Bicycle thieves
I've had a lot of bicycles stolen over the years.
The most recent one was only a few years ago when two bikes vanished from a shed behind my garage. I was walking out to the garden one morning and noticed an old Sears bike lying in the grass. It had been in the shed the night before and was the first one that the thief got, but it didn't take him long to discover that it had a badly warped wheel that rubbed the fender. So he dropped it and went back for two more. One was a beautiful old Schwinn, that was really valuable. The other was just a bike. But they were gone.

One of my former students had been by and expressed an interest in the Schwinn, but didn't have the kind of money that it was worth. He said he was going to save it up and buy it. As he left, he said, "I'll be back for that one."

A neighbor told us that he had seen a suspicious car in the neighborhood that night and the description matched the guy's car right down to the bike rack on the back.

He was 20 years old, but still lived at home, so my wife called his home and talked to his mother. She identified herself as the "president of the neighborhood watch," and said that we had a witness that could place her son on this block at 10:30 pm of the night that the two bikes were taken. She said that if the bikes were not returned immediately, she was going to recommend that the matter be turned over to the police. The bikes were back in my shed within an hour.

When we lived in town, somebody walked into our basement garage and made off with our daughter's 24 inch bike. We never saw it again.

When I was a 3rd grader, I had what was then called a sidewalk bike. It had hard rubber tires, and no brakes. The wheels were about 10 inches in diameter and it was probably manufactured in the late 30's. Someone had painted it silver and I bought it for $1. It's hard to believe, but someone stole it off the porch. A couple of weeks later, I saw it in a bike rack at school and rode it home. I kept it for a long time, but I don't remember what finally became of it.

When I was about 12, a friend of mine came by and left his 20 inch bike on the sidewalk in front of our house. We were standing in the yard when a kid came down the street, jumped on the bike and rode off . My friend yelled something like, "Hey, come back here with my bike!" and took off running after him. The bike was faster, so he grabbed a lump of coal that had fallen off a truck, and threw it with all his might at the fleeing thief. The coal, which was about the size of a baseball, hit the kid in the back of the head, causing him to leap off the bike and run crying on down the street. He must have been injured because the coal shattered and we saw drops of blood on the pavement. We had the bike back and we never saw the kid again. I hope he was OK. I know he must have learned a lesson.

A chain and lock won't always work. I had my bike locked up tight one time and someone cut the grips off and slashed the front tire. It was probably a frustrated would-be thief.