Trike

(entry for 8/21/2024)

People who were born after the Second World War ended have absolutely no idea what it was like. In their wildest imaginations they can’t even come close.

Everything normal shut down completely. They stopped making cars and made tanks and ships and airplanes instead. They stopped making and selling tires. If you wore yours out you simply didn’t drive anymore. 

Little kids wore miniature military uniforms.

You collected ‘tin’ cans, cut both ends out, and flattened them (tucking the lids inside) to give to the ‘war effort.’ (They were made into bullets.)

You collected everything you owned that was made in Japan, and you ruthlessly threw it away. You didn’t recycle it or give it to the poor. You threw it AWAY, as though it were made of poison.

At the grocery store you could still buy bread and milk, and flour and even certain kinds of breakfast cereal. (There were three: Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies and Cheerios. That was it.) Everything was rationed. You had little books of tickets that entitled you to buy the necessities of life. If you used up your tickets, you did without the things they stood for. Need some gasoline for your car? (Assuming you still had tires you could drive on.) You had to turn in a gasoline rationing ticket for every gallon you purchased. And you only received ten gasoline tickets per month. If you ran out of gasoline because you ran out of tickets, you took the street car. Or, on the streets where there were no street-car tracks, the bus.

Parades didn’t involve marching bands or cheer-leaders, or floats. Tanks with metal treads rolled down the middle of the street, chewing up the pavement. People cheered. People waved flags.

I once, at age three, refused to wave a flag as the tanks rolled by. I insisted on saluting instead. Cute girls in military uniforms had walked among the crowd previously, handing out miniature flags to anyone who wanted one. I didn’t want one till after the parade was over. Then I regretted my stubbornness and even shed tears about it. But I so much hated the pressure to be like everyone else that I defied my own wishes to have a flag, at the moment when it mattered. I got a lot of frowns from folks who didn’t know me that day. If you were alive, you were for the war. There were no protesters or anti-war activists. If you weren’t totally comfortable with the way the West was behaving, you kept your mouth shut. And you were against the ‘Japs,’ as the Japanese were called, and you were against the “Jerries,’ who were the Germans.

We had no idea that, in California, US citizens of Japanese extraction were being rounded up and taken to Concentration Camps, supposedly “for their own protection.” Most of them never got their houses back. I never heard about that till I went to college and met one of the victims in person. 

My German maternal grandmother, who had been conceived in Germany, though she was born in the US, was aghast at the mood in the country. The culture she had come from was the enemy! She had to be super-patriotic to make up for it. She collected more tin-cans than anybody and turned them in with a passion.

One of the things they stopped making, along with cars, was bicycles. And tricycles. I was too young for bikes, but my dad was bound and determined (his favorite phrase) to give me a tricycle for my fourth birthday. I already had one, but it was about the size of a roller skate, and I couldn’t fit on it anymore.

So one day at work when he was complaining about the state of the recreational economy, a fellow worker offered to make him one, and the offer was gladly accepted. The fellow was a wizard with his hands and tools, and it wasn’t long before the object in question was produced.

My dad was dumbfounded. “How in the world did you do that?” he asked.

So the guy answered.

“Well, first I took a bed frame,” he began.

Who else would think of building a tricycle from a bed frame. Nobody else, that’s who!

But he scoured the local junk yards and found an old bicycle wheel (complete with intact spokes) from a very small bike, two much smaller spoked wheels from an old toy wagon, a seat from the same bicycle the front wheel came from, and voila! A tricycle. (The bed frame was from his own house, not the junkyard.)

The picture at the head of this post will give you some idea, although the colors are all wrong and the rear wheels are a bit larger than mine were.

My tricycle was blue and yellow, with a black seat. The hollow metal tubes from the bedframe were painted a royal blue, and the fenders were bright yellow. It looked like something from a professional bike shop, and it might as well have been. It lasted a long, long time, far beyond my use of it. It eventually ended up belonging to my sister, and she rode it for another several years. It was still just as sturdy the day we gave it away as it had been the day he made it.

I wish I could show you a picture of it, in living color, but none exists. The best I can come up with is this black and white one at 4801 West Fifth, when I was five.

The Trike, as I called it, had been born in Denver, but through all our perambulations, everywhere we went, it went too, and it was admired, fussed over, and beautiful. We kept it till long after I had a bicycle, and even after Rita had a bicycle. We finally gave it away to a family in Grand Junction who couldn’t afford even a cheap factory-made one. (And yes, by then they were making them in factories again.)

The war ended when I was five and a half, not long after the above photo. Rationing came to an abrupt halt. We could buy tires again, and did. There was one more parade, complete with pavement-demolishing tanks, and this time I did wave a flag. We stopped saying ‘Jap’ and ‘Jerry.’ My German grandmother relaxed a smidgeon.

The Trike lived through it all, unfazed.

*

copyright © 2024 LegendKeeper LLC

*

If you'd like to see more posts in this Memory Blog series (in reverse chronological order), please click HERE.

If you'd like to see posts in my Music Blog series (in reverse order), please click HERE.