Just watching a movie called Strange Bargain, 1949. It’s an American movie and I think the setting is California. A family is at the breakfast table and the 10-yeat old kid is trying to persuade his pop to buy him a bike. He says, “I know where I can get one second-hand - $28 and another 50 cents for the license.”
The license? Kids needed a license to ride a bike in California in the 40s?
It wasn’t a license to ride a bike, it was a little registration tag or sticker for the bike itself. It’s actually still a requirement in a lot of places (it was only repealed in LA in 2009) but actual enforcement is pretty uncommon. Usually the worst you’ll get is an unsympathetic ear from the cops if your unregistered bike gets stolen.
Yep. When I was a kid there were little license plates that hung off two slots on the back of the bicycle seat. Like GreasyJack says, you registered your bike with the police, and if you lost it or it was stolen, the cops would know it was yours.
In Tempe, AZ in the late 80’s they would put a yellow numbered sticker on the seat tube and stamp the number from that sticker on the bottom bracket. It never got MY stolen bike back.
Back in the 70s one year our town got a bug up it’s ass and decided it was going to start enforcing the bicycle license law. Cops handing out warnings and fines all summer long to the kids who didn’t have a tag.
it might be mostly registration for theft though they might have safety literature that they would want you to read and follow.
I grew up in a small city in SE Wisconsin in the 60’s and 70’s. An annual license was $1. At first it was a blue sticker that went on the frame part where the seat post sunk into. But in the early 70’s it changed to an actual plate that you hung off the back of the seat with hooks.
Usually you were left alone, but if you fucked around like built a jump ramp on a heavily trafficked sidewalk and bothered pedestrians [
jebus kripes that was fun! ] patrol officers would take your bike and you couldn’t get it back for 7 days. And then it would cost you. At first it was $2, but then it went up to $5. it was always more than the license was.
And $5 was a lot of money for a kid in '68!
Bikes that weren’t picked up got sold at an annual auction.
I remember one time my brother parked his bike at another boy house. That guys stupid mother didn’t know who’s bike it was, so naturally called the cops to report an abandoned bicycle on her property.
:rolleyes::smack:
He didn’t know she did that so when they got back from swimming he thought somebody stole his bike! He combed the neighborhood looking for that bike to no avail.
About a month later we went to the bike auction and there was his bike with a tag on it that it was turned in as abandoned. He had to pay $12 to buy his own bike back! He told that other guy he was going to punch 1 tooth out for every dollar he had to spend to get his own bike back. So the kid stole money out of his mothers purse and gave it too him. She found out and the kid talked. She bitches to our folks and my brother has to give the money back and get’s his bike taken away and put in the attic for the rest of the summer.
2 weeks later my brother beat that kid until he begged for death!
Had he paid the buck for the license when that twat reported the abandoned bike the local cop could have checked it and he’d of gotten his bike back that day.
They were just municipal ordinances. The town I grew up in did not have them, but I think every other town nearby did. Bike theft was not much of a problem, kids would just leave their bikes lying on the sidewalk in front of the drug store lwhile they were in there reading comic books,and I never heard of anybody’s bike being stolen. I can’t imagine how it would be a deterrent, it would take ten seconds to get the plate off with a pair of pliers, but the bike’s serial number would be on file with the police if it was licensed, and the plate is just a sign that the bike was not known to be stolen when the plate was issued. The fee probably just offset the cost of having a series of plates manufactured to order, with the name of the town on them. There were rules and regs, probably enforceable in some way – I got pulled over by a cop for riding at night without a light, scared the shit out of me, I was afraid he’d tell my dad.
That’s certainly what the line referred to, but FWIW, there are certain places, like state roads, where, at least in some Indiana counties, you have to have a driver’s license to ride a bike on them. Actually, I think a motorcycle license would work too. They want you to be riding an adult-sized bike, to know highway rules, and they want to be able to give you points against your license for unsafe operation.
Now that the question about the license has been answered, does $28 for a used bike in 1949 strike anyone else as a lot of money?
The BLS inflation calculator says that’s the equivalent of $280 today.
Here in Oregon, many cities and universities offer bicycle registration but it is optional, and usually free. If the bike gets stolen, having the information such as size, color, serial number, on file can help you identify the bike. But the authorities are quick to state that registration does NOT indicate who owns the bicycle. Obviously, you could register your bicycle and then sell it the very next day and now it legally belongs to the person you sold it to, who is under no obligation to re-register it. If someone steals your bike and then claims they paid you cash for it, you essentially have a case of their word against yours. All the registration does is establish whether you’re talking about the same bicycle or different bicycles.
5 years ago, there was a bill introduced in the Oregon legislature that would REQUIRE bicycles to be registered, just like motorcycles and mopeds. What made no sense to me was the fact that they wanted $54 every two years to register bicycle, the same price as registering a car at that time, but motorcycles paid less money. It didn’t seem fair to me that it would costs less to register a motorcycle but bicycles would have to pay full price. Anyway, the bill didn’t pass.
Personally, I would gladly pay 7 cents per day for each bicycle I own IF it meant that the cops would finally take seriously the task of enforcing traffic laws for bicycles. That was the stated purpose of the law, according to the bill’s sponsor. But I suspect that, if it had passed, things would just continue on with business as usual, bicycles running red lights, riding the wrong way on one-way streets, and cops looking the other way until there’s a crash.
In 1975 A Schwinn scrambler was $125 which the calculator says is $553 in todays money. Might as well have been a million dollars as I didn’t have that either.
Largely quoting myself from another thread a few years ago…
Long Beach, California required bicycle registration until early 2011. The law was apparently widely ignored (it certainly was by me), partly because actually performing the registration was a major pain; what really prompted efforts to change it was its apparent inconsistency with Long Beach’s efforts to promote itself as one of the more bike-friendly cities in the area.
Here is a city news release discussing the change back when it was under city council consideration in December 2010:
Here is a blog article from the Los Angeles Times in February 2011 describing the passage of the above-mentioned motion.
Lakewood, OH technically requires registration of all bikes, but I’ve never heard of it actually being enforced. It’s mostly just for tracking down stolen bikes (as long as the bike is actually in the city of Lakewood, because the Cleveland police don’t have time to give a damn about bike theft). It’s not a plate-- It’s a sticker that you attach to the frame, and which won’t come off without stripping the paint off that spot. Plus they record the manufacturer’s serial number. I expect that if someone stole a bike and claimed they bought it cash, the fact that registration is mandatory would help the legitimate owner in the ensuing he-said-she-said.
And $280 or $553 isn’t all that much to pay for a bicycle, but it is a lot for a bargain used bike from “I know a place”. A kid nowadays begging “It won’t cost that much!” would probably name a figure under $100.
No, it sounds about right to me.
In 1982, I bought a Sears Free Spirit 10-speed bicycle for $99 brand new, which is $244 in 2014 dollars and $24.40 in 1949. Three years later, I bought a better quality Bike Nashbar 12-speed for $239 ($529 in 2014 and $52.90 in 1949), and that was about half what a similar bike cost in a brick-and-mortar bike shop. The fact that you can buy a made-in-China 10-speed today for $79 is AMAZING when you realize that’s only $32 in 1982 dollars – less than 1/3 what I paid for my Sears Free Spirit! Those kind of bargains were NOT available in 1949.
I can easily imagine an above-average-quality bike in 1949 selling for $39 new and $28 used.
My first bike was a 76’ Scrambler (from West Allis Schwinn as a matter of fact). I was saving my allowance of 50 cents a week to buy it. I was probably up to $8 when my dad gave in and bought it for me. I had no idea it was $125.
In about 1950, the basic wide-tire one-speed Schwinn with Bendix rear-wheel brake was about $40. (Maybe $4-500 in today’s dollars.) “Skinny-wheel” bikes were laughed at. Used bikes were plentiful,at about $10-15 in decent condition.
Here’s one example of a city that still requires a bicycle license (scroll to the bottom).
Here in Austin back in the early 70’s my dad took me to the firehouse to register my new bike. I don’t know what it cost but I got a little plate that was attached with tin strips below the post. They also stamped the number on the bottom bracket. I was in awe.
Well, looking at Sears’ current selection, for example, there are a lot of brand-new kids’ bikes for around $100, which would make twenty-eight 1949 dollars for a used one seem fairly expensive.
Straight inflation numbers are going to be misleading, though. Both the market and the industry for bicycles have changed a lot in the last 60-70 years. Globalization has made a lot of mass-produced goods very, very cheap, and bicycles are produced on larger scales than they once were. These days, most bikes sold at Sears are going to be near the bottom of the barrel, quality-wise, probably only above Wal-Mart. Kids’ bikes from Trek range in price right up to $1000.
(And I just paid about $3500 for a new Trek, which is still a bit on the cheap side for carbon fiber racing bikes – there’s practically no upper limit on bicycle pricing!)