If not for the moms who threw away those baseball cards, the folks who altered the "common" commercial products of their time, and the many other examples that were just used as intended and eventually used up, there would not be many "rare" types of anything except for those limited-edition/limited-run specialized examples that were collector's pieces from the start.

We are talking about a commercially available mass-produced consumer-grade bicycle here -not a hand-built race bike or custom show-stopper bike built by a famous builder to spec for a well-heeled buyer. This is not a high sin of destroying an irreplaceable masterpiece that belongs in a museum.

In the end it's just frakkin' stamped-out mass-produced Schwinn for chissake!