At the time, Schwinn sold more than three hundred different bike models, and the bestselling among them moved maybe ten thousand units a year. In 1963, the StingRay’s first year of production, with a pool of 23.4 million American children between the ages of six and eleven, Schwinn sold 46,630 StingRays at $49.95 a pop. By 1970, hi-rise-style bikes—sometimes called “muscle bikes,” sometimes called “wheelie bikes”—made up most of the American bicycle market. In that first year of the new decade, 3.4 million hi-rise bikes were sold in the United States. The StingRay and its many cheap knockoffs rose in tandem with the career of Evel Knievel. On a million plywood driveway ramps, kids braver or tougher or cooler than I was tried (and often violently failed) to jump rows of galvanized-steel trash cans.
What made this bike so bewitching? To begin with, there were those candy-shop colors—Flamboyant Lime, Kool Lemon, and the insuperable Radiant Coppertone. For a time, StingRays came in the vivid purple of cough medicine, which also happened to be the color of Bloomington’s most famous residents, the Minnesota Vikings. These colors, set off by chrome fenders, with a reflective bicycle license issued by the City of Bloomington adhered to the seat tube, gave the lucky StingRay riders a pride of ownership, something to take care of. A bike was our first licensed anything, before a driver’s license, before a hunting license, before a real estate or forklift or marriage license.
A bicycle was independence, a magic carpet, freedom of movement, but also a belled or tasseled expression of our developing personalities, even if my bike was a burgundy CCM Mustang Marauder festooned with Valvoline and STP stickers, stuck to the seat by my older brothers, who’d gotten them free at the gas station.
The ape-hanger handlebars on a StingRay made it easy to pop a wheelie. In its chrome fenders was reflected the fish-eye image of the bike’s blissful owner. A cable lock coiled around the seat post like a steel serpent kept the StingRay secure when parked in the bike rack of the Penn Lake branch of the Hennepin County Library, where it was the envy of all who passed it. The racing-slick back tire was designed for fishtailing or leaving the longest possible driveway skid marks.
But of course you couldn’t say “skid marks” without irony, without thinking of underpants, without someone chanting “Fonzie’s cool! He’s not square! Skid marks in his underwear!”
Underwear, not incidentally, was white, the porcelain white of toilets and tubs, of T-shirts washed in Tide or teeth brushed with Topol (“The smoker’s tooth polish”). The colors that would come to be associated with the 1970s—harvest-gold; avocado-green; the brown-and-orange scheme favored by Burger King and the San Diego Padres—had nothing on white: white tennis shoes, white tube socks, our tighty-whities scored with skid marks, awaiting the cleansing touch of Fab or Bold or Cheer.
My mother aspired to the dazzling white bedsheets of detergent commercials, but there were also the white loafers and belt of the esteemed architect Mike Brady, the white jumpsuit of Evel Knievel, the white spikes of the Swingin’ Oakland A’s, the white-smocked Mr. Whipple (squeezing the Charmin), the white cleats that spawned the nickname of Billy “White Shoes” Johnson—kick-return specialist of the Houston Oilers and early adopter of the end-zone celebration dance. The ’70s era was the gleaming white of storm-trooper armor, of Travolta’s suit in Saturday Night Fever.
White was also the color of heaven in the movies, and I spent the ’70s at Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, K through 8, wanting this spotlessness, to feel Scrubbing-Bubble clean coming out of confession or Christmas Mass. I wondered if the conscience could be cleansed of its ring around the collar, if there were—as in the Calgon commercial—an “ancient Chinese secret” for scrubbing the soul.
Heaven, I knew even then, would be an uphill battle. The tenth commandment was against coveting thy neighbor’s goods, and there were so many goods to covet growing up in that decade, not least of all the Flamboyant Lime StingRay, gliding past me now on West 96th Street, its owner—a freckled twelve-year-old from Washburn Avenue—fixing me with his gaze and saying, “What are you looking at?”
“Your bike,” I said with the innocence of an eight-year-old.
But he was already past me, and he shouted over his shoulder, “No shit, Sherlock!”
Even as my face flushed and my armpits ignited, I could appreciate the alliteration. (It was the alliteration as much as the candy itself that bewitched me at Pik-Quik: Chunky, Chuckles, Chiclets, Charleston Chew.)
As the bike was pedaled into the distance, the white letters of “StingRay” painted on the chain guard rearranged themselves into an anagram: “It’s-Angry.”
The StingRay was undeniably beautiful, but before I ever laid eyes on one, there were Big Wheels and Green Machines to lust after, and Topps baseball cards, just as later would come boom boxes, pinball machines, custom vans, and—at the very end of the decade—girls. Women, rather: Charlie’s Angels and the Farrah poster my brother Tom put up in the room we shared for twelve years and the newspaper ads featuring Bo Derek in 10.
All my father would say on returning, lightly flushed, from seeing 10 at the Southtown Theatre with my mother in 1979 was “You can see it when you’re forty.”
Charles Foster Kane was fixated on his sled, but childhood has a thousand Rosebuds. The 1970s escorted me from age three to age thirteen, from the onset of memory to the onslaught of puberty. My childhood ran precisely in parallel with that decade. As such, the ’70s don’t seem to recede at all with the passage of time but follow me, the way the moon always followed our car at night when I’d pretend to fall asleep in my seat and be carried into the house and upstairs to bed.
There, my mother would tuck me into a quilted, baby-blue bedspread emblazoned with tin soldiers and toy cannons, $7.99 in the Sears Christmas Wish Book of 1972. The Sears Christmas Wish Book, thick as a telephone directory, was more than a catalogue of consumer goods. It was a glossy catalogue of children’s dreams, a hard-copy rendering of an eight-year-old’s id.
Beneath that Sears blanket, my fingers did their nightly inventory of bugbites—like rereading the day in Braille—and I drifted into many a StingRay dream.
In those dreams, I parked my StingRay in a friend’s driveway, angled just so, the sun glinting off the silver fenders, the kickstand sinking into the softening blacktop. (It always did this. Every driveway was kickstand quicksand.) The metallic green chain guard painted with that white hyphenate magically angled to the right—StingRay, as if in forward motion—was to me what the Cadillac badge would become to my dad: a token of arrival that was always just an inch out of reach.
Dad didn’t have a Caddy, and I didn’t have a StingRay. I had something like a StingRay, which is to say something not at all like one, something by the Canadian Cycle and Motor Company, more famous for its hockey skates, though it might just as well have been by Huffy or Raleigh or even Sears, purveyor of the Spyder 500. Sears also sold a tennis shoe—“Made by Converse, just for Sears”—with four stripes. Sears, protesting too much, called it “The Winner.”
“Four stripes,” Mom would say, stroking my hair. “That’s one better than Adidas.” But she and I both knew this wasn’t the army, and that extra stripe didn’t signify a higher rank but rather its opposite.