My dad's bicycle has been sitting in the garage collecting dust essentially my entire life. I think it's cool to have a couple meaningful artifacts in my life. Plus I will get to look like a cool kid hipster riding around an ancient bicycle.
Well I wasn't going to be able to ride it in its current condition.
Everything rubber had turned into brittle cardboard.
It even had a leather seat.
We brought it over to our local bike shop, Big Shark, to get it a makeover.
One decision I needed to make was what kind of tires to put on it. I wanted to stick as close to the original as possible.
Surprisingly they had the exact same tire in stock! It even had an identical tread pattern.
A couple of days later we returned and it was ready to ride. Got new... brake wires? And it generally looked shiny and new.
There are Schwinn nerd websites that you can look up your bike its serial number. I was surprised at how old the thing was! I guess the Schwinn company used to build its bikes in Chicago but eventually got bought and the brand floated around. I think now it's just a label they slap on Chinese crap. Anyway mine was from Chicago!
I had some fun poking around the Schwinn catalogs from the time period.
I turned it upside down to mess with it and noticed my dad had put a label on the bottom. Pretty cool relic that I will treasure.
While looking through some old pictures that I took in 2009, I reread this little snip and realized it was the same bike! It's great for so many reasons: the misspelled last name, the fact that it's from a time of such innocence that a stolen bike made the newspaper, and the fact that they went so far as to include the serial numbers! And they must have actually recovered the stolen property because here it sits! Crazy.
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