Bikes for kids
Donated bucks can help needy kids wake to bikes this Christmas. Page 1c
Do you remember your first bike? I posed that question to my Midwest City childhood friends and received a flood of nostalgic answers.
Cheri Hill Allen was 7 when she got a pink and white Schwinn for Christmas. “Loved that bike,” she said.
Eva Vasquez Maerten’s first bike also was a Christmas present.
“I remember riding it to McDonalds with my brother in the summers to get a nice cold Shamrock shake,” she said.
Robert Slomkowski recalls he and his brother both were surprised with 1966 Huffy Rail bikes one Christmas.
“Due to the stretched-out frame, I was too small to pop wheelies,” said Slomkowski, who as an adult owns and occasionally rides a ‘66 Rail.
Fred Kienle, an author, speaker and consultant from Garland, Texas, said his first bike— a Western Flyer gifted to him by his uncle— expanded his world. He and his friends would ride to the swimming pool, movies or into the desert to go hiking.
“We’d put streamers on the handle bar grips and clip baseball cards to the spokes,“Kienle said. “Today, when I walk into Walmart where zillions of bikes are lined up, something wells up inside me,” he said, “and I can hear them whispering ‘Buy me, ride me, remember when ... free as a bird ... riding your bike.’”
It’s no surprise that a bike is the No. 1 wishedfor Christmas gift of needy children through the Salvation Army’s annual Angel Tree program.
For nearly a decade, I’ve had the privilege to help distribute donated toys the week before Christmas to parents who, without help, wouldn’t be able to afford Christmas for their kids. There’s so much joy in the parents’ faces when they collect the presents. Many cry.
Amid the joy, some parents whose children requested bikes and didn’t get them, beg for them.
Last year, thanks to the generosity of Oklahoman readers and several corporate sponsors, all 1,535 kids whose moms had hoped for a bike got one. The previous year, some 650 needy kids didn’t wake Christmas morning to a dreamedfor bike.
The Buck$ 4 Bikes program, founded in 2006 by the Salvation Army Women’s Auxiliary, helps fulfill those dreams.
Every July, the auxiliary distributes more than 100 countertop Red Kettles to area businesses to collect donations for the program. Every penny donated goes to order $34 to $52 bikes from Ohio-based Huffy Bicycles in September. FedEx ships the bikes for free, Rotary members and other volunteers assemble the bikes in early December, and the Oklahoma Bicycle Society supplies a helmet for every bike donated.
How to help
Drop a buck in Buck$ 4 Bikes’ buckets when you see them this month. This Thanksgiving, take an Angel Tree tag for a child who wants a bike from a tree in Penn Square or Quail Springs Mall; or better yet, send a tax-deductible donation now to The Salvation Army Women’s Auxiliary, 1001 N Pennsylvania, Oklahoma City, OK 73107, Memo: Buck$ 4 Bikes.
When I filed this article, I mailed my donation. Won’t you join me? Christmas will be here before we know it!