Jerry Seinfeld

'I led the swinging Sting-Ray life'

By Andy Edelstein | Staff Writer

Preoccupied with bikes and sneakers as a boy, Jerry Seinfeld didn't try comedy until college. (Seth Poppel Yearbook Archives; Above, Los Angeles Times Photo/Robert Gauthier, 1995)

Today he may drive Porsches, but some 30 years ago Jerry Seinfeld's vehicle of choice was the Schwinn Sting-Ray bicycle, which was just about the coolest mode of transportation a guy could have.

Especially if that guy was 11 years old and lived in Massapequa. The domain that young Jerry was the master of was the patch of town called Harbor Green.

"I led the swinging Sting-Ray life," the comedian says during a phone interview on a brief break from filming an episode of his NBC sitcom. "And the older I get the fonder my memories are of that life."

Seinfeld, 44, says he was -- and who's to dispute him? -- the owner of the very first Schwinn Sting-Ray in Massapequa, which he bought at the cycle shop on Unqua Road. It was a groovy metallic-blue model with the banana seat that may or may not have made an impression on the girls in the 'hood.

"You could ride them on the handlebars or share the banana seat with them," he recalls. "Mainly you were on patrol at all times. I really didn't get the girls at 11, but I was always around the neighborhood."

Alas, Seinfeld doesn't know what happened to the bike. "I had so many different Sting-Rays -- I had every one made -- the three-speed, the five-speed, you name it. They would get stolen pretty regularly. The chains were like necklaces. If a crook just stared at it, it would open."

Seinfeld was born in Brooklyn in 1954, moving shortly thereafter to Massapequa with his family -- older sister Carolyn, mother Betty and dad Kal, who ran a commercial sign business, and whose sense of humor was a major influence on his son. They settled into a house at 311 Riviera Dr. S., near the water.

If Seinfeld had the classic neurotic childhood that became the raw basis of many comedians' material, he isn't talking about it. He had what he describes as a fairly happy childhood. "I had a lot of fun," the former Cub Scout recalled; he watched his favorite TV shows ("Rocky & Bullwinkle," "Jonny Quest," "Batman," "Flipper") and soaked up his favorite comedians (Red Skelton, Jonathan Winters, the Smothers Brothers and especially Bill Cosby, whose entire LP output he owned).

His first comic routine, he told Larry King in 1991, took place when he was 8 in 1962. It was a bit about a fat girl in class that made a friend spit up his milk and cookies. "I felt the milk and I saw it all coming at me and I said, 'I would like to do this professionally."'

Indeed, through his years at Parkside Junior High and Massapequa High School (Class of '72), his comedic skills were shared with only a few classmates. He didn't try comedy for real until 1976 in his senior year at Queens College, when he appeared at an amateur night at Manhattan's Catch a Rising Star.

One reason he's grown fonder of the Massapequa of his youth was because of the freedom of being able to come and go. "You can't do that as much nowadays," he recalls. "I'd get on my bike in the morning and take off for parts unknown like Tackapausha Preserve [in Seaford] or Bethpage State Park. Now, that was an exciting adventure."

In addition to exploring the world beyond Massapequa, he put the bike to the pursuit of commerce. Like many boys of that time, Seinfeld had a Newsday paper route for a few years. "The bike was also a superior paper-boy vehicle because of the way bags stood on handlebars."

So did anything exciting ever happen? "There was a rumor that there was a lady on my route who would answer her door in a robe. It never happened to me, but it kept me going for many a delivery."

He earned, he thinks, $8-$12 a week.

"I couldn't believe I made that much," says the man whose "Seinfeld" salary was $1 million per episode.

And as young Jerry furiously pedaled his bike, no doubt on his feet -- as with the mature model -- would invariably be a pair of sneakers.

"I've always liked sneakers -- that was something I responded to even at 6 years old," he told an interviewer. "I drove my mother crazy about getting me sneakers. She wouldn't let me wear them in the winter. She would set a day when I was allowed to start wearing sneakers again."

His favorite was Keds. "The dark blue kind that you could get only in the city," he pointed out. "On Long Island, they only had black. I've got a picture of me wearing them in my first-grade class. Every other kid in the picture has regular shoes on. I'm in high tops."

And when young Jerry got tired of riding his bike, he could cruise the waters near his home in his 8-foot Boston Whaler boat.

"I really had it all," he marvels. "A Sting-Ray and an 8-foot boat. I was like Sly Stallone there."

But as with most other red-blooded suburban boys, Seinfeld's transportation lust veered to the four-wheeled kind as he entered his teens. At Massapequa High, he even took auto mechanics, even though "everybody tried to discourage me because I was in 'college prep.'

"At about 13 I realized I wanted a Porsche," he has said, "and I was unhappy until I got it. Now I have it and I'm happy."

Still, the happiest the day of his life was when he got his driver's license. "The greatest moment of my life," he recalls, especially when his mom handed him the keys to her '65 red Rambler. "I had it repainted blue for $19. The job was not nearly as good as Earl Scheib's . . . snowflakes would actually chip the paint."

And though it's been more than 20 years since Seinfeld last regularly cruised Sunrise Highway, Massapequa -- which, he has said, is Indian for "by the mall" -- has shown up in his show.

The most memorable instance was a 1994 episode in which Jerry and George's ninth-grade gym teacher, Mr. Bevilacqua (portrayed by an actor), returned to officiate a rerun of a disputed race that Jerry had with a classmate.

In real life, Albert Bevilacqua was Seinfeld's phys ed and driver's ed teacher at Massapequa High. "We'd have a lecture class in driver ed," Bevilacqua told Newsday in 1994. "I'd try to animate it and be funny. After class, Jerry would say, 'You're terrific on stage, Mr. Bevilacqua. You should go to Hollywood."' He recalls the teenage Jerry as "one of those great personality kids you never forget."

There's certainly nothing wrong with that.