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Steve Sleightholm
Steve's Venezuela Memoirs
Bicycles
Steve Sleightholm's Venezuela Memoirs
Bicycles
Oh to have your own bicycle. Every boy’s dream!!
I recall in Hollywood, my brother Bill had a bicycle – he could ride on two
wheels!! What a deal. I wanted one so badly, but I was about 3 years old and
could not reach the pedals, much less the seat of his bike.
If my recollection serves me well, Dad and Mom got me a tricycle at first. This
was a big trike as I remember. It had a big front wheel and I would zoom around
on it, but it wasn’t a bicycle, which is what I really wanted.
Christmas of ’47 came around and under the tree that year was a bicycle and this
one had trainer wheels and I remember Dad helping me to ride it on the driveway.
I would sway from on side to the other and the trainer wheels kept me upright.
Eventually I got the hang of it and could scoot down the streets without the
trainers. This was a big day for me.
We transferred to Tia Juana in about 1949 and I recollect riding my bicycle
around the camp. A was about five years old then. During the raining season the
streets would flood and all the boys would be out on their bikes riding through
the high water. We ruined a lot of bike wheel bearings doing that, but it was
great fun.
When I was about eight years my parents gave my brother, Bill, a new bike for
Christmas. It was a Schwin and it had a horn which he could toot by pressing a
button on the side of the frame. It weighed a ton and also had an unusual front
suspension system. By that, I mean it had a spring arrangement which was tied
into the front fork which absorbed the bumps. It looked neat. The bike was heavy
though, with fat tires and only one speed and when the roads were hot and soft
from the blistering sun it was hard to ride. I could not reach the seat, so I
used to put my right leg through the frame placing my foot on the pedal and
somehow I would pedal the beast down the street. My sister, Cris, did the same
thing when she was old enough until my parents got her a bike of her own.
To make the bikes lighter, my friends and I would strip them of all excess
metal, etc. No fenders, just the frame and tires. We went through a period of
pretending we were riding motorcycles and, using our mother’s clothes pins, we
would attach playing cards to the fender braces so that the cards extended into
the spokes and we would ride around the camp in groups with the cards creating a
kind of sputtering racket. That was great and lasted about one summer.
Riding bikes consisted of phases which came and went as our interests changed.
We learned early on to strip the bikes down to service the rear brakes which
consisted of a number of metal disks in the rear tire hub which had to be
replaced exactly as removed. My brother and I would tear the bikes down, lube
them and reassemble them making sure we did not lose any of the small bearings.
They were stripped of excess metal to lighten them and could be taken anywhere
which is what we did with them. Today, you have 15 speeds and can climb a
mountain with little extra effort, but, back then it took effort to climb any
incline much less the dike when all we had was one speed. The bikes gave us a
sense of freedom which we could not get any other way. We weren’t old enough to
drive our parent’s jeep and motorcycles were not part of our way of life. Later
we had Cushman scooters and Vespas and some of the older boys such as Jimmy
Penhale had an Indian Motorcycle.
A group of us would regularly ride out past the Tia Juana offices on the back
roads and the worse thing that could happen to you on those excursions was a
flat tire. It would be hot and humid as hell and you would be forced to walk the
bike back to camp under that blazing sun. Since there were burrs and stickers
everywhere, a flat tire was accepted as the going penalty for riding the bikes.
We got pretty good at passing our bikes over the barbed-wire fence on the dike
which separated the Shell camp from the Creole camp and then further down the
dike where the small Mene Grande (Gulf) camp was and where the cute Wagner girls
– Sharon and Sandra - lived.
I could strip and rebuild a bike in a couple of hours. I can still visualize the
condition of the inner tubes of the tires on my bike. They were nothing but
patches, one after another. In those days, you fixed your own flats and we
utilized a vulcanized patch which was a rubber patch which you placed over the
leak using a tube of glue to hold the patch and then you clamped a metal
container over the patch using a hand held clamp with a screw device to hold the
container tightly against the patch and then you lit the material in the
container which heated the patch and vulcanized it to the inner tube. It would
hiss and sputter, giving off a bluish smoke, and create sufficient heat to melt
the patch into the inner tube. I loved the smell as the patch was heated.
My father gave my brother an English racing bike for his 16th birthday when we
lived adjacent to the Staff School. He came home one Saturday afternoon and
parked it in the driveway and went into the house to eat lunch and when he went
out again, the bike had been stolen. He was heartbroken as it was the nicest
bike and gift my father had every given to him. Both he and my Dad tried to find
the bike by driving around the camp, but it was out of the camp in a blink of
the eye. Following that incident, Dad fenced the yard. That was about the time
Castro was beginning to export his revolution to Venezuela.
As we grew older and could drive my Dad’s jeep, I recall the bicycles of my
brother and I resting upside down on their seats and handlebars at the edge of
the driveway gathering rust with wild morning glory vines encircling the front
wheel forks intertwining the spokes and the flattened rotted tires and the bike
frame and the beautiful blue and white flowers when the vines came into bloom.
That’s how I remember it...
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