Wheelmen ride through bicycle history

Round Rock (KXAN) - For the sixth straight year, bicycle enthusiasts will gather in the Texas Hill Country this weekend for the LBJ 100 Bicycle Tour .

The event, put on by the “ Friends of the LBJ National Historical Park ,” to support the park, boasts rides of 10, 30, 42, 62 and 85 miles. Riders will spread out over scenic country roads surrounding Stonewall in Gillespie County .

But this year, the riders will be joined by members of the “ Wheelmen ,” an international organization dedicated to preserving the history of cycling from its roots in the 19th century.

Among the Wheelmen planning to attend are Karen and Don VanOverloop, of Round Rock. Their immersion in vintage cycling started with Karen’s father, when she was still just a teenager. He worked for Ford Motor Company and, with a group of friends in the “Early Engine Club,” started building exact replicas of the old, “high wheelers,” bicycles built with one huge front wheel and a much smaller one in the rear.

“They were using micrometers and machining all the parts,” Karen VanOverloop recalled.

“So he made two high wheelers, one for himself and one for my brother and then one that my sister and I shared. And I was about 16 when I learned to ride.

“But my mother decided she needed to ride, too. So he made two or three replicas of a tricycle like this that my mother could ride one of them.

“And then eventually he got my grandparents riding. And of course, the boyfriends started riding.

One of those boyfriends was a young man named Don VanOverloop.

“I was scared to death,” he said, “because her dad was,” his voice trailing off in search of an appropriate adjective.

“Scary,” his wife offered.

“Scary,” he laughed. “That's a good way of putting it. And I got out on the road and the first thing that happened was the chain broke. And I'm thinking this bike's, like 100 years old and I just broke it.’”

You see, by that time, Karen’s family had moved on from replicas to the real thing, actual vintage bikes of all kinds, including the high wheelers.

“My father's philosophy,” she said, “was: 'Save the bike. You're repairable; the bike's not.'’

And indeed, over the decades, plenty of human body parts suffered in the ongoing effort to save the bike.

“We've had people that have broken their jaws,” said Don VanOverloop. “Typical is you're riding along and all of a sudden the front wheel stops. Your center of gravity is right over the pedals. So you go forward and you put your arms out and they break their arms. It gets really messy.”

“The front wheel hits something,” said Don VanOverloop, one of the couple’s two sons, “and you'll just go straight forward over and, you know, there's not really any grace to it.”

Perhaps the only riding member of the family to escape calamity, so far, is Karen. But she, too, had a close call.

“I was riding at Walt Disney World in a parade when I was a teenager,” she remembered. “And I missed a curb where there was a raised spot in the pavement and I was riding my high wheeler over there and I missed the brick and I landed in a man's arms.”

Despite the danger, though, the family relishes its hobby.

“The first thing I can remember is show-and-tell days,” said John VanOverloop, “going and being like, 'Okay, finally I can do something cool.'

“You know, we'd go to Grandpa's basement. It would be 400 or 500 bikes and you're just sitting there like, it looks like a museum.”

Another part of the legacy is something known as, “Centuries,” 100-mile rides aboard vintage bikes, including the high wheelers.

“First of all,” testified Don VanOverloop, “your derrière really feels the leather seat after about 30 or 40 miles. And secondly, these bikes don't have any gears. So if you go down a hill, you go really fast. If you go up a hill, you go really slowly.

But for all the fun, there is, among the Wheelmen, an overarching goal.

“The mission,” said Karen VanOverloop, “is to preserve the heritage and the history of cycling, the changes that cycling brought to other industries.

“Automobiles, planes, all those technologies began down there in the 1860s and the 1840s. And as they added those technologies to bicycles, they then went into other vehicles.

“Women's clothing especially was also very directly impacted by cycling history.

“History is easy for us to forget. You know, we go on to our computers and our cars and that kind of thing and it's very easy to forget where we began.”

That history, including Wheelmen wearing their vintage garb, will be on full display over the weekend at the LBJ 100.