Our house on the Thomas Long lease sat back about a hundred yards from Oklahoma Highway 33 which was surfaced with walnut-sized rocks.  A few times a year a road grader would come along to smooth out the ruts and level the high and low spots.  The roads that branched off the highway into the oil lease were not well-kept.  They were just ruts, filled with sand and rocks, with sheets of underlying exposed sandstone here and there.  All of which would have had very little to do with my life, had it not been that the time had come for me to learn to ride a bike.

I don't know who the old bicycle belonged to but I remember its condition quite well.  Where fat balloon tires had once fitted over metal rims there were now just metal rims.  There probably had been fenders over those tires at some time.  They had been stripped off long ago.  Well-equipped bicycles had  a chain guard to keep a boy's pants from getting caught in the chain, and their foot pedals had nice rubber bars on which the rider kept his feet.  The bike I learned on was Spartan.  Where pedals had once been, there was now a metal spike sticking out from the crank the pedals screwed into.  The seat which had once been padded and covered with imitation leather was now bare rusty metal.   Still, it was a bike and if I was to learn to ride it was what I had to learn on.

Traffic was no problem, not even on the highway.   The occasional car or truck that came down Highway 33 could be heard crunching over the rocky surface long before it was anything to worry about.  That road surface was the problem.   Not only was it bone jarring to ride over those rocks on a bare-rimmed bicycle with an unpadded seat; maintaining control was a much greater challenge than riding on a smooth surface.  The concave surface of the bicycle's bare rims followed the contours of the rocks the way a train wheel follows its rail.   The front wheel rolled from one rock to another taking the the path of least resistance.  If a rock was bigger than the one the rim had just run over the rim took a detour around that rock.  When that happened the the handlebars would hook to one side like the horns of an angry bull: With almost the same result.  It was impossible to go very fast on that road but as every bike rider knows, the faster you go, the easier it is to keep your balance. I left a lot of skin and blood on the rocks of that road but I learned to ride.

Learning to ride it was a do it yourself project for me.  My brothers had better things to do than teach their much younger brother how to ride a bike.   Dad was working away from home most of the time, and Mother had no idea how to ride a bike.   Maybe figuring out how to teach something to someone was in my blood from the beginning because I devised a program to teach myself how to ride that bike that was the same method I used to teach students.  I divided the goal into a series of small objectives then tackled those objectives in a logical sequence.

First, I took the handlebars in my two hands and just ran alongside steering the bike.  When I understood steering I put the foot that was farthest away from the bike on the pedal nearest me then pushed along with my other foot, like a kid on a scooter.  I was soon able to coast a foot or two standing on the pedal and keeping my balance.  After a lot of “scootering" I took a fearsome chance one day.  While coasting I swung my leg up and over, put my feet on those metal stems that had once been pedals, sat on the seat and coasted.  I stillI didn’t know how to pedal and keep my balance so those first rides lasted only until the bike lost momentum.  Seconds after that I either fell or jumped off the bike.   I collected a few bruises and scrapes and cried once in a while until I figured out how to work the pedals and still keep my balance.

All this time my brother Gene had a friend, Teddy Moore, whose family had way more money than we did. Teddy had a beautiful bike with tires, fenders, a seat with padding and a cover.  I yearned for the day when Teddy, after seeing me struggling with my old tire-less bike would unselfishly offer me the chance to ride his bike.  Whatever compassion Teddy had did not reach that far.  I was still yearning when we moved away from the Thomas Long lease.

A couple of years later my older brother, Rudy, bought me my first bike and I've been on wheels since.