RedNova News:

Standing in front of Wolski’s Tavern on Saturday morning, Steve Mayer beamed as he talked about the bicycle he picked to ride in the 21st annual Fat Tire Tour of Milwaukee.

The avid cyclist had a stable of bikes from which to choose, including a mountain bike and road bike that each might be worth more than your pizza delivery guy’s car.

But he settled on his little red Schwinn five-speed Stingray, the one he received on his sixth birthday 33 years ago this Wednesday.

“I got the bike for quitting sucking my thumb,” Mayer said.

And he pedaled it all the way into adolescence 1,030.4 miles, to be precise. That’s the reading on the odometer that broke sometime around age 12, and Mayer figures the last time he rode the bike was when he was 13 or 14. Then he moved onto a bigger Schwinn Typhoon, which he used as a paperboy for the Milwaukee Sentinel in his Whitefish Bay neighborhood.

By 1988 he had left his youth and his Schwinns behind and was riding mountain bikes. The red Stingray disappeared into storage in a family barn outside Milwaukee, where it remained entombed in rodent waste until Mayer resuscitated it for Saturday’s ride.

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