By John W. Ballantine, Jr.
I. My Bike
My first bike had red-rimmed training wheels as I swerved down Newlin Road at three. They came off in 1953, when I was four, as I pedaled down the street looking back at my father. “Go, John, keep pedaling, look straight ahead.” A slight panic as I slipped off the sidewalk. Then I was off at five, biking around the block to Battle Road—goodbye as I glided into the Institute of Advanced Study and its curvy, long road with smart men thinking about relativity theory, splitting atoms, and bombs. Back then the US did not speak to communists in the light of day but built more and more bombs to keep everyone safe.
My first bike was small to fit me; however, at eight I was pushing five feet when my first real bike—a blue Schwinn—was purchased after many visits to Kopp’s bicycle store on John Street. It had a ribbon around it on my May birthday—a one-speed American model that I pedaled uphill—standing up—on Cleveland Lane to my best friend, Phil Sherwood. We shot baskets until it was so dark that we guessed the whereabouts of the rim.
Back then I biked anywhere I wanted, as long as I stayed off the busy roads, like Bayard Lane. The sidewalks were safe, and cars moved over when I spun a path between the traffic on Nassau Street. No helmets or locks. Almost every kid lived on their bicycle. The cold winter with snowstorms, sledding, and toboggan runs pushed us into school buses. Radiators clanked in the school. Carpools took many to school, the lunches were mushy, but we were hungry—captive kids in grade school with assembly speeches about civics, the Russians, and why Princeton was a model of integration. Every kid in town went to the same school. Why were the adults telling us this?
The days grew longer by the Ides of March as we rode on the sidewalks to Nassau Street School. I was free, even if my sister Chia tagged along. We had to get there before the 8:30 bell. I would drop her when we passed the university library, racing to the playground for ten minutes of running back and forth before we were summoned to class.
My parents bought the Tudor house Woodrow Wilson designed for his extended family when he was president of Princeton. I had a corner room with fireplace, ghosts, soft green rug, and two bears—a teddy bear and a real bear rug with teeth. A room with books.
My father completed his dissertation—lamenting the greed and meanness of men—and tried to mediate between business owners and workers. Not easy when the men in the factory breathed in asbestos and the owners wanted more profits from their factories where “Trenton makes and the world takes.” My mother took me to the boys’ and girls’ reformatories so I could see that I had it good.
My bike was a three-speed Cougar with gears on the chrome handlebars and brakes that did not squeak as I sped downhill at fifty miles per hour. Chia could not keep up with me and searched out quieter paths to school. In the morning I would eat my bacon and eggs, ask my father if the Yankees won again—he started with the sports page and then the Cold War and the Dulles brothers advising Ike to push back hard. I just wanted the Yankees to lose, even as I admired the power of Mickey Mantle’s forearms and Yogi Berra’s strong legs behind the plate.
I disappeared after breakfast, biking quickly to town. My head was full of images as I pushed past the governor’s mansion at Morven, George Washington sitting on a horse crossing the Delaware River, and the town newspaper, the Packet, explaining why we needed a new school. I looked at the dark gothic Princeton University dorms and wondered what went on there—school was boring, so why continue learning? Sometimes, if it was early, I detoured through the university and visited the gray chapel—almost a cathedral—with an organ rumbling the foundation and the Scottish minister speaking in a brogue that no one could understand. So, here was the word of God? My bike rested outside, and I stood quietly looking up to the high, arched ceiling—not quite knowing why we gathered in churches to calm our thoughts, soothe our souls.
II. The World
My blue Schwinn opened the world for me. I am going to school, to Mark’s, to my Little League game. Bye, see you later. I was off at ten and back at thirteen, when I was sent away to boarding school, locked away with no free time and no bike.
My bike was squeezed in the narrow carriage garage, where I lifted it over my father’s green 190 SL convertible, ready—like some ancient charioteer—to take me into the world. I pushed the bike down the gravel driveway, past the libraries of higher learning and the Five and Ten Cents store—a store full of models, glue, soda fountain with round red leather stools, and no adults watching. I paid for my pilfering crime by confessing to less than I stole. This meant I only had to help stack toys at the store on two Saturdays in October, instead of four. My bike took me beyond Nassau Street School—with huge windows, dirt playgrounds, jungle gyms, and turf fights—to Mark’s house near the Princeton Stadium, where the varsity football team persisted in a single wing offense, confounding the brightest on the gridiron.
Here our day began with pickup games, chess matches, and boys on bikes meandering down yellow brick roads. No one asked where we were going in the morning—out for the day, maybe home by dinner.
We escaped our parents, who were always messing up. Bomb shelters and cold wars, not to mention the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and missile crises to come. Martin Luther King’s 1963 dream speech stirred many parents—some marched as we sat in integrated schools separated by sections: 7N for the smart kids—professors’ sons and daughters—who were college bound.
And why did my friend Hartney burn Francis’ hair with a magnifying glass as we practiced set theory—zeroes and ones, a whole new way of counting? Because he wanted to test what they told us in science class—concentrated sunlight is a source of fire. Eureka. The French substitute teacher did not get our cries of delight with smoke rising from our success. Hartney became an engineer. Sam, the chess player, had the magnifying glass. We sat in the back of the room and watched her hair smoke—and then we explained to Mr. Cobb, the principal, that we were just experimenting, nothing mean. Francis had long hair and was smarter in French. Still Mr. Cobb professed an hour in study hall would help us think about what we did. Really, adults believe that stuff.
III. Libraries
At ten things did not add up. Still the library with stacks next to the chapel was a refuge that I was allowed to visit with a pass. I spent afternoons in the sunlit rooms away from everyone, pulling books off the shelves as I wrote my first paper on the history of New Jersey. Not so simple. But the Depression stumped me with all the pictures of starving people in soup lines, stock market crashes, and President Roosevelt trying to assure all on the radio that everything was all right. When it wasn’t.
I asked my father why, and he did not have an easy explanation. I read books on the Great Crash, gave my first economics lecture at twelve to my eighth-grade class—explaining how things fall apart when the great circle of paying and spending is broken. My arms showing the circle of money and how people’s confidence collapsed back then. Animal spirits it was called. My gangly classmates looked back at me—where did I get these ideas? Books.
Libraries were open to me and my friends—Mark, Carl, and Peter—all professors’ sons, IF we biked to the Firestone Library early on Saturday morning before the university woke. With a pass, some index card numbers, we disappeared into the stacks for hours. Then a milkshake and burger at the Balt before the baseball game near Princeton Country Day (PCD) school, the boys’ private school that none of us knew. Baseball games just happened as we weaved through town.
Later the community pool was built near the PCD ballfields. I ran, hit, and caught the ball, over my head, almost as good as Willie Mays. Life seemed good on those sunlit spring days. I disappeared early in the morning, found a quiet library corner to fall into the history of depressions and wars, and then slid home with the winning run under the catcher’s tag in the afternoon.
At 6 p.m. the phone rang. “Is John there?”
“Yes, John and Mark are eating dinner—macaroni, some ham, and salad with ice cream to follow,” explained Mark’s mother with burning red hair, Mrs. Jacobs. Mark’s father, the professor who explained why leaves turned in the fall, joined us for dinner, raising his eyebrows at our questions. Photosynthesis is complicated—and we don’t know why some leaves are red, others orange or yellow. Later during my second dinner conversation, my father explained why unemployment and recessions were hard to break and why workers had to fight to sit at the table.
Mark and I—future roommates—did not know of the scrouge of racism, stupid wars, the draft, or the riots and assassinations until much later. We listened to the cheap Japanese transistor radios—“Soldier Boy” and “Sherry”—and played chess with Sam Goldberger before Bobby Fischer turned the world upside down. Our bikes weaved past Princeton clubs of Scott Fitzgerald and down the leafy streets where the day was ours—not a Leave It to Beaver world, but certainly not the Depression or World War of our parents where Hitler blitzed Belgian, and Polish spitfire pilots saved London.
We feasted on opportunities and dreamed with President Kennedy of Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon. When I pedaled very fast, standing up, breathing hard, past Dillon Gym, I saw Bill Bradley practice his jump shots for hours. Twenty minutes back home from Mark’s—three miles uphill as the night closed in. “How was your day, John?” Fine.
I gobbled my second dinner—growing more than twelve inches in a year—and asked my parents why people in India were starving as wheat piled up at my grandfather’s grain elevators across the Midwest. “Can’t we fix these markets, Daddy?” I looked at my mother, declaring that I would write my grandfather—buy the surplus grain cheap and ship it to India for the starving multitudes without disrupting the markets. I wrote that letter and my grandfather said, “Great idea, John.”
IV. Meditations
My bike was a meditation, the pumping of legs, coasting fast, head tucked in, close to fifty miles per hour with no helmet to escape the adult world. Not safe but exciting. Peter’s ten-speed racing bike was proof of the rewards of caddying on the university golf course, lorded over by men laughing. Mark and I had more utilitarian bikes, not locked up at school like Peter’s. He was faster as his parents left for India for some educational posting. Peter ate dinner with us, sleeping over often, since his house was empty. Parents said this was strange. We did not care. Peter had a ten-speed racing bike, and he was our best friend.
I biked to school debating relativity theory and why Einstein was so upset—the probability of electrons meeting did not satisfy this white-haired man with a violin. Yes, we all knew Einstein was smart and so were the many other bombmakers and mathematicians, but Princeton was not a happy place. Destroying Japanese cities sat heavy. Still Carl and I debated the shape of the universe and the black holes to come. And Sam wanted to become a grand chess master even if he did not speak Russian. Our biking debates were serious. Sometimes God existed, but mostly he stumbled.
We talked about civil rights—racism was not a word that passed our lips—even with the separation of sections by smarts—so the IQ test said but not the differences by neighborhood. I had plenty of food on the table, lots of talk at dinner. The only insults I heard were on the playground, you know, words that we did not repeat. Yes, there were bullies, fights, and switchblades, but West Side Story made it all right.
My biking buddies were not so innocent. Sometimes we stole an idling police car, dropped cherry bombs down university toilets, and shot out streetlights with paper clips. Spanky and the gang smoked some, stole girly magazines, and snapped brassieres as we danced close at the Y. The cops knew the good and bad kids and who hung out at the bowling alley. No Officer Krupke would rescue all of us. Mark and I were roommates in Ivy halls. Dougie was caught robbing the post office—losing his scholarship. Jeff did not run fast enough to escape trouble. And cousin Paul with bags of bad stuff was lost in a Golden Triangle prison for three years. Boys broken by wrong turns and mistakes.
Nightmares to come—adolescence and drugs, some said. Not listening in class, professed others. Or just bad luck.
V. Other places
My bike powered me to other worlds. Soon I would be hiking Welsh bogs and hearing the pub songs of the 1966 World Cup as Britain celebrated. My eyes caught the skirt of a young lass; I drifted in the evening mist with two girls who did not understand English yet kissed with Norwegian wood as McCartney serenaded us. The knocks of the day, the drink, the struggles, and cold, unturned beds were not real. I escaped on my bike, which carried me onward.
The two-wheel Schwinn was not always waiting for me. Sometimes just a book bag and a walk to school—through arches, some evening song, ringing bells, and sitting round a table talking about Catcher in the Rye, or The Ambassadors. I could write one, two, three and count zeroes and ones, and I knew that a German scientist living nearby would get us to the moon before the Russians.
The spring of 1966 was cold. No heat, rain, and the misery of a dying British port town hit me. The beer was flat. Cassius Clay would whip another White boxer, and Mailer would take us deep into his head as he marched against all that the government stood for. No more napalm in Vietnam and someone screamed, “Burn, baby, burn.” Don’t turn your cheek, fight. The TV turmoil woke me, broke my dream. The world seemed unfixable, and it would get worse with the draft and rising war dead. No escape, no way out.
I tried to explain poverty, why some are poor, why some are locked up, why that is not me behind the bars as I walked the hallways of Rikers Island, the model jail that no one could get to easily. Later I stood in the Tombs of NYC and said this is not where justice happens. But that was my summer job, to wander prison hallways, talk to people behind plexiglass visitor booths, and watch Black men in orange suits switch the TV channels. I started my days on leafy bike rides debating the shape of the universe. Prisons were not the morning dream I spun each day.
The world was not right. I wrote earnest missives to my grandfather about the starving masses. I talked to my parents, my friends. Yes, I came up with plans. No, there was no way to get the truant thief out of jail—if he was returning to a home with no father, street drugs, and gangs at school. A lost soul at sixteen. There was no Maria for him. And those bombs and bullets killing so many in Vietnam. A place my mother said I should not touch. And who will die in my stead?
Still, I biked, walked, ran until my thoughts slowed with the night. A light saxophone or gentle ballad spun on the record player, no weed, just the quiet of the one o’clock bell tower before I drifted off with no answers. The night tunes calmed my heart. Jesters were quiet and Lear did not storm into the night. This college world was more than I bargained for.
Not the sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Not the glazed eyes, or the “hell no we won’t go,” as the cobblestone streets filled with raised fists, but the billy clubs of cops I knew coming down on my friends. Still the morning bike ride and bird songs stayed with me as psychedelic guitars burned. Jimi Hendrix died before he could explain, and Janis chuckled in her Mercedes-Benz until she went.
I was lost with my longhaired classmates wanting only love. Music filled the tear gas college streets, and banks burned as we voted for truth and justice in stadium rallies for NO More spring classes. STRIKE. I did not go to war. I saw the snow falling out the window and footsteps leading toward the horizon, like some film.
I heard the sermon that said march. I listened to the thunderous call of preachers to set our world right. I looked each way, astonished at the orange-robed Hare Krishnas chanting as bricks broke bank windows and cities burned. This was my world. I did not want to die, go to war, or work in the dark, satanic mills making bombs.
VI. Naïve
I shook the darkness closing in on dreams of goodness. I continued to bike, turned over leaves. My muscles twitched. I ran faster and forgot why I was here. What was the errand and who stood in the aisle next to me? Was that Lorraine’s mother, or maybe Rick Hagadorn—each putting on a good face as we pushed through adolescence. Lorraine, my seventh-grade girlfriend, would find her calm hands taking care; Rick cried too long into his beer and disappeared with cigarettes into the dark pool halls as his cop family wept. I hit the ball far and stepped aside as my gang friends flicked their switchblades.
I did not walk across the war-torn blocks flashing on TV each night or hear the cries of hunger in the villages bombed by the B52s. I did not work twelve hours to feed three children or knit thick sweaters to break Siberian winters. That was all in movies—the struggles, the spirit. My bed was warm, stars flickered, dogs barked. Books filled my head. Fear found no home in my imaginings.
John, what happened today? Nothing, I took the punch and did not see the shiv. I stood my ground. My pumping legs, head in the sky, kept the traumas at bay. Parents loved me, sister too, and of course, Henrietta, the Black woman who fed, smacked, and loved me like her own.
But my world exploded—assassinations, trashing, the tearing down of the library pillars that held the vaults of dreams, of almost truths. I did not know the treachery of every day until the deceits, the killing, and the racism filled the screen, with Walter Cronkite’s avuncular voice reminding us, “That’s the way it is.” I did not know the streets I biked, or the stories behind the closed doors until I did.
This should not be. History told me of tougher times and dark hallways with no smiles. Cynicism closed my eyes; I choked on antiheroes. Yes, those men and women driving off bridges, rolled over in burning cars. Film images and Grace Slick taking us down those rabbit holes. Why the existential questions? I slipped but did not fall.
VII. Out of Here
“There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief.” Dylan, too, was lost in the blues. Pinballs ricocheted all night, pages turned, poets raged, and someone said our parents were the enemy. They made the bombs, told the lies, and led us into war. No bike nearby, yet I still walk along the river with lights blinking and late-night jukeboxes calling out to the love that walked out the door. I hold the melody of each day. The tear gas lifts with the morning light.
The Hare Krishnas’ chant, the cigarettes whisper in the West Fourth Street blues, and the prostitute smiles. Come sit with me, John, breathe and slow down. My blue Schwinn stands against the black iron fence. Another day begins with dreams pushing back the night.
John W. Ballantine, Jr., Ph.D., is a professor emeritus at Brandeis University. His writing is a longstanding avocation and reflection of being in the world of his family, the equations he discusses in class, the books he reads, and the films he watches.