Dear Listees,
Jerry Moos wrote quite incorrectly that the West coast never came under attack during WW2.
Please edumacate yourself here : http://tinyurl.com/
There WERE certainly a number of attacks on the West coast during the war. Enough so that there was quite a panic, and this combined with racism whipped up by propaganda (and sheer greed to seize their assets at fire-sale prices) led to the notorious internment camps for Asian-Americans. A deplorable and unpleasant part of US history.
There was also the invasion of the Aleutian Islands off Alaska. Perhaps in retrospect all of these might seem like small incidents, but considering the shock of Pearl Harbor these incidents did help to create a large amount of "invasion fear". The Pacific coastline is a pretty vast with large remote areas and it was probably very easy to envision Japanese submarines being able to drop off all sorts of spies and worse mischief-makers, unobserved.
There was a considerable blackout and coastal monitoring by Civil Defense in major cities, especially early on in the war. It seems hard to believe that bicycle mounted CD patrols did in fact NOT exist, especially considering at the time the more common presence of bicycle delivery people, bicycle mounted mail carriers, and also the Western Union Telegram bike couriers. Don't forget that UPS (yes, THAT UPS that loves to smash up our beloved bikes) started as . . . TA-DA - a bicycle messenger and delivery service in Seattle.
Unlike the current paranoia about letting kids out to play, back then kids actually rode bikes - many of them rode all over the place. Doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to see them as blackout monitors, or waiting in vain doing plane-spotting activities.
Google searches are not that hard to do before posting historical revisions
and conjecture,
Mike Fabian
San Francisco, CA