My Life Behind Bars (eBook)

John Campo (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
170 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
9798317825973 (ISBN)

Infos

My Life in the sport of cycling and bike racing from the time I first got on a two wheeler at the age of 10 to when I stopped racing at the age of 67 and retired. I still ride but I'm a gentleman biker now and only go out on sunny days.

I am a professional union musician, fine woodworker and luthier: I am also professional cyclist, coach, velodrome director; I have written many articles for news papers and magazines and have a series of 5 mystery/crime/noir novels published. The latest book is a biography on my life in cycling profession.

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My Life on a bike as a child to being a professional bike racer, coach, and velodrome director; this was done over 65 years while holding down a job as a union musician, and woodworker. I ran coaching programs children's after school cycling programs put on bike racing events and worked to gain sponsorship for a sport that can be very expensive in equipment, travel expenses, license fees and entry fees. My love for the sport was contagious and I made a difference and left the sport better than when I started.

Textauszug

Chapter One

I was asked by the official: "Do you want to do the last round tomorrow?" I was quick to answer: "No way, I'm not going to give Mike Robinson a day's rest." The third and deciding sprint round would be in the approaching twilight. The official, Gwen Bubb, worried that since the Kissena Velodrome had no lights and no fence, we might hit a rabbit or something. We were tied one round each, so I knew if I took him long on the last one, I would beat him. Here we were poised and ready; the holders let us go, and we pulled off at a walking pace into turn two. I let him take the lead. I closely watched his calf muscles. When he turned his head and I saw the leg muscles relax, I dashed down the banking full speed. He gave a great try, trying to pass me in turn four but I held him off for my first NY State Sprint Championship, 1999. I had to thank great bike racers Scott Berryman and Bob Zumwalt for that.

My dad brought home my first bike, a three-wheel job with a drive shaft instead of a chain drive. It was sturdy and slow; I even got beat by Cookie Monahan in a race. Peter and Cookie were my only friends when my family moved from Greenwich Village to Flatbush Brooklyn. I was an outcast, being Italian in an all Irish neighborhood. Peter and Cookie were outcasts because their mother was a brash German woman with ties to Nazi family members in Germany. We hung out together in my backyard, which was off limits to me, although my parents owned the Victorian three-family house. We lived in the attic apartment and an Irish family with seven boys lived on the ground floor apartment with access to the backyard. My mother told me it was my backyard and to go play there, however when I did there was a bunch of kids choosing sides for stickball game to be played against the garage in the driveway. They wouldn't let me play. So when the pitcher picked up the ball, I threw a stick at the ball and it hit the batter in the head, opening up a big cut. He was bleeding all over and his mother showed up screaming at me. Well, after that I was labeled 'crazy', but I was still only four years old so everyone gave me a wide berth. No one interfered with me or my crew using the backyard from then on.

Peter and Cookie lived in the attic across the way and we communicated across the driveway where our windows met. We would make a lemonade stand and pick flowers and sell them as a side venture on the corner at rush hour to workers on their way home. One day we picked some lovely flowers from a house at the opposite side of the block, and a kid came out and beat us up and trashed our tray of flowers. His name was Johnny McGuire. After the scuffle and our apology we became great friends and he joined our group of outcasts. I was flabbergasted when Peter told me that I was not going to attend school with Cookie and him because I was a Catholic, and they were Protestant. That was the first little upset in my young life.

Where I had spent the first three years of my life was with my extended family grandparents, aunts and uncles in Greenwich Village. Now in Brooklyn where every day is Saturday, and there is no hustle bustle of the big city to bounce off of, all I had was my gang of misfits. The next big blow was when Peter told me his parents were moving to Islip, Long Island. He assured me that we would still be friends and they would visit me. They never did however and I never saw them again. It was the first big heart-wrenching loss in my young life and I was devastated.

I was starting to hate Catholic school because the nuns were vicious and spiteful to kids that were vulnerable. A nun told me my head looked like a bird's nest. I remember coming home in tears because one of my classmates, Ray Hart, was humiliated in front of the class of 90 kids, and when he started to cry the nun put a bowl on the desk in front of him and told him: "Fill it up cry baby!" My mother was so upset that she took me to the rectory for an explanation, but the monsignor schmoozed her into keeping me in Catholic school.

Somewhere around the summer of 1958 when we didn't yet have air conditioning, my big bike adventures began. Money was slim to none and you had to find ways to entertain yourself. I asked my dad for a two-wheel bike and he made me prove I could ride one first. Danny Mannix lent me his bike; they pushed me down a driveway, and off I went on a 20" bike that they call a BMX bike today. Dad then bought me a brand new Huffy 24" bike. I grew out of that bike real fast and traded it for a used 26" Columbia.

Every morning in the summer, I would ride that Columbia to the Riis Park Beach Bay 14 and swim until around noon and ride home back over the Marine Parkway Bridge. The rest of the day I'd lay around the house trying to keep cool. One thing that caused a panic was that I got really black quickly, and my dad was mad at my new complexion. I can remember the Irish girls in the neighborhood would tell me I wasn't really white.

One day when my dad came home from work seeing me laying around he said: "You kids don't know what to do with yourselves all summer. Why, when I was a kid I rode my bike to Poughkeepsie."

That set off my brain to thinking.

I got John McGuire (Mack) age 13; Bobby Walker (The Barrel) age 11; Danny Mannix age 12; and me, Johnny Campo, age 12, and we started working on our bikes for a trip to somewhere. Where we would go, we didn't yet know. Our minds were raging on the things we had to carry for a long extended trip: army surplus tent, Sterno stove, axe, canned food, and miscellaneous items that we would need, plus a carrier of some sort for our bikes. I think it was Bobby Walker who had a lot of this camping stuff because he was a Cub Scout. As the days wore on my dad got involved. I don't know if he thought we were really going to go through with this scheme or not, but he couldn't say no to it. I mean, he said he did it when he was a kid, and that gave us the green light. He even made plywood platforms for our rear carriers so we could put a backpack and tent on them.

We had a surplus army pup tent which was not the most compact—but what the heck?—and ponchos also army surplus for rain and laying on the floor of the tent. Bobby the Barrel (so-called because all he did was drink cherry Cokes and read Nancy comic books) said his family vacationed in Jefferson Valley New York some summers at a place called Kerney's Lakeside Rest. That sounded good to us and we made that our finish line for the trip. Bobby's mother called ahead and told Mrs. Kerney she might see some miscreants show up at her door.

I started poring over gas station maps and plotting our route. People told us: "You just go over the Brooklyn Bridge and take Broadway straight to Peekskill." That sounded easy enough... We loaded up our backpacks with canned food and utensils. I was able to tape the axe to my frame and fit the poncho in between the cross tubes on the Columbia. I took apart the New Departure rear brake and greased the bearings. In those days the trend was to point the handlebars up, it actually made for better control, and I guess it was the kids that had paper routes that did it because they could put the newspaper bag to hang off the bars. Bikes in the 1950s were what our world revolved around. We were always looking for new places to ride.

I remember when Mack said to me: "What do you think that building is outside the school window?" It was the only large building in that part of Brooklyn, and curiosity got the better of us, and off we went only to find out it was Kings County Hospital.

Our lives also revolved around the block, and as we approached our teen years, the girls on the block were very interested in our shenanigans. There was Judy Franklyn, Betty Boop, Barbara Calimier, MaryAnn Beck, and Cathleen Casey. Betty's house was a great hangout for red light parties and spin the bottle.

As the day was fast approaching, I told the guys to get their packs ready, and to meet me at 3 AM in front of my house, since I was carrying most of the gear. The morning we left, I woke my dad and the pitiful look on his face was so sad, but he never said no to the trip. He got up and met us outside the house. Danny's mother and father were livid, and Bobby's mother was screaming that it was all my father's fault. I don't remember any hesitation on our part at all. We systematically shared the tent sticks and tents and pulled out of E. 35th Street, Flatbush, Brooklyn at 3 AM on July 2, 1958. You can imagine this was not something 1950s pre-teens did on bikes that today would be called Beach Cruisers.

The old-timers that rode fixed gear bikes in six-day races were all but gone. My father would tell me about them, names like Georgetti, who was brought to this country by an Italian club named USI. I would imagine my father must have ridden his fixed gear bike to Poughkeepsie. What a fixed gear bike meant, and him saying he stopped the bike by grabbing the front wheel with a leather glove, was beyond me.

The street lights cast a misty glow as we went down Glenwood Road to Flatbush Avenue, and slid downtown past Grand Army Plaza in the middle of night. We were so excited we couldn't stop talking and yelling into the quiet of the Brooklyn night. Approaching the Brooklyn Bridge we had to find the stairway to get on the footpath. Previously Mack and I had ridden over the Manhattan Bridge with the truck traffic on the lower level, but we couldn't do that with all this gear and little Bobby and Danny with us. Once we wobbled around an industrial cobblestoned area we managed...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 25.11.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport
• ISBN-13: 9798317825973 / 9798317825973