Great bike rescue and kudos to you for supporting your nieces interests. I'm so glad there are younger generations interested in keeping the past alive. In this case my parents and grandparents pasts, me being a child of a WWII vet and Rosie the Riveter (my mom worked at Douglas Aircraft as a machinest in southern California).
Back in college in the late 1970s I got roped into playing music for Irish and Scottish dancers at the Rennaissance Fair and playing sea chanties and Irish music at the San Francisco Dickens Fair. This changed the whole trajectory of my life. I made hundreds of life long friends, steered into my first job as a National Park Service Ranger at Alcatraz and the Maritime museum, and met my wife of 33 years working at the Hyde St. Pier historic ships. So many great people and experiences and all those historic interests meshed so well with old bikes.
Here is a photo from a few years ago at a Scottish Ceilidh with four of my friends from way back then. Two have since passed but not the older gentleman. The one in the middle with the eye patch talked me into all this in college. He had just left the Navy, he had been a corpsman with the Marines in Vietnam who also happened to teach Scottish Dancing, fencing, Irish dancing,etc. Worked in medicine his whole life. I'm on the far left not in a kilt.
Ian standing next to me is still with us at 98 years old. He lied about his age and enlisted in the highland regiment in Canada. At 16 or so he was in the Canadian Highland unit in the rear guard at Dunkirk where he was machine gunned in his legs. He recovered and served with the 8th army in Africa against Rommel surviving an SAS mission to destroy a fuel dump. Only he (wounded) and the wonded comrade he carried out of the desert survived. And then there was Sicily, Anzio, Normandy, 2 more stays in the hospital. After the war he eventually emigrated from Nova Scotia to California and in the 50s became a highway patrolman. He's also an known expert on Lighthouses and their history. What a life. His daughter for many years has worked for the Smithsonian Museums. She was education drector at the Air and Space museum and was able to meet every living astronaut! You just never know where an interest in history can take you, just ask this lifelong history geek.
Our hometown WWII Naval Air Station has the USS Hornet with all its WWII and space race history.
