Bob,
Your Philips revitalization brings back memories of my 19" Philips 3- speed with the bent top tube. It was my first multi-speed bike, and I got it in 1963 when I was eleven and had outgrown my Schwinn Sting- Ray. I was very short, and that bent top tube was the only way I could fit an "adult" bike. It was a pretty blue-green color, and it survived lots of abuse in my pre-lubrication-awareness days....
That summer, the Philips became the ticket to my first real job, delivering prescriptions for Carl Ondre (our family's pharmacist) at Medical Center Pharmacy in Redwood City.
Yellow Cab was charging 50 cents per prescription to make deliveries, so I offered to make them on my bike for 35 cents each. Carl took me up on the offer once his surprise and shock wore off. (My mother still insists that she has no idea where I got that entrepreneurial streak.) I rode all over Redwood City during the next few summers (including up into the hills on Jefferson) with a map in the back pocket of my Levi's and the twin rear racks full of medications and other drug store products. I didn't lose many of them to breakage, either...
I bought my first Bianchi three years later, with the first $100 I'd saved from making those deliveries on the Philips. My folks and my friends could not understand why I wanted such a fancy and expensive bike (over $100!) when everyone else rode a Schwinn Varsity (costing only $69.99 back then) instead. But I was hooked on lively derailleured bikes, and I have been a Campi partisan ever since the Valentino gear on that marvelous blue bike, made possible by the folks at Philips and Sturmey-Archer.
Thanks for the memories,
Jon Spangler (taking a break from packing up the house in Alameda, CA USA)
On Sep 5, 2009, at 6:27 PM, <classicrendezvous-request@bikelist.org>
<classicrendezvous-request@bikelist.org> wrote:
>>
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Sat, 5 Sep 2009 18:10:37 +0000
>> From: Bob Hillery <rhillery@hawksi.org>
>> Subject: Re: [CR] Old Phillips - corrected link
>> To: <classicrendezvous@bikelist.org>
>> Message-ID: <W7407623496321771252174237@webmail10>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>>
>> Corrected flickr link:
>> http://www.flickr.com/
>>
>> ooops.
>>
>> Bob Hillery
>> Stratham, NH, USA