Colorful Schwinn memories

[mrg]

Pouched this pic from another thread of a police bicycle impound, it reminded me of when I was a kid and being at city hall with my dad and looking in their impound room full of lime, violent, copper tone & sky blue Schwinn Stingrays, Varsitys & Continentals!, I was in heaven, tried to talk my dad into coming back for the once a yr auction but never made it. I worked there for the city about 12 yrs later and looked in their same room and don’t remember being as impressed or coming back for the auction but I was 19 thinking about girls, surfing, cars, motorcycles etc so you know, man if I only had a Time Machine now!

 

[coasterbrakejunkie1969]

Pouched this pic from another thread of a police bicycle impound, it reminded me of when I was a kid and being at city hall with my dad and looking in their impound room full of lime, violent, copper tone & sky blue Schwinn Stingrays, Varsitys & Continentals!, I was in heaven, tried to talk my dad into coming back for the once a yr auction but never made it. I worked there for the city about 12 yrs later and looked in their same room and don’t remember being as impressed or coming back for the auction but I was 19 thinking about girls, surfing, cars, motorcycles etc so you know, man if I only had a Time Machine now!

I'm dying to see the pic

 

[Frank&Pam (SKIDKINGS VBC)]

Great story pic. Reminds me of some of my friends garages.

 

[cyclingday]

I worked for the City of Newport Beach for 37 years, and witnessed many of these year end Police auctions.
The 80’s were pretty good, because there were still plenty of older American made bicycles, but things got more generic as time went by.
The best deals were the Harbor department auctions.
I saw nice boats sell for as little as $100 dollars.
The only criteria was that you had to be able to haul the boat away, or have a mooring for it.
The old city vehicle and equipment auctions were pretty good as well.
Newport was a full service city, so everything was in house, but as time went by, they realized that the employees had an unfair advantage, so they moved all the surplus auctions to publicly accessible forums, and started contracting out the services.
So things weren’t as much fun after that.

 

[mrg]

I wish I had pic of the colorful impound room from when I was a kid, oh well, I to retired from the city ( cities) after many yrs and I bought a lot of stuff ( junk? ) at our auction, one good one I remember was a lot of pallets one had a 2180 VW motor, lowered front end & 4 centerline wheels/tires I got for $100 but had to take 2 pallets of bench seats and one with gas tanks ( sense I worked there I couldn’t just leave the unwanted pallets ), luckily I had a flatbed and sold the seats & tanks to a junkyard for $100 and got the VW stuff for my labor.