The cold Wisconsin air bit through my DeafNation polo shirt as I rummaged past hundreds of vintage bicycles, following 27-year old Ryan Kelly into the second floor of his barn, which was serving as one of his three “garages”. Stepping over bicycle parts and squeezing between towering boxes of tools, the DeafNation crew watched on as he introduced his antique bicycle collection, which totaled to nearly 500 in number. With a time span of 70 years, his bicycles date from the late 1900s to the early 1980s. Looking around amongst the dust and rust as he regaled us on the background of his collection and how it came to be – I knew that what at first seemed like junk was, in fact, real treasure.

When asked where the interest in collecting antique bicycles started, Kelly credits his woodshop teacher – who in his spare time fixed up bicycles in the woodshop class, offered to give then-fifteen year old Kelly course credit if he wanted to learn how to repair and restore bicycles. Kelly happily accepted, and with the influence of his father and grandfather’s pack-rat tendencies, what started as an interest soon grew into a hobby, and eventually blossomed into a collection.

Trailing behind Kelly into one of his larger garages, I skinnyed between what seemed like endless line-ups of Schwinns, my eyes traveling skyward to see even more jam-packed rows of bicycles hanging from the ceiling. Almost as if he read my mind, Kelly explained that he finds most of the bicycles at yard sales and flea markets – and that very fact allowed his compilation to grow to the hundreds, even enabling him at one point to collect an all-time high of 200 in one year. “I do it all – buy, repair, restore, sell,” Kelly says. There are cases where he just buys and sells – other times he restores and repairs in -between of purchasing and putting it on the market, mainly promoting his collection on e-Bay and his own personal website (www.thebicyclejungle.com). “I must’ve handled, to date, nearly 2,000 bikes,” Kelly laughed, enjoying my astonishment at the number.

When asked if he sees any profit from his collection, Kelly nods, going on to agree with the famous adage that one man’s junk is another man’s treasure, and that the market held people who were willing to pay top dollar for antique bicycles. “I would purchase a vintage bike for cheap, read up on whether people were looking for it as is or restored, then follow that path to later sell it for nearly twice as much as I purchased it for. And the best part is that I enjoy it,” Kelly signed, his open palm emphasizing circular motions over his heart.

Some of the gems amongst Kelly’s treasure include:
•    A circa-1920 wooden and metal “horsey” bicycle;
•    A Schwinn bicycle dating back to 1917;
•    Four unicycles (one a Schwinn Giraffe unicycle and three smaller ones);
•    Four PPVs (people-powered vehicles shaped like pedal-boats, but on wheels!) from the 1970s;
•    A handful of “pimped-out” bicycles, including one which had 144 spokes instead of the typical 28-48 spokes
•    Almost a thousand hard-to-find bicycle parts from a 50-year time span

When asked if his collection would ever turn into something sort of a business, Kelly turns his head towards me, eyes gleaming at the prospect, his mouth slightly turning up to form a sheepish smile. Holding a degree in Business Administration from Gallaudet University, Kelly vows to make use of his college education to pursue a long-time dream: open up his own bicycle shop, later to add on an indoor bicycle park and – perhaps even more later – a bicycle museum.

“I’m not just attracted to the bikes themselves – there’s just so much historical value,” Kelly said. “You can actually see the evolution of the bikes from the 1800s up to now, and have a visual image of what they added or changed…” His father, Dean – an antique collector himself – agrees, adding on that “…there’s just integrity in it that’s not in today’s toys…older toys are real.”

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