Ernie Maier

A bicycle has been part of my life, off and on, for more than three-quarters of a century. At age 88, I am still riding. Looking back, I realize that bicycles have served very different purposes at different stages of my life. As a boy, a bicycle meant transportation, work, independence and adventure. Later it became transportation around a college campus. During our RV years, it traveled around the country with us. Today, bicycling is primarily exercise—but it is still something I enjoy.

My First Important Bicycle

The first bicycle I remember clearly dates from around 1952, when I was about 13 or 14 years old. I believe it was a Schwinn, probably a Standard Autocycle or a similar model. I distinctly remember the tank-like case between the frame bars.

What I remember especially well is the price: $62.50.

My father signed for the purchase, but I paid for the bicycle myself. I paid $5 at a time. When I had paid $50, I apparently had enough money from my paper route to pay the remaining $12.50 all at once.

Remarkably, I still have the little receipt book recording the purchase and payments on that bicycle. It is among the memorabilia stored in a box in the storage bedroom at my present home. I hope eventually to have it scanned and included with the collection of scanned records and notes I am leaving with these stories.

For a young boy in the early 1950s, paying for a bicycle with money I had earned myself was important. It may well have been my first experience buying something on credit and then satisfying the debt.

The bicycle quickly became a working vehicle. I delivered the Detroit Times, a newspaper that no longer exists, on a route around Alter Road between Mack and Jefferson on Detroit's east side. At one point I had two routes totaling about 125 customers.

The bicycle also led to another job. A neighborhood druggist knew that I traveled around the area on my paper route, so he sometimes sent me by bicycle to an apothecary farther down Kercheval to pick up medications he needed to fill prescriptions. In the early 1950s, prescriptions were handwritten and pharmacies did not have today's computerized systems. A boy with a bicycle could actually become part of the delivery system.

A Bicycle Meant Adventure

The bicycle was not all work.

My friend John McDonald and I sometimes rode from our neighborhood all the way into downtown Detroit to Grand Circus Park. We both had baskets on our bicycles for carrying newspapers. At the park, those baskets acquired an entirely different purpose.

We would take them off the bicycles, prop them up with string, put bird feed underneath and attempt to catch pigeons.

John knew considerably more about pigeons than I did. Pigeon racing was popular among some of the Belgian families in our part of Detroit, and John eventually raised pigeons himself. We would check the pigeons we caught to see whether they were banded. John handled most of that operation. I was primarily his bicycling companion.

Those trips are a good example of what a bicycle represented to a boy in Detroit in the early 1950s. We weren't being driven somewhere by our parents. We got on our bicycles and went there ourselves.

There was another bicycle in my life during the summers I spent with my grandmother at the family cottage on Lakeville Lake. During those years, probably when I was about 13 to 15 and perhaps continuing into the year I was 16, I worked as a lifeguard at a beach operated at a private home on Lakeville Lake. I actually began doing that work before I had an official lifeguard card. I later received my formal lifeguard certification shortly after my 16th birthday.

I used a bicycle to get around the lake and sometimes rode west into Oxford to go to the movie theater. I remember riding home with a light on the bicycle. At an age when young people today would probably expect someone to drive them, the bicycle gave me the ability to get where I wanted to go on my own.

College and Then a Long Break

I don't remember bicycling very much during my years at the University of Detroit. By then, jobs, school and automobiles had become more important forms of transportation.

The bicycle returned to my life in 1961 when I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on a teaching assistantship in the business school. I had a car for traveling between Illinois and Detroit, but I also had a bicycle that I used to get around the university campus.

After that, bicycling largely disappeared from my life for many years. Marriage, raising a family, teaching, my years with IBM, and operating the Aqua Weed Control business occupied that period of my life.

Eventually, however, the bicycle came back.

Bicycling and Our RV Years

Around 1999 or 2000, Jean and I began traveling by motorhome. We first had a 38-foot gasoline Winnebago and soon moved to a 40-foot diesel Monaco Diplomat.

That began an entirely new period of bicycling.

I carried a bicycle with us as we traveled. Eventually I had a substantial rack mounted behind the vehicle we towed behind the motorhome. One rack could carry four bicycles and could swing away from the back of my 2005 Chevrolet Silverado, allowing me access to the truck even while the bicycles remained on the rack.

I carried a bicycle thousands of miles around the country, although I certainly didn't ride it everywhere we stopped. Many campgrounds had gravel or rough roads that simply weren't enjoyable for bicycling.

But when we found a good place to ride, I took advantage of it.

For three years we spent about two weeks at a campground near Walt Disney World in Florida. The campground had paved roads and some hills, and I could ride vigorously every day. It provided excellent exercise.

One of my favorite bicycling experiences was at Camp Reinberg northwest of downtown Chicago. It was an unusual campground with only a handful of RV sites, surrounded by fields, trees, grasses and gently rolling terrain. Accessible paved bicycle and walking paths ran through the area.

When we stayed there while visiting Chicago, I would take the bicycle off the rack and ride almost every day I could. It was peaceful, beautiful and, most importantly, a safe place to ride with very little traffic. After spending a day dealing with the crowds and activity of Chicago, I could return to the campground and bicycle through quiet natural surroundings.

Those rides remain one of my favorite memories of our RV travels.

Silver Lakes and Bicycling for Exercise

Jean and I eventually became part of the RV community in Naples, Florida, first through Pelican Lake and then Silver Lakes Golf & RV Resort.

By this stage of my life, the purpose of bicycling had changed again.

I wasn't delivering newspapers. I wasn't picking up prescriptions. I wasn't catching pigeons in downtown Detroit or traveling across a college campus.

I was riding because I enjoyed it and because it was good exercise.

For many years I regularly rode more than 10 miles a day. As I moved into my 80s, I reduced the distance but continued riding.

During the winter of 2024–25, when I was 86, I rode regularly inside Silver Lakes, usually about three, five or six miles at a time. By the end of that Florida season, my bicycle odometer showed exactly 500 miles. I even took a photograph of it.

During the 2025–26 season, I accumulated only about 220 miles. That wasn't because I had decided to stop riding. I arrived in Florida later, the weather was wetter, and I returned to Michigan on April 8 to prepare for an April meeting concerning the teaching endowment I was establishing at De La Salle Collegiate.

For the 2026–27 Florida season, I hope to be back closer to 300 miles.

I have owned several bicycles during these later years, including Trek bicycles and other brands. The particular bicycle has become less important than the fact that I continue to ride.

Still Riding at 88

Today, at age 88, I am still bicycling in Michigan.

My usual route around my subdivision is approximately 3.3 miles. That has become a comfortable everyday ride.

There is something I have noticed about bicycling as I have gotten older. During the first half-mile or mile, my body seems to ask:

"Why are you doing this again?"

Then something changes.

After about the first mile, my body seems to answer:

"You know, this is still fun."

And it is.

I settle into the ride and enjoy the remainder of it. Unless it is an especially hot day, I can finish several miles without even working up much perspiration.

I don't know how many more years I will continue bicycling. Nobody does.

But when I look back, the bicycle has been an interesting thread running through my life. It carried newspapers through Detroit when I was a boy. It carried medications for a neighborhood druggist. It took John McDonald and me downtown on our pigeon-catching adventures. It carried me to the movies from Lakeville Lake to Oxford. It transported me around the University of Illinois campus.

Decades later, a bicycle traveled behind our motorhome as Jean and I crossed the country. It gave me exercise at campgrounds in Florida, Chicago and elsewhere. Eventually it became part of my daily routine at Silver Lakes.

And now, more than 70 years after that young boy paid $62.50 for his bicycle, I am still getting on one.

The distances are shorter.

The speed is probably slower.

But after that first mile, the feeling is remarkably familiar.

It is still fun.