Lee High School - Huntsville Alabama Alumni

Tommy on trike with brother Don on bike.

Gone With The Schwinn

by Tommy Towery

Class of '64

Times and things change, we all know that. Sometimes the changes are like an Olympic diver that enters the water so smoothly that he doesn't cause a ripple. Sometimes it’s like Bobby Cochran doing a cannonball off the high board at the swimming pool at Big Springs Park . We notice it. This week I came upon one of those Olympic-diver-no-ripple changes that entered our lives without us knowing it until the diver was standing atop the platform being awarded the Gold Medal.

Christmas ads started showing up in my local newspaper this last weekend and I was drawn to a toy catalog type booklet of ads for Target Department Stores. It was thick and I looked through it, trying to put myself into the mindset that I had as a 10-year-old. I was looking at all the action sets, the games, the cars, and trinkets, trying to see what I would have circled when I was that age. That was one of my favorite pastimes when I got the new Sears, Penney’s, or Montgomery Wards' catalogs in my pre-teen years.

One particular section of the Target catalog caught my attention because it showed things that we never saw in our toy catalogs back then. It was not the high tech games, music players, or computer things that this modern pre-teen society has come to love. It was the simple page that featured bicycles, scooters, and tricycles. I know many of you remember the thrill of waking up to find a new bicycle left under, or at least near, the Christmas tree as a present left by Santa.

I remember quickly getting dressed, jumping on the bike, and heading off to show all my friends my new transportation. Clinton Street was usually crowded with kids and their new two or three wheeled wonders during that season. Being on a bit of a hill, we would all ride to the top and coast back down – until the sun went down.

The high tech things in the toy catalogs today are things that we just did not have available back then. Two and three wheelers were available to us even in the dark ages of our youth. There were even some four wheelers, if you count the training wheels that were attached to some of our early bikes. The difference in the ad today is that there is not one riding device pictured on the page that does not show the rider wearing a helmet. Even the little tricycles were photographed with the toddlers sitting upon them with radically multicolored helmets on their heads.

In the Air Force we called helmets “brain buckets.” I think that was because it would hold our brains in if we had to eject from an aircraft and plummet to the earth in a parachute. If we were to land upon rocky ground, then the helmet would keep our brains in place, even if it cracked our skulls.

There’s a big difference in ejecting from a jet plane at 35,000 feet as opposed to falling two feet from a plastic trike, but I admit that wearing a helmet is the safe thing to do. It was just not something that we even had the option to wear. There were no bike helmets when we were young. I doubt that many of us would have worn them anyway…they would not have been cool to us.

The thing that gets me is looking back at how many miles we all must have put on our bicycles, tricycles, scooters, skates, and many other devices with skids or wheels attached to them when we were young, and never wore helmets on any of them. I also do not personally know of a friend or classmate who was killed or even cracked their skull while riding such a non-motorized device and would have benefited from having a helmet on his or her head. Do any of you have stories about this that you would care to share?

The first thing that came to my mind was “The Great Radio Flyer Caper” story which Mike Boggs shared with us and that has become a favorite story of mine. I still smile each time I think of him coming down Monte Sano riding in a wagon with no brakes, unaware as to how fast such a device could obtain on such a slope. Now he did admit in his story that he and his co-conspirators in that scheme wore army helmets on that ride. He also admitted that they probably needed them.

But, putting childish suicide stunts in a little red wagon aside, we never thought about not having any skull protection when we went riding. I can never guess the number of miles I must have put on my bicycles back then. I say bicycles, because I owned multiple ones. I had the bad luck of having several of my bikes stolen over the years. It was like someone had put a curse on me. The last one I owned in Huntsville was stolen from beside my back porch when I lived in Lincoln Village (about 10th grade) – but that is another story for another day.

I don’t remember many permanent scrapes, bruises, or breaks or cuts, that I incurred during my time spent on a bicycle. I cannot look at any part of my body and say that scar was the result of a bicycle accident. I am sure that I had my share of wrecks, but obviously I did not hurt myself bad enough in any one incident to make a lifelong impression on me.

I know that I did my share of falls, and as a result, my share of bending the handle bars sideways on my bike. I don’t think I had a friend who did not know how to straighten out the handle bars by holding the front wheel between his legs and twisting on the bars. It was one of the first laws of physics that we put to practical use I believe.

Other damage I remember from my biking days was chewed up cuffs on my blue jeans. Somehow I always managed to find a way to get my cuffs caught in the chain sprocket. Perhaps that was because a lot of times the chain guards were one of the first pieces to get removed or knocked off of my bikes. I wonder why that was. Anyway, I would be riding and the next thing I knew, the pedals would quit spinning and I’d look down and see my cuffs entrapped in the chain. Not only did it chew up the jeans, but it also usually made the chain jump the sprocket. I am sure that many of you remember the feel of free spinning pedals when they are not engaging the chain.

I rode my bike to school, to church, to the movies, to Scout meetings and to friends’ houses. I rode it in sun and rain, heat and cold, darkness and light. Often I’d jump off and let it freewheel to a final resting place somewhere in the yard like a glider coasting into the fields of Normandy on D-Day. Sometimes I’d kick down the kick-down stand; sometimes kick up the kick-up stand; and sometimes kick the bike against the wall.

There were “bike racks” where we could park our bikes in front of the theatres, and there were bars on the bikes that “racked” us males so bad that we would talk like Frankie Vallie. Why did the girls’ bikes not have those stupid bars and the boys’ bikes did? We were the ones that were in mortal danger if our feet slipped off the pedals and we came crashing down to straddle the bar.

I rode my bike to the store and came home with groceries held in one hand and me steering with the other. I gave friends rides on the handle bars, the back fender, and side-saddle on the bar between the seat and the handle bars. Neither the driver nor the passenger ever had a helmet on.

We fixed flat tires on them, painted them wild colors, and customized them by removing things that we didn’t feel needed to be attached. Several of you will remember that if you took the back fender off, that riding in the rain or through a mud puddle would spin the water up to the back of your shirt or jacket. For some reason mothers did not like us doing that.

Today’s mothers probably don’t like their kids riding things without wearing their helmets, but back then that was not a problem. God must have watched out for us.

I guess the biggest injury I got from riding my bicycle was one that I got on a trip I took across town. That trip resulted not in a broken skull but in a broken heart. I was talking to a new friend one day in the early Sixties telling him how cute and what a neat girl my girlfriend was. He had just moved to town from Guntersville and I was singing her praises so much that he decided he just had to meet her – right then! We were too young to drive even if we had a car, so we rode our bikes the 4.17 miles (according to Mapquest) from Wells Avenue near Maple Hill Cemetery to her house over in West Huntsville near Jordon Lane just so he could meet her.

That was an early evening ride, and that was the distance for one way. The bicycles back then were only one speed and did not have lights on them. That was okay, our city streets had streetlights and that was all we needed. Sure some lights for bicycles were available for purchase if you could afford them or if Santa was generous. Some of them had battery compartments if you could afford the batteries and the really good ones had a little generator that mounted to the wheel fork and generated power by a rotor being pressed against the sidewall of the spinning front wheel.

But, let’s get back to the injury story. We arrived at my girlfriend’s house early in the evening, a little tired, but also a little proud for riding the distance we had covered. I introduced her to my new found friend and thought maybe he could be her friend too. Although she and I were going steady, she took a liking to my new friend, and the end result was her breaking my heart by cheating on me to be with him. If we had not ridden our bicycles to her house that night, who knows where the story would have led.

Times and things change, we all know that. But, even with all the new things that technology has given us, I look at the Christmas catalogs and there still are no devices to protect a teenage bicycle rider from a broken heart.

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Subject:Your High Tech

Linda Beal Walker

Class of '66

My console stereo was purchased at a store, I don't remember the name, located on University Drive. It was place in my room so that by closing the door, hopefully, I wouldn't disturb the folks. There were two records my father theatened to destroy (I played them too loud, door didn't help). One was a 45 RPM, either by the Isralites or that was the name (I know I misspelled it) and the other was an LP, Iron Butterfly - In-a-godda-vida (which I probably also misspelled). But coming home after a stessful day at work, putting that album on, as loud as I could stand it and stretching out on the floor to feel the vibrations sure made the stress go away. And for the real feel of stereo there was nothing like the instrumental, Frankenstein, which sounded like it traveled from one speaker, back thru the console to the other speaker.

Now for your hi-tech memories - when I began working with South Central Bell (it had just changed from Southern Bell), I typed on a teletypewriter, a noisy, loud machine which punched holes in yellow strips of paper for each letter, the tape was then place in a plastic envelope, clipped to a copy of the service order and passed to the next department to be place in another teletypewriter to have more information added, then placed into the plastic envelope, to be passed to the next department, and so on until the service order was completed. It took me years after typing on those things to lower my voice when talking to people.

My next job was in the District Manager's office where I typed on a Royal manual typewriter. Woe be unto you if you were typing triplicate and made a mistake. No dictaphone, typed from his written copy. The "fax" machine was a telecopier, I think that's what it was called. The phone rang, you answered and put the receiver in/on the machine and the message came out, slowly compared to today, on a roller of slick paper that wasn't easy to read and even harder to keep from rolling back into a roll.

The next promotion was to a CDT, Control Data Terminal, almost as large as the teletypewriter, but no noise and no tapes ( don't think). Their main problem was the electricity in the carpet. The offices were set up with a long metal table with a CDT at each end with someone working at the table dividing the orders between the two CDT operators. However, if the person working at the table tapped the table with something metal, stapler, letteropener, etc, it cleared the information on each CDT. We complained about it so much until one day the BIG SUITS from B'ham came up to check on it. You should have seen these grown men rubbing their shoes on the floor and then touching a CDT just to get shocked and watch the screen and it's info disappear. We got new and better carpet.

Several job titles later I ended up in B'ham and we had computers, real computers, which were outdated as soon as we got them and it's been the same ever snce. I am not as computer literate as you are, but even the one I have now that is several years old, sure is a lifesaver when you want to reach the outside world.

I have to stop now because I have to get ready for church, but I have to say you have the world's best memory or you recorded everything that passed through your life. I have thought about "number please" and transister radios in a while.

Keep us going, Tommy. Still love the website and staying in touch with what's going in others lives.

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Subject:Another Failed Technology

Mike Acree

Class of '64

If you recall, there was in the early '60s a deodorant called Stereo. It didn't stop the odor, but you couldn't tell where it was coming from.

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Subject:Judy Adair Harbin

Nelda Sharp Nagy

Class of ' 65

Without this web page I wouldn't have known about the passing of Judy Adair Harbin. I met Judy when we entered the 7th grade and we graduated together. She was the same sweet, kind person when we graduated as she was the first day of the 7th grade. She was a wonderful person to all those who knew her and she will be missed. My thoughts and prayers are with her family.

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Subject:Judy Adair Harbin

Eddie Burton

Class of '66

Tommy, I for one speaking for the boys of the class of 66 would like to say that we all secretly had a crush on the lovely Judy Adair. She was beautiful and smart and the most un-stuck-up girl you’d ever want to meet. She was a class act all the way around. Heaven is the winner and we are the loser. Just knowing she’s not on this earth makes it seem a less hospitable place.

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