Growing up on NE 28th Street, there weren’t any kids my age. I had been caught in the bottoming out of the Baby Boom generation… I was the youngest kid on the block outside of Michael Hanshew, a late addition to a Catholic family of nothing but girls. He was about six years younger than me.
That didn’t mean I didn’t have friends. They just weren’t the kind that you could go down the street and knock on their door at any time of day to see if they could come out and play. I think my mother was glad of that, given that my brother had gotten into small time crime, hooky and drugs with Daniel Levy, the neighborhood juvenile delinquent.
My best friend lived a half dozen blocks away from me. His name was Bob Core. We attended Kennydale Elementary School and we used to play four square together on the playground. On rare occasions, he would come visit my house or I would go to his.
As we got into middle school we were always together. We would spend entire summers riding bikes, hiking down to May Creek and playing with each other’s toys.
I’m surprised that Bob and I stayed friends all that time, considering that one of us was always doing something stupid because the other one egged him on. As I’ve noted, it takes two boys to create stupidity and we were pretty stupid.
I remember one time playing with the Tonka trucks I had under the front tree. As I’ve noted, I had concrete roads under there, something most kids probably never would have thought to do. There we were, playing with the trucks. Running them around the roads got boring so decided they should jump instead. We would grab onto the back of the cab and let the truck sail through the air, seeing how far we could make it fly.
Bob’s truck was leading in our little contest. I was not to be outdone. I grabbed the pickup truck (like the one pictured) and let it fly. It did. Up into the air it went. Bob’s head stopped it from landing. The impact bent the truck like a fortune cookie. These were all steel trucks so you can imagine the impact it took. Bob had a real hard head. He burst into tears and ran home. I was more concerned with fixing the truck than tending to Bob’s injury.
He wasn’t hurt. This time. During the long summers, we would regularly head down to May Creek and “go it alone.” We would take one of those three-hour fireplace logs, matches, hot dogs and marshmallows with us. We’d go “crick stomping” in our tennis shoes, walking up the creek for miles to find an out of the way spot. There, we would drop our fishing lines into the water, wait endlessly for nothing to bite, then start a fire and roast hot dogs on an island that that creek had created.
God, those were fun days. We didn’t have to worry about weirdos kidnapping us or molesting us. We would be gone all day long, which in Seattle in the summer meant coming home around 9 p.m.
We were also big into bikes back then. Who wasn’t? We would spend hours working on our bikes, taking them apart and putting them back together. Once we had did all our fine tuning, we’d take them out for a test.
At the end of our dead end street was a hill with a dirt barrier at the top of it to keep cars from driving down the path that connected our street to the community center on the next street over. We would ride with reckless abandon down the path and launch off the dirt barrier, our bikes flying through the air.
I took my first turn at the jump, flew over it with ease and slammed on the brakes, turning 180 degrees so I could see Bob’s jump. He was really flying through the path and hit the jump. And then it happened. I can still close my eyes and see Bob’s panicked face as he immediately realized something had gone horribly wrong.
It seems that Bob had forgotten to tighten the lug nuts on his front tire. This presented no problem riding down the street, gravity kept the fork and tire together. But as Bob went airborne, his tire continued on its merry way, over the hump and down the hill. He knew immediately that he was screwed and I knew this was going to really, really hurt.
His back wheel came down first, then the fork hit the dirt. The bike stopped dead in its tracks but Bob kept moving. He flew through the air, then hit the ground with a sickening thud, like a rag doll tossed from a moving car. I should have looked away, but I didn’t. It was horrific. Thankfully, he didn’t break a bone. He was bleeding and his jeans were ripped, but he had survived a jump Evil Knievel would have been proud of.
Now, you’d think that this would be the end of our stupid bicycle adventures. But it wasn’t. Not too long after we were going to his house. To get there, you road down Aberdeen Avenue which initially went downhill, then rose to a crest near the neighborhood park, then dipped again. If you built up enough speed on the first dip, you could make it over the crest and then get some real speed up.
This called for a race. We started off. Bob was fast on that bike of his. He had a distinct advantage with 24″ tires compared to the 20″ ones on my Stingray. He shot off down the hill and hit the crest while I was just starting up it. I pedaled like crazy and almost caught up with him. Then we hit the downhill portion and off he went again.
He was going to cream me. We had foolishly assigned lanes on a two lane road. Mine was the one going with traffic. Bob was in the oncoming lane. As he looked back at me to laugh, I saw the car pull out of the driveway and head onto the street. Bob turned back just in time to get a closeup of the hood. His bike hit the car and he flew over it and down the back. Ouch, that had to hurt.
Fortunately for Bob, the car wasn’t going more than five miles an hour when it pulled out. Bob was fine, but the fork on his bike was now shoved back into the frame. It would never be the same again. Thankfully, with brothers around, there’s always another bike to be had.
Bob and I lost contact after high school. He became a respectable home owning citizen and I became a rogue pirate living a gypsy life. But I still wonder about Bob and how he’s doing. And I hope he’s still double checking his lug nuts.
Out on the Treasure Coast wanting to go on a bike ride but there’s no hills in Florida to conquer,
– Robb