Wheel Stories
We all have a childhood memory of riding our first bicycle. What was it like for you? The readers below share their stories. We hope they inspire you to share yours.
Riding your first real bike is a potent childhood memory. Before you got your first car, before you took off for college, your first two-wheeler was a sweet taste of freedom. Riding was all about breaking away and asserting your independence—it had nothing to do with exercise or staying sane in a world full of bills and obligations. It was pure fun.
"I remember when my dad took me to a grassy field to teach me how to ride my bike without training wheels," says Shaun Kennedy, 28, a teacher in Oakland. "He'd been running back and forth with me all day holding on to the back of the seat, promising not to let go," she says. "When he finally let go, as all parents do, I looked back—then I went flying over the handlebars!" That was the last time she looked back, and riding became one of her favorite activities that summer. "I rode every day."
The same was true for Martha Murdock, 45, a first-grade teacher in Ewing, N.J. "It's how we got around as kids," she recalls. "We rode our bikes everywhere." Every day in the summer in Princeton, N.J., she and her siblings would ride to the local pool for workouts and swim meets. Her first big-girl bike was an old Raleigh three-speed with a basket strapped to the front.
Barbara Besser remembers her mom driving her and her best friend to the top of the steepest hill around Pinecrest Lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains with her blue Schwinn in the trunk. Once there, Besser and her friend would unload the bike and take turns straddling the long banana seat and taking off down the incline. "I loved going downhill fast. The feeling of flying...it was a high," says the 53-year-old consumer marketing director, who now lives in Berkeley, Calif.
Lisa Kelsey, a magazine designer in New York City, got her first two-wheeler at age 7 after winning an art contest sponsored by her local newspaper. "I don't remember the make, but the color was gold and black. I remember going to Northgate Mall to retrieve my prize and have my photo taken. What an exciting day!" Once she learned to ride, Kelsey says she loved racing down the steep hills in her neighborhood. "It was easy to pick up a lot of speed (no helmet, of course, it was the 70s!), which is to this day one of my favorite things about riding." Today, Kelsey lives in Pawling, New York, where she rides her mountain bike on the surrounding trails.
