Frank Mineo was walking through the Biltmore Fashion Park when chance brought him into Antiquities, a second-floor shop that sells memorabilia from the 1950s. There, looking as fresh if it had just come off the assembly line, was a Schwinn Black Phantom bicycle. It was red, black and loaded.
Frank rushed to find his wife, Carol. They own the Valley Pet Centers. "You've got to see it!" he told her. "It's identical to the one I had when I was twelve!" Carol knew that childhood bike. Her husband still had a picture of it. Somewhere, in his mother's misguided cleaning of the family garage, perhaps, it had disappeared.
Carol, needless to say, bought her husband the Black Phantom from Antiquities.
Only now the price tag was $3,500.
SCHWINN BICYCLES of the 1950s are one of the hottest collectibles in a world where seemingly every bit of ephemera the Baby Boom generation ever touched is acquiring resale value. Hammacher Schlemmer sold more than six dozen reconditioned Black Phantoms from its Christmas catalogue at $3,499 each. In November, a gallery in New York's SoHo devoted a show to the bikes. It was presided over by a curator who will insist they are works of art. Tee shirts pledging loyalty to Schwinn bikes and scale models of them, complete with glass display cases, are available for those unable to afford the real thing.
In the past few years, Schwinns have done better than the stock market. They have been subject to the same kind of nonsensical inflation that pushed the price of Vincent van Gogh's "Irises" into the stratosphere.
The cost of an unrestored Schwinn-- fenders missing, chain rotted, chrome rusted out--has risen to $600. Collectors will share stories of bikes bought at yard sales for $2.50, refurbished, sold for $5,000 on Saturday and resold for $7,500 on Wednesday.
1950s Schwinns have achieved collector status and four-figure price tags seemingly against all rationality. They're mentioned in none of the histories of bicycling. Nor are they regarded particularly highly by collectors who specialize in historic two-wheeled vehicles.
Schwinn bicycles of the 1950s had big fat balloon tires, coaster brakes and as one owner says, were heavy enough to bench press. With their headlights, luggage racks and metal tanks that were supposed to look like a motorcycle's fuel tank but instead contained a horn that seldom worked, they were vulgar and gaudy.
They were also produced in very high numbers. In that way they are like '57 Chevys, which have become icons of American popular culture not because they were rare, but because they were common. In fact, Schwinn bikes of the 1950s share many characteristics of cars of that era, in their devotion to weight, chrome and wretched excess.
Although that makes them perversely appealing, that does not seem to be why they have found loving homes in the living rooms of collectors. The devotion to them is explicable only by nostalgia. Schwinn bikes partake of some of the it-was-my-childhood-and-so-it's-important appeal of shows like Leave It to Beaver. They have been given the imprimatur of hip in the form of a starring role in Pee-wee's Big Adventure.
They are a barometer of our national dissatisfaction with today's reality. They are a tribute to the power of collective memory and the kinds of things that happen to a man when he reaches middle age. A few random telephone calls have determined that more than your usual number of Schwinn owners are guys in their forties with Jaguars, lots of money and blond second wives who are younger than they are.
One of the wellsprings of collectible Schwinns exists in Phoenix in the shape of Antiquities, where Carol Mineo picked up her husband Frank's childhood dream. Owned by Toby Stoffa and her husband, Mitch Menaker, Antiquities got into 1950s bikes a couple of years ago. Toby thought her husband was nuts when he came home from a buying trip with eight old bikes. Three weeks later, the owner of Lionel Trains walked in and bought seven of them. These days, $4,000 bikes fly out of the store, most of them landing in the homes of out-of-town collectors with a lot of what Toby delicately calls "discretionary income."
ED BRANCH WILL OFFER you a beer before he even invites you to sit down. In fact, you're expected to know that you can sit down. Ed Branch, ruddy faced, blue-jeaned, barefoot and hearty, lives in a house in north Phoenix that is evidence of what happens to decor when there is no woman around. A Texaco gas pump stands in the middle of the floor. There's a jukebox. There's an army helmet on top of a stereo speaker. There are parts lists all over the dining room table.
Ed Branch restores Schwinn bicycles. He sells most of what he restores to Antiquities, because he can't be bothered selling them himself. Ed knows all the important people in the United States who deal in Schwinns. He knows that former Arizona governor Jack Williams has an old Schwinn. Ed has a garage out back filled with frames, horn tanks and lights, attending upon his leisure. He does not have a great deal of this commodity, since he has other things to keep him busy, like raising two children, owning Neely Tile and restoring jukeboxes and gas pumps.
In the past couple of years, however, Ed's been devoting a lot of his free time to the Schwinns. "I've lived through it," says Ed's son, Travis, thirteen. By this he means cross-country trips looking for old bike parts, sleeping on sagging motel beds, and getting up at four in the morning to dig through boxes of horn tanks with a flashlight in your mouth at swap meets in Ohio. And don't forget dodging lunatic drivers in Detroit who don't know what red lights mean. Travis' dirt-bike trophies are also part of the decor, and crowd the living room mantel.
Ed Branch got interested in Schwinns the way everyone else in the United States of America did. He wanted to buy the bike he had as a kid. So he did. Then he sold it. He did this three times.
He distinctly remembers that childhood bike. It was a 1955 black-and-cream Schwinn B6 that cost $39.95. He rode it all around his neighborhood near 23rd Street and Thomas. He got it when he was nine and quit riding it when he was fifteen, by which time friends of his had cars. Bikes had a very specific life span that coincided with adolescence.
They also had a very specific style. You took the fenders off. You took the horn tank out. You got high handlebars. You stuck an ace of spades in the tire spokes with a clothespin. You were cool!
Sometime after he began restoring Schwinns, Ed Branch thought he would try to find all those parts he had stripped off his bike, thirty years earlier, since they were now worth hundreds of dollars. So he went back to the house he'd grown up in, and asked the old man who now owned it if he could go and look for the fenders, horn tank and luggage rack. They weren't there anymore.
"He doesn't want to let go of his past," is how Travis summarizes his father's activities.
"Travis, go get us another beer," is Ed's response to that.
FOR YEARS, Landis Cyclery was the place everyone in Phoenix bought his or her Schwinn. Actually, it still is. People come in all the time and say, "I bought my first bike here." "They got heavier all the time," says Dick Landis Sr. of the bikes of the 1950s. He took over the family bicycle shop at Seventh Avenue and Indian School in 1947. The store, one of the oldest bicycle shops in the country, was started by Dick's father, Ben, in 1912.
"Different parts of the country had different handlebars. Here, they used a high gooseneck," he says. "We used to buy them by the hundreds."
Dick Senior--there's also a Dick Junior--is shocked to discover that refurbished Schwinns will fetch as much as $4,000.
"Is that right? I'll be darned," he says. Then he leads the way to the Landis warehouse out back. Tucked behind boxes of mountain bikes are a couple of dozen antiques from the 1950s, in various stages of completeness. "I'll tell Bob that for $4,000 he might look into it," he says. Dick's son Bob runs the store these days.
"Wesley Bolin, Bill Rehnquist, Margaret Hance, the Babbitts, Jack Williams, Sandra Day O'Connor . . . " Dick Senior reads off a list of illustrious customers from the past.
He stops, looks up and smiles. "I almost dropped my teeth the other day. I saw Jack Williams, he was wearing that old floppy hat, riding that old Schwinn around." JACK WILLIAMS, former radio personality, former Phoenix mayor, former Arizona governor, is 81 years old. He lost an eye in a childhood accident, which allows the nickname One-Eyed Jack. He is a fountain of knowledge on Arizona history and a man with an opinion on a great many things. He lives in an upscale complex with pools and trees and enough peace and quiet to allow a bicyclist to pedal four laps, or one mile, around the courtyard every day. So that's what he does.
"It's my son's bike," Jack confesses, showing off the black and cream Schwinn Wasp he bought at Landis back in the 1950s. The bicycle is almost impossible to lift. Jack grins and accepts congratulations on the possession of muscle power sufficient to propel such a heavy object. "It's good exercise," he says. "We have a ten-speed at our cabin in Pinetop, but no one can figure out how to shift the gears." This sentiment is appropriate for a conservative.
"THE DEAL WAS that Dad would buy the basic bike, and I would handle the accessories," says Rick Williams, now vice president of project planning with Gosnell Builders, and still the legal owner of the bike Jack Williams gets his exercise on every day. Rick got business experience early, when he raised the money for his bike's accessories by writing a column of high school news for the Phoenix Gazette. One of the first things he bought was tassels for the handlebars.
"This was class, to a fifteen-year-old in 1958," he says. "In 1991, it's total tack."
Rick is silent for a moment.
"I'm sitting here, smiling, remembering the day we went to Landis," he says. "It was a son of a gun to move. Dad has my profound admiration and respect for riding it."
DICK LANDIS SR. doesn't have to tell son Bob that the ancient Schwinns in the warehouse are now worth a lot of money. Bob already knows. In fact, Bob began noticing something was going on with 1950s Schwinns as far back as the 1970s. People began asking for spring forks, that coiled contraption that connected the front wheel of the bike to the frame and acted as a shock absorber. Schwinn responded to the demand by manufacturing new bikes with spring forks for a couple of years, but they never sold. The company was left with truckloads of the coils. Then, in the mid 1980s, the interest in Schwinn bikes of the 1950s boomed for real. Guys began traveling around the country to places like Landis Cyclery, and bought up all the old parts they could find. Fortunes were made in spring forks alone. J & B Importers in Englewood, Colorado, made one such fortune. Jim the warehouse manager ("everybody in the industry knows me as Jim") tells the story.
"Schwinn had these things in a warehouse in Chicago. They'd ceased to manufacture the bikes, so these spring forks just sat in the warehouse. We have a reputation in the industry--people come to us with close-outs. So our parent company bought them all. We bought this warehouse merchandise at 4 cents a pound. We bought eighteen forty-foot trailers. Most of the items we purchased were three to five years old. Schwinn considered it junk. They saw no value in it."
Ha!
"The spring forks were less than one-tenth of 1 percent of it, but we made the most profit out of them," Jim says. "We sold each of them for more than what the bike sold for. We had 1,500 of them. I wish I had 5,000 more."
J & B's Jim sold those spring forks to places like Landis Cyclery, which only a few years before had not been able to give away a bike bearing one of them, but were now buying up secondhand spring forks to put on brand new bikes to make them look old. WITH THE EXCEPTION of the spring forks, and a time in the late Seventies when Schwinn stuck with the Varsity while the rest of the world was going to lightweight ten-speeds, the company seems to have been remarkably prescient about consumer habits. In fact, the story of Schwinn in the 1930s is an important chapter in the history of American merchandising. Schwinn bicycles stand as examples of how through advertising and packaging, products could be made to appear not only desirable but absolutely indispensable.
end part 1 of 2
