My first bicycle was a 20” Huffy. Deep candy red with white pinstripes on its triangle-shaped fenders. I remember it so perfectly because this was the bike I first learned how to balance without training wheels. I can take you to the exact spot where this miracle occurred. My mother held the bike up by the back of its saddle and then released me. The thrill of that moment was like nothing else. It felt like I’d just learned the greatest magic trick ever.

Many kids learn to self-balance today using a very small pedal-less 'balance bike’, a type of miniaturized bicycle that did not exist when I was a child. Whenever I see a child using one of these it looks so natural and easy. It’s automatic and happens so early that kids who learned the miracle of balancing this way won’t remember the magic moment when they first could do it because they acquired the ability at such a young age.

For me there was much anticipation and for several weeks prior some discussions about removing the training wheels. Was that what I really wanted? Was I sure? Did I feel ready? This was serious, important stuff. What I didn’t know at the time was when my mother had been around my age, her mother had witnessed the horror of a small bicycling child being killed in a collision with an automobile, so she was never allowed to have or ride a bicycle. She never learned how to ride like the millions of people all over the world who somehow never learn how to swim. It’s probably why she took my learning how to ride very seriously.

My first self-balancing riding moment was on a regular sidewalk only a hundred feet from the house we were living in at the time. The training wheels had just been removed, but I don’t remember by whom. I don’t remember ever riding my Huffy with training wheels, even once, but I’m sure I must have, and many times.

That day was a bright, clear sunny warm spring day. Probably a Saturday as my dad was at work and I wasn’t in school. The street in front of the house ran slightly downhill and there wasn’t the usual grassy boulevard between the sidewalk and the street. Directly to my right was a curb with a drop of several inches to street level. There were no parked cars which meant everyone who had a car had already driven off for work or somewhere else. Not everyone had a car during the late 1950’s.

My mother and I walked up to the corner, and I was pushing the bike. I’m sure she wore a simple cotton house dress, as was her custom in those days. Or maybe Bermuda shorts, which were very popular. I don’t remember some details. Only that ‘Mom jeans’ were nonexistent. Still decades in the future. And I was on the sidewalk, not in the street.

There was one home between our house and the corner. White. Clapboard siding. Porch. Both the street and the avenue were residential-quiet, and the intersection was uncontrolled from all directions. You were supposed to look both ways before crossing, which probably I wasn’t yet allowed to do. But my limited little world was about to radically change.

This neighborhood had been built out thirty years earlier during the mid 1920’s. The street and sidewalk surfaces were all concrete, not asphalt. Up at the corner I turned the bike around, my mother grabbed the underside of the saddle and I climbed on. There were a few brief words of discussion or encouragement, but whatever they were is another forgotten detail. A low hedge bordered the immediate left side of the sidewalk, along the front yard of our neighbor’s house. Maybe two feet high at most.

Focus. Concentrate… 

GO!

She let me free with a light push. I made it about fifty incredible feet and then don’t remember exactly what happened next. For some reason I think maybe I crashed into the hedge and cried (?) but was uninjured and immediately got back to the top of the street and did it again. Successfully. Or maybe I got going ok that first time and came to a safe (Bendix!) coaster-braked stop in front of our house.

Whatever it was, all I know for sure was that suddenly I could actually balance, perfectly and easily, and in that one magical instant my life was forever changed. And thanks to a huge dose of adrenaline right at that exact moment I can still remember this as clearly as if it just happened yesterday. I can still go back to the exact moment when I first acquired wings and began to fly. To leave the nest behind.

From that day on I could not stop riding.

What is your memory of learning to balance? Share below!