Just remembering this "Open Road" BMX bike sold by Montgomery Ward. It was a fall day and my dad took me to Golden Ring Mall to see a movie. I'm not 100% sure but I want to say it was "Hangar 18" which was about the government covering up a collision that the Space Shuttle had with an alien spacecraft or something. If I remember correctly later in life I'd get flashbacks of the parallels between Hangar 18 and the Roswell UFO crash tale, in particular the Blue Room, which was supposedly the room where the aliens were kept, and was later memorialized by the sound system called The Orb. All of this is very loose as far a memories go.
Anyway, back to the bike. Before the movie we took a stroll through the MonkeyWards and went to the bike section. Dad knew I was going to ask for a bike for Christmas becayse I -always- asked for a bike, so I guess he figured he would get ahead of the game, and let me pick out the exact one I wanted. This was not the exact one I wanted. This one is:
Unfortunately this was out of our price range. In fact at this point in my life I had never even been to a real bike shop and seen a Redline in real life. But on this particular day it didn't matter, I was stoked that I at least got to pick out the exact bike I wanted from the row of stingray clones and ten speeds. This was the only thing even close to what I needed. Boy was I happy when he walked up to the counter and put it on lay-away!
The next few months were torture, waiting for Christmas day and my new ride. Soon enough the day came and I couldn't wait to take out my new bike and check out the other new bikes that all the neighborhood kids had gotten. Whether mine was nicer or not I was sure I was the only one with this model.
Overall, I had a blast on this bike, thrashing the bejeezus out of it until some point about mid summer when I cracked the rear Lester Allow Mag. This was an interesting failure...the bike would still roll, but it made a noise that said "when this thing finally fails completely, you are gonna end up bloody and hurt. I listened to that message and soon enough traded something or other for some spoked wheels from Crazy Gary, the neighborhood tinkerer and electronic genius.
Ended up getting a bit more lifespan out of it and of course as it grew closer to Christmas I started thinking about what I was going to replace it with, so it soon faded into oblivion like a zillion bikes before and after. Now that I'm, older it is very easy to see that this thing was most likely made in the same factory as the Huffy Pro Thunder series. Open Road, you were not the best bike I the world but I'm fond of the times we had together.
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