Bicycle Inspection

It was always the Monday or Tuesday following Easter. You had to ride your bicycle to the nearest school and have it inspected by the police, and then you had to take a short riding test, and if you passed the police would affix a tin license plate around the steering column of your bicycle.


I cannot specifically recall when kids were no longer required to have an annual bicycle inspection, but I'm pretty certain this ritual faded out sometime in the mid-to-late 60s if not sooner.

It may have disappeared, like other civic duties of the time, from a lack of cooperation from families and/or the bureaucratic strain. When I was growing up a number of these organized civic activities existed, and town residents, families, were expected to comply, mostly for reasons of public health and safety. I suspect this model of civic responsibility was largely left over from World War II and the first decade of the Cold War. The great polio vaccine was one of these activities, and on a lesser scale the fire house held dog and cat vaccinations for rabies, and there were collective safety programs, and the aforementioned bicycle inspections. At school we all watched astronauts fly into space, and we were also indoctrinated about The Enemy. We had all learned early on that Communism was The Enemy and Khrushchev was The Enemy and that Communists didn't believe in God or Freedom. But mostly we wanted to play our 45s, or listen to transistor radios, or watch Soupy Sales on TV.

One bicycle inspection year I had to stand before the police lieutenant for an oral quiz. I must have been eight or nine years old. The lieutenant was a tall, large and menacing crew cut figure with sharp eyes and a gun and bullets and badges and all kinds of medals and metal clinking and jingling on his starched uniform. The ultimate authority figure. The only equally frightening authority figure was the school principal. Anyway, I had taken the road test---a quick execution around a painted figure-8---and then the brake test, which was to pedal fast and then stop on a dime. (It is worth noting that back then no one wore helmets for bicycles or motorcycles). I was terrified of the police lieutenant, and as I was seated on my bike, he crouched down and asked: "How many can you ride on a bicycle at one time?" I sensed a trick question, but didn't know the right answer. After all, I often rode with two, or even three kids on a bicycle, and while I suspected it was wrong, riding this way didn't strike me as an evil or criminal act. So I took a safe guess and answered "two" which certainly seemed innocuous compared with "three" or "four"

The lieutenant's face turned to stone. "One!" he thundered. "Never, never ride a bicycle with more than one person! Riding double is against the law! And you can get killed or get someone else killed! Do you want that to happen? Do you understand? Now . . . " and the lieutenant asked me the question once more, and the second time I got it right..