The Bikernet official Curator, Don Whalen, recently ran across this 1913 Sears during a swap and trade transaction. The seller mentioned in passing, “This bike was featured in Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”
Don was a childhood fan of this publication. “You’re kidding,” he said.
“Nope,” the seller said, “here’s the clipping.”
The story behind this bike didn’t end with the published clipping. The first owner, Keith Henry bought the Sears new and rode it virtually his entire adult life. When he could no-longer peddle-start the bike, he welded a loop to the front of the frame, and his Knoxville, Tennessee family towed him to get it started.
He rode it from 1913 until 1971, when he was forced to quit. He passed three years later in 1974. Hell, he didn’t register the bike until 1960, and it cost $6.00 at the time.
Sears Roebuck, the Chicago-based department store added motorcycles to their massive catalog in 1912. In 1954 the catalog company made a deal with Puch and sold Austrian made 49 cc lightweight machines, and Italian Gilera until 1968 when they dropped motorcycles.
There you have it. Wait, here’s some history around Robert LeRoy Ripley, the founder of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
In 1919 Ripley married Beatrice Roberts. He made his first trip around the world in 1922, delineating a travel journal in installments. This ushered in a new topic for his cartoons: unusual and exotic foreign locales and cultures. Because he took the veracity of his work quite seriously, in 1923, Ripley hired a researcher and linguist named Norbert Pearlroth as a full-time assistant. That same year his feature moved from the New York Globe to the New York Post.
Throughout the 1920s, Ripley continued to broaden the scope of his work and his popularity increased greatly. He published both a travel journal and a guide to the game of handball in 1925 and, in 1926, became the New York state handball champion and wrote a book on boxing. With a proven track record as a versatile writer and artist, he attracted the attention of publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst, who managed the King Features Syndicate. In 1929, Hearst was responsible for Believe It or Not! making its syndicated debut in seventeen papers worldwide. With the success of this series assured, Ripley capitalized on his fame by getting the first book collection of his newspaper panel series published.
On November 3, 1929, he drew a panel in his syndicated cartoon saying “Believe It or Not, America has no national anthem.” In 1931, John Philip Sousa published his opinion in favor, stating that “it is the spirit of the music that inspires” as much as it is Francis Scott Key’s “soul-stirring” words. By a law signed on March 3, 1931 by President Herbert Hoover, “The Star-Spangled Banner” was adopted as the national anthem of the United States.
–Wikipedia
