I was given my first bicycle at age 5 by my father and mother which was a 24 inch bike I believe. A normal size bike like a racing bike is often a 27 inch bicycle(this is what they were called in the 1950s at least). So, I went riding with Danny Barsocks my next door neighbor who had already been riding a bicycle up to a year or more so he was expert and I was a novice. I was always very bold and often I wonder how I survived to grow up because of this quality. But, I was always very co-ordinated and lucky too and big boned so I didn't ever break anything but my nose and my little toe during my life time.
So, we lived in El Cajon then near San Diego when I was 5 in kindergarten and my friend Danny was showing off and went over a 3 foot cliff dirt burm which landed him into the middle of a paved street. We were traveling from a dirt trail to off the burm and into the paved street.
Well. I didn't have the skills yet to do this right so I crashed in the street and burned off my eyelashes and eyebrow on my right eye. Luckily, we have the eye socket bone surrounding the eye which protected my eyes. So, when I went home my mother and grandmother were freaked out because I had to ride about a mile to get back to them and I looked a fright I guess. But, luckily my eyelashes and eyebrow grew back and there wasn't a scar (at least that I can notice) after all those years.
My father also gave me a jacknife for my 5th birthday and I immediately wanted to see how sharp it was on my right thumb. Yes. It was sharp and now I have a permanent scar across my right thumb ever since from testing to see how sharp the knife was when I was 5.
Then at age 6 we moved to Tujunga against the mountains in the Los Angeles area. This crash I'm not sure what I was doing but I wound up crashed inside someone's garage with my toes caught in the spokes and my jeans caught in the chain. So, I think this was when I learned not to ride my bicycle without at least tennis shoes like we all wore then. They were ankle high tennis shoes then. They are called High top tennis shoes now. Luckily, my toes were bleeding but none of my toes got severed in the crash.
Then the last crash was a fluke that I likely couldn't repeat for you no matter what I did. I was riding my 10 speed racing bike home several miles from Woodrow Wilson Junior high School and had hadn't washed my gym clothes in at least a month so I stuffed my gym shorts and T-Shirt and everything else in the shoes and then hung the shoes off my racing bike handle bars from the laces.
If you understand the basic laws of physics you might know what happened next. I was in front of a car going about 20 mph and suddenly the shoes got caught in my front spokes and the bike flipped and through me face down on the pavement. The first miracle was that I wasn't run over by the car behind me and the 2nd miracle was that I wasn't seriously injured. Once I hit I didn't want to be run over so I just got up and dragged my bike to the sidewalk because I couldn't breathe yet. So, I sat on the curb and tried to get my lungs to work again for awhile while people asked me if I was all right.
So, eventually I shortened the laces so this couldn't happen again or I tied the shoes with the laces to the backpack. Remember this is 60 years ago now for me so the details are a little fuzzy after I hit the ground and dragged my bike to the sidewalk and sat on the curb to recover. This would have been 1961.
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