You were lucky with the cotter pins. Those things can get really stuck. I have an old Raleigh 3-speed I haven't gotten them out of. Our shop used to have a wooden tool with 15 inch lever arms that would pull cotter pins pretty easily. 27 x 1 1/4 tires were the norm. 700c was found only on sewups until maybe the mid 80s.

I got a summer job in a bike shop in 1973, when I was 16, in Florissant, Missouri. The pay was $1.50/hour. I worked there for 4 summers, plus some weekends during the school year. A couple male friends of mine worked there, so I asked for a job. I wasn't interested in any typical female jobs and wanted to learn about bikes. There was a bike boom at the time (1st energy crisis in the US) and help was needed. I think the owner expected that I would mostly do sales and replace his wife who was pregnant and would have to stop working soon, but I said I wanted to learn mechanics, and he started training me. I learned fast and two years later had the best job in the place - assembling, adjusting, and testing all the new bikes we sold. It was often hard to be taken seriously as a mechanic because I was female. Customers who came in the shop were usually convinced pretty quickly (maybe it was the grease on my T-shirt, cutoffs, and hands), but phone customers were always a problem. Several times per day I would answer the phone with "Florissant Cycle" and hear "Can I talk to a mechanic?" Usually I would answer "What do you need?" and satisfy all their questions, but sometimes I couldn't take it any more and would hand the phone to a guy.

I left Missouri to attend MIT in the fall of 1974, though continued my summers in the bike shop until 1976. I graduated from MIT and have been doing atmospheric science ever since, though I still work on my own bikes and those of friends. I'd love to go back to a bike shop someday (I actually got an almost serious offer last year when buying wheel-building parts). The way my science funding is going, I could get my wish in a couple of years. As to how I remember obscure details about bikes from 30 years ago, well, guess that's just how my brain is built, or those are the details that I like to remember.