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For years now I’ve been searching for a Murray Wildcat.

You may remember Murray-Ohio. The company built cheap bicycles from the 1930s to the 1990s, the kind other companies stamped with their name for resale. When I was a kid, that bike of yours from Sears or Western Auto probably came from Murray’s giant factory in Lawrenceburg, Tenn. – my hometown.

The factory is still there. About 43 acres under a single roof, it’s roughly the size of 30 football fields. I remember as a kid being told it was the world’s largest bicycle factory. Now it’s a big, mostly empty building. Locked gates keep out people who don’t want inside, who watched helplessly as their factory strangled on cheap Asian imports.

This is not some self-indulgent, fuzzy-headed reminiscence of a small southern town that will never be the same. Okay, maybe it is. A little. My search for a Wildcat is probably a metaphor for my search for that same small town. More on that later.

What I’d really like, though, is that bike. It was so cool. I delivered newspapers on icy Tennessee mornings on the thing, hung out with friends the rest of the day while straddling its banana seat. I lived on that bike. Heck, I loved that bike.

So what’s a Murray Wildcat look like?  To the right is an advertisement from the 1960s, found thanks to the magic of Google. Doubt I’d find one for that price today, but I’ll happily write a check if someone’s selling.

Back to the metaphor, the search for the bike and my hometown. Neither of my parents worked at Murray but it seemed nearly everyone else did on my street and in town.  Bicycle production at the factory slowly faded away, replaced for a while by lawn mowers, but fewer and fewer people worked there. Today L’burg seems to have two chief industries: neon-lit fast food joints to fatten people up, and pharmacies on every corner to deal with the caloric consequences.

So for me, a Murray Wildcat reminds me of the town I grew up in, not the town I visit today.

I’ve tried the usual searches: the obnoxious eBay, the bizarre Craigslist, even a guy in L’burg who rebuilds old bicycles. No luck, at least not in finding one that looks something like my original with a single speed and plenty of memories. Below you’ll see a rusty beat-up version that looks a little like my old best friend. Heck, it might even be my old bike, or what’s left of it. If so, I apologize old friend for what’s become of you.

My bike got sold decades ago. At age 14 I’d moved on to a bigger paper route and bought a motorcycle (yes, you could get a license back then in Tennessee if you knew how to fudge a cycle’s horsepower). At 16 I got a Honda 175 and later a car, and with each purchase my newspaper route got bigger, the hours longer, and the money better. My poor old Wildcat gathered dust in the shed. One day a guy looked at the bike and made my dad an offer he couldn’t refuse.

A fixer-upper Wildcat

When he told me, I just shrugged. I was 20. In other words, stupid.

There are worse midlife crises to have. I could want to replace one of my three motorcycles I owned in my youth or even a big, thumping Harley. But all I want, for a reasonable price, is that Murray Wildcat probably too small for me to easily ride. With it I might recapture a bit of that small southern town — where people made things.

1. Kip Burke says:

   August 10, 2009 at 10:21 am

   Thanks for your memories, Barry, they gave me a few fuzzy-headed self-indulgent moments recalling my most awesome bike, a Schwinn Stingray with the same banana seat and ape-hanger bars as yours, but with a fat, drag-slick back tire and even a wheelie bar. It was bright Corvette metalflake blue with chrome fenders, and I knew I looked bad as hell ripping down the hills south of Birmingham on it.

   And, like you, I cast it aside when cooler wheels came along. As the philosopher Bob Seger sang, “Wish I didn’t know now, what I didn’t know then…”

   Reply
2. Jim Warren says:

   August 10, 2009 at 11:53 am

   Thanks for the great story. I too had a Murray bike…gold metal flake, single speed, banana seat and butterfly handlebars. Rode that thing forever and was my favorite bike by far. It held up to such punishment. Kids today don’t know what they missed. Once you had a bike, the world was yours.

   BTW, self-indulgent memories of childhood/hometowns are one of the many ways I keep perspective in this adult life. Most all my writings incorporate some joy, lesson learned, heartache, or thrill from childhood that has helped me through adult times.

   So please, self indulge for us some more.

   Reply
3. Barry Hollander says:

   August 10, 2009 at 1:37 pm

   What’s missing in this world: bikes with banana seats and metal-flake paint jobs. A colleague read this and sent me two links of bikes for sale. Between the two of them, he says, we could recreate my old bike. Nah, we could never recreate that old bike.

   Reply
4. Janice Sikes says:

   August 10, 2009 at 5:23 pm

   My girlfriend and I rode all over Meridian, Mississippi on our bikes. We delivered fish sandwhiches for our church fundraisers and stayed too long at our friends houses. It was one of the few real freedoms for girls in the 1960’s. A Schwinn repaired by my father’s distant cousin saw more road time than the newer bike my folks got me from Sears. One time we stayed so long at a house across town that dark set in and my father came and picked us and our bikes up in his truck!

   Reply
5. Nathan says:

   December 28, 2009 at 12:30 pm

   I have one of these sitting in my garage. Black with silver chainguard, CW style bars, spring seat, knobby tires. I’m not sure of the year email me for pics if interested. gbnathan75@yahoo.com

   Reply
6. abid naqvi says:

   January 28, 2010 at 11:27 pm

   Hi, i have a murray wildcat exactly like in the picture, and am willing to sell it for $1500 obo.

   Reply
7. Barry Hollander says:

   February 3, 2010 at 10:13 am

   You want $1,500 for a Murray? Go back on your meds.

   Reply
8. Gary says:

   February 12, 2010 at 11:06 am

   I rode that same Murry Wildcat. Back in the Northwest around 1969. My bike was purple with a softer metal flake seat than the Schwinn Stingray. I remember a race against three of four Schwinns at my friends birthday party. We started at the top of my Street…35th Avenue. We finished on 25th at the home of birthday boy. My best friend had the same Wildcat. In the end, those two Wildcats reigned supreme. As we raced down Chestnut Avenue, the heavy tree-lined street was our race track. It was close, the Murray’s prevailed and the Schwinn’s were second rate. To this day, I don’t know if our Murrays were better than the Schwinns, but we let our race friends know who had the faster bikes every time we peddled together.

   Reply
9. Barry Hollander says:

   February 12, 2010 at 11:23 am

   I agree, Gary. The Murray would fly and I think was a lot tougher — or at least mine took more abuse — than other bikes. Then again, in L’burg as the home of Murray, riding any other bike would get you hounded out of the neighborhood.

   Glad to hear you beat the competition and they were Gone with the Schwinn (to steal shamelessly from Kermit the Frog in one of the Muppet movies).

   It’s funny. The other stuff I’ve written for the Dew seems to quickly slip away into irrelevance, but this story keeps on going, at least in terms of comments. Proving again the power of the Murray Wildcat (which was named that, I firmly believe, because the nickname of Lawrence County High School is The Wildcats).

   Reply
10. m Mettle says:

    February 13, 2010 at 8:07 am

    Friends, can you help me? A mate of mine is thinking about getting themselves a new CBR 1000 as their first bike! Never rode much of anything else before! I said this is definitely not a good idea for the first one, but they are adamant and wont change their mind! What do you rekon, is this ok and would u maybe then just recommend good training lessons?

    Reply