Bikes and Kites – Growing Up in Dublin, Texas

Emmet and Jimmy were two boys, who lived down the street from us, and my Brother Ralph and my buddies, when we were kids. We all had fix-em-up bikes, we all wore cutoffs and hand me down clothes.

Our bikes were nothing fancy, just the frame, handlebars, chain, seat, tires, one main gear and pedals, a front wheel and a rear wheel with sprocket. We would race up and down that dusty Thomas Street, I still don’t think it is paved. Going down the road like bats out of hell fast, and invariably the chain would slip off or break, and one of us would be coasting with no brakes. Kinda of a daredevil existence we lived then, almost on a daily basis. I do ot know how many times we would fix these bikes, or where we found the parts, but we did all four of us.

Another thing we would do with our bikes and I have since found this to be universal, and must be is innately plugged into little boy’s brains. No one had to tell us, we just did this. First we would get a handful of clothespins, and an old deck of cards, those we would play solitaire with for hours only to find a few cards missing.

Like, “Oh yeah I knew the deck was a few cards short all the time. I just wanted to see if I could win anyway.”

What we would do is place the card next to the portion of the frame that held the wheels, and slip it in far enough between the spokes to still have a bit of over hang to clip it to the frame with the clothespin. Then would come the test drive.

It sounded ok and worked, but of course being boys we wanted to make the sound more robust. So, two cards instead of one, and minimal one set on each side, of the front and the back wheels. Now we were talking, and so were the bikes.

Kites were another good way to pass the time, and pretty cheap too. The ones got were the simple cross bar type made of two sticks of balsa wood and diamond shaped paper with a string and opening at each corner of the diamond, and cost about a 10 cents each. We would get 100 yards of heavy cotton string for 15 cents. so for around fifty cents we would have us entertainment for days on end , or at least as long as the wind was blowing.

We would usually go out into the pasture to run along and launch them minding the mine field of cow paddies. Then we could set in the front yard and fly them letting the string out as far as we would dare. I remember once when we had a few extra rolls of cotton string, we tied so many ends together, the Kite was like a speck in the sky.

It seemed like that the kite would fly forever, until the string broke.

I do not recall getting one that far away ever again, but we did fly kites many more times.
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Hope you enjoyed my ramblings and that it brought back few memories of you childhood days, no matter what state you hail from.

© Texas Tortilla Factory 2006 – Mike Vauthier