Friday Follies ~~ Inventions and Intentions

The Louisiana delta country is about as flat as a floor. Sometimes that’s okay. If you hate hills, it’s like arriving in the Promised Land. If the date is 1962, and you’ve just found out about “sidewalk surfboards,” it can be deadly.

It was in the early sixties. Annette and Frankie were making beach movies. Those movies showed a lot of the California scene. One of the things featured in one of them was a new craze, an invention that would later come to be called “skateboards.”

Neal and Stan were kids in their very early teens. They saw the sidewalk surfers and were fascinated. A little invention and they had one. Simple. Take an old clamp on type shoe roller skate. Take the front and back apart. Hammer the edges flat. Nail the two resulting wheel trucks to the bottom of a chunk of scrap lumber. Presto!

The fist time Stan stepped on the thing it shot out from under him. Result? Simultaneous sprained wrists.

Experimentation and practice followed. Soon both boys could scoot around okay on the thing, but it got tame pretty quick. What to do? In Baton Rouge, LA there were only two locations with anything like pavement and hills. One was the state capitol grounds, the other was the sidewalk on the Mississippi river bridge.

The bridge, fortunately, was out of the question. There was no way a couple of 12 year olds could access the thing without the cooperation of an adult driver. But the capitol grounds worked pretty well… For a little while. Then the local police kicked them out.

Undaunted, the two boys looked for another way to satisfy their need for speed. They had both been water skiing. The idea occurred to them, why not tie a two rope to the back of a bicycle?

What followed was a series of physics lessons. Stan’s big old cruiser was drafted as the towing vehicle. (You knew there would be a bicycle in here somewhere. Right?)

At first things went well. The boys took turns pulling each other down the gently curving residential street. Faster and faster they went. Then, they took a turn. Stan was on the bike, Neal on the board. Stan turned left onto an intersecting street. Newton’s First Law took effect and Neal went a lot wider, at the end of the rope. The lateral force of the rope tugging against the bike’s seatpost caught Stan by surprise. The bike almost went out from under him. Stan turned toward Neal. The rope slacked. Neal went down. Hard.

After some impromptu first aid, the project was resumed. The boys learned to slow a bit before taking turns. That way the one on the board didn’t pull the bike over. It was fast and fun. Until…

Stan was on the board behind Neal. The two were cruising along. Neal signaled a right turn. Stan was ready and leaned out at the end of the rope, perforce taking the turn wider than the bike was. It was going well, until… There was an oncoming VW bug on the street they had just turned onto. The driver, seeing the oncoming duo, hit the brakes hard. Neal and the bike went to the right of the car. Stan, still hanging onto the rope, went to the left. The rope hit the windshield of the car. The bike stopped, but Neal didn’t. Stan was jerked right off the board and performed a perfect face-plant on the asphalt.

The two boys went home, battered and bleeding. Neither of them ever tried towing a skateboard behind a bike again.

Schwinn introduced the Stingray bike that summer. Neal got one for his birthday. Stan used the procedes from his paper route to buy a new “English Racer,” drop bar, five speed road bike. The boy’s courses diverged rapidly from that point. Neal went to LSU, graduated neat the bottom of his class and went into state politics. Stan studied engineering and landed a job with a chemical company. No one knows what happened to the driver of the bug.