What year did you learn how to ride?

1960. I was 5 too. Pops got me a 20 incher and put on the training wheels. After a week he raised them up so I could get the feel for the balance. They were off in a month.

Of course I fell over as soon as they were off, but only once and I knew what it felt like and how to avoid it.

Glory days! I've been riding ever since - :)
 
I must have been five, maybe six? Year? Ha ha. I'm not sure they had calendars back then. Folks just watched the moon.

Tom
 
I'm pretty sure it was 1966. Maybe 1965, but I don't think so. My older sister taught me how to ride on a blue girl's bicycle that belonged to her at that time. I don't think I ever used training wheels.

I think I dimly remember a red tricycle. But that would have been when I was little more than a toddler. The memory is very vague.
 
Took me a while to find this. It was buried on an external hard drive.

Check out the vintage of those cars in the background. See what I mean about it being a long time ago?

Tom
 

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Ok... 81 or 82 I'd guess.
High Street, Brockton Mass. I do remember moms pushing me, and training wheels, but the bicycle evades me.

Tom, those cars in the background remind me of my grandfathers endless stream of black Dodges. They kinda 'bounced' down the road.
 
I was seven, I believe, and have a picture with my big sister helping me. It was a 26" boys balloon tire bike and had 2x4 chunks taped to the pedals so I could reach them by sliding down from one side to the other as I pedaled. The bike frame looks like a kind of beat up Schwinn straight bar, but was probably something else bought through Montgomery Wards mail catalogue. That would have been in 1952. As I recall my sister would hold on to the bike at the top of a gentle hill, give a push and then help me up after crashing at the bottom of the hill. No training wheels, but lots of band aids.
SB
 
i was 4-5. so '73-74. lived on a farm in wisconsin with a giant grass hill that went down to a dirt driveway. at least, when i was that young it seemed like a giant hill.

we had a bunch of scrap bikes in various barns and my older brother put together a rusted up 20" together and shoved me down the hill. no training wheels, no tutoring, just " quit crying and get on!"

after about ten times of all sorts of falls, i finally made it down the hill to the driveway.

no one explained coaster brakes to me yet. or peddling.

so i kept on flying, then rolling, then wobbling, and finally falling over.

i remember being a skinned up, bloody, grass stained mess. but the next day i was riding like i was born on a bike. a few weeks later i was riding down the hill on the dirt driveway and my pantleg got caught in the chain. went down and was tangled up in the bike. being five, i couldn't figure out how to get my leg free, so i lay there crying for a long time.

then i wet my pants. (i mean, c'mon, i was five...)

then i squirmed out of my toughskins and walked back up to the house in my underwear.

after my mom cleaned me up we were walking out to get my bike and my step dad drove up in the tractor with my mangled bike on the back. he ran over it. he was probably drunk.

ahhh. memories... :)
 
Yea mid 60's for getting off training wheels. I had keen interest in dome pop push toy lawn mower I remember a 1 to 2 years late 50's. I'm not sure that helped me with learning mower engines early on, but maybe? As far as putting an engine on a bike, I actually spent 5 dollars or so on plans from the back pages of Popular Mechanics. The plans said to drill through the frame to bolt the engine if not welding. Now that held, but what a bad idea. Now I use my own MIG to work on bikes.
 
1896 for me...

Actually I got my first real bike early spring 1968- A 3 speed "Dragster III", Huffy's inexpensive answer the popular Schwinn Crates. I was 8.

-Kirk
 
Likes like about the same time I as I started, Tom, pretty much the same bike
too. '53, my mom got me started pushing me up & down the alley. I busted
the frame jumping it off a loading ramp down by the tracks, but we got it welded
back together. It wouldn't be the last frame I'd busted.
 
I gotta say 1959 or 60, 5 or 6 years old. Then me and an older friend got a minibike going when i was about 9 or 10. And I've been on two wheels ever since one way or another. I put my first REAL motorcycle together when I was 14. A H.A. friend had a 305 Honda that his son outgrew so he disassembled it and put it all in boxes. sold it to me for $50 and a week or so later I was kickin butt on most of the 350's in town.
fatdaddy.usflg
 
1963......and I'm still learning. I started late compared to all of but one of my four sons. They were riding without training wheels by age 2 and catching air by age 3.

I started at age 6, I'm starting to get the hang of it finally :D

The wheelie King in my day! .wee.

Here is a pic of my youngest son that didn't start riding bikes until he was 5......no training wheels, just jumped on and rode like no ones biz. He's 16yrs. old now and has his drivers license.

 
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