Wordplay, as its name suggests, is a form of play. I first discovered it in the school library at Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in a book called 300 Best Word Puzzles, which took as its epigraph a line from Hamlet: “Words, words, words.” Among the words on the pages that followed were the first palindromes I ever laid eyes on, including “Was it a rat I saw” and “Rise to vote, sir.” I spent that first recess after library telling puzzled classmates, “Draw, O coward!”
In truth, I was the one who was puzzled, comprehensively puzzled. The phrase “You can tune a piano, but you can’t tuna fish” had not just transported that snake in the basement but me as well. I loved the Knights of the Round Table in a Bugs Bunny cartoon: “Sir Loin of Beef,” “Sir Osis of Liver.” At the parties my parents hosted, grown-up guests, drinking and smoking in sport coats and tennis dresses, told me punning titles of “books” I might like: “You should read Fifty Yards to the Outhouse by Willie Makeit, illustrated by Betty Won’t.”
No, what I liked was 300 Best Word Puzzles. It was first published in 1925 as World’s Best Word Puzzles by—according to the jacket flap—“England’s most distinguished puzzlist,” Henry Ernest Dudeney, who was born in 1857. The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary library was not known for its contemporary collection. Its shelves apparently had been stocked once, when the school opened in 1951, so that a quarter century later a boy bewitched by the aerial acrobatics (and mushroom-cloud Afro) of the Philadelphia 76ers star Julius Erving would be chastened to find, in the basketball section, books with titles like Comeback Cagers and Sink It, Rusty. On the cover, our frail white hero, in buckled satin shorts and ginger crew cut, always heaved a two-handed set shot at a wooden backboard.
The stamp on the little index card tucked in the envelope glued to the endpaper of each of these books I read invariably showed it had last been checked out on November 3, 1954. Coincidentally, it was the last time anyone had checked out the librarian too. Or so we said in eighth grade, as adolescence and the 1980s both beckoned, a decade and a childhood running down together.
In the shadow cast by our driveway basketball hoop, lying on my stomach at the curb, using a Popsicle stick to burst the tar bubbles that blistered the road surface on a summer day—this was where I saw my first StingRay.
It was meant to resemble a motorcycle, so that while biking to buy baseball cards at Pik-Quik, two or more eight-year-olds on StingRays could—when viewed through a heat haze—just about look like Hell’s Angels. Heck’s Angels, perhaps, or maybe Hell’s Hall Monitors.
The StingRay was the brainchild of a Schwinn executive named Al Fritz. In the early 1960s, a bicycle salesman in Southern California told Fritz that kids in suburban Los Angeles were tricking out old twenty-inch bike frames with banana seats and chopper handlebars. If you were too young for hot rods, but too old for Hot Wheels, this new style—called the “hi-rise”—could serve as the halfway house between your toddlerhood and your teens. Six hi-rise bikes parked side by side turned any suburban cul-de-sac into the parking lot of a biker bar, as Fritz was quick to recognize. At the laminate bar of a kitchen countertop, you could down a shot of Hawaiian Punch, then crush the Dixie Riddle Cup in your fist before jumping on a StingRay and laying a patch of rubber in the driveway.
That was the whole point of childhood, or of boyhood, or at least of boyhood in the 1970s in the South Brook subdivision of Bloomington, Minnesota: to look and act as old and as hard-boiled as possible against all evidence to the contrary. In the spring of 1973, when I was six, researchers at the University of Chicago reported that “young school children at play are similar in a number of ways to young baboons or monkeys,” a fact any boy could have told them. “Boys play aggressively in large groups,” the report said, “and social rank [is] equated with ‘toughness.’”
Toward that end, candy cigarettes with trademark-evading names like Marboro and Cool were enormously popular at Pik-Quik, the Bloomington convenience store that promised six nickel items for a quarter. Outside its glass door, a thousand grade school Grouchos gesticulated with bubble gum cigars. Big League Chew—shredded bubble gum in a chewing-tobacco pouch—would not arrive on Pik-Quik’s shelves until 1980, but that hot-pink weed was sown in the 1970s, cultivated by the decade’s kid culture.
And so a fourth-grader with a red-tipped Lucky Spike dangling from his lip and a die-cast metal cap gun tucked into the waistband of his Toughskins, riding through South Brook on a StingRay the color of grape soda, was an adolescent American badass circa 1974—especially if he had a temporary tattoo from a Cracker Jack box adhered to one or both of his pipe-cleaner biceps.
Al Fritz was also an American badass. The Chicago-born son of Austrian immigrants, Fritz left school after eighth grade to study stenography before serving on the staff of General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines, where he was wounded by a Japanese mortar. After the war, Fritz returned to his old Chicago neighborhood and to its dominant employer, the Schwinn plant, where he took a job on the factory floor and soon parlayed his stenography skills to become secretary to Frank W. Schwinn. Schwinn’s father, German-born Ignaz Schwinn, not only founded the bicycle company that bore the family name but also owned the Excelsior Motorcycle Company from 1911 until 1931, at which time the Great Depression forced him to end production—and his career as an esteemed designer—of American motorcycles.
Ignaz Schwinn had been dead for eighteen years by the time Al Fritz—having worked his way up to vice president for engineering, research, and development—sold Frank Schwinn on a ready-made, factory-fresh, motorcycle-inspired bicycle whose in-house name (model J-38) was unlikely to resonate with America’s eight-year-olds. Leafing through a dictionary, Fritz saw a line drawing of a stingray, its pectoral fins raised on either side, and its profile put him in mind of those ape-hanger handlebars.