I wish I didn't want to bludgeon the activists on my team

[walkitout]

And yet, it happens a lot.

This time, it's _Pedaling Revolution_, by Jeff Mapes, which at least some media coverage indicated would be available on the kindle, but I grew tired of waiting and bought in paper, figuring I'd donate it when I was done with it. R. and I have done a lot of talking about what the hell happened with bicycling culture in the US and this here's the timeline we have for our lives:

white people move to suburbs (post WW2)
in 'burbs, 1 car per family, so other adult (usually, but not always, wife) rides bike
bike is often an English 3 speed (Raleigh) with a Brooks saddle
kids get Schwinns
wife gets job, wife gets used car (possibly husband's car doesn't get traded in one cycle)
Reagan era cheap gas + high cost of new expected standard of living = no more adults cycling
kids lust after 10 speeds with drop handles
kids get a license at 16
[ETA mountain biking as a sport is invented]
parenting standards change (moving into the Clinton era here): car seats required by law, chauffeuring kids around, helmets, blah, blah, bleeping, blah
mountain biking [ETA: er, mountain bikes as a consumer item] becomes uber popular
Schwinns all but forgotten, adults and kids no longer ride, except when they ride the mysterious hybrid (because still, no one can cope with those drop handle bars IRL)
kids grow up, move to the cities, import bike culture from elsewhere (mountain biking, the Netherlands, etc.)

In my driveway last Saturday, the saddle on the Townie was noted and admired, and C. wanted to know what a "Brooks saddle" was. There was a brief pause, as everyone contemplated how to explain to R.'s mom what a "Brooks saddle" was and why it was special. I pointed out that she almost certainly had _had_ one and after discussion, concluded yup, she had -- and she had put a sheepskin on to make sure it stayed dry. This, of course, will never explain to C. why a Brooks Saddle is a lustworthy object to folk of her children's generation -- but then, try to explain Lady Ga-Ga to me. Unlikely to work, and even if it did, probably not worth the effort.

Where the bludgeoning comes in is here:

"But not since the Great Depression or the gas rationing of World War II have most people expected to do much of a utilitarian nature with their bike, at least as adults."

Because women don't count? Really? Clearly someone pointed out that as teenagers, they all expected to do something of a utilitarian nature with their bikes, hence the last clause. But no one of C.'s generation was consulted. And women's history, once again, was ignored and forgotten.

Comments

Re: my life? my husband's life?

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I will double-check with my sisters, but I am really just about positive that Mom never rode a bike as an adult. Our family was pretty car-minded: my great-aunt even had a car of her own when she went to college (her father sold Oldsmobiles as a sideline in addition to being a farmer) and used to lend it to rum-running friends who took it up to Canada. And of course my mother had to have a car of her own when she was in practice, because she was on call. My grandparents shared a car at this period, I'm pretty sure, but they also lived in a tiny town and I have the impression that my grandmother often dropped Grandpa off at the hospital and kept the car to do shopping and what not (though an energetic woman and not particularly overweight, she was not much for walking, and I can easily see her refusing to cycle even if lots of others did).

What about black people on bicycles? I think lots of (white) people these days would swear that there are essentially no black cyclists, but in fact if you actually look there are quite a few.

Re: my life? my husband's life?

[walkitout]

I would be interested to hear what you get back. I don't know the generation lengths in your family, but assuming your grandmother was born around the turn of the century, the bicycle craze was hitting pretty hard around the time she was born and the car wouldn't be common until she was an adult. It is almost unimaginable that they did not both learn to ride as children, and I would expect your grandmother at least would have ridden some as a young woman and/or during the WW2 years of gas rationing. Unless they _really_ had access and could afford to run a car that entire time. Which would be pretty amazing.

The race question has not come up yet. It is an interesting one.

Re: my life? my husband's life?

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I will see my dad and some of my siblings tonight (my nephew is getting married) -- if I get a chance will bring up bicycles.

My grandmother went pretty much straight from horses to cars; she rode a horse to high school in Sharon, Wisconsin, and sometime in her mid to late teens (say 1910+, as she was born in 1895) my great-grandfather was having her deliver Oldsmobiles to local families for test drives. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/archstories/suburbs/automobile.asp points out "State motor vehicle registrations demonstrate the astounding growth of automobile ownership in Wisconsin. In 1910 fewer than 6000 vehicles were registered in the state. By 1915 this number had grown to 88,390. In 1920 the number of registered automobiles alone was over 277,000." Clearly Great-grandpa picked the right time to get into the auto business, though it was never more than a sideline for him.

My *great*-grandmother was terrific at managing a team of horses (Great-grandpa, who also sold horses, used to tell people "Why, a lady could drive this team. May! Come on out here," and she'd show the buyer that indeed a lady could drive them), but was the kind to say "whoa" to the car and then be surprised it didn't stop. Great-grandpa tried to teach her to drive a car, but gave up.

My grandfather would have had gas during rationing if anyone did, being a country doctor who had to drive out to surrounding farms and deliver babies and what not. I looked it up and even the minimum (for "Sunday drivers") was four gallons a week, which seems to me a fairly generous allowance if you live in a town only a couple of miles across.

Re: my life? my husband's life?

[walkitout]

Holy crap!

Your family was cool. :-)

I'm now _really_ curious about whether they bicycled. Clearly they had the resources for any number of bicycles -- but they might well have decided they didn't want anything to do with them.

Congratulations to your nephew!

Talked to my dad, step-mom, sister

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

My dad was fairly uncommunicative on the subject, but he may not have been able to hear me properly. I'll try him again by email. He did remember bicycling to work a few times. I had misremembered this effort myself: I had thought he'd tried biking out to the University (from our house on Capitol Hill) back when he was teaching a class there, but he says no, he got the bike later, after he had stopped teaching, and rode it all the way to work (in Renton) a few times. He specifically remembered stopping at someone's house on his bike on the way back from work in order to watch Nixon's resignation speech, which dates this effort to 1974. May have had something to do with gas prices (though as far as I can tell, gas wasn't as high then as it is now, in constant dollars).

In any case, his bike mainly sat completely unused in the dining-room for years and years. The reason he was fit enough to bike that kind of distance on a first effort was that he was a marathon runner -- I'm sure he'd done at least one full marathon by then, and probably several. He used to go to work extra early and take a very long lunch to run. Boeing had a gym onsite with showers and so forth.

My stepmother said she herself used to commute to her law office by bike (which I knew), but that she didn't remember any of her friends biking at all, and that they all thought she was quite eccentric for doing so. Mind you, M. rather likes to think of herself as a complete maverick, so she may have been exaggerating. Her first husband was a doctor, and a lot of the women in their social circle were what she calls dismissively "doctors' wives," a category in which she doesn't seem to place herself. She said her mother had certainly never been on a bicycle. M. has always been athletic, and still swims and plays tennis, at 85 or whatever she is, so (a) she isn't typical and (b) she may find other people's less exalted performances hardly worthy of note. Actually she may have given up tennis, but if she did it was extremely recently (less than a year ago).

My sister didn't have anything special to say, but we didn't get a chance to talk that much -- anyway, she didn't remember Mom biking either.

Re: Talked to my dad, step-mom, sister

[walkitout]

Bike commuting father and stepmother!

Wow. That's really kinda cool.

There is a certain amount of no-one-else-cycles that comes out of the mouths of people who cycle conspicuously further/more often/in a different way. I'm going to count step-mother and mother as #s 6 and 7 in my informal data collection, and say I'm 6 out of 7 for bicycling adult women in the relevant decades.

If your stepmother is in her 80s, she's also older than the rest of the people I'm using for my data points.

Re: Talked to my dad, step-mom, sister

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

But it's so much harder to prove a negative. I am morally certain that my Aunt J. didn't bike, that Mrs. D. and Mrs. P. next door to us didn't, etc., but there's no way I could count them in your stats. Whereas if I suddenly remembered *once* having seen Aunt J. on a bike, all of a sudden you could have 7 out of 8. Seems to me it skews the data seriously. In other words, I'm happy to allow you your six, but the "out of 7" is statistically funky.

Dad's experience seems to me to be the sort of thing we should be trying to prevent, actually -- the whole "if I can't consistently bike to Renton I'm not even going to try biking to the store" business. By the way, he was 56 at the time, and probably already had knee damage from bad form while running (he ran ON HIS TOES exclusively -- yes, marathons and all). Plus the bike had some number of speeds that I'd previously never known was possible (I'd heard of 3-speeds and 10-speeds, but Dad's was 15 or 22 or something), and I wouldn't be at all surprised if he had difficulty with the gears and didn't want to admit it.

Re: Talked to my dad, step-mom, sister

[walkitout]

I'm in no way suggesting this is scientific. The "out of 7" would be an indication that these were instances we pursued far enough to be quite certain what kind of cycling was involved (or definitely not cycling). I'm happy to make it "out of 10", if you would be happier, to thus include Aunt J., Mrs. D and Mrs. P., and trust that your sense of this is accurate. I've at no point intended to assert that all adult women of the '60s and 70s were cycling, just that it was a fairly normal thing for them to be doing.

Toe runner, hunh? :-)

Runners switching to cycling as they age is _very_ normal.

15 speeds were definitely around at the time; 22 speeds do exist altho we're not sure they were around back then. Perhaps your brother could give a definitive answer if he remembers the bike.

I agree that it's important to make sure people who are cycling have predictable experiences, especially as they are developing the habit of cycling.

Re: Talked to my dad, step-mom, sister

[walkitout]

22 speed campy groupset was a joke (teach me not to actually read the post and just go off the google list as an indication that this stuff exists) and the other 22 speeds appear to by typo-d craigslist entries.

So, still no 22 speeds. I think.

gears

[(Anonymous)]

My bike, purchased in 1985 has 21 theoretic speeds. 3 chain rings, 7 cogs on cassette. However, like all bikes with chain rings and cassette, not all combinations are functional. 22 doesn't make sense mathematically.

Just heard from one of my brothers

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

He said "Mom certainly rode a bike as a child, and equally certainly never rode one as a mom, not during my lifetime anyway. I remember many things mechanical, and Mom never had a bike. I remember Dad's bike pretty well. I would have remembered if Mom had one."