From the New York Times News Service, alarming stories about our nation's youth. Not that they're down in the basement with the Internet and enough ammo to blow up, well, a large high school; not that they're up in their rooms with the Internet and enough images of Pamela Sue Anderson to go blind. No, this is about the demise of the bicycle as a rite of passage in the lives of young America.
    Consider this: Less than 1 percent of kids ages 7-15 ride bikes to school, a decline of 60 percent since the 1970s. Experts say bikes have been squeezed out of kids' lives by traffic fears, "organized play," television and computer games. As if that weren’t bad enough, sales at the Huffy Corp., makers of styleless bikes that can’t be destroyed, have been flat for a decade.
    I can recall my first bike as well as I can remember my first time. She was a 20-inch burgundy number with chrome fenders. British (no clumsy Huffy for me) as I recall. My parents bought her at John Wanamaker in downtown Philadelphia and we walked through the store with it like we had just purchased a Ferrari. The burgundy babe was wheels at a time when my universe consisted of one square block, so the feeling of freedom I had from the bike was greater than when I got my first car, for example. Although my parents were at first apprehensive about my newfound license, they also realized that when I returned from extended explorations of Levittown, I was too tired to care about making bombs or Pamela Sue, or equivalent distractions of the time.
    But enough pedaling down Nostalgia Lane. I know what happened to bikes: cars. Kids drive cars to school now, because cars are much handier for transporting explosives, computers, $2,000 stereo systems and classmates who might be potential Pamela Sue Andersons. This is what they must mean by "organized play."
    The Times story says today’s kids don’t have time for bikes because they're on "tight schedules for after school activities" like dance classes and soccer. Our crowd considered dance lessons and soccer novel punishments invented by sadistic adults for whatever it was you did to have your bike taken away. If dance lessons and soccer are all the rage, why does the Center for Disease Control consider 22 percent of American children not chubby, but obese, twice the level since the 1980s. Duh — maybe they're obese because they're not riding bikes.
    In a way, I almost feel sorry for today’s kids. They're having all the usual adult misery — consumerism, sex, computers — shoved at them at an increasingly younger age. Some will never know the feeling of hearing their parents' voices recede in the distance as they pedal away on the sweet rolling freedom of two wheels and the whisper of the wind.

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