Text Size
  • A
  • A
  • A
Share

30 Years Later, a Stolen Bike Still Stings


For Christmas in 1983 I asked for a new bike, a dog, and the miniature WWF wrestling ring with Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant figurines. Santa Claus, (aka Big Pat and Carmella Kozlowski) decided that I would enjoy a Cabbage Patch doll instead of the wrestling ring and on Christmas morning, under the tree was a boy Cabbage Patch doll named Whitney Vincent. Whitney did not have a good life and DHS should have been called on my 8 year old butt as I tattooed him with magic markers and made him wrestle the wrestling figurines that all my friends got that year.

However, a blue and yellow BMX bike was under the tree for me (and it made me forget that we didn’t get the dog either).  That spring and summer of 1984, I rode that bike everywhere that I was allowed in the riverward boundaries. I could go north as far as Bridesburg and south as far as Fishtown.  The movie E.T. was still hot and riding BMX bikes was cool as hell as another movie called “Goonies” was just ready to be out in the theaters.

In an effort to ruin my childhood, like she ruined my Christmas of 1983 with the Cabbage Patch doll, my mom Carm slapped 50 “Property of PAT” stickers all over my bike. On the handlebars, the seat, the pedals, the plastic yellow rims.

This is cool if you race in NASCAR to have sponsor decals, but not when you’re an overweight kid chugging along on your BMX bike with a pretzel in one hand and balancing a cherry water ice on your handle bars. Yep, everyone knew that bike was mine. Even my best friend Jen teased the hell out of me about those stickers. Her mom Mary even got in on it when I would ride up to their porch. “Hey, Patty, is that your bike?”

One hot August night, the bike was stolen out of our backyard. I would chain it to the fence behind our BBQ grill but a pair of bolt cutters took care of that security. The morning I saw the chain on the ground and the bike gone, I sat on my step and cried. Who would come in our backyard and take my stuff? See?  If they would have given me that damned dog for Christmas, the dog would’ve barked like hell to stop the thief.

A few weeks later at 1:30 in the morning our phone rang. It was the 24th police district calling. They nabbed a guy stealing bikes in the neighborhood and in his backyard was a pile of bikes he had stolen. He had filed off the serial numbers and re-painted most of them but the cops found a Property of Pat sticker underneath the seat that the scoundrel didn’t catch and peel off. Those damned stickers ID’d my bike. Carm drove to the police station in her pajamas to reclaim the bike. (Her Sicilian blood also prompted her to turn over the property receipt she had to sign at the police district and she found out who the guy was that took my bike. Let’s just say he walks with a limp now.)

And now, almost exactly 30 summers later, I find myself standing on my porch in Bridesburg early one morning holding a cable lock that has been broken and cut. My blue Rallye Mountain Bike that I rode on the Wildwood Boardwalk, the Lehigh Valley Gorge, Kelly Drive, the new Port Richmond riverfront trail and Pennypack Park was stolen, as was my better half’s beach cruiser. Charlie, the dog that howls, yaps, barks and puts it on Facebook, if God forbid, I break wind in my sleep had been silent the night before as we slept to the rhythm of the air conditioner in the window hum. My neighbors have security video of two guys coming onto my porch at 4:55 a.m. and then riding our bikes away at 5:02 a.m.

I call my mom. She asked if I put my name on my bike. And that is when I start to cry.

The Spirit | Hyperlocal done differently
Advertise Now

Related News