NBHAA
National Bicycle History Archive of America
You are very welcome. We are happy to supply information. But we can't haul out and post every Bean Son item we have just to extinguish all arguments and reveal every possible detail.
CABE is a haven for arguments and arguing. As we said, Bean Son Company was a Schwinn distributor FOR A WHILE. But only for a while. We really don't want to do an entire discertation on the phenomenon of wholesale-distributors vs. official Schwinn distributors along with the whens and wherefores, dates and how the entire history of BCSO and Schwinn and W-D bicycle companies worked in the USA. This is a ginormous amount of data and investigation.
The hobby– as it exists today– clearly does not understand either about bicycle wholesale-distributors, how these related to Arnold, Schwinn & Company, how the different brand names evolved and what they did or did not mean. And when all these things happened and didn't happen. It is useless to make statements because someone will simply jump up and go, "AHAH! !!!!" And then they will present what they imagine is "evidence" to support their argument... which may SEEM supportive, but only SEEMS supportive.
There really was no such thing as a "BEAN" bicycle– even if some actually had a headbadge that said "BEAN" or "BEAN SON" or were subtitled so. Why? Because Bean Son was a WHOLESALE-DISTRIBUTOR. They were not a bicycle manufacturer. Therefore whatever bicycles they W-D'd were always made by somebody else.
Like the Monark and Huffy folks who will post up a trade magazine press release story about Monark and Huffy.... a story that today's DIY folks clearly do not fully understand. Nor do these people know any of the background behind what actually happened at that time. But this does not stop them from going..."Ahah! We've got this ALL figured out!!! And NBHAA is WRONG!"
The same goes for today's DIY-ers arguing about how Schwinn invented balloon tires (they didn't). Or serial number freaks and their serial number arguments... "AHAH! But I've got a serial number list that shows... " And on and on.
We've been doing this stuff with American bicycle history for a while. Back in the 1970s we were discussing Monarks in the first newsletter for these types of bicycles: Classic Bicycle & Whizzer News. In a correspondence with a fellow who imagined himself an expert of Monarks, we included a very accurate image of a Monark. It was equipped and shown with what yours truly coined as a "pedestal headlight." You guessed it... then came an arguer. "You're WRONG! I gotta Xerox copy out of a Firestone catalogue showing TWIN-TORPEDO HEADLIGHTS on Monark!!!!! You're WRONG!!!!!"
Of course what this arguer did not understand was that MONARKS and FIRESTONE SUPER CRUISERS MADE BY MONARK were two different bicycles. Of course we had the literature for both. BUT... the arguer felt confident that HE had shown us up. And in his mind, proved us wrong!
So? Near fifty (50) years go by... and not much has changed.
Leon Dixon
National Bicycle History Archive of America
(NBHAA.com)
