After joining the Air Force in 1969, and my younger unicycling brother joining in 1970, we pretty much lost contact with the club. I spent 6 years 9 months of my first 9 years deployed to Vietnam, Thailand, Okinawa, and Guam, so I didn’t spend much time stateside, let alone riding regularly.
The founder of the club, Phil Bartell, was very active in promoting unicycling to the public. In addition to encouraging families and friends of riders to join the club and participate in supporting activities and help keep up a very busy schedule of events and parades, we also provided free unicycling lessons every 3rd Sunday at San Diego’s Mission Valley Shopping Center. This created a lot of public interest and the club grew rapidly. I think Phil Bartell left the club and possibly the San Diego area in the 1970s, as I was unable to make contact with him at his former bicycle shop in the late 1970s. It is highly possible that without his leadership, along with the popularity of the Schwinn Stingray and skateboarding, that unicycle enthusiasm faded in the 1970s.
| johnfoss
January 7 |
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GREGORY_THOMAS:
I was a member of the San Diego Unicycle Club, the largest club in the world with 600 members and 200 riding members.
That’s huge! I wish I knew more about it. How did it get so big, and how did it fade away? I think we would have heard more about it if it had still been active in 1974 or later, when the Unicycling Society of America had Bill Jenack doing a quarterly newsletter with lots of info about his unicycling contacts all around the US and world. Would love to hear more about that group!
I have a Loyd unicycle (eBay purchase), but you definitely know more about them than me. Mine came with a bicycle seat on it, and I’m curious to know if that was original or added by the owner. It’s definitely a worse seat than any rectangular thing intended for unicycing, it’s a narrow saddle that pretty much guarantees pain!
You described a squared-off vinyl seat on your 1963 model. Did you ever see any with black, narrow road bike-type saddles? I don’t know the vintage of mine. I think Loyd unicycles may have been more regional than national, but not sure about that. I hope Loyd Wicker Smith got a generous deal from Schwinn to license (or buy) his frame design, it served them well. In fact you could still buy a split-frame Schwinn from Unicycle.com up until fairly recently. Their website still lists the brand but no longer has any Schwinn products. Their blurb about the Schwinn brand also could use a correction or two (Schwinns were around at least until the mid-90s).
I believe the Schwinn unis hit the market with the 1967 Christmas season, but 1968 is probably when they started showing up everywhere. Cottered cranks were the standard back then, which encouraged riders to not do too many jumps and drops–or else. Note for anyone riding cottered cranks, the pins should be inserted in opposite directions. That is, the pins should not be paralell with each other like you pounded both in from the same side of the wheel. Greg, check your pins and see if one just needs to be flipped around, it might even out your cranks!
Cotterless cranks (square taper axles) were introduced in the 1930s, but didn’t become mainstream until much later. I think Schwinn and Miyata both switched to cotterless around the same time, 1980. I only know of one example of a Miyata with cotter pins; it’s a 1978 example from the Bill Jenack collection (now in my collection), and is believed to be the first Miyata unicycle in the USA.
The biggest innovation Schwinn brought to unicycle was their patented saddle design. These were manufactured by Messenger, a company that also made many of the older, rectangular style uni saddles, possibly even the ones on the Loyd unis. When Schwinn revamped their unicycles for their reintroduction to the market in 1986, they added some plastic bumpers and a design that could take more of a beating without ruining the covers.
Thanks for sharing that great history of your unicycling adventures. It makes me curious to see if your club ever got a mention in the early days of the Unicycling Society of America Newsletters. Someday we’ll get them all indexed and be able to look those things up without having to flip through pages… 
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