If you are like most people, chances are great stories interest you more than old bikes. In fact bicycles in general are a ways down almost everybody’s Items of Interest list and even then as something inconsequential, in a world long smitten with automobiles when it comes to getting around and which also tends to prefer other activities when it comes to modes of exercise or even just having fun. That said, it is also true that many or possibly most people in the world have fond memories of biking somewhere back in their joyful childhood. Charles Foster Kane might’ve died uttering the name “Rosebud”, his childhood sled, but is it possible a name like Schwinn or Huffy or Columbia resonates warmly somewhere deep in your psyche, in like fashion? And what color was it? And whatever happened to it? We know for a fact that you’ve never forgotten how to ride the thing.
It is not imperative but if you haven’t read part one of this story it is highly recommended you go there now, and whereas part one contained lots of personal story, this time around it’s more about the historic and cultural, and in the end the object itself. Bicycles are a clever example of industrial technology that mostly dates from the late 19th century, but they’ve also always been a product designed to sell to a consumer market with its trends and fads and caprices, which is where culture enters the picture. The historic and the cultural and the personal together make for the whole story, and in the end some semblance of that is the goal, here. I will admit to a fascination for the object itself that you are unlikely to possess, but if you do, heaven help you, and I will try to curb my enthusiasm if it feels like things are getting out of hand to the point of boredom for most people. It might help if you already have a general interest in antiques and old objects in general (which that PBS TV show has driven to the point of mania, though its obsession with the dollar value of things makes me kind of sad), but a bike is not a clock or piece of furniture or bit of crockery or a quilt or almost anything one might find in a store specifically catering to people who like old things. In fact, one hardly ever sees old bicycles in so-called “antique” stores, unless it’s the kind clearly in the “toy” category.
The fact is most old bikes just end up in landfills, regardless of whatever value they might have once had historically or culturally or technologically or even personally, sad to say. Speaking of which, whatever happened to that bike you treasured in your childhood, did you tell me? The bike in this story was headed for just such a fate when the universe steered it my way at the last minute, and what we got is this ongoing and now hopefully never ending story, here. Read it and see what you think and be certain this bike will never turn up on Antiques Roadshow, as they wouldn’t know what to make of it. For what it’s worth, most of the knowledgeable antique-obsessed bikies scouring eBay every day wouldn’t either, as it’s only an old faded Peugeot and a “girl’s” bike, to boot, with steel handlebars and steel fenders and downright eccentric details, as we shall see, starting with that skirt-guard and getting weirder from there.
So the first order of business after having dragged this cobbled-together mess of a bike home was to disassemble it, so as to begin re-cobbling it with more appropriate and/or historically accurate parts, of which I miraculously possessed more than a few as I’m the kind of guy with whom this treasure was fated to cross paths. The universe works in mysterious ways, as we all know, and sometimes these ways can lead to genuinely good things, as rare as that is.
The first astounding discovery in this process gets a bit technical & mechanical but the pictures should help a lot, and just maybe you’ll learn something fascinating about how bicycles are constructed along the way, if you don’t get bored first and go back to your jigsaw puzzle, which is a whole lot more interesting. As for the anatomy involved: so your feet get placed down there on the pedals, which are attached to these arms, which are called the cranks, which are connected to one another via an axle that passes through the bottom of the frame (it’s called the bottom bracket, a wonderful self-explanatory term if there ever was one). That axle spins freely on a set of ball-bearings (invented for the bicycle in the mid-19th century) at each end, or at least such is the case when it’s all new and fresh down there, before the ravages of time and the weather and neglect take their sorry toll. Most bicycle owners never give any of this a thought, but those in the know or who put their bikes to heavy use year ‘round or who love their machines and do “regular maintenance” which is the bike shops’ bread and butter, go to the trouble to refresh the lubricant every now and then, to keep the whole apparatus functioning as God and the manufacturer intended. My guess is about 10% of bikes ever get this kind of care, and it is testimony to the dirt-simple technology that they all seem to work okay anyway, the tender feelings of bike mechanics regarding abused machinery notwithstanding.
The upshot being that when I opened up the bottom bracket on this venerable French steed and yanked out the crank axle, what to my wandering eyes should appear but a long-defunct but perfectly preserved insect! A beetle of the “ladybug” variety, to not get too technical. If you’ve entomological knowledge, I leave it up to you to make the correct ID, and my first question is: is this bug of European or North American origin? If the latter, is it common to the midwest or the east? Evidence suggests this bike was sold in France, made it to Michigan at some point, after which it ended up in Egleston Square MA, any point at which this poor beetle could’ve flown or been sucked down into the bowels of the machine, so to speak. As a career bike mechanic, it may astound you to reveal that I’ve seen this kind of thing before, as rare as it is. Sometimes it’s a beetle, sometimes a spider. The obvious question is How the hell does this happen? a mystery I have pondered for lo these many years. It is a fact that the only opening that might provide egress is the seat tube that comes down to the bottom bracket from above, and the fact that seat posts that connect the saddle to the frame were once hollow at the top, which is no longer the case with modern posts. So is there some uncommon and fantastic vortex of air generated by a moving bicycle that generates this amazing outcome? It boggles the mind, of course, and the truth, as we all know, is out there.
If you care to get a closer look at the cause of all this mystery, the first responder who sends an SASE will get the insect carcass in question mailed to them post haste. Just kidding! I’ve misplaced the evidence, same as police departments do the world over, and I doubt I could part with it even if I do find it again, but how should one appropriately display such an oddity?
The re-cobbling effort led to the disposal of the whole crankset apparatus anyway, including the pedals which were hopelessly frozen. So much for originality, though it is unclear whether those parts were original. As this trained old-French bike aficionado knew from the very beginning, the wheels, besides being steel and heavy and hideously rusty, happened to also be the wrong size. Not to get too technical, they had a larger rim and a smaller tire than the original, and I happened to have a wheel set of the proper size (did I mention that destiny brought me & this bike together?) and take a look at the enormous tires that fit in there (!), as God and the people at Peugeot intended. These are the same kind of tires found on clunky one-speed American kid’s bikes of midcentury America, providing a big soft cushion of air eschewed by “serious” bikers of the day, at least until some clever Californians adapted them to multi-speed adult bikes and added good brakes, which gave us the so-called “mountain bike” with which you assuredly must be at least vaguely familiar by this time. These design tweaks created a machine much more useful and pleasant to ride for normal people, even if they never took it near a mountain or trail, and it is the dominant type of bike the world over, at this point. Most bicycle historians ascribe the origins of this back to those Californians, and it is a fact they were the popularizers, but looky here, this is a production French bike that predates those guys by 30 years. The antique brakes on this bike which caught my eye when I first noticed it work wonderfully, by the way, much better than the ones that turned up on those bike-boom Peugeot racing-style products of the 70s. Those bikes targeted a post-adolescent American baby boom market, which might have been you, and did you buy a Peugeot? Or was it a Raleigh, or maybe a Schwinn “ten-speed” or maybe something similar as there were oh so many more that that, at least for about a decade, at which point the Japanese took over and the boom kind of ran its course.
Which gets us to the cultural history part and the fact that the first “bike-boom” of the 1890s faded quickly by the early 1900s, and especially by 1908 when Henry bestowed upon Americans the blessings of the Model T and all of its ilk which were to follow, whose motorized advantages captured the American imagination for all time, abetted by the fact that most people could afford one, or would sooner or later. What most Americans might not realize is that the timing of this for rest of the world was quite different. Motorcars were an affectation of the rich for most of Europe until the mid-1950s, in much of Asia until the 1970s, and in China only in the last 20 years. And hopefully even Americans know that in much of the “less-developed” (i.e. more impoverished) parts of the world most people still walk or ride bikes or use public transportation. There is so much to ponder here (and so much fodder for so many potential blog-posts) that it ain’t funny but that will have to wait, perhaps forever.
What is fascinating and germane is that in France for the first half of the 20th century, bicycles were a key part of adult culture. Self-respecting everyday French men and women used bikes for transportation and recreation at levels even higher than their European counterparts, and a few French professionals and other “people of means” spent big bucks on handmade touring bikes, with lights and racks and fenders, with which they rode through the Alps and to other “vacation” spots. Of course there was always the Tour de France and the racing element, but the country’s fascination with bicycles was so much more than that, at least until the economy improved after WWII and France went the way of all countries where most everybody can finally afford to get a car.
Just look at these pictures! You are beholding images of people & their bikes from the ‘20s into the early ‘50s, collected from family albums or whatever. Couples on tandems! Old guys with skinny but muscular legs! Serious but clearly non-racing types doing what many French people loved best, just riding their bikes. In Paris, newspapers got delivered by professional “porteurs” on special bikes up until the mid-‘50s, and they even staged a yearly race that required they deliver 33 pounds of newsprint over a prescribed course for the best time. My source also claims that their daily load could top out at 110 lbs and that’s a bit hard to believe, which doesn’t mean it’s not true. My source, by the way, is a fellow named Jan Heine who single-handedly has made many Americans, if not the world, aware of 20th century French bicycle culture and these pictures and everything I know comes from his writings, and the pictures are from one of his books, brazenly and illegally shown here. Thanks, Jan! It would not be a stretch to say except for Jan I’d never have given this bike a second look, but we shall never know for sure.
At any rate, the task that remained was to put the thing back together with what I had, most of which can be seen in the pictures. What I did not have was any of the lighting system, which was run by a generator and included a headlight and tail light, all of which were missing, often the case with old bikes, especially French ones. This left various holes in the fenders and tabs and brackets for the wires which no longer fulfilled any function, which bothered me a bit but thank God awhile back I scored a bike that had all this stuff intact, making it less of an unsatisfied yearning.
Which left only style and whimsy. I happen to also possess another quite obscure history book full of pictures from old bike catalogues, most of them French, compiled by a Japanese enthusiast. Another curious piece of all this is that it appears the Japanese have been the biggest fans of old French bikes of all (or maybe after the French themselves), and scarfed up a lot of the best old French bikes still left after WWII, even produced a few of their own machines following French design trends (none of them imported to the US, by the way). Take a look at some of the cool stuff from the catalogues, designed for looks and not function. It is also true that many clunky American kids’ bikes from the old days emphasized style, with the Rollfast Hopalong Cassidy of 1952 probably the epitome of this kind of thing, the likes of which will probably never be surpassed. With a lot of luck and a few thousand bucks you might still get one of these, too, but remember it has only one speed and a coaster brake, so your riding ambitions must be limited. It helps if you’re a kid at heart.
The rest of this is best left to the pictures. I plugged up a few of the holes with Lucky Little Cat and a mouse, contemplated more ambitious things in that direction but decided the results you see were whimsical enough (let’s not go nuts here with something that’s nutty enough already). The choice of bell (ALL French bikes had bells, for obvious reasons) was tough, as I had so many from which to choose, but Mickey seemed good enough. After all, Walt & Company picked France over Britain and Italy and Spain for its European theme park, which is the busiest theme park on the continent and only the second non-US operation after Disneyland Tokyo (which is independent of the Disney corporation, oddly enough). There are rumors of a Walt Disney World Canada Resort in Toronto and if you search with your computer for that you will get the most amazing website ever, but my Canadian informants tell me this is merely one of the greatest hoaxes to be found on the internet and nothing more than that.
There is little more to say here, other than that this unfancy and rather elderly ladies-model French bicycle is more of a “performer” than I ever would’ve expected and a total blast to ride and behold than I ever would’ve expected. If its owner ever shows up in the neighborhood and wants it back I suppose I’ll have to turn it over with great reluctance, or maybe we’ll work out some kind of rideshare arrangement. Those guys up Washington Street who gave it to me technically stole it, I suppose, and that’ll have to be worked out, as well. With any luck none of this will ever happen and I sincerely hope that that person is alive and well and riding something just as classy wherever they happen to be. If this is the case, they should also take better care of it, for God’s sake, and lock it up securely from now on. Bikes like this can be hard to replace.
