saved for me. There was a ton of it that I had completely forgotten about.
The bearing races on those old painted wheels were shattered. Try finding a pair of original Schwinn races. Dad saved me a pair. They're now on the front axle of the Starlet awaiting the final rebuild. Just like the two shattered top headset bearings in the B-6. Or the front axle lock washers for the Jaguar. And the locking clip for the master link in the chain, or the perfect rubber washer to shim up the shifter.
But this last find just sort of takes the cake.

From jwm's world famous blog

It doesn't look like much, does it? A steel ring three and five eighths inch diameter, and a quarter of an inch thick with three holes drilled. I have no idea what it was originally. A scrap of two millimeter thick aluminum plate. What the hell use could that stuff possibly have?
It is exactly what I need to mount this:

From jwm's world famous blog

on this.

From jwm's world famous blog

The Spoiler is an awesome bike, but it's big, heavy, and has only one gear. The stick shift is to a special extra- wide three speed chopper hub that will fit into the Spoiler frame. The hub fits, but there is no way to mount that shifter without resorting to machine shop fabrication. I had secured the assistance of a guy from the local Starbucks gang. He has a hot rod/ auto restoration business, and was going to fab up a bracket for me. I was happy to get the help, but...
I wanted to do it myself. This was my bike, my project, and I wanted it done my way. Yesterday I opened the garage, stood there for a moment, and the thought came winging into my head:
You know I'll bet- I just know I have something here... And I started fishing around in the tobacco cans full of nuts, bolts, and miscellaneous bits of hardware.
It's my bike, my project, and it will be done my way. I'll do it myself, with a little help from my dad.

Thank you Father.

JWM

The All Time Coolest Bike Ever Built (and it's mine!)

This post is sort of an epilogue to The Jaguar Project. As I mentioned early on in that narrative, my three classic Schwinns were doing time as living room decor, and hadn't been ridden since sometime in the mid 80's. In '97 I crated them up, and they were buried deep in the rat's nest of my garage. Right now, I'm having the wheels to the B-6 re-spoked, and while I was at it I pulled the wheels from the Jag, and took them in as well. They needed to be trued up. With a little luck I'll have both bikes done by the end of next week, and then I can start work on the Starlet.

So how did I catch the fever again? What made me go to all the trouble of cleaning out the garage (no small task!) unpacking the oldies, and finishing the overhaul that I never quite completed thirty years ago?

It has to with this post, here.
I had been thinking about motorcycles. More specifically, I had been amusing myself by pipe dreaming about getting hold of an old Harley Davidson Panhead, and building a chopper. I was killing some time checking e-bay motors, and going through Google images when I stumbled across a picture of one of these:



It's the Schwinn Stingray Spoiler adult sized chopper bicycle. The Schwinn company filed bankruptcy on 9/11/01. They were bought out by an outfit called Pacific Cycles, and the bikes were being made in China. Pacific introduced the Stingray Chopper, and decided to take a gamble on an adult size version. They went out on a limb with the high end Spoiler, and promptly went belly up. It was introduced for one model year, in'04, or '05. They didn't make very many. Pacific was sold. Schwinn bikes still exist, but they're little more than a badge on inexpensive discount store bikes. Sad.
I found this one on e-bay. It was owned by a former Schwinn dealer, and never uncrated. I had it shipped down from Washington state this last December.
Anyone who gets into cool machinery, new, vintage, or custom, does so, in part, for the attention it draws. Part of the fun of riding the Jaguar, or the B-6 around is that people notice the bike, comment, and strike up conversations. I'm used to that, and I enjoy it immensely.
The Spoiler is in another class entirely. Even I was unprepared for it. I've had several people actually pull their cars off to the side of the road, and flag me down to get a better look. Harley riders (notoriously impossible to impress) stop and stare. I've secured a reputation around here for being that crazy-ass old fart with the wild bike. This is not a toy for shy people. But dammit is it fun!


JWM

Jaguar Project (conclusion)

1955 Schwinn Starlet

1950 Schwinn B-6

Schwinn Black Phantom

It rained today, and I didn't get any work done on the B-6. I had planned on having all three bikes overhauled in the time it took to write the narrative of how I came to own them, but that didn't quite work out. The Jaguar Project turned out to be more involved than I had anticipated. But then again, make me a list of all the things that work out just the way they were planned. It occurred to me last night that I've made several references to the Schwinn Black Phantom, but most people outside of the antique and classic bike scene have never seen one. This picture came from Memory Lane Classics in Grand Rapids Ohio. Another great source for pictures and information about old bikes is Dave's Vintage Bicycles. They have an incredible gallery of old bike pic's, and it's worth some time to just go browsing through the folders. Beware, though. You don't have to come in contact with one of these things to get Old Bike Fever. You can catch a wallet draining case of it from pictures alone. The photo of the B-6 was taken in '93 when it was serving time as a living room decoration, and if you look closely at the shot of the Starlet, you'll notice that it's looking pretty dingy, the pedals are off the bike, and the tires are flat. I'll get to it soon enough, and then the whole fleet will be overhauled, and ready to ride.

It's a peculiar sort task- composing a narrative wherein the main character behaves in a -shall we say- less than admirable manner. Particularly when the main character is me. I could, at this point, sling some pious crap about 'turning my life around' back then, but that isn't part of this story. Just for the record, though, that was the end of my affair with the gal from the market. Yeah, she had her problems, but I behaved like a world class asshole, and she really didn't deserve to be treated like that. Some years later I looked her up and made a formal apology for my behavior. I did give cocaine the boot later in 1980, and to this day the very thought of it makes me sick. It's the uncontested heavyweight champion of dogshit drugs.

But back to the final notes on The Great Bike Hunt.
I patched up the damaged headlight shell with fiberglass, and fabricated a light to go inside. Not original equipment, but it would do. Now, with e-bay, Craig's list, and on-line collectors' forums at my fingertips it's only a matter of time before I find the original light tray that came with the machine. I mentioned that the B-6 was sporting chrome plated fenders when I bought it. The picture shows it as it is today, with correct fenders matching the rest of the bike. The fenders came to me in the last, and most improbable coincidence of all.
It was 1983. I had quit the utility company, and started the long, tedious march through my college education. The Starlet, and the B-6 were under wraps in a storage shed in my Dad's back yard. I kept the Jaguar out for occasional rides. It was Spring Break, and I was on Main Street in Huntington Beach just a block away from the intersection where I first spotted the Autocycle that lit the fuse on this whole obsession to begin with. Old Schwinns were a fad with the surfing scene, and one of the small shops had a dusty Black Phantom sitting in the window. I stopped to look, and a moment later another guy stood beside me checking out the Phantom. I always talk to strangers.
"Awesome old bike, huh?" I said.
"It sure is," he answered. "I have one like it at home. Only problem with mine is that it has painted fenders that belong on a maroon and cream B-6. I sure wish I could find the chrome ones that went with the bike."

(epilogue: The coolest bike ever built)

JWM

Jaguar Project (part seven)

I got to work on the B-6 today. The bike is disassembled, and I got the spring fork taken apart, cleaned, greased, and put back together. The wheels are going to be a project in themselves. I didn't realize it when I bought the thing, but whoever owned the bike before me had plundered it for parts. The painted rims were surely taken from some other Schwinn, but luckily the Bendix rear hub is still correct for the bike. It looks like I'm going to do a little plundering myself. The Starlet has chrome rims, and the B-6 needs them. So I'll get an opportunity to try my hand at lacing up a couple of wheels. Never done that before. Should be fun. I'm a little reluctant to plunder the Starlet, but I gave it a rattle can paint job way back when, so swapping out the rims won't affect either its value, or its originality too much. For all their rarity, these machines seldom command great prices. Come to think of it, the prices that these things were fetching thirty years ago are not much different than the price you'd pay for one today. I guess you could make the case that the monetary value has actually declined. So what. If you're looking for an investment, you can do way better than a rusty old bike. Anyway- where was I? Oh, yeah- back to 1980...

I didn't cash the tax check right away, and I remember carrying a queasy sort of knot in my gut all that week. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was in trouble. The gal from the market worked nights until Friday, but I had promised her that we'd get all kinds of crazy that weekend. That was one promise I did keep, but not in the way I intended. I'd talked to The Cowboy several times, but I kept balking before coming to the topic. Thursday afternoon I cashed the check. Friday morning I told The Cowboy I'd maybe be in touch tomorrow. I stopped for beer and groceries Friday night, and told the gal from the market that we were on for Saturday evening.

It is only in hindsight that we can see the patterns of events that shape our lives. Part of the web of coincidence that surrounded the Great Bike Hunt had this recurring theme- Bikes I didn't want would come my way. And they would provide essential components that would be missing from the machines that I would buy later- machines that I would not have bought otherwise. I'd scavenged some small pieces of hardware for the Starlet, and I wouldn't have bought the Jaguar except that I already had the racks that it was missing. And now I had rotten headlight shell, half of a rusty horn tank, and the remnant of a Black Phantom sitting out in the garage. The newly repainted Starlet, and completed Jaguar occupied center stage in my living room. Remember I said that those bikes kept me out of jail? We're going to get to that part in just a bit, here.

I wasn't exactly hung over that Saturday morning, but I wasn't hitting on all eight either. I had told The Cowboy I was going to come by sometime early that afternoon. But I didn't want to do it. Six hundred bucks meant a quarter ounce of toot, and a marathon "session" that could run twenty four hours or more. I wasn't up to a long bike ride that morning, so I took the truck down to Woodlake.
I pulled onto the freeway with the bottom falling out of my stomach. I felt like I was going to trial. Four off ramps to The Cowboy's house. I lagged along in the right lane. Three off ramps. Then two. Then Dorado Boulevard Next Right.

And all in a flash, something wild just took hold of me. I got hit with an adrenaline charge that felt like I'd grabbed hold of a power line. I let fly with an AHHHWOOO from the beach bum days, punched the accelerator, and passed the Dorado Boulevard off ramp like I was ditching school for a surf run. I pulled off on the Southbound 405, and headed for Newport Beach. I was going to see the pusher. The Pedal Pusher, that is. They sold old bikes.
Parking in Newport beach on a Saturday is usually close to impossible. There was an open spot with time on the meter right in front of the bike shop. I pulled up, got out of the truck, walked in to the shop, and spotted my next bike. It was a maroon and cream B-6. But it had chrome fenders that should have gone to a Phantom. And, of course it was missing parts: the headlight shell, the gooseneck, the signature seat post. I had all that stuff at home. And the rest of the bike was immaculate. Asking price: five hundred seventy five dollars. I put cash on the counter, and rolled it out the door. Bike in the truck. Truck on the road. Straight home. Well, a stop for beer, and then straight home. I was manic- jumping up and down giddy. I couldn't believe what I had just done. But dammitall- I had my tanker! I took it out of the truck, and spent the next few hours just cruising the neighborhood, and then made I a stop for more beer.

Soon enough, though, I remembered I had a date that night. What to do? Screw it. If the chick didn't like it she could take a hike. I cracked another brew, and cranked up the stereo. I had parked the B-6 in the living room right next to the Jag and the Starlet. My fleet. I sat there watching them like a television show. And then the doorbell.

She was dressed to kill- perfume-short skirt- heels- hose- the works. And ready for some serious party, too. I was dirty, sweaty, drunk as a boiled owl, and ready to declare my independence.
"What's going on?" she asked.
"Hey, check it out I got a new bike."
"I see. Did you see your friend down in Woodlake?"
"No," I said. "I bought this instead."
"What about tonight?" she said.
I shrugged. "Wanna brew?" The gal from the market did have a temper, and it was heating up fast.
"What about tonight?" she repeated.
"Who fuckin' cares?" That was it. She went off like the Disneyland fireworks. Only this wasn't Disneyland.
What happened next was sort of a blur. I remember a lot of yelling, and before I could get up off the couch, she went for the bikes. She tried to knock them over in the living room, but she slipped (thank God for high heels). Drunk as I was, I was on my feet before she could take another swipe at the fleet. I grabbed her around the waist, and tried to wrestle her out the front door. Things got very very loud, and the next thing I knew there were police cars in my front yard, and I was spread eagled on the lawn. I heard a voice over my head.
"So what was happening here? Did you hit her?"
"NO!" I said, She was trying to trash my bikes, and I was trying to get her out of the house."
"Your bikes?" said the cop.
"Go see." I said. "She was trying to wreck them."
Just then another cop came out of the house. "Hey", he said to his partner. "Check out the old bikes this guy's got." The first cop went into the living room leaving his partner with me. "Where'd you get those things?" he asked.
So there I was with my face in my own front lawn chatting about antique Schwinns with a cop I couldn't see. It was kind of surreal. The other officer came out of the house. The two of them talked for a bit. They said I could get up off my face, but I still had to sit on the grass.
The first cop came back to me. "You're lucky," he said. "She said you didn't hit her, and she doesn't want to press charges. She's going home. I'd suggest you go in and sleep it off. We don't want to hear from you again, understand?"
I understood.

Jaguar Project Part Eight (conclusion)

JWM

Jaguar Project (part six)

No seat. No fenders. Broken spokes. Rotten tires. Spray-can black paint job. But I knew a Schwinn frame when I saw one, and the locking spring fork, and razorback gooseneck marked it for a high end bike.

"Well", said the old guy. "How much'll ya give me for it?"
"It's missing a lot of stuff," I said. "Do you have any of the parts around here?"
"Well- I don' know... here wait, there's this."
He went over to a workbench, rummaged around in the junk, and came back with a rusty tank half, and the headlight shell, The pot metal shell had been rotted out from battery corrosion. There was a big hole in the top of it, and a large section had pretty much turned to dust. The tank still had the black paint, and yellowed decal. No doubt about it. This rusted old beater had once been the top of the line of the top of the line. It was beyond restoration.
"Well?"
I could pretty much figure was coming next. He'd be sure that this old junker was worth a thousand bucks, or something. As it was, it was good for spare parts, and not much else. Nonetheless, if I bought it, even for more than it was worth, then maybe I'd get a shot at the rest of the stuff he had in the yard. Who knew what could be out there in that pile?
"I'll tell you what," I said. "There's not too much to work with here- best I could offer you for it would be fifty bucks."
"Fifty bucks," he grumbled. "You said these things were worth money. Alright. You can have her for fifty."
I loaded the sorry old wreck into the back of my truck, and headed home. It was Tuesday night, and the gal from the market was waiting at the house when I got back. She wasn't exactly living with me, but she never really went home much these days. Home meant dealing with her daughter, and her mother, and, well- it was more fun over at my place. The kid hated my guts. But that's not part of this story.
"You got this in the mail", she said. Yellow envelope. Green cardboard check. Tax return, and six hundred bucks. "Woo hooo," she exclaimed."We can do some real party there!"
"Uh, yeah- we can at that," I said. Six hundred bucks would buy a load of buzz. And I'd be a liar if I said it didn't sound like fun. But this relationship was nowhere. It was sex and dope. It was an easy getaway for her, and easy sex for me. And I had promised myself no more of this shit one too many times.

Jaguar Project Part Seven

JWM

Jaguar Project (part five)

"It snowed last night in Woodlake, brah..."
"What do you mean?" I asked Eddie. Eddie was from Maui; he was another one of the crew at the utility company. He lived a couple of blocks away from me, so we sometimes shared the ride to work.
"You ain' talk to da Cowboy?" Eddie said. "He gots da soda, man. Da kine shit."
"Oh, yeah? Well maybe I'll check it out. I've never done it before. What's it like?"

The Cowboy lived in Woodlake, which was about seven miles down the river trail from my place. I used to ride the bike down there Saturday mornings, pick up some weed, and then take a buzzed and leisurely cruise back home, or maybe down to the beach. This Saturday I took the Jaguar, and came back with my usual stash, plus a tiny white envelope full of grief. I had just made one of the two worst decisions of my life, up to that point. I'd follow it up soon after, by asking out one of the checkers at the nearby supermarket.
The gal from the supermarket was not interested in bicycles of any manner, shape, or form. She liked blow. And she liked to party.

Every time I'd invite the Gal from the market over for "a little session" as we called it, I'd be well supplied. I found reasons to stop by The Cowboy's place more and more often. I'd see him at the yard before the shift started, and we'd BS about this and that, and somehow the topic always rolled around, and I'd order another G. That was a hundred bucks in 1980 bucks.
And I couldn't quite figure it out. I don't know how many times I'd plow a line, and realize once again, "you know, this stuff isn't all it's cracked up to be- in fact, it's a shitty excuse for a buzz at all- I don't really even like this feeling, and besides it's fading already after barely only ten minutes, and yeah this stuff is bullshit, and right now I need a hit, but once this shit's gone that's it. No more...
And the next day I'd feel like total crap. And a couple or three days later, I'd be talking to the Cowboy, and...
Even though I was making pretty good money, it didn't take very long before I found myself running short of cash.

But, wait- we were talking about classic bikes here, not sex, n' drugs. Wasn't there something about an old Schwinn in this story?

Despite the new relationship, and the financial drain I was still on the hunt for old bikes. The Starlet was the right vintage, but it was a girl's bike. The Jaguar was cool enough, but it was a middleweight sixties bike, and barely twenty years old. I wanted a forties, or fifties machine. And work still kept me going in and out of old neighborhoods, and old houses, and one day I got a call to change out a meter at an ancient two-story wood frame house, set way back on a big lot. The place even had a barn. I knocked. A scruffy, skinny old guy came to the door. I identified myself, and told him why I was there. I walked around to the side of the house to check the meter, and my eyes were pulled like a magnet to a giant rusty tangle of old bikes sitting in the yard like a mountain of iron spaghetti. I walked back to the fence for a closer look.
"What're you lookin' at, there?" I hadn't heard the old guy following me, and it startled the hell out of me when he spoke up.
"Oh," I said. "I like to fix up old bikes- hobby of mine, you know?"
The old guy said nothing.
"I was just wondering if maybe you had any of this stuff for sale. I pay pretty decent money for the right bike in the right condition."
"Nothin's for sale here."

It wasn't supposed to go this way. He was supposed to say, "Well I got one I could show ya' here. Bought it for the boy way back when, but he ain't interested no more so you can have it for twenty bucks if you want it". And then, of course he'd pull a tarp off a 1949 Black Phantom...

"Nothin here's for sale", he repeated.
Time for diplomacy.
"I understand, sir- know just how it is. I have my own big old pile of parts, and stuff at home, and well- I'll tell you what. Here's my home phone." I wrote it down on a blank repair order. "If you ever want get rid of any of this stuff give me a call. Like I said, I do pay good money for the right old bike." He didn't say anything, but he took the phone number. Weeks later I got a call. He had one old bike he'd sell me if I wanted to see it. I drove over there, and he took me into the barn to have a look. And damned if it wasn't a genuine Schwinn Black Phantom, practically the Holy Grail of collectible bikes.
Or what was left of one.

Jaguar Project Part Six

JWM

Jaguar Project (part four)

I went out yesterday, and put ten or twelve miles on the Jaguar. This was the first real ride I'd taken on the bike in years. I mentioned earlier that the old brake shoes were hard, and the shifter is a little touchy. Nothing I can't live with. And the other little repair jobs held OK, too. The headlight lights, the beeper beeps, and the handlebars are firmly clinched in the gooseneck.

And actually riding the bike? Like I said, I put maybe a dozen miles on it yesterday- not exactly a marathon, but it was enough. The Jaguar was supposed to be a 'sportier' model full dresser- thinner tires, a little less sheet metal, three-speed hub. By contemporary standards the Jag is "sporty" in the same way a 1961 Ford Falcon is a "sporty compact car". A dozen miles on my two year old, 21 speed comfort bike is no effort at all. A dozen miles on the Jag is a lot like work.

When you take an old Schwinn apart, you realize that you're dealing with an antiquated technology. There was no planned obsolescence in the design. You didn't buy a Schwinn, wear it out in a year, and just get a new one. Everything on the bike is solid, over-engineered, infinitely adjustable, and durable as a hammer. But all that durability and style has a price. It is steel on steel, and unapollogetically heavy. It's a bike built to take years of hard use at the hands of the Great American Boy.

I'm sure that this was the first time in its fifty year history that this bike had been taken down to nuts and bolts. And I have no doubt that the Jaguar will be good for another fifty years of service. No part of the bike was worn out or unserviceable. Except for the gooseneck.

The gooseneck.*sigh*
This was one of those slightly unnerving incidents where hard reality cuts into the soft edges of memory. But then again, this stuff happened in 1980. Thirty years ago. Anyway- The gooseneck on the bike is not the one that was on the bike when I bought it. I do remember that the old one didn't hold the bars tight, and that it cinched down with a nut and bolt rather than just a bolt, threaded into the gooseneck itself. But I don't remember swapping out the part. At any rate, the gooseneck that I have is correct for the bike (I checked), and that's what really matters. Nonetheless, it still didn't hold the bars tight so I had to shim it up with a piece of aluminum cut from an old license plate.
And, as I try to piece the rest of that year or so together I find a lot of stuff that seems pretty clear until I try to focus in on it, and then...
And why is it important? The part is important, because the object of the game is to get your 1961 bicycle back together with all the correct parts. Similarly, I want to get the story of those bikes correct, because it is my story as well. And now, with the Jaguar complete in both the present, and in this narrative of events passed, I'm moving on to the second of these three machines up for overhaul: the 1950 B-6.
The B-6 is the flagship of my little fleet of bikes. And as with all of these old bicycles of mine it took a near miracle of coincidence to complete the bike. But I didn't find the B-6 through any sort of amazing coincidence. I bought it from a shop, out of a desperation that had nothing to do with bicycles.

Jaguar Project Part Five

JWM

Jaguar Project (part three)

I finished the Jaguar, and put the bike on the street for the first time since the mid 1980's. Of course, there were a few minor glitches, but I got them worked out. The brake pads are hard, and they barely stop the bike. The shifter is a little touchy. I remember when I first got the bike that the shifter wouldn't stay in gear. The spring was weak, and the notch that holds the indicator lever in place was worn, and rounded. In my Dad's can of miscellaneous rubber pieces and parts I had found a large rubber washer that seemed like it was made to fit the inside of that shifter. It did the job, but, like I said, the indicator is still a little touchy. Nothing you can do about fifty year old brake pads. I did a damn nice job on that thing, if I do say so myself. It whirls along like a brand new bicycle.
Yesterday it rained all day, so I took the camera out into the garage, and tried to get a very cool, moody, low available light picture of the newly reassembled cruiser. Tried. Most of the pics were shitty, and I don't know why I was surprised and a little disappointed that the bike ended up looking just like it did when I started. The picture I posted is probably the best. Anyway...

I mentioned earlier that I found my three classic Schwinns during a brief period of good luck. Finding those bikes was the only thing that remotely resembled luck during that period of time. The rest of my life was on track for a major train wreck. That I pulled those bikes out of the fire is pretty remarkable in itself. I can count the good choices I made in that year or so on the fingers of one hand. And the bikes count for three out of five good choices, at that. Hell, those bikes kept me out of jail. Like I said, the bad decisions started with taking the job. I hated the job. But, as luck would have it then, I got introduced The Cowboy, and that only helped to set up the impending disaster.

The Cowboy was another one of the service crew at the base. He was a tall, raw boned man in his early sixties- gray, weatherbeaten, mustache, cowboy boots, and Stetson hat. Looked, and talked like The Marlboro man, pardner... Drove a new Corvette, and carried a sawed off, side by side 12 gauge in his coat pocket- right chamber, rock salt; left chamber, buckshot. He didn't drink, or get high, but he sold weed for a hobby. That, for me, was not a bad thing. But back then in the early eighties, cocaine was becoming a fad, and all the cool kids were doing it, so The Cowboy sold coke too. Which brings me to another less than wise decision that I made: hooking up with a gal who liked cocaine, and kinky sex. She had a budding sociopath of a daughter to boot...
I'll let you infer the rest. This narrative is about bikes.

I had walked out my front door and found the 1955 girl's bike. This was what I'd been hunting for. This was the real thing.
The first thing I did with the old beast was to soak every nut, bolt, and screw with Liquid Wrench. I let it sit a couple of days, re-soaking all the fittings, and then I began disassembling.
Despite the thick coat of barn paint, the bicycle was in very good shape. The fenders had dings, but the struts were straight. Of course, the horn, and light were ruined from corroded D-cells, but the tanks were undamaged. I actually got the old horn to work; the light was beyond repair.

I got a few cans of paint stripper and, piece by piece, started brushing it down. The thick coat of red paint peeled off easily revealing the bike's true colors- white, with rose pink trim, and the model: Starlet. I bought more stripper, and took the whole thing down to bare metal, and then fine sanded it all until the whole collection of pieces and parts was gleaming naked metal.

The painted frame looks like a single curving piece. Stripped of paint it reveals an assembly of beautifully bent segments of tubing, mated with elegantly brazed joints- shiny gold against the cold white steel, and ground so smoothly that a blind man's fingers would not detect a seam. As I disassembled the Bendix coaster brake, the brass shoes, friction polished like two pieces of gold jewelery, tumbled out into my hand. I think this is where I really began to fall in love with these old machines.

I hadn't painted anything with a spray can since I built model cars when I was in Jr. High. And I had never tried giving anything a two tone paint job. Original or not- white and pink was an unacceptable color combination for a bike I planned to ride around. I bought a bunch of rattle cans: forest green, and antique ivory. I'll have pictures up in a subsequent post, and I wouldn't have sidetracked into talking about the Starlet at all, except it was fixing up the Starlet that led to my finding the Jaguar. One coincidence set up another.

The house I was renting was a couple of blocks away from the San Gabriel River Trail. If you're not familiar with Southern California, that may conjure up an image of a serene path following the green banks of a flowing river. It is nothing of the sort. The riverbed, all but dry for most of the year, is a concrete culvert some hundreds of feet wide with smooth cement banks some fifteen or twenty feet high. The bike path runs along the edge of the trough, and if you're courageous enough you can dive off the path, and skate a bike up and down the steep walls like a wheeled surfboard on a concrete wave. Seal Beach was about two hours away, and that was my first destination once I got the Starlet finished.
I remember that I had just reached the end of the river trail. I was lifting the Starlet over the bike gate when another bicyclist noticed it, and stopped to talk. He knew someone who had some old bike like that- wasn't sure what it was. I gave him my phone number, (I used to carry pen and paper just in case.) and forgot about it.
Many weeks later I got a phone call from a stranger. Was I interested in buying an old Schwinn? When I saw the Jaguar I was too excited to do much bargaining over the price. I think he was asking $275. or $300. (remember- 1980 dollars) The only problem was that the bike was missing the front carrier, and the four-reflector rear rack. I had those parts sitting at home on the girl's bike that I had bought some months earlier.

Jaguar Project Part Four

JWM