On Wednesday, May 21, 2003, at 09:13 PM, chasds@mindspring.com wrote:
> Ok. As penance for dissing Jack's Paramount earlier...(hey, all I
> said was, it wasn't worth that much money to me. Clearly it was worth
> that to someone, though)...anyway, as I was saying...
Like Charles I said the bike wasn't worth the $2500 to me personally. Over the last two day's I've been thinking about why I didn't feel it was worth the money. The reason was I was thinking about it as a bike. I've never paid more than $200 for a classic bike with full Campy, but I don't really care about NOS and I've been really lucky. If I had thought about the historical importance of this Paramount as a piece of American history $2500 would have been a steel. Schwinn is a very important name in American history and their bikes have worked their way into the mindset of many generations of Americans. Most likely when people think about Schwinn they're not thinking about Paramounts, but if you ask the non-cyclist to name a bike company I'll bet Schwinn is mentioned first. The Paramount was the bike Schwinn made as a no-holds-bared racing machine to compete with the best from Europe.
Maybe they weren't always the best quality and some years were better
then others. What they represented as a symbol of American bicycle
manufacturing is priceless. When I think about Jack's Paramount in
these terms I start reaching for for my checkbook. For an idea about
what people pay for memorabilia check out this fine example:
http://ebay.com/
--Sarah Vowell--
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