Iron Boys Part 2: Minibikes and Shoeburners

The greatest movie of all time, On Any Sunday, is about those blonde-haired, blue-eyed, godless boys of sunny Southern California. Now, just hear me out. It’s not that we didn’t like the movie, up there in the black culm hills of northeastern Pennsylvania.

We loved it, we idolized it. It was produced both for us and about us. The problem was the day of the week.

There was an impenetrable wall built every Sunday morning. It stood between us and our dirt bikes, and it was shaped exactly like a grandmother.

To scale that wall would be painful. Our Polish, Italian, and Irish babcias, nonnas and mameos had no problem whatsoever, using whatever was in arms reach, to beat us into holy submission in order to herd us to church.

I watched some of my closest buddies get whupped with the most creative persuasive devices ever—a length of Hot Wheels track, a badminton racket, a length of 240V/10AWG electrical wire.

One grandmother I knew threw a D-size battery at her grandson. She nailed poor Wally right between the eyes just for being “too saucy” about going to church. He looked like a cyclops for about a week from the red, circular mark on his forehead.