My first bike

I remember getting my first bicycle. It was on Thursday, June 11, 1959, my brother Jerry's twenty-first birthday. He was off serving a mission in Canada at the time. I had been earning and saving money, selling greeting cards, thinning sugar beets, and other such stuff a nine-year-old boy was able to do.

On our farm we used to get paid for thinning or hoeing sugar beets, something like 25 cents a row, as I remember. And they were long, long rows. I don't think we were paid for anything else around the farm. Except grades. I think in an effort to en­courage Ray and Dale to get better grades at school, my parents used to pay for each A on the report card. I didn't need the encouragement, since my report card was typically filled with A's, but I reaped the benefit since they had to be fair about it.

Finally, after a lot of time and effort, I had accumulated the $50 I needed. Well, I actually had $28, and my brother Gene loaned me $22. We went to the bike store in Nampa to pick out my bike. I chose a blue Schwinn. A one-speed.

And then, to my wounded sense of fair play and justice, my parents pro­ceeded to pick one out for Dale, who was seven. His was a red one. A little smaller than mine. He hadn't earned a penny toward his, and here they thought if I had one he should too. Because he was littler than I was. How unfair can life be?

I didn't appreciate it at the time, but my bike was far more fun to have because Dale had one too.

I don't remember particularly when or where I first learned to ride a bike. But I remember clearly that first day we were home with them, and we started circling the open yard where the cars and pickups and tractors and other stuff parked, and seven-year-old Dale was headed straight toward the side of the barn yelling, "How do I stop this thing?"

For­tu­nately, neither boy nor bike was too seriously injured as a result of his collision with the barn.