The Canonical Penguin: “Bicycle Crash Along the Bay”

Bicycles were always a big part of my growing up. Everyone had one and we took them everywhere. Now, first I must tell you that my mother and grandmother were paranoid to the point of dysfunction about the danger of riding a bicycle in the neighborhood. For this reason, I was forbidden to ride off my block or cross streets with it until I was like 10 or so. I remember knowing that this sucked (not my word then but a perfectly good description of the feeling) and always begged for more freedom. It came slowly and eventually I was all over town, so to speak, on my own two wheels.

When you come from a large family, the thought of a new bicycle is almost non-existent. However, when you have a dad who is good with a wrench and does not mind storing spare parts in the garage (pack-rat), you at least had options. We all had bikes, maybe not the flashiest but certainly very capable in getting us around.


There were the old style Schwinn bruiser, like our friend Tom had, and when were growing up,
but it was also the time of the

stingray and we had those too with the banana seats and high handlebars.

Finally after all the begging we could muster, my brother Mike and I got new bicycles at Christmas, which is a story itself, to be told in a later blog post. These were the three speed varieties, ready for some long distance hauling. In our family this also meant the passing down of the older bicycles. Well these new bicycles just wet the appetite for bigger and better bicycles. There was a bike shop in town and we went frequently to see the new ones in the shop – with 5 speeds! Not just 3…

With money earned doing summer jobs and the help of some funds from my parents, my brother and I got to purchase new 5 speed bikes of our own. My dad made us go to the bike shop just over the city line in Nassau County because you saved on sales tax. Mine was shiny and blue and spiffy all around. Soon after getting them we organized a bike ride along Little Neck Bay, a trail about a mile from our home. It was a nicely paved path along the water which meant cool breezes during the summer. There were about 5 or six of us including my dad and Tom and brother Mike and (I think she was there) his future wife, at least two other siblings, my sister Johanna and brother Anthony. Quite a crew peddling along the shore. The path ran next to the highway, close to it in spots but with a big steel guardrail between. We were about a mile in on the path with 3-4 miles to go when it happened.

This part is a bit fuzzy in my mind but here goes. My brother and I were racing ahead, He was slightly ahead of me and my front wheel caught his real wheel. The bike slid to the left, bumped up into the air and impacted one of the steel beams on the guardrail. My new bike was ruined. Front wheel bent like a taco, front fork twisted into a Y shape from its U shape beginning. I was cut and scraped and had my pride wounded yet it took a while before I realized that at a slightly different angle, I could have been vaulted onto the highway. BUT MY BIKE WAS RUINED!

We walked the whole way back, carrying the bike in several pieces. My dad, master mechanic, bought a new fork for the bike and installed it. It didn’t match but it had extra chrome so that made it ok, I guess. And that is the story of the bike crash along the bay.

(These are stories about things that actually happened with plenty of witnesses. It has passed from the apocryphal to canonical in nature. Wiki says of canon – “material that is considered to be "genuine", "something that actually happened", or can be directly referenced as material produced by the original author or creator.”)