A little addendum. I started learning how to ride a two wheel bike back when I was around 7 or eight. Not knowing how to keep my balance riding slow, I had to practice in the parking lot behind my apartment. Soon, though, I thought I had learned everything my brother could teach me, and i decided to venture out onto the street. But I was wrong. Nearly dead wrong. See, I didn't know how to brake. This bike, not like the older bikes had hand brakes, not the older kind where you stepped on the pedals and the bike would slow down. To make matters worse, I lived on a hill. So I came out of the parking lot and turned the corner headed down the hill, picking up speed as I went. Oh, I forgot. There was one more lesson I didn't learn. How to steer. At the bottom of the hill, Walnut street forked and went in two directions. It turned a corner, leveled out and kept on going. The other fork was Bragg street. Still unpaved at that time. There is no good news here. If I had hit Bragg street, I MIGHT have been saved by the loose gravel and thrown from the bike, OR, I MIGHT have kept on going and if a car or the city Bus didn't hit me as I sped out onto Fayetteville Street , then I would have hit the fence surrounding the field across the street.
As I mentioned, I had neglected to learn how to steer, so I kept straight. This was a mixture of good luck and bad. Good, because there was no house or building there at the time, and no curb. Just a raised earth embankment. Which I hit and went airborne. I landed in a grove of bushes that softened my landing. It bent my bike wheel, but that was the MOST that happened to me. That was the GOOD luck. I I had gone just a foot or more in the other direction, well, there's a telephone pole that's still there today that I would have slammed directly into. Two feet, and I would have missed the pole, but slammed into a mulberry tree. I went back recently and remembered the incedent in my mind. Bragg Street has been paved, the Bushes and mulberry tree have been bulldozed and removed. Ironically, a small church now sits on the corner where the bushes were.