Just got off the phone with my excitable brother, who called in a no small state of agitation over a find he’d made in the attic over Mom’s garage.

Seems our old bicycles were up there, and upon investigation he found that his is worth a lot of money. I don’t know what pleased him more – finding his bike or learning it was valuable. Probably a little of each.

His bike is a Schwinn Fastback – a variant of the Stingray model with a banana seat, ape-hanger handlebars and most importantly, a 5-speed transmission controlled by an oh-so-desirable (to a boy in 1968) bar-mounted stick shift. It was an exceptionally cool bike in its day and made my brother the envy of his friends, most of whom were tooling around on hand-me-down 3-speeds. When they were all lined up at school, my brother’s bike looked like a Ferrari parked next to a bunch of Amish buggies.

And now it is a collector’s item.
Of course, my brother went immediately to eBay to see how much of a fortune his two-wheeler was going to bring (answer: wow), and here is where he encountered a dilemma. Should he fix up the bike, which is nearly complete but a little rough and rusty? Should he sell it as is? Or should he sell it part by part to collectors looking to restore Fastbacks of their own?

Unfortunately, my brother is ill-equipped to handle such questions, as he is sentimental by nature. And as we all know, sentimentality has no place in the cutthroat world of antique toys. And I do mean cutthroat.

Just watch what happens when an old toy shows up on “Antiques Roadshow.” There’s one appraiser who practically sneers when he observes that a toy has been played with. I guess in his world, kids are supposed to keep their toys in the boxes unopened, in pristine condition, awaiting the day when they transmogrify from “playthings” into “collectibles.” What a happy Christmas morning that would be: 
“Oh, wow, it’s the new G.I. Joe with the kung-fu grip!”
“Yes. Now, keep it in the box, dear, so it will be worth something someday. Mustn’t play with your investments.”

But back to the bike. The smart course would be to get started tearing that thing down and putting the parts on eBay, where there is bound to be some sucker – I mean, collector – who doesn’t mind paying a wildly inflated price for a chain guard. And another one who’ll do the same for handlebars. And yet another who has been looking for a front fork. And so on. 

But if I know my brother, he’ll either stick it in a storage shed with the intention of fixing it up some day, or he will fix it up – making him the sucker on eBay paying the wildly inflated prices for bike parts – and then find himself unable to part with it. Either way, his fortune will remain unclaimed.

And that is OK. He got a lot of fun out of that bike, which is what really matters. And besides, it’ll keep him even with me. My old bike was up in the attic too, remember, and landed on the trash heap because it was worth zip. I know. I checked. 

While cleaning out Mom’s house in preparation for the big move into town, I ran across a December 1979 copy of “Mad” magazine.

Naturally, I saved this from the trash pile. It’s “Mad,” after all –the publication that, along with Green Lantern comic books, made adolescence tolerable. Until I got a little older and started reading “Playboy,” that is.
(Yes, I said “reading” “Playboy,” although I’m not sure why. As far as my friends and I were concerned, we never read “Playboy,” although we looked at it plenty. The appearance of articles among the photos was nothing but a rumor to us.)

Anyway, back to “Mad.”
This particular copy – dog-eared, a little musty – must have belonged to my brother, P.D. By December 1979 I was long gone from both the house and from the roster of dedicated “Mad” readers (see above under: moved on to Playboy, or va-va-voom.) 

But the issue has all the features I remember from my years of “Mad” readership: a brilliant movie parody drawn by Mort Drucker, goofy panels drawn by Don Martin, outstanding little cartoons in the margins drawn by Sergio Aragones – the pencil-wielding heroes of my misspent youth. This one comes a little late in the run for other “Mad”-isms I remember so fondly – the words “potrzebie” and “axolotl,” for example, appearing here and there in the magazine, or the rules for the greatest game ever, 43-Man Squamish. Some of it is wildly funny; some of it doesn’t stand the test of time, but all in all it’s a good example of late 1970’s nonsense.

It was my kidhood ambition to … well, I had a lot of ambitions. I wanted to be a lawyer, or so I thought. This was before I got a close-up look at how they had to make their livings. I also wanted to be a major league baseball player, a NASA scientist, a television star, a radio broadcaster and, in a stunning lack of imagination, a newspaperman, which is what my father did and where I eventually landed.

But mixed in with all that was a desire to somehow be a contributor to “MAD.” I imagined the magazine’s office as a place where people sat around all day saying funny things and drawing funny pictures, probably while wearing funny hats, and saw it was a perfect fit for me. After all, I liked jokes, and I was known far and wide, or at least throughout study hall, for my caricatures of our Brighton Junior High School science and agriculture teacher, Leonard Prisock. 

Mostly, though, I wanted to be involved in an enterprise whose sole purpose, it seemed to me, was making fun of everything. It seemed a perfect fit with my talents.

Alas, life intervened, and I embarked on that newspaper career I mentioned previously. I did so, however, with “Mad” in my memory banks and in my attitude, which is how I eventually became a columnist who made fun of things. Nice to know my misspent adolescence paid off.

Oh, and incidentally: I also found a couple of old “Playboys” among my brother’s college papers. Funny how “Mad” held onto its charm over the years – well, mostly – while the “Playboy” magazines did not. They went into the trash heap.

I must admit the articles looked interesting, though.