September 23, 2025 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, life in law enforcement is filled with long nights, constant stress, and moments that never leave you. For Richard Muniz, one of those moments came during his time as a deputy in the Conejos County Sheriff’s Department. A wreck he responded to on duty became a turning point in his career and his life, leaving him to grapple with the unseen weight of police stress and the lasting impact of trauma. His story opens a window into the realities of the police work environment and the question of how officers cope when the job follows them home.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we're back with our American stories and with author
Margaret Gooff telling the story of the bicycle and America.
When we left off, she just told us about the
bicycle boom in the eighteen nineties, when a technological innovation,
the lowering of the bicycle thanks to the chain, allowed
(00:30):
more people, including women, to access writing and increase mobility.
Back to Margaret with the rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
So in Europe there had been a move towards more
scientific understanding of medicine and health. In this country, people
thought of doctors as kind of in charge of the
whole person. They're not just their physical well being, but
sort of their their moral well being and how that
(01:02):
could play into their health. There was a thought that
each person had their own individual chemistry, like just because
something was good for one person didn't mean it would
be good for everybody. Each person had to be individually
analyzed by their doctor who knew them well. And one
(01:22):
of the things that American doctors were saying about the
bicycle was that you shouldn't ride it, or you shouldn't
override it, because you only had so much energy in
your life, like a battery that you can't recharge, and
you had to conserve that and you couldn't. You couldn't
be going out exercising willy nilly, because you would just
(01:44):
wear yourself out and then you'd die. And there were
certain things about American life that supported this, like the
clothes that women wore. Middle class women at the time
were expected to wear these very restrictive coursets that they
needed in part because the weight of their clothes and
the weight of their skirts was so much that they
(02:05):
needed this infrastructure underneath that would distribute the weight. So
it wasn't all just sitting on their hips, but you
could be wearing twenty five pounds worth of clothing. You'd
be wearing very narrow, pointy shoes, and so these women
were in these very tight things that kept them from
breathing well, and they weren't exercising, so they had no
(02:27):
muscle strength, and so they were very frail, a lot
of them, and they couldn't you know, you couldn't catch
your breath or you would faint. And the doctors were saying, well,
of course a person like this should never exercise, because
that would be the end of them. But what happened
with the bicycle and I were talking about in the
eighteen nineties. The safety bicycle is that they were so
enticing and they seemed like so much fun that people
(02:50):
were willing to try them, you know, even though the
doctors were saying, please, don't do this, you'll die. And
these women could not wear these corsets. They had to
figure out a different way to dress themselves because it
just didn't work on the bicycle. So they started wearing
just for bicycling, not in the rest of their lives,
(03:11):
but for bicycling. They would wear a looser undergarment, they
would wear shorter skirts. They would go riding around, they
would get a little exercise, they would get a little sun,
and they would feel better and people started feeling stronger,
people started, you know, feeling healthier, and that was part
of a larger move that combined with what was going
(03:35):
on in Europe and the fact that there were, you know,
the communications between America and Europe were tighter. We were
seeing a lot of people immigrating from Europe, including people
who had medical knowledge. So there were you know, they
were discovering all these new things about health and discovering
the germ theory of disease. There was a lot going on,
(03:56):
but part of what was going on was that people
who were riding these bicycles and feeling better were realizing,
you know, my doctor doesn't know everything, and you can
test something out and see whether it works, and if
you know, exercise works, exercise makes you feel better. And
(04:17):
this also showed that there were in fact some things
that were like good for everybody, that you didn't need
this individual like person studying you and telling you how
your moral life would be improved or changed or whatever.
You could say, well, maybe everybody should eat more roffage,
or everybody should do this, you know. So it was
(04:39):
part of and played into a larger change in how
people thought about health and medicine at the time. The
beginning of the eighteen nineties, the production of bicycles ramped
up like crazy. Producers were making new innovations in how
bikes were built. They were adapting technology from making plows
(05:04):
and making tractors, and so the bicycles became by eighteen
ninety seventeen ninety eight, just the market was just flooded
with them, and some of them were not good, which
a lot of people say is another reason for the
boom to end was that there were just a lot
of bikes on the market that were dangerous, falling apart,
or that didn't give you that exhilarating experience that got
(05:27):
people hooked. In the eighteen nineties bike boom, it seemed
like everybody was riding a bike, got more and more popular,
they got cheaper and cheaper to buy. There are more
and more used ones, so it seemed like everybody was
doing it. And then right around the turn of the
century boom stopped. People stopped using it for the most part.
I mean, there were still people who rode them and
used them for work, but they weren't a fad anymore.
(05:49):
The myth has long held that the car was invented
and everyone just moved directly from bicycles to cars, and
that that's what killed the bike boom. But in fact,
the car was invented at the end of the nineteenth
century and invented by people who had been bicycle mechanics.
First Henry Ford. Yes, he was a bicycle mechanic, and
(06:11):
he adapted a lot of bicycle technology wheels and stuff
like that, gears and everything to what he was doing,
but they were very expensive, so it wasn't until you know,
Henry Ford in the second decade of the twentieth century
started mass producing cars that ordinary people could start to
(06:32):
afford them. So there was this ten year gap when
people really had stopped riding bicycles, but before a lot
of people could start being able to afford a car.
But the thing that made it much more difficult for
people to ride bicycles at the beginning of the twentieth
century was things like street cars, which were cutting up
(06:52):
the roads and cities and went fast, and you know,
there were beginning to be cars on the roads. Just
became less practical for people to use a bike for entertainment.
What happened in the nineteen seventies was that again a
new technology for US, lightweight European ten speed bicycles came
(07:13):
over and then we started building American ten speeds and
that got really a lot of young people on bikes
in the mid nineteen seventies. And some of those young
people had the same kind of organizational aspiration as the
earlier bikers who had fought for just main roads. And
so with this new group you see people advocating for
(07:37):
old railway right of ways that weren't being used for
anything to be turned into rail trails that starts happening
in the seventies, and also the first dedicated bike lanes
in cities like New York are happening in the nineteen seventies.
You also had bike messengers at that point. I mean,
there's a whole bunch of stuff going on. The thing
(07:59):
about the bike is that it comes and goes. Right now,
I think a lot of people are finding really practical
uses for it, especially in cities where distances are shorter.
But there have been times recently in our recent history
where nobody rode a bike, and there are still places
in the country where you can't really But the times
(08:20):
when bicycles are popular coincide with times when they are
perceived as fun and safe. And what's happening right now
is that a lot of cities have been investing in
bike lanes and also in bike share companies bike share programs,
(08:41):
and that gives people a way to use a bike
without really taking their lives into their hands. And now
we're seeing another new technology that is really starting to
catch on, which is electric bicycles, which make it super
easy to go up a hill. They are getting cheaper,
they're getting lighter weight, and that's coinciding with a huge
(09:05):
older demographic, baby boomers who came of age maybe in
the nineteen seventies bike boom, after a period when nobody
rode a bike really and they want to keep riding
their bikes, but they maybe don't want to deal with
those hills anymore. So this electric addition, it's something else
that is fun and practical, and I think that's a
(09:26):
lot a large part of why right now we're seeing
a lot of people on bikes. So before the bicycle,
really the only way to travel a long distance in
this country, other than on the waterways, was with a horse,
whether it was riding a horse or a horse and carriage.
And the creation of the bicycle really affected the way
(09:49):
we live now.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Madison Dericut, and a special thanks to
Margaret Goroff Mechanical Horse. How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life
is her book and it's available wherever you buy your books.
And it was just a blast to just walk through
American life and the bicycle and where the two intersected,
(10:14):
and how the bicycle changed in some ways and in
many ways American life and my goodness, when we hear
about where the science was as related to let's say, exercise,
and how we had a finite amount, so we should
be careful how we use it up. Be careful. Anytime
anyone says the science is settled, that's a humbling, humbling
(10:36):
anecdote about where the consensus was on science in the
eighteen nineties. The story of the bicycle, the mechanical horse.
Here on our American stories
And we're back with our American stories and with author
Margaret Gooff telling the story of the bicycle and America.
When we left off, she just told us about the
bicycle boom in the eighteen nineties, when a technological innovation,
the lowering of the bicycle thanks to the chain, allowed
(00:30):
more people, including women, to access writing and increase mobility.
Back to Margaret with the rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
So in Europe there had been a move towards more
scientific understanding of medicine and health. In this country, people
thought of doctors as kind of in charge of the
whole person. They're not just their physical well being, but
sort of their their moral well being and how that
(01:02):
could play into their health. There was a thought that
each person had their own individual chemistry, like just because
something was good for one person didn't mean it would
be good for everybody. Each person had to be individually
analyzed by their doctor who knew them well. And one
(01:22):
of the things that American doctors were saying about the
bicycle was that you shouldn't ride it, or you shouldn't
override it, because you only had so much energy in
your life, like a battery that you can't recharge, and
you had to conserve that and you couldn't. You couldn't
be going out exercising willy nilly, because you would just
(01:44):
wear yourself out and then you'd die. And there were
certain things about American life that supported this, like the
clothes that women wore. Middle class women at the time
were expected to wear these very restrictive coursets that they
needed in part because the weight of their clothes and
the weight of their skirts was so much that they
(02:05):
needed this infrastructure underneath that would distribute the weight. So
it wasn't all just sitting on their hips, but you
could be wearing twenty five pounds worth of clothing. You'd
be wearing very narrow, pointy shoes, and so these women
were in these very tight things that kept them from
breathing well, and they weren't exercising, so they had no
(02:27):
muscle strength, and so they were very frail, a lot
of them, and they couldn't you know, you couldn't catch
your breath or you would faint. And the doctors were saying, well,
of course a person like this should never exercise, because
that would be the end of them. But what happened
with the bicycle and I were talking about in the
eighteen nineties. The safety bicycle is that they were so
enticing and they seemed like so much fun that people
(02:50):
were willing to try them, you know, even though the
doctors were saying, please, don't do this, you'll die. And
these women could not wear these corsets. They had to
figure out a different way to dress themselves because it
just didn't work on the bicycle. So they started wearing
just for bicycling, not in the rest of their lives,
(03:11):
but for bicycling. They would wear a looser undergarment, they
would wear shorter skirts. They would go riding around, they
would get a little exercise, they would get a little sun,
and they would feel better and people started feeling stronger,
people started, you know, feeling healthier, and that was part
of a larger move that combined with what was going
(03:35):
on in Europe and the fact that there were, you know,
the communications between America and Europe were tighter. We were
seeing a lot of people immigrating from Europe, including people
who had medical knowledge. So there were you know, they
were discovering all these new things about health and discovering
the germ theory of disease. There was a lot going on,
(03:56):
but part of what was going on was that people
who were riding these bicycles and feeling better were realizing,
you know, my doctor doesn't know everything, and you can
test something out and see whether it works, and if
you know, exercise works, exercise makes you feel better. And
(04:17):
this also showed that there were in fact some things
that were like good for everybody, that you didn't need
this individual like person studying you and telling you how
your moral life would be improved or changed or whatever.
You could say, well, maybe everybody should eat more roffage,
or everybody should do this, you know. So it was
(04:39):
part of and played into a larger change in how
people thought about health and medicine at the time. The
beginning of the eighteen nineties, the production of bicycles ramped
up like crazy. Producers were making new innovations in how
bikes were built. They were adapting technology from making plows
(05:04):
and making tractors, and so the bicycles became by eighteen
ninety seventeen ninety eight, just the market was just flooded
with them, and some of them were not good, which
a lot of people say is another reason for the
boom to end was that there were just a lot
of bikes on the market that were dangerous, falling apart,
or that didn't give you that exhilarating experience that got
(05:27):
people hooked. In the eighteen nineties bike boom, it seemed
like everybody was riding a bike, got more and more popular,
they got cheaper and cheaper to buy. There are more
and more used ones, so it seemed like everybody was
doing it. And then right around the turn of the
century boom stopped. People stopped using it for the most part.
I mean, there were still people who rode them and
used them for work, but they weren't a fad anymore.
(05:49):
The myth has long held that the car was invented
and everyone just moved directly from bicycles to cars, and
that that's what killed the bike boom. But in fact,
the car was invented at the end of the nineteenth
century and invented by people who had been bicycle mechanics.
First Henry Ford. Yes, he was a bicycle mechanic, and
(06:11):
he adapted a lot of bicycle technology wheels and stuff
like that, gears and everything to what he was doing,
but they were very expensive, so it wasn't until you know,
Henry Ford in the second decade of the twentieth century
started mass producing cars that ordinary people could start to
(06:32):
afford them. So there was this ten year gap when
people really had stopped riding bicycles, but before a lot
of people could start being able to afford a car.
But the thing that made it much more difficult for
people to ride bicycles at the beginning of the twentieth
century was things like street cars, which were cutting up
(06:52):
the roads and cities and went fast, and you know,
there were beginning to be cars on the roads. Just
became less practical for people to use a bike for entertainment.
What happened in the nineteen seventies was that again a
new technology for US, lightweight European ten speed bicycles came
(07:13):
over and then we started building American ten speeds and
that got really a lot of young people on bikes
in the mid nineteen seventies. And some of those young
people had the same kind of organizational aspiration as the
earlier bikers who had fought for just main roads. And
so with this new group you see people advocating for
(07:37):
old railway right of ways that weren't being used for
anything to be turned into rail trails that starts happening
in the seventies, and also the first dedicated bike lanes
in cities like New York are happening in the nineteen seventies.
You also had bike messengers at that point. I mean,
there's a whole bunch of stuff going on. The thing
(07:59):
about the bike is that it comes and goes. Right now,
I think a lot of people are finding really practical
uses for it, especially in cities where distances are shorter.
But there have been times recently in our recent history
where nobody rode a bike, and there are still places
in the country where you can't really But the times
(08:20):
when bicycles are popular coincide with times when they are
perceived as fun and safe. And what's happening right now
is that a lot of cities have been investing in
bike lanes and also in bike share companies bike share programs,
(08:41):
and that gives people a way to use a bike
without really taking their lives into their hands. And now
we're seeing another new technology that is really starting to
catch on, which is electric bicycles, which make it super
easy to go up a hill. They are getting cheaper,
they're getting lighter weight, and that's coinciding with a huge
(09:05):
older demographic, baby boomers who came of age maybe in
the nineteen seventies bike boom, after a period when nobody
rode a bike really and they want to keep riding
their bikes, but they maybe don't want to deal with
those hills anymore. So this electric addition, it's something else
that is fun and practical, and I think that's a
(09:26):
lot a large part of why right now we're seeing
a lot of people on bikes. So before the bicycle,
really the only way to travel a long distance in
this country, other than on the waterways, was with a horse,
whether it was riding a horse or a horse and carriage.
And the creation of the bicycle really affected the way
(09:49):
we live now.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Madison Dericut, and a special thanks to
Margaret Goroff Mechanical Horse. How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life
is her book and it's available wherever you buy your books.
And it was just a blast to just walk through
American life and the bicycle and where the two intersected,
(10:14):
and how the bicycle changed in some ways and in
many ways American life and my goodness, when we hear
about where the science was as related to let's say, exercise,
and how we had a finite amount, so we should
be careful how we use it up. Be careful. Anytime
anyone says the science is settled, that's a humbling, humbling
(10:36):
anecdote about where the consensus was on science in the
eighteen nineties. The story of the bicycle, the mechanical horse.
Here on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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