Bicycles

I think this was before I was born or when I was a very small baby, I'm not sure.  But my Dad walked down to Lafe (or Lief) Hinkle's store at Richardson and spent (what at that time was a great amount) a lot of money to buy my brother and sister a bicycle.  They would get up on the top of the hill on the old road by our house at the path down to the Wash Rock and ride down the hill and into the gate that separated our yard from our old coal house.  My brother made his run but my sister did not and rammed her bike into one of the posts holding the gate up and drove the front wheel all the way back to where the back wheel was.

I don't recall hearing she was injured though it seems to me to be impossible she was not.  But it ruined her bike.  I can't recall who or why or even if it is true but someone (I think) straightened our her bike as much as could be so it was not an entire waste.

That was a long time before I was ready for my own bike.  I did not get that until we moved to the  big, white house in West Van Lear.  I was so happy and excited.  Except the left peddle would come off when riding.  I was afraid to tell my Dad as I feared he would take it away from me.  But, he noticed I was not riding it and asked me if I did not like it.

So I told him all about the peddle.  Frank Spears, whom we rented the place from, put a fitting in the hole where the pedal threaded into and then the peddle into that fitting and it worked  fine.  I was quite happy then.

Burgler Holler (real name is Burger Hollow but everyone knows it as what I said.) had a "front road" and a "back road".  We lived almost all the way up the holler on the front road and it was covered in "Red Dog".  Red Dog is a kind of slate that comes from coal mines and was used to cover roads as it was cheap and plentiful.  Problem was it was very sharp.  Like riding one's bike over a bed of knives so I spent a lot of time patching my inner tube as I has lots of flat tires.

My Dad would not allow me to ride my bike down into "the Junction" though I did anyway.  I ran into him (figuratively) once at the post office and he almost took my bike away from me.  I did not stop going to the Junction but I became much more observant.

Here is a lesson for parents... When you catch your kids doing something you have forbidden them do do does not mean they will stop doing it.  It just means they will be more careful to not get caught.  This was a thing that proved true all my life, doing what I was told not to do meant nothing to me.  Getting caught doing it was what made me careful.  Still, I got caught enough times.

I think most kids were like that.  Makes me wonder why so many parents seems so surprised when they find their kids avoiding, ignoring, or just circumventing their instructions.  We all thought we knew more than our parents.  We just did not say so to avoid the inevitable beating to follow such a remark.