’400 Bikes Ready for Santa’
Jack Hairston is puttering around his new store on 24th Street in West Palm Beach and suddenly comes up with a number.
“Four hundred,” he says, “I’m going to have 400 bikes ready for Santa.”
Hairston, 63, is Jack the Bike Man. He takes in busted bikes and donated new bikes and turns them into gifts for an army of mostly Guatemalan kids that live north of Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard.
“Bikes build trust,” he says.
He started four years ago with a kid who couldn’t fix his brakes. “He kept banging into the curb to stop it in front of my house,” says Hairston. After he fixed that bike, neighborhood kids started bringing bikes to him to be fixed. Then people started giving him broken bikes.
That first year, Hairston fixed and donated 25 bikes. This year he has fixed and given away about 250 bikes and hopes to do the 400 more before Christmas.
As word about Hairston and his fluctuating dozen or so volunteers – Guatemalan teens after school, bike-savvy retirees on weekends – has spread the past four years, donations of bikes from brand-new to in bad shape have come from Vero Beach to Fort Lauderdale.
Hairston’s involvement in his community has grown as well. He’s established a nonprofit agency, Mayan Family Services, and he hopes eventually to provide legal, medical and educational services as well as bikes to his adopted minority.
Hairston is a retired landscape engineer with a bad back and creaky knees. He once owned a Danish furniture store in Fort Lauderdale. After he quit drinking, he was a substance abuse counselor.
His new bike store has a bright pink and yellow outer office decorated with Guatemalan tapestries. The sturdy chairs and loveseat are from Guatemala. He has cobbled together donations to have a working office with computer, shelves, reception desk and waiting area.
Bikes are fixed in the store’s backroom. That’s where kids “shop” and point to the one they want. Each bike is registered with West Palm Beach Police.
“The helmets cost up to $30,” he says. “I try to impress these kids that they need a good lock and chain, but that costs probably $15, and they don’t have it. I try to get them to take the bike in their house, but sometimes there’s no room. There’s too many people packed in the place.”
A friend in Wellington, product designer Louis Lara, created a Jack-the-Bike-Man logo. Hairston is putting that logo with his phone number on a sticker for each bike as an easy ID if the bike’s stolen.
Hairston would welcome donations of locks and helmets for his Christmas giveaway. Ask Hairston what else he needs to pull off his 400-bike goal this Christmas and he isn’t shy.
“Volunteers to pick up bikes. People to fix the bikes. Tire pumpers. Test riders. Money to buy inner tubes and parts. I’m always really short on boys’ bikes (16-20-inch) for the little ones. The bikes donated are so beat up because boys are so hard on bikes.”
Jack Hairston can be reached by e-mail: jack@jackthebikeman.org, or by phone: (561) 491-BIKE (2453). Mayan Family Services is at 528 24th St., P.O. Box 8125, West Palm Beach, FL 33407.
paul_lomartire@pbpost.com