And Another Box of Chocolates.
The fellow who became the owner of the first Aerostich suit is a highly accomplished writer with a bunch of published books, a degree in history, considerable expertise in Air Force subjects, airplane and flight history and technology, and a successful career as an automobile and motorcycle journalist. He rode twisty backroads FAST and was a skillful motorcycle road racer, too. During my twenties and thirties his smart editorials in Auto Week and Cycle World taught me a lot. Many of them offered a deeper understanding of motorcycle culture and mainstream culture than anything I’d read elsewhere or could have come up with myself.
Steven L. Thompson got that first Roadcrafter unsolicited, with a cover letter introducing it and attempting to explain what the suit was for, and letting him know if it was not his size to please let me know. I hoped he’d give it a try. Fortunately, he immediately understood what it was, and liked it very much. He also wrote encouragingly about it ('Dressing Up’). Aerostich would not exist today without his generous encouragement, support and recognition, literally from day one. As the years passed, we became friends and eventually collaborators on his insightful book ‘Bodies in Motion’ which analyzes some of what underlies our profound attraction to motorcycles.
Steven is still around, and we’re still friends. Recently he sent me a link to a story about the ‘Big Wheel’ children’s trike. Unfortunately, it was behind a paywall, so I was unable to read it, but the story’s title alone was enough to get me going and I wrote what follows. (That behind-a-paywall article is here: “The Wild—and Weirdly Dark—History of One of America’s Most Iconic Toys - How the Big Wheel turned plastic, physics, and pure chaos into a generation’s first taste of freedom.” from Popular Mechanics. If you subscribe to Apple News at $12.95/mo and want to make me a .pdf, I’d love to read it.)
What follows is an autobiographical story from my childhood. Among other things, it reveals how much of an insufferable, overly-opinionated little sh-t I was.
The first Schwinn ’Stingray’ bikes came out when I was in the 5th grade. With their innovative chopper-esque styling they quickly became the company’s best-selling bike and were soon copied by many other bicycle manufacturers. Nearly all kids loved ‘em.
That year I was still pedaling my trusty red and white 20” Huffy traditional bicycle with painted steel fenders, ‘paper-boy’ style bicycle handlebars, ‘balloon’ tires, a Bendix coaster brake and a normal bicycle seat. It handled great and was good on both sidewalks and single-track ’shortcut’ trails through overgrown vacant lots. Excellent at jumping curbs, too, this was a true do-anything little bike, and I loved it enough to periodically use auto paste wax to shine it up. It became my faithful wings as soon as its bolt-on training wheels were removed.
So when I examined those flashy new Stingrays it was with narrow eyes and a mix of anger and sadness, in roughly the same way as a decade later pop singer Don McLean described America and American music culture changing in ‘American Pie’, his wonderful song about the “Day the music died…”
Here’s verse three of that song:
"Now, for ten years we've been on our own
And moss grows fat on a rollin' stone
But that's not how it used to be
When the jester sang for the king and queen
In a coat he borrowed from James Dean
And a voice that came from you and me
Oh, and while the king was looking down
The jester stole his thorny crown
The courtroom was adjourned
No verdict was returned
And while Lenin read a book on Marx
The quartet practiced in the park
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died”
(Notes: “jester” = maybe Bob Dylan, “rollin’ stone” = maybe the Rolling Stones band, “the king” = maybe Elvis, “Lenin read a book on Marx” = maybe John Lennon, “quartet practiced in the park” = maybe The Beatles. Personally, I love both pre-and-post ‘American Pie’ pop music.)
Those Stingrays embodied everything which seemed to be going bad in America in the worlds of bike marketing, and about the inherent wonders of riding a bicycle. The overly stylized machines seemed like pure evil on two wheels, yet they were selling like hotcakes and ’sliced bread’. I had neither the age, wisdom, or experience to understand what was happening to America, but I knew this terrible bike represented the beginning of the end for something amazing about the experience of riding a bicycle. At age ten I was unable to appreciate and describe it, yet one look at a Stingray and I instantly felt a kind of anger through my every fiber: “The jester stole his thorny crown, the courtroom was adjourned…and we sang dirges in the dark, the day the music died.”
For a couple of months every spring and fall, from the third through fifth grades, I rode that Huffy about two miles to and from my elementary school. On September 24th, 1963, a couple of months before President Kennedy was assassinated, he did an overnight campaign stop here in Duluth, speaking in the basketball gymnasium of our local university (UMD). Their campus was less than an eighth mile from my elementary school and that night my parents went to witness the President speak. They had either left me with a babysitter, or maybe I was left on my own - I no longer remember this detail clearly - but I also went there, pedaling my trusty Huffy just to see if I could somehow get in. As I left our house it was already twilight, and if there was a sitter (?) I‘d have sneaked out very quietly, powered mostly by adrenaline and curiosity, hoping to sneak into that gym.
I knew the best route even in the dark since it was the same one I’d been pedaling to school every weekday. When I got there some guy at a side door actually let me in and I stood with a few others, crowded into an aisle between folding bleachers, looking around at a sea of people, and trying unsuccessfully to spot my parents because I did not want them to see me there. That trusty Huffy got me into lots of trouble like this and then always got me out of trouble, every time.
After the President finished his speech, none of which I remember (…or understood), the city was already in full darkness. Despite the gloom I pedaled back home like the wind and fortunately made it there before my parents. I was in bed faking sleep by the time they arrived. None of this would have been remotely possible riding an idiotic ill-handling Stingray.
When the Big Wheel trike came out a few years later I was already older. Little kids had them. The roto-molded polypropylene frame and matching soft plastic tires were as ridiculous and useless as it’s ‘chopper-esque’ riding position. Those G-d Damn’s Stingrays had somehow led to this abomination, I thought. But parents and little kids both loved them because on asphalt or worn concrete driveways they were pathetically easy to drift and slide around in safe and controlled ways, thanks to the near-zero frictional coefficient of roto-molded polypropylene. Plus, they were cheap and less tippy than a traditional trike. When used as intended, which they all were, it did not take super-long to wear through the oversized front wheel’s molded plastic tread, at which time the entire crude and cheaply made thing went into a garbage bin, and then a few days later to the local landfill. It was still years before today’s semi-fake plastic recycling programs existed.
Despite (or because of) those dynamic and durability limitations, little kids everywhere begged grownups for them and thanks to a very low price it was not difficult for even lower income parents to comply and shut them up. A few years later those kids would be pedaling Schwinn (or imitation) Stingrays and a few years after that they would be making horrible ‘sissy-bar’ equipped almost-choppers out of completely inappropriate used Honda CL 77 scramblers, all while Evil Knievel was bloviating about jumping the Snake River, true courage and good ol’ American pride while wearing rhinestones on his fingers and a snazzy leather suit which looked like it had come from one of fat Elvis’s concert wardrobes.
These days I’m still riding those same streets as I once did on that Huffy, except now I’m doing it year-around thanks to a lightly-modified a 200cc fat-tired Suzuki Van Van ‘winter bike’, which turned out to be a dependable cold-temp starter and seems/feels safe-ish for use on snowy and icy streets. You don’t know what strange is until you’ve ridden a studded-tire bicycle, e-bike or Van Van for day-to-day transportation though one of our always slightly too-long northern Minnesota winters.
“To discover what normal means, you have to surf a tide of weirdness.”
– Charlotte Rampling, Actor, interview in The New Yorker, 16 May 2021.
I’m no poet or Henry David Thoreau philosopher and weirdo, but in America today there’s something inherent about riding which estranges you from all those who do not ride, and which also helps you see the world a little more clearly, probably a little more cynically, and possibly with a bit more humility and a little less hubris than all the good and sensible people surrounding you. Most of them from inside their sealed/safe/comfortable/convenient cars.
Also, I was not ‘born old’, or with a good sense of self-discipline and a desire to be on a scholastic ‘honor roll’, and an ambition to be an Eagle Scout, admirable as those things all are. Back when I was riding that Huffy my simple plan was to become a paleontologist who drove a Corvette across the sands of outer Mongolia to find and dig up dinosaur bones. I’d also hoped someday along the way a pretty HS homecoming queen might fall in love with me.
Never got that Corvette or any dino bones, but finally - and entirely by chance – did end up married to a smart, feisty, pretty homecoming queen almost as lonely and (forgive me honey…) weird as me. It sure took a good long time, though. By the time we’d met at random, I was old enough to be eligible for Social Security. “Life” really “is like a box of chocolates.” You never do know what you’re gonna get.
She and her brothers all loved their Big Wheels. If you loved your Stingray and Big Wheel, that’s ok, too. From a certain viewpoint those things did look fly and were great fun. You probably looked really cool on yours, too.
But they still rode like absolute crap…
Mr. Subjective, February 2026
PS – Possible future blog post: “Every Dog Has Its Day: The Fall of Schwinn and the Rise of (good handling) Mountain Bikes”
PPS – I was completely wrong about the Big Wheel. Though it resembles a tricycle in form it’s actually and more simply a perfectly genius toy. Children of all ages love the sensations of skidding, sledding, skiing, sliding,surfing and every other form of semi-controlled drifting. Many kinds of mammals (think otters, etc) do. This toy was cheap to make, safe to use and introduced kids to exactly this kind of fun in a beautiful way. At a fast glance it looked like a trike, but it was always so much more. These days I am sorry I misunderstood and maligned these things for most of my life.
