During the 1969 to 1972 period in NYC, the theft rate of road bikes was so high that it ended up damaging my cycling psyche. In 1969 my good friend Peter, whose father was a tv film producer, had a beautiful mid level Atala. I rode with him many days through Central Park with me on my modified Rudge three speed (turned down handlebars, stripped of fenders and chain guard). He was a poseur and I was an even worse poseur. I originally came from a wealthy family but after my parents' divorce, I lived with my mother whose ability to buy things like this were very limited (A bike like that would have represented a major part of her weekly take home salary and I couldn't ask that and I knew it). Our maintenance on our two bedroom apartment was at that time $250 a month. (It's only four times that now but it's value has increased almost one hundred times since then - You can't live off future unrealized earnings anyway).
I saved up enough to buy a U08 Peugeot by working odd jobs an entire summer. The demand for these things was so high that I had to put a deposit on it and wait. I loved the new paint, the new plastic smell and it was way cooler than my Rudge. I had it for only a week when I decided to take it for a Sunday ride in Central Park. I was busy showing it off when an obvious dope addict put a gun in my ribs in the middle of a crowd and ordered me off.
I went without a decent road bike for a while when an acquaintance told me he had an Atala with mostly Campy Valentino in his basement. It was broken and had horrible paint touch ups on its Atala green frame but I bought it for thirty bucks and spent one dollar to fix it up. It only needed some adjustments, oil and a new cotter pin. It turned out to be a better bike than the UO8 but I missed the joy of ownership of a shiny and pretty bike.
I gave up biking a year later when after high school the scholarship program on Harkness Ballet school discouraged any kind of bike riding. Patrick Swayze rode a cheap ass motorcycle to Harkness but for dancers motorcycles were acceptable at that time but not real bikes which was what I really loved.
It wasn't until a decade later that I got back into biking. Finally I could afford whatever I wanted but it was those late adolescent years when biking long distances on a classy Italian or French bike was the ultimate experience that any boy could hope for (other than smoking reefer or having sex). I was feeling really sad for myself as I wrote this however, yesterday I saw Slumdog Millionaire and pittying my past poverty seems overindulgent compared to what children experience in India.
Garth Libre in Miami Fl. USA