As somebody who’s been around the block a few times, or even more than a few times, you’ve probably had your share of experiences with old things in your life.  For a child, old things such as toys tend to get little respect (the really disrespected ones often get broken in short order), as the new gets old very quickly.  This year’s Christmas and birthday presents retain their appeal for only so long until one hankers for the next new thing, and of course toy marketers play this one for all it’s worth, especially the video game makers.  This is not a hard and fast rule, for it is also true that children will sometimes get attached to items like stuffed animals or dolls – and what’s the special object from your joyous childhood that is currently coming to mind?  I can think of a few baseball gloves I used until the leather was splitting and fielding fly balls and hard grounders became impossible, but at some point repairs became pointless and one moved on to the next glove, the way it is with so many things.

Of course this dynamic plays out on a gigantic scale in a capitalist “consumer” economy, where created needs are what it’s all about and moving on to the newest & latest anything and disposing of the old (or putting it in the basement or attic or a storage facility to be forgotten) is what keeps the economic engines running.  As they said in Brave New World, “ending is better than mending”, and amen to that. 

Many families have one or a few heirloom items, like silverware or dishes or quilts or classy furniture with a history, whereby one learns about the value of old things worth preserving.  Privileged families have a whole lot of this stuff and their children might suffer for having to be so careful when they want to play in the living room around the Louis the 14th couches and chairs (or maybe that’s one reason why some grow up with “playrooms” in their oversized houses).  For the rest of us we learn the concept from museums, where preservation is a way of life if not a religion and the old things teach us about the greatness of human fabrication down through history.   The whole point is to maintain or restore old items in a way that doesn’t violate their original condition or alters it as little as possible.  We must honor history and not forget it.

On the other hand, not all items deserve this respect, wouldn’t you say?  Haven’t you ever “restored” a piece of furniture whose history hardly seemed worthy of honor, if it was known at all?  Like those junky kitchen chairs you found on the street (I don’t know about your neighborhood but in Boston the sidewalks offer such things in endless variety), painted some lurid color?  Which you brought home and painstakingly stripped using some labor-intensive (and often foul smelling and probably toxic) process to reveal the lovely wood grain underneath, which you then stained in some tasteful shade (“red maple”? “white oak”)?  With this act you might even be erasing some sad history that was just waiting to be erased, and good riddance, though of course the painter of that lurid color no doubt shared a similar joy back during their moment of exuberant creation, using different aesthetic standards.  We will never know, of course.

There are endless categories of items that could be considered in these matters beyond furniture and toys, but today and perhaps always this writer’s obsession dictates that he apply such principles  to bicycles, with which he has a ridiculous amount of personal experience in these matters. Let us just say his basement is somewhat akin to a museum, but let him add that his historic “inventory” has never amounted to a few more than a dozen examples, while he has read about and even met a few others who claim to possess several or many times that.  God knows where they store them or if they share living space with other human beings who have their own storage needs  –   or share their lives with other human beings, at all, when you think about it. 

There are actually a few museums devoted to bicycles which a web search will readily reveal, but it seems they are mostly small or obscure or fleeting in their existence or in out-of-the-way or faraway places like New Bremen, Ohio or Sekai, Japan or Grenoble.  There happens to be a beer can museum in East Taunton MA which has to be the epitome of obscure and out-of-the-way, and a bicycle museum is not that, but almost.  That beer can museum is only open by appointment, by the way, which was a disappointing discovery on our ride down there.

On the other hand there are plenty of car museums out there, large and small, well-known and obscure, though the average person could probably not name any unless they’ve happened across one on a vacation.  Many are the collections of rich guys, some of them still alive but often not, who might’ve “bequeathed” their costly display of conspicuous consumption (and excellent refined taste in automobiles) to some town or foundation as a tax write-off, or such is this writer’s suspicion.  

Right up the hill from Jamaica Pond lies the old Larz Anderson estate now owned by the town of Brookline, that has made it into a park, but the one preserved building is Anderson’s old grandiose “carriage house” that houses his and his wife’s car collection.  Larz came from a family of longstanding political prominence and old money (he was born in Paris in 1866 when his parents were on a year-long European “vacation”, which tells you something) and he happened to marry Isabel Anderson who by some measure was the wealthiest woman in America at the time.  The charming couple evidently spent a lot of time whooping it up with their fortune, but they also shared a passion for cars back when cars were a really new thing.  Isabel was the first woman in MA to obtain a driver’s license, if that tells you anything, and she loved her 1908 Bailey Electric (talk about being way ahead of her time!) which you can see today in what is billed as “America’s oldest car collection.”  This is true in more ways than one, as the Andersons first put their cars on public display in 1927 and most of their vehicles were produced from 1899 – 1915, in what automobile historians refer to as the “brass era”.  That was when a plenitude of mostly small outfits produced hand-made product for a wealthy market of “early adopters”, and the results were quite beautiful, while also being fragile and having limited reliability.

What is germane, here, is that old cars and old bicycles have much in common.  Both are about transport, obviously, tools of conveyance that get you somewhere faster.  As such they’ve always been a common sight on the streets, familiar to all.  Of course here in America automobiles were a far more prominent presence than bikes after about 1920, which was not at all the case in Europe and the rest of the world until many years later.  And of course cars were and are a key part of most people’s lives, often part of their best (and sometimes worst) memories. The nostalgia for old cars is powerful and varies greatly among individuals.  The strongest evidence for this is the many car shows that turn up everywhere, especially in the summer months.  What is important, here, is that museums play a minimal role in keeping this nostalgia and appreciation alive, unlike the fine old things found exclusively indoors. Old cars can turn up anywhere anytime, just getting driven around, as the best part of ownership has got to be watching people smile and gawk as you pass by, or coming up to talk and take snaps when you park the thing.  Old cars are simply cool, about that there can be no dispute.

It helps that most of the old cars still around getting driven have also been well preserved, or more often, restored to perfection or something close.  One might see lots of simply “old” cars around the neighborhood, like the decades-worth of Toyota Camrys and Corollas that fill the streets of Boston, in various states of decay that truly show their age.  Most of these are not really all that old, and most are destined to disappear, such is the way of old cars, almost all of which become truly worthless at some point, except for parts or what a scrapyard might pay.  Chances are you’ve owned your share of these, but don’t you sometimes wish you’d hung on to that lovely Impala convertible or Dodge Dart with its legendary slant six engine? The truly old cars that survive and see use tend to look brand new, which is another part of their appeal.  These beloved objects appear as they did in our youth, forever young, unlike ourselves.  They remind us of all the different aesthetic standards and fads of the past, not just the styling of the bodywork but details like the chrome embellishments and humble items like the handles that opened the doors and raised the windows, about which nobody paid much attention when the car was a common sight on the streets.  

Compared to old cars, old bicycles are a different thing altogether when it comes to drawing anybody’s attention.  What’s funny is that most people are at least aware of the presence of old bicycles on some conscious level or another, because the fact is they are everywhere, rusting in people’s yards or locked up outside libraries and schools and other institutions.  Of course one sees many more in population centers, especially places where there are more young people, and college towns are obviously among the best open-air bike museums that there are.  Whether one gives them any notice is something else entirely, as almost everybody doesn’t, and why should they?  Some old bikes were distinctive, like those glorious fat-tired one-speed cruiser “tank” bikes of the 1950s that flooded America’s suburbs, which are the fond memory of many a paperboy or girl and are now also valuable collector’s items.  There were also the “stingray” type bikes, the ones with the banana seats and high-rise handlebars that kids rode in the ‘60s (with their pals sharing the ride sitting behind them), later to be superseded by somewhat similar “BMX” bikes that the children of the next era rode.  These bikes all arouse nostalgia with the appropriate generation, but such memories are nothing compared to what seeing a car from those eras can trigger.  

As an aside I should add that we recently visited Wellesley College to visit their excellent art museum, and of course the campus was full of fine old bikes of which this writer took careful notice.  The best one was a perfectly intact Raleigh Grand Prix, a green one (they also came in red and white) from about 1972 that looked like it had been stored in a climate-controlled garage for 50 years:  the original paint was shiny and new, with all the chrome still perfect.  I know these bikes well, as I once assembled them out of the boxes from England at a shop in Chicago for $112.  They came in “Gents” and “Ladies” versions, or so the boxes were labelled.  Most had drop handlebars which customers hated, but it was the style everybody was buying, akin to women buying high-heeled shoes, I suppose.  Whoever had purchased this one had evidently hated it so much that it appears they rode it for a week and put it in storage until this past summer when their grandchild probably saw it and asked if they could take it to college to ride around campus.  This Raleigh, by the way, had a flat tire and was not locked, so maybe the grandkid had come to hate it, too, so sad.  Of course, who’d want to steal it?  I can name one person but thank God he has great self control and way too many bikes already, all of them much nicer than this one in most ways, and he was also accompanied by his wife, end of story.

There are many reasons why adult bikes, even old ones, are forgettable to the average person.  For one thing the basic“diamond frame”, invented in the 19th century, was already perfect and beyond improvement, so most bikes at first glance all look pretty much the same, except for the paint jobs, which tend to cater to the conservative tastes of the market (any color so long as it’s gray or silver or black and more black, especially nowadays).  I’m sure you remember the beautiful blue or green or red bike from your childhood, and these colors are still available but only on a few brands nowadays.  Complex or unusual paint schemes and distinctive colors tend to show up on fancier machines, though some people do their own handmade efforts that usually look “artistic” or just plain ugly, as a good paint job requires industrial processes and practiced skills, same as with an automobile.

For a long time, distinctions between different makers could be seen at the places where the tubes were joined on the frame, that were basically plumbing connections known as “lugs”.  These had varying design features, but right away we’re getting into a detail one would have to scrutinize pretty closely to even notice  (fans of old bikes always pay attention to this one).   Most bikes since the 1990s are welded and  dispense with this design element altogether, making them even less distinctive.  All the bikes in the pictures are lugged and in this case more than ever a picture is worth etc.  Scan them, and consider yourself now an expert on this subject.  Interesting lugs can contribute greatly to a distinctive paint scheme, which the pictures also suggest.

But aside from most bikes’ lack of visual interest, what probably makes them most forgettable is that bicycles play only the smallest part in most people’s adult lives, or have no role at all.  Whatever nostalgia there is is limited to one’s childhood memories, if there are even those.  If one sees an old Schwinn on the streets that reminds one of the “stingray” they rode when they were eleven, or that Varsity “ten-speed” at thirteen, they might have a warm moment of reminiscence.  They might even take a second glance at the Peugeot or Raleigh parked at a bike rack in their town that is the same as what they rode in college (was it the green one or the red one or the white one?).  Then again, maybe not.  But an old Chevy or Ford or British sports car or Volkswagen beetle (or a Citroen deux chevaux if one is in France) seen on the street makes almost everybody stand up and take notice and lingers in their memory for awhile.  As for me, I may never forget that Raleigh in Wellesley, which took dead aim at my own nostalgia memory bank, and wouldn’t the bike’s owner be shocked to hear this, as they well should be?  Crazy old man!  Maybe they’d offer it to me, free, out of pity.

Which brings us to all the very very special bikes in this writer’s cellar, and this brief primer on the ways some old bikes might be visually interesting in ways you’d have never considered until his moment.  It also gets back to the original deep topic of respecting history and the different ways this can play out in the case of fine old machines.  With bikes it’s a bit different than with cars.  Fancy as well as very humble old bikes can simply be kept running with minimal inexpensive maintenance and they tend to fade into the landfills gradually;  most of the ones you see around are still in use.  In contrast, decrepit and inoperable automobiles that are never going anywhere again litter America’s driveways and back yards and junk yards and sometimes even front yards (I am thinking of impoverished rural Virginia and New Mexico).   All of the really old cars on the streets that are still running tend to look, as has been mentioned, perfect or nearly so.  The rare contradictions to this general rule can present as quite shocking.  

I will never forget attending the 100th anniversary of the first ascension of the Mt Washington summit road in NH by an automobile, a Stanley Steamer no less (made in Newton MA!), that had gotten the job done back in 1899.  Imagine a mountainside meadow filled with over 80 of these steam-powered machines, like it was 1920 all over again, all of them restored and maintained at tremendous expense, appearing as brand new except for one.  That example ran fine but otherwise clearly showed every bit of its 90 years, which is to say it was a bit corroded here and there and missing pieces and as faded as can be and almost sad.  Which it wasn’t because it still ran fine which seemed like a miracle, making it memorable in a special way compared to all its gorgeous brass era counterparts there on the mountainside.  It reminded you of how really old all of these cars from the first decades of the 20th century truly were.  There was something humble and honest about it, though it was also kind of ugly in its grand decrepitude.  

Which brings us to La Perle, which chance brought my way around 40 years ago when it was already 30 years old or so, and even then 30 years was old for a bike and this one showed all the usual decay of neglect.  Bikes left in the rain or stored in damp places suffer even worse than cars, and show it.  There is no bodywork on a bike, which can hide a lot of bad history on a motor vehicle unless one crawls underneath or opens the hood or pulls up the floormats.  I liked the idea of riding it as an “honest” example of how truly old it was even then.  Like many a fine old forgotten bike, this one lacked a few basic things, like wheels and a seat and derailleurs.  But the rest of it was there, all of it rare and unusual in a very French way, and as it is with French cars, nobody does it quite like the French.  Even all these years later, with the vast resources of Ebay, La Perles remain a very scarce commodity, like many obscure French brands from the 1950s.  This is not so much the case with anything British or Italian, or even the popular French brands that were imported to the US during the “bike boom” of the 70s.  Your old Raleigh or Peugeot can probably readily be found, but then why should you care?

So I assembled La Perle into a ridable bike, pretty much rode it that way until very recently and of course it was eminently more of a pleasure to ride than it may have appeared.  Any bicycle can be made perfectly functional, so long as the frame is not bent and the worn out parts get replaced and installed with care.  Rust is rarely a problem on old bikes as the steel is relatively thick, unlike with cars, where the sheetmetal is very thin and the whole vehicle can be subject to endless erosion from road salt, at least where there is winter.  In the beginning, most all the bikes I collected had their original paint.  Professional bicycle painters were rare and very expensive if you even found one.  Over time, I made a few DIY attempts on bike frames that were disgustingly rusty and chipped, and my paint work did in fact get smoother and shinier with each new attempt, though durability was never great.  In short order they looked like nice paint jobs with lots of scratches, still better than before but not great.  Bikes are constantly subject to abrasions simply by leaning them up against things;  they can fall over or get bumped around in the cellar or garage, or strapped onto a car rack jammed in with other bikes.  A bicycle paint job leads a hard life.  

At some point “powder coating” became a thing, an industrial method which uses a very clever process that employs electrolysis to apply paint.  It is relatively cheap and very durable, and powder coaters are easy to find and will do bikes, or anything made of metal, for that matter.  The range of colors is phenomenal and the only drawback is that all you get is one color, no panels or stripes or anything, so your bike will look “clean” and simple and kind of plain.  I fairly recently discovered there are sources for stickers and decals used on most old brands of bikes, and have begun sprucing up powder coat paint jobs with those.  I have also splurged for a few very expensive elaborate “wet paint” treatments on a couple of bikes, and the results are quite stunning, as the pictures show. That said, I can ride these bikes around or lock them on the street (always very briefly!) and passersby tend not to notice them, at all.  These are not old cars.  Philistines! 

Things had recently reached a point where all the bikes in the cellar had professional paint, most of them powder coat, with a few holdouts on bikes where the old paint had kind of held up or which had decals unavailable as reproductions, or were utility bikes to be locked up a lot around town for hours at a time and benefitted from being somewhat unattractive to thieves.  The case with La Perle was somewhat different.  It was an especially old bike relative to most of the others down there, and it had pin striping that is unique and clearly hand done by a skilled artisan, back there in France in 1953 or whenever.  Memories of that ancient looking Stanley steamer back in New Hampshire had also haunted and inspired me to “keep this one original”.  Such thoughts are, of course, a kind of rational attempt to justify a decision that in the end is more emotional than anything else.  At some point I realized I was riding this bike less and less because it appeared to me more and more as something neglected and worn and really kind of ugly, its dull and highly blemished finish obscuring much of the beauty it probably had when it was new.  Such thinking is far more emotional than rational, and does rationality really apply in these matters, at all?

The upshot can be seen in the final pictures, here.  La Perle along with its fenders and racks has been powder coated in a most appropriate color:  “almond pearl”, that has a silvery pearly sheen.  Perfect!  It has markings that are accurate reproductions of the original, though the wavy stripes on the fenders were likely never seen on old French bikes (or maybe any bike, ever), though the fenders themselves follow an original old French design.  It was a difficult decision  to obliterate the pin striping, but this loss is greatly overshadowed by what is now a smooth and shiny and mostly perfect finish, which reveals some aspects of the beauty the bike possessed back when it was new, that had been obscured by too many signs of age.  Hey, even museums have entire departments that clean up their old paintings and sculpture and other artifacts  –  always appropriately!  –  when it comes time.  This bicycle’s time had come.  Wouldn’t you agree after looking at the pictures?  It’s even better seeing it in person and above all riding it to beautiful places, where it fits right in.

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