Vintage Raleigh Bike

More info about this image

Vintage Raleigh Bike

This bike is permanently parked outside my favorite diner in Salt Lake City, next to this bike. I’ve walked by it countless times and the double bar design and coloring always catches my eye. Love the blue. I finally had my camera with me and shot this image as well as this one:

Vintage Raleigh Bike Chainguard by Jon Armstrong for Blurbomat.com

This bike looks to be the inspiration for Raleigh’s Retroglide bikes.

While I was trying to find the exact original model name of this bike, I found Cycle Smithy. That site has a sweet bicycle museum with some really beautiful and weird bikes:

1950 J C Higgins Color Flow Blue Vintage Bike

Spacelander grande vintage bicycle

I never had a Raleigh bike. Schwinn and whoever made Free Spirit bikes for Sears. Something about the orange on the bike in my images makes me think of 1973, cold Pepsi in 12 oz. bottles (5¢ deposit!) and the intro to “Gimme Shelter” on AM radio. And Nixon leaving the White House. Always Nixon.

I still don’t know the model name or year(s) this was available in its original form. I know it’s vintage, it’s made by Raleigh and it’s a bike.