The first bicycle I ever bought for myself, and the last one I ever bought new, was a Royce Union 3-speed. It was when I was nine or ten years old or so, maybe in 1967 or a bit later, and I used all my savings of birthday and Christmas money to get it, for about $39.
It was as others described above -- an inexpensive department store bicycle, a knock-off of an English 3-speed. But the hub and shifter were not Sturmey-Archer; I'm quite sure it was 333. And the shifter was a stick shift mounted on the top tube. Handle bars were for upright seating -- perhaps they could be called North Road.
It was, at the time, a beautiful bike to me -- glossy black body, black fenders with white tips, white handlebars, thin whitewall tires, white shifter and cables, black and white saddle. I had been riding my mother's hand-me-down rustbucket, a faded blue and gray Western Flyer that weighed as much as a 1958 Plymouth. That Royce Union instantly made me the envy of many kids in the neighborhood -- they called it an "English racer", which was about as far as our knowledge of bikes went. It was the top bike on my block, until my then-best friend got a ten-speed a little while later.
It's easy to dismiss those inexpensive imports as inadequate and cheaply made. But I rode it for years, and I learned most of what I know now about bicycle repair from that bike. For one thing, I was hard on it, and the fender didn't look so good after I'd hit things a few times, so I took them off to match the look of the popular ten-speeds in the '70's. I can't count how many times I patched tubes or rubbed rust off the rims with a Brillo pad I'd snuck out of the kitchen before my mom saw.
It's true that the bike was built for smaller people. It fit me fine when I was a pre-teen, but I outgrew it in my teens. And I still rode it. I didn't have a driver's license until I graduated from high school, at age 17. And I didn't always have the use of a family car for fun, either -- although I commuted to a city university, I sometimes still needed a bike to get around at night.
I finally gave up on that Royce Union when I was finished with college, but I still have the Schwinn-approved speedometer I'd put on when I was in high school. It registers 2602 miles, and the bike was older than the speedometer.
It may have been a cheap bike, but it served me well for at least ten years.