The first time I met Des Moines Register columnist and RAGBRAI founder Donald Kaul was Monday, June 14, 1971.

I was between journalism jobs, working on a construction crew, burying telephone cable near Williamsburg, Iowa, when Kaul and a few friends pedaled by us on a county blacktop road.

They were riding from Des Moines to Iowa City. We waved and scratched our heads. They waved and rode on.

This was two years before the first Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa in 1973. By then, I’d moved on from digging ditches and was a reporter in Davenport, the endpoint of that first-ever, weeklong ride.

The 51st RAGBRAI starts July 21.

I never rode RAGBRAI, but I did buy a bike that year – a 10-speed, orange Schwinn SuperSport that accompanied me to Des Moines in 1975. I rode that bike to work downtown for most of my 38 years at the Des Moines Register and Tribune.

My first two-wheeler, when I was 7 or 8 years old, was an adult bike my father had ridden to work. My feet did not reach the pedals when I straddled the center bar. So, I slipped my right leg under the bar to pedal. It was awkward, but it worked.

A year or so later, our parents bought me a used green, three-speed Schwinn Tiger and a new red Schwinn Corvette for my older brother, Steve.

Our bikes became business expenses a year or so later when Mom got us into mowing lawns.  At first, we pulled lawn mowers behind our bikes, reaching back with one arm; later, Dad built goosenecked transport carts that attached to seat posts on our bikes.

Mom kept the books and credited the first money we earned toward the cost of the bikes. Eventually, we mowed as many as 50 yards each summer for several years. By the time we finished, we each had respectable college funds.  

I was recently reminded of my bicycle history by an article in Jill Lepore’s 2023 collection of New Yorker essays called “The Deadline.”

A piece titled “Easy Rider” recalled her own biking adventures as a young girl and, later, as a college professor. Along the way, she provided a CliffsNotes chronology of bicycles.

The first two-wheelers, she explained, were pedal-free machines created in Germany in 1817 by Baron Karl von Drais, who called them “running machines.”

“On descent, it equals a horse at full speed,” the inventor claimed.

Pedals were added, most likely by a French carriage-maker, in about 1855. They were initially attached to the front wheel, which was increased in size to provide more propulsion/speed per revolution.

The French called their big wheelers “velocipedes … which is roughly Latin for ‘fast feet.’”

“People expected velocipedes to replace horses,” Lepore wrote. “It does not cost as much; it will not eat, kick, bite, get sick or die,” wrote an American in 1869.

By 1880, a “safety” bike was being sold. It had equal-sized wheels, pneumatic tires and pedals that drove the rear wheels. It was, according to Lepore, the prototype of modern bikes, minus brakes.

During the last decade of the 19th century, it looked like bicycles might replace horses, Lepore wrote. “But then along came the automobile.”

At the turn of the century, 1.2 million bicycles were sold in the United States. But less than a decade later, after the 1908 debut of the first Ford Model T, annual bicycle sales dropped to fewer than 200,000.

During the decades before and after 1900, Des Moines’ park planners included bicycle paths, along with golf courses and swimming pools, as proposed amenities for new parks. But while swimming and golf opportunities expanded, bike paths beat a retreat for the next half century.

Not until the 1970s, when oil prices suddenly shot up, did bicycles come back into fashion for adult transportation. Rides like RAGBRAI did much to promote biking.

Now, 50 years later – more than a century after the invention of the automobile – bike paths and bike lanes, abandoned during the 1920s, are truly back in vogue.