FIXING UP BIKES FOR NEEDY KIDS
For Nearly 40 Years, Ed Rivera Has Collected, Refurbished and Donated Bicycles
Almost every day, Ed Rivera stands outside his Jackson Street home in Willimantic and waves to everyone who drives by. The busy stretch of Route 195 — about 7 miles south of the UConn campus — gets plenty of traffic, and yet on one recent Tuesday nearly everyone who drove past returned his greeting.
And why shouldn’t they? Few people have done more for the community over the past few decades than Rivera, and he shows no signs of slowing down.
For nearly 40 years, Rivera has been collecting bicycles as part of Little Angels Bicycles. The program, which he began in 1980, takes donations in all forms — old bikes, new bikes, spare parts, financial contributions — and brings bicycles to people in the community who need them most, primarily children who attend local schools and live in the housing projects surrounding his home. In doing so, he has become a tireless advocate for a segment of society often pushed to the margins.
Back when he first started collecting bikes, he was surprised by the need.
“We noticed that a lot of little kids — the situation in Willimantic and surrounding towns, Coventry,
Columbia and all them — the population was growing. They started building housing projects all over the place and the need was there,” he said. “Somebody had to stand up to the plate. We started with a few bicycles — working on them, fixing them — then things started to grow, and I thought, ‘Oh this is pretty good.’”
Rivera has had financial and logistical support from local organizations including Charter Oak Federal Credit Union and dozens of police departments. Meanwhile, friends and family have helped out, hauling hundreds of bicycles around the state. However, it’s Rivera’s home that is the epicenter of the operation. His driveway serves as something of a collection bin and his basement is his workshop, with shelves containing every tool and part you could possibly think of to make a broken-down bike ride-able again.
“People want me to take a rust bucket and make it brand new,” he said.
The help comes from around the state, including Avon’s Rick Dubiel, who has contributed bikes for about four years.
‘I come across a lot of bikes and I have a storage shed, so when I accumulate enough, I bring them out to him,” he said.
Bicycles seem like an ideal way to give back, Dubiel says, because of the myriad benefits they offer children.
‘It was such a major part of my life as a kid growing up,” he says. “We used our bikes to travel, range 5 miles in any direction. It was a good part of the town. Part of our social life. Kept us out of trouble. It’s a great activity for kids.”
The group has grown considerably since it started 38 years ago. During the intervening decades, Rivera has seen the charity provide thousands of bikes to people across the globe — 10,000 to Haiti, 10,000 to Peru and 10,000 to countries in Africa. But it’s the young children in his hometown that he gets the most joy out of seeing.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of Little Angels is Natchaug Elementary School — which Rivera attended when he was a child. He makes a point to provide 40 bikes to the school every year before moving on to the rest of the Willimantic community and the state.
“I always give 40 brand new bicycles to Natchug School. I never fail.”
If it sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is. And it’s especially impressive when one considers that Rivera was sidelined with a stroke in July. A large part of the drive that keeps him motivated is a kinship he feels with the recipients of his bikes. When he looks at some of the children, he sees his own experience growing up as the youngest of nine children.
“The kids, the little kids. You’ve got a lot of kids that are 3, maybe 4, they get a bike. I was brought up, the youngest out of nine kids. I had bugs in my hair, I had worms in my stomach. I was real poor. I never got a Christmas present. I struggled to buy this house,” he said. “It’s been tough, but I stayed with it. I say, ‘I know what you’re going through, little guy.’”
It’s that mindset that has led Rivera to extend his charitable efforts to more than bicycles. His son, who is a Willimantic police officer, will hand over some toys after the Christmas “Stuff A Cruiser” drives. And Rivera heads right back over to his alma mater.
“I try to make people happy,” he said.