History of Bade Bike Shop
Bade Bike Shop opened May 2, 1945, in two unused bays of Gniot Brothers Service Station on the northeast corner of Lee and Prairie Streets in Des Plaines. The owner was Carl J. Bade, 39, a Des Plaines resident who earlier in his life had been an amateur Chicago indoor bicycle racer.
Coincidently, the opening day was the thirteenth birthday of the author of this article who, as the first employee and owner's oldest son, started at thirty five cents an hour.
The business goal of the shop was to sell bicycles and repair them.
The two bays fronted on Prairie Street and were shut off from the rest of the building by 2 x 4's covered by paneling. There was a door in the wall that opened to the main business of the building. Each of the bays had large pull up doors leading to the street. One was usually opened in good weather and became the business entrance.
There was pot belly stove heat for the winter. Customers and my father and I used the gas station bathroom. Lunch was available in a brown paper bag packed early in the morning by my mother or as a small hamburger and eighteen cent chocolate milk shake purchased from the Prince Castle carryout around the corner.
The opening day was not an auspicious start. I believe my father said he took in thirty five cents the first day, the equivalent of my hourly salary. Fortunately business quickly improved.
The physical layout of the business space was simple in concept, complex in operation. The bay by the east wall was sunken so cars could drive over the hole and mechanics could work on the underside of a vehicle. My father covered the opening with a wood floor. A metal ladder led into the hole where extra inventory was stored. Unfortunately there was no electricity there so a flashlight was needed to find what you wanted.
The newly built west wall had shelves that held accessories and parts that were for sale. At the beginning there were not many items on the shelves.
Twelve inches below the high ceiling were metal rods six feet long and a half inch in diameter that were attached at five foot intervals to the back brick wall. Through experiment it was found that each rod could support a dozen bicycle tires of various sizes. Because the tires were stored so high it required a long pole to pull one off the rod, sometimes causing a tire to bounce off a new bicycle displayed on the floor below.
The shop would repair any make of bicycle, but my father decided to sell only Schwinn bikes because of their high quality and because they were manufactured in Chicago. The company owner was the elderly Ignaz Schwinn who was assisted by two sons. My father would call the company to place an order for bicycles and insist on speaking only to Ignaz, not one of the sons. Getting the owner on the line, my father would read from a list and order at least a dozen bicycles because that number gave him a break on shipping costs. The mostly assembled bicycles would arrive in a day or two in large cardboard cartons. As the number of bicycles ordered increased, disposal of the cartons became a problem.
In the middle 1940s most bicycles sold had wide "balloon" tires. The styles were either simple and budget priced or loaded with accessories and expensive. The later eventually became sought by collectors. A few years later the so-called simple lightweights with narrower tires became popular. At first they had foot brakes and could not "change gears" to make pedaling easier when going uphill. They were available only in dark blue for girls and maroon for boys. Cost was listed at $49.50.
By the end of the first summer the new business on Prairie Avenue was firmly established and my salary was increased to fifty cents an hour.
After a few years expansion was considered. The first move was to offer bicycles for rent, especially on the weekend. Twenty lightweight bicycles for that purpose were ordered - -- ten for women, ten for men. Rental price was twenty five cents an hour or two dollars for a day that started at 8 a.m. and ended at 6 p.m. I was awarded the franchise with fifty per cent of the gross income. I lasted for one summer and then someone else took over. Those were my high school years and I wanted my weekends.
Bicycle repairs mostly fell into a few categories: Flat tires, bent wheels, rear brake failure and accidents. In the beginning fixing a front flat was fifty cents. A back tire flat was sixty cents because you had to remove and properly replace the chain. In the early 1940s rubber tubes and tires were not available because the material was used for the war effort. There were butyl rubber tubes but they did not work very well. The best way to repair a puncture was to cover it with an adhesive patch, preferably heated, but even that tended to come loose. After the war, rubber tubes became so inexpensive a damaged tube was always replaced by a new one.
If a wheel became bent, you straightened it by tightening or loosening several spokes that joined the wheel hub to the wheel rim. The work involved mounting the wheel on a brace, slowly spinning the wheel and choosing the proper spokes to either tighten or loosen.
Most bent wheels occurred through accidents or by young boys engaging in "front wheel fights."
The mechanisms for the foot brake or coaster brake looked complex but were not. Repair involved replacing a defective part and properly returning it to the brake.
Damage to a child's tricycle was common. Invariably it happened when a child left the machine in the driveway behind a parent's parked car and the driver backed out without first checking behind the car. The result was the child often got a new tricycle and a tongue lashing.
Soon after opening my father decided he needed to learn how to weld because of the nature of some of the repairs. He turned to a local welder and hunting partner to learn that skill.
As the business grew and became better known, the shop took part in various celebrations held in the town. This increased involvement brought even more success for Carl Bade Bike Shop and after a few years of operation physical expansion was necessary.
Dr. Purvis, well known in Des Plaines and a friend of my father, lived on the southeast corner of Lee Street and Prairie Street, almost across Prairie Street from the bike shop. He sold his house with the lot to be used for commercial redevelopment. East of the house the doctor owned a vacant pie-shaped lot that fronted on Prairie Street with the point touching Center Street. My father purchased the lot for $750 and constructed a two story, pie-shaped brick building to house a new bike shop.
The new building, including the second floor, had more than five times the floor space of the old shop. It also had modern utilities and a bathroom. Access to the second floor was by steps, but the first floor ceiling also had a large opening through which cartons of new bicycles could be hoisted up for storage.
The entire first floor had an open feeling permitting customers to stroll through a large display of new bicycles that were for sale. Adequate work space ran along the entire back wall. A second wall supported shelves filled with spare parts and accessories. In a sense the new building had what the old one had but much more.
The building and new location were well received and resulted in a large increase in bicycle sales. The volume made Bade Bike Shop one of the top bike shops in the Midwest and hot on the heels of the southern states of California, Florida, Arizona and New Mexico where cycling weather is year round. New bicycle sales at Christmas topped several hundred year after year.
The larger volume of business could no longer be handled by the owner and part time help. Albert Bade, another family son, took a full time position in the shop. And then, Albert Winkelman, the owner's brother-in-law, came out of retirement to work part time.
Twenty five years after opening the business Carl Bade retired and turned the operation over to his son Albert. He ran the business until XXXX when he too retired. The new building no longer is home to a bicycle shop, but vestiges of the shop continue to show up throughout the country on Schwinn bikes with the Bade Bike Shop decal just below the handlebar.
