Recycling Christmas wishes 365 days
a year

By RON HAYES
Neighborhood News Group
Posted Dec. 15, 2011

WEST PALM BEACH — “Everybody knows Jack The Bike Man,” Jack The Bike Man says.

Especially at Christmas.

He’s Santa Claus riding two wheels instead of a sled, the fellow who repairs old bicycles and gives them to children – always needy, often migrants – in the city’s poorer neighborhoods.

One spontaneous act of kindness in 1999 is now a burgeoning grass-roots philanthropy with a used-bike store, two full-time assistants, one part-timer, and a list of about 2,000 donors, some with old money, some with old bikes.

There’s also a secret location Jack calls “my Santa Claus warehouse.” By early November, that warehouse was already the temporary home to 500 bikes, repaired and ready to ride. By Christmas week, Jack will have 800 bikes and the names of 800 children eager to claim them.

Yes, everybody knows Jack. But do you know his story?

Before he was Jack The Bike Man, he was Samuel Henry Hairston III, and the journey from Samuel to Jack is a bike ride full of Southern history, aristocratic privilege, defeat, despair and, finally, redemption.

“I come from a Scottish family that came to Virginia in the 1720s with land grants,” he begins, seated behind a gloriously cluttered desk in a wonderfully cluttered office at 44th Street and Broadway. “My family owned 45 plantations throughout the Deep South. Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi …”

The 72-year-old man in T-shirt and jeans doesn’t look like Southern gentry. While he sells used bikes from a former gas station, others along this stretch of road are selling drugs – or themselves. But then he reaches into the clutters and holds up a hardcover book. “The Hairstons: An American Family In Black & White,” by Henry Wiencek.

“My grandfather, Samuel the first, ran a hospital in Meridian, Miss.,” Jack says. Reaching into the clutter once more, he retrieves a colored post card of the hospital. “People said he’d come fast as a jackrabbit, so they called him Dr. Jack.”

The name has stuck through three generations.

But before he could fix bikes, Jack The Bike Man had to fix himself.

“I studied at Louisiana State University to be a landscape architect,” he goes on, “but mostly I learned how to drink. Well, I tried to learn how to drink. I’m an alcoholic, and I couldn’t graduate.”

At 26, he was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver.

“Do you want to live or die?” his doctor asked.

“I walked out of the hospital and crossed the street and ordered a whiskey,” Jack says.

He moved to Florida in 1973, worked in home furnishings, retail, landscaping, tried AA a few times. Mostly he drank.

“Then one night, I was walking on Clematis Street and I saw some people I knew a block away,” he recalls. “They saw me coming and got a horrified look and walked away – and I realized I didn’t have any friends. I was just existing to drink, and I remembered that those idiots in AA were nice to me.”

That was in 1982. He hasn’t had a drink since.

“I still go to meetings four or five times a week,” he says, “but now it’s social.”

Sober again, he worked two jobs while earning a degree in substance-abuse counseling, but in 1993, poor health forced him into retirement.

One day in 1999, Jack spotted a young Hispanic man trying to ride a bike outside his house. He went out, inspected the bike and saw that the front brakes had become detached. He got a screwdriver, fixed the brakes, won a friend and found a calling.

“When I fixed that first kid’s bike,” he explains, “my head was so full up with poor little me. This little sliver of me went out and he came in. Then the next day when two more kids showed up, that was two more slivers of me going out.”

Eventually, someone alerted WPTV reporter Jamie Holmes that a local man was repairing old bikes and giving them away. After Holmes’ story aired, 125 viewers contacted Jack to offer money, bikes and help.

That first Christmas, he distributed 100 bikes. Local business leaders found him temporary storefronts in which to work, and Jack The Bike Man started fixing and selling used bikes, pouring the money back into his charity.

“I’ve sold about $60,000 to $70,000 in bikes this year,” he says. “But the individual financial donations have dropped off. Now we’re supported by bike sales, donations, grants and selling scrap metal from bikes that can’t be repaired.”

He lives on Social Security in a nearby house that’s in reverse mortgage, and he takes no salary.

“This kept me from dying,” he says. “I don’t have money to enjoy worldly things, so I sleep and go to church and AA and the bike shop.”

Nine years ago, a 13-year-old Guatemalan boy appeared at Jack’s house.

“You Mr. Jack?” the boy said. “I want school.”

His name was Uriel Ramos, he said, and he’d been in the country a year, but his mother spoke no English. Jack The Bike Man went to work, and after some bureaucratic roadblocks, got Ramos enrolled in Palm Beach Lakes High School. Two years ago, he graduated from Jupiter High School.

As Jack tells his story in the cluttered office, Ramos is out in the garage, repairing a bike. For the past year, he’s been one of Jack’s full-time employees.

“He’s not really college material,” Jack says, “so I’m trying to send him to a bike mechanics school in Colorado.”

Now it’s time for lunch – not Jack’s lunch, though. In the yard behind his bike shop, fellow parishioners from St. John Fisher Catholic Church prepare a simple meal of rice, beans and tortillas for the area’s hungry. Some are simply poor, others fellow alcoholics who haven’t found AA yet. Jack feeds them all, then he goes back to the bikes.

“Every day people bring bikes to us,” he says, “so I don’t have to ask for bikes anymore.

Everybody knows Jack The Bike Man.”