BobbyG

"Baker Street's" opening saxophone immediately transports me back to the summer of 1978, when I was 16 and spent my summer working in my uncle's olive and cherry warehouse near Armitage and Pulaski on Chicago's near-west side. Almost every afternoon "the old men" would turn on talk-radio 720AM WGN to listen to Chicago Cubs baseball. The radio station would use the Gerry Rafferty song "Baker Street" to pad the time until the broadcast team was up and running. (At least that's what I remember).

There I was in the hot, cramped warehouse stuffing jars full of olives and cherries, slapping labels on bottles and boxes, sweeping up broken glass and moving wooden pallets amid the smell of musty cardboard, rotten olives, cherries, cocktail onions, label glue and human sweat.

I'm sure that's not what Gerry Rafferty intended the song to invoke, but almost 45 years later that's what it means to me.

To tie this back in to bicycling, I just checked, and the warehouse is an 8-mile bike ride from the house I grew up in. Because of traffic and stops it took so long to get there by bus, I never considered riding there on my bike, what was then a 2-year-old yellow Azuki 10-speed. Now at 58 I've been biking 9 miles to work for almost 30 years, and I am easily 10 years older than "the old men".