As old things go, bicycles draw less general interest than all the wondrous things that turn up in history museums and antique stores and in private collections or get placed with pride and nostalgia here and there around your house. They’re not like jewelry or furniture or even old cars, which are also in the transportation category but which clearly have a hold on the public imagination (and wealthy people’s investment interests) in a way that bicycles do not. I’ve been to many a car show but very few bicycle shows, partly because over the years there have been almost none of the latter and even those were rather small affairs. All of this, of course, reflects the cultural reality and the fact that automobiles are elemental to everyone’s life from birth to death for the most part, whereas for most people bikes at best are a simple and fleeting joy of childhood and nothing beyond that.
Nonetheless bikes are everywhere, some in use on the streets and roads of course, which get parked and locked up at the school or library or house of pizza, or in the city locked up wherever one looks. But there are many more sitting in garages and at yard sales or just lying by the road waiting for a taker. Most of these are not all that old; others are really old and often downright decrepit but still functioning.
As an old guy who was truly smitten by the bike bug 50 years ago and for whom the love affair is never ending, and as one who worked in the bike biz through the “bike boom” of the 1970s when American adults rediscovered the allure of the machine and tons of them were sold in this country, I became educated first-hand about what was “good” concerning the better old machines. As a result I would accumulate examples of some of these when desperate people showed up at the shop selling them cheap, or when they turned up as discarded donations at a place I once volunteered, or even when they just turned up on the street awaiting the trash pickup. What is key to note is that I never went looking but only passively picked up those bikes that came my way. Thus I have a collection based on that simple principle, unlike the more common bike-collector (yes there really are such people) who obsessively scours Craig’s List or Ebay or Facebook, or even travels to someplace like England or Italy seeking treasure.
A long time ago I also scaled my efforts way back, as there is only so much basement space here on Iffley Road and this is a good thing, believe me. A bike would have to be really special to catch my eye these days, much less inspire a wish to possess it.
Which brings us to the bike in question, a Peugeot, which is a name known to many as they were sold in vast numbers and dirt common back there in the ‘70s. It is quite possible you owned one once, and quite possible it was long ago discarded. Most Peugeots were decent quality but in no way “special”, with a few exceptions, and if you had one of the “good” ones, chances are you knew it and might still have it, in which case how much do you want for it? Just kidding! Our basement is too small, and I mean that, except…
Just look at this one! And then probably look away, with such thoughts as “what a rusty piece of junk” or “somebody actually rides that thing?” or “why doesn’t the city remove that neglected eyesore?” all of which are eminently reasonable responses.
So I can understand your likely skepticism when I tell you the first time I saw this bike I thought “treasure!”, and was astonished that it sat on the street barely two blocks from our house on very busy Washington street in very urban Egleston Square. When I first beheld it, locked up in the most primitive and insecure way, I wondered even then if it was functional and actually used by someone to get around. Indeed it was, evidently, as it disappeared and reappeared at that same spot on a fairly regular basis. I assumed they never went very far, but who knows?
So what does the discerning eye (mine) find special about this heap? Even the undiscerning eye might notice it’s odd construction, with two skinny tubes of steel replacing the conventional single round “top tube,” a reference I hope is self-explanatory. Also note how these upper tubes present a pleasing curved aspect, most graceful and unusual, and the downward slant establishes that this is a bike for the traditional ladies market of its day, where madame might choose to ride in a skirt at times. But wait, there’s more going on here, much more: look at all those tiny eyelets there on the perimeter of the rear fender! This is what might pique the curiosity of anyone glancing this bike’s way as they walked down the street. What (sacre bleu!) is going on there?
And what’s with the string? Maybe it sort of keeps the kickstand-whose-spring-has-failed from falling down, in which case it must be a chore to tie and untie it every time you want to park the bike and stand it up. Why not simply remove the thing altogether and lean the bike against solid objects, as the legions of bike owners who eschew kickstands have done since forever? And what about the string across the handlebars? It is possible these musings are simply way off base and the string generates some protective spiritual force-field that keeps the rider safe from injury and prevents theft, or some similar extraordinary function. We shall likely never know.
Those baby grommets are a giveaway that this velo is assuredly antique, following a convention for “ladies bikes” that goes back to the 19th century. They afford a way to run a network of strings back and forth radially from the hub to the fender, affording an extra special level of protection ensuring that madame’s lovely skirt won’t get caught up in the whirling spokes of the wheel inviting one messy catastrophe, maybe not quite what happened so tragically with Isadora Duncan but messy nonetheless. Inserting all those grommets into that fender involves a whole extra process with which modern fender-makers simply do not bother, aside from the fact that there is virtually no current market to which such a feature might readily appeal. And as for gender orientation in general when it comes to bicycle design, simply looking around on the street or venturing into a bike shop nowadays – or even beholding your own cycle which you might’ve bought in the last decade – will quickly tell you that that upper tube on almost all bikes now slants down at some angle or other, as the characteristics that once segregated bicycles into boy’s/girl’s or men’s/women’s or gent’s/lady’s with some distinction has become a very gray area, indeed, and much for the better in this age of gender equality. But as for those grommets, they are a most quaint and glorious once-feminine feature, non?
Something else of immediate note are the curious brakes on this bike: without getting overly technical, might I point out that the design here, the geometry of this particular “caliper” brake is most peculiar. Now you might not be the sort of person who pays any attention to what a caliper brake looks like on a bike, or then again you might recall, if vaguely, the general mechanical appearance of the stoppers on your bikes down through the years. On the other hand, do you even remember the brand or model names of those bikes from your personal history, or the colors? Woe that childhood memories, even good ones, can be so fleeting! Anyway, as regards those brakes on your old bikes, odds are very very good that none of ‘em looked at all like like these here, unless perhaps you grew up in La Belle France or thereabouts, and parlez-vous Français? and by now you must certainly be getting on in years. If so, good for you!
You’d have to be getting on in years if you remember these brakes from your childhood, for it is only the most peculiar bike nut in this country (or even in France nowadays) that would know these brakes with their weird pivoting motion, which appeared on bikes of French manufacture up until the early ‘50s. Even this obsessive bike nut only knows about these brakes due to a velo he obtained in a trade back in the mid ‘80s, one that had this very same brand of frein, a Jeay if you care to know. That bike, a La Perle, is one even many old bike nuts have never heard of, even though a racing La Perle was the steed of a Tour de France winner back in 1952. La Perle went belly up just a few years after that, when the bike biz mostly collapsed in Europe as the improving post-war economy meant everybody who could got a car. But enough bicycle history, as spell-binding as it might be.
What is important here is that at some point in the past year the bike in question became a permanent fixture, locked in a most insecure-looking way to a city bicycle rack that happened to be located in a spot which we pass on an almost daily basis whenever we make a trip to the Stop and Shop. I had already done a close inspection months before, and knew how special this bike was. I was also intrigued by its long individual history of which there were glimmers offered by several bits of evidence. One was the dealer sticker on the seat tube, which shows it had been sold by a shop in Grenoble, France, God knows what year. Many European bicycles that predate the US bicycle boom of the 1970s were brought over to this country by individuals who knew the nice bike they’d been riding Over There was not available from any dealer in this great country, where the children’s market reigned supreme and the few adults who rode had to settle for fat-tire one-speed “cruiser” bikes of the same primitive technology as the ones the children rode, with few exceptions. On a totally serendipitous nostalgic note, I had lived in Switzerland as an exchange student in 1968, the year the winter olympics had been staged in Grenoble not far away. Anybody remember Jean-Claude Killy? His name was on everyone’s lips that winter.
All we know is that from the mountains of France this bike made its way to Ann Arbor MI by the mid-60s, very likely a campus get-around conveyance for some U Michigan student, perhaps handed down to them by a parent who’d bought it a decade earlier in France and couldn’t part with it. We shall never know. And we shall also never know how it turned up in a mildly gritty Boston neighborhood over 50 years later, still functioning, though just barely, from the looks of it. Or why at some point it ceased functioning at all in recent months, having become an unmoving object and neighborhood landmark there at that bike rack, something so pathetic that local street-entrepreneurs evidently decided it wasn’t worth stealing or even stripping for parts; it doesn’t get more pathetic than that. All of these facts were painfully driven home by a two foot snowstorm, after which the plows on Washington Street, a “snow emergency” thoroughfare, most effectively buried the bike in many cubic feet of the white stuff, well mixed with sand and who knows what else. It was a sight as forlorn as it gets, especially to this old bikie who knew how special it was.
Advance in time to the present, when just a few weeks ago I finally decided to record it for posterity before it inevitably disappeared, such is the way of all things left on the street in the big city of that you can be certain. As I lovingly captured its rare and poignant beauty with a camera, two guys standing in the doorway of a storefront down the street observed me until one of them asked “Do you want that bike?” All that you have read so far should tip you off as to the answer here, but I suppressed any surprise or urge to give a straight answer outright, wisely and appropriately asking “Is it yours?” which I sincerely doubted was the case, and I was right. What they said was that they knew the guy who’d owned it and that he’d left town months before and that he was likely never coming back, at least not for this bike. All evidence supported this story.
But there was one more thing: “Yes, but it’s locked up and I’m not somebody who can break locks” sez I, which was not exactly true, but no matter. At which point the guy walks over and pulls at the cable lock, which slips completely free at a yank. The second one, a padlock on a cable, did not yield so easily, so he goes back in the store and comes out with a rock. Two knocks from the rock popped the padlock and that was that. I rolled it home, with their best wishes.
So what now? I’ve been known to take bikes like this and do the whole makeover thing to where the original product became much more beautiful and functional and like-new, with little trace of the worn as-found original. I’ve a number of those, all of them wonderful rides. But in this case, that seems disrespectful. This bike has patina and history written all over it in a way that says it would be bad karma to mess with. The clear strategy is to do the minimal to make it ridable once again, so it can hit the road like it’s 1953 in the mountains of France or 1965 when it spun along the streets of Ann Arbor, where maybe its owner pedaled to one of the big Vietnam protests that happened on the U Michigan campus that year. Chances are it was ridden by a she who was not due to get drafted, but you never know. Old bikes tell no tales but can only suggest them.
