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| This is the famous SEVEN MAN BICYCLE......a major attraction at community parades around the Strum area and west central Wisconsin. A Strum product! Built in Strum by Jewel Berge, our Blacksmith, and crew. This bicycle also appeared in the Fall 1964 Homecoming parade at the University of Minnesota. I was a student and resident of Frontier Hall Dormitory. I convinced my father to let me bring it to Minneapolis, that I had the guys in the dorm that could ride and manipulate this monster of a bike. Maybe a week before homecoming my friends and I and a Corvair with hitch made the trip to Strum, hooked up the bike and specially built trailer and made the trip back to Minneapolis. The stares along the way through Eleva, Mondovi, Durand, Prescott and then through the St. Paul-Minneapolis Metro area on U.S. Hiway 10........the stares were unreal! Once we found a parking place for the bike back of the dorm, it was the local attraction around the dorm and Minneapolis campus for days. And then we practiced and the attraction grew. The bell, the air horn fed by that tank on the back of the bike.. A hit as you can imagine. . This bike and our 7 guys, me being one, were the Frontier Hall entry in the Homecoming Parade. The parade angled down University Avenue on the Minneapolis Campus.....and we snaked this bike along the way, working hard to keep the back wheel on the center line and veering left and right with the front. It worked. We won first prize for all dormitory entries in the parade..........and the stares and hoots never quit! What a great idea my fellow Strumites (or is it Strummers) had for promoting Steam Engine Days....and just about anything! Put a candidate for local or state office on something like this and the voters would never forget the person, just like the memory no doubt caused many a parade goer to never forget this entry in the parade and the NEED to get to Strum on Steam Engine Days each year. NOTE: my father, Roy Matson is the second man from the left in this picture. All of these men are well known in the Strum area. In this picture, they obviously are riding in a parade (probably other than Strum) to promote the upcoming Steam Engine Days probably during the mid to late 1960's. |
| Left to right: Bud Brion, Roy Matson, Dick Ellifson, Doug Runkel, Java Bergerson, Arnold Gunderson, Bill Amundson |