Retrospect: bicycle inner tubes

Self-tutoring about people and events from the past: the tutor thinks back about inner tubes.

When I was a kid in the Maritimes in the late 70s, change was upon us. I didn’t fully realize it, of course, because I was unable to remember what it had been like before: my awareness began around ’76. However, the economy started to get rocky, after being still quite strong in the early 70s. By ’78 and ’79 it was plainer to see: the school was contracting, some businesses were closing, and people were talking about the declining economic environment. Moreover, prices were rising.

In response to the developing recession, and also because it was a farming place, people liked to reuse and repurpose things. For townies, it was about saving money; farmers, since they had storage space, didn’t like to throw anything away that they could perhaps repurpose. Being a kid in that context, I developed that same point of view.

One example was inner tubes. Whenever one was finally beyond patching, kids saw it as gold: “You get great elastics from an inner tube,” one older kid observed. I wondered – did he mean cutting the tube into rounds or strips? Such an idea was foreign to me: at that age I wasn’t allowed to use cutting devices beyond scissors. Yet I decided that must be what he meant.

Like so many ideas, I let that one rest. Over various moves, I rode my bike less. Eventually I ended up in cities where I took the bus. Yet I never fully forgot that kid’s love of expired inner tubes and the fact that you could get elastics from them.

When my own kids had bikes, one of them had an inner tube that needed replacing. I kept the old one, still recalling what that kid had said around 35 years earlier. The old inner tube sat in the tool box, unused – until yesterday, when, doing yard repairs, I decided I wanted some big elastics.

I got out the expired inner tube from the toolbox and cut it with shears to produce some elastic strips. It worked great, just like the kid predicted back in ’77:)

Those farmers were smart:)