Originally Posted by
Chicagoan
... I'm sure that I am younger than alot of the guys here, I'll be 16 in a few days. But back to the topic at hand. I am fine with the performance of my Varsity. The brakes could be better, but they are fine now after I paid $140 to get the bike tuned up (needed new derailers). The other day, I was cruising at about 18mph when some roadie in a superhero costume flew past me. I kept up with him for the next half mile, then I got close enough and saw that it was some old dude ( no offence), Hillclimbing wasn't his his thing and he slowed to a crawl. The look on his face was priceless as I clanked past him on my 40 year old Varsity. ...
I love hearing about young whippersnappers getting interested in vintage bicycles, classical music, and numerous cultural assets I want to survive through succeeding generations. I am probably a bit older than you parents (58 tomorrow, on Tullio Campagnolo's birthday), but I have two true Varsity stories you may enjoy.
Following my one-and-only collision with a car, I had my prized Reynolds 531 frame straightened and continued to ride the bike. Shortly after moving to San Diego County, I was climbing a hill, trying to stay ahead of a young kid on a Varsity, when a crack began to propagate around my downtube, just behind the head tube lug. I had to slow down and pedal gently to get home safely.
About a dozen years later, my father-in-law gave me an early 1970s Varsity, which I used for commuting to work. Between the commuter rail station and my office was a 12% grade, on which I passed a certain chap almost daily. After a few weeks of this sort of abuse, he traded in his old klunker on a Specialized Epic, and every time he saw me, he blamed me for the expenditure. I replaced the Varsity with a Peugeot UO-8 of about the same vintage and broke a chainstay four years later. I suspect that would not have happened to the Varsity.