In the summer of his sixth year, myson Erik hollered from the front yard one evening, “Hey, Dad, watch this.” As Istood by the front door watching, he hopped on a two-wheel bicycle and rode merrilyinto the distance. I thought I was watching a miracle.
I don’t remember him ever riding ontraining wheels. He’d never been on a two-wheeler before that moment. When Iasked him about it, over this past weekend, he recalled watching a neighborhoodpal, who was a year or two older, and saw that the faster his friend pedaled,the easier it was to stay upright. The rest was easy.
For the next decade or so, it feltas if my son spent every free moment of his life cycling off somewhere if hewasn’t throwing a ball around.
I mention this now because his kindof childhood seems to be vanishing across the American landscape.
TheWashington Post reports sales of bikes to kids aged 6-to-17 decreased bymore than a million from 2014 to 2018, and a decrease in bike sales over thepast year of 7 percent in dollars and 7.5 percent in bikes sold.
It’s a drop, says The Post, “serious enough that retailers have already raised prices to make up for lower demand…and it’s all caused the American bicycling industry — worth $5.6 billion, according to the National Bicycle Dealers Association — to hunker down in preparation for things to get worse.”
To me, this is a reflection ofsomething I notice every time I drive or walk through a residentialneighborhood, or past a schoolyard or a sizeable yard or an open field: Kidsaren’t riding bikes — and they’re not playing ball.
I don’t mean organized ball, whereleagues have been set up by grown-ups and kids are wearing uniforms withsponsors’ names on the back. I mean bunches of kids who have come out of theirhomes and spontaneously gotten up a game of baseball, softball, stickball, punchball,curb ball, step baseball, three-flies-in, running bases, SPUD, or any of the ancientstreet games of summer.
Including the game of simplyhopping on your bike and riding around the neighborhood — so you could raceyour pals, or (long ago) catch up to the Good Humor ice cream man, or zip aroundthe corner to get a snowball, or just ride to feel the wind in your face.
What happened to all that childhoodjoy?
Shall we round up the usualsuspects? In my distant youth, when nobody had air conditioning, you were eagerto get out of the house to catch some fresh air. Now we’ve got kids saying,“It’s too hot out there.”
Then came round-the-clock TV, andcomputers, and video games, and all manner of electronic equipment that has socaptivated young people that we’ve got health experts worrying about kids’puffy shapes because they never bother to leave their rooms.
In that sense, the fall in bicycle sales seems part of a modern pattern. But, remember what it felt like to ride your bike down a hill and feel that wind in your face? Now the kids feel it coming out of an air conditioning vent and imagine it’s the real thing.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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