One of my heroes when I was kid growing up in Wisconsin Rapids was a man named Reuben Lindstrom who mostly lived on the streets, rarely ever spoke, and was a local legend because he had converted a bike to ride on the train tracks. I have many memories of seeing him buzzing down the tracks with his dreads flapping in the wind. By city officials he was considered a nusiance and at one point run out of town and another time he was detained by the public health service and his long long dreads were shaved off. There were always rumors that he was a mad inventor but only recently I discovered that he had actually filed a patent for a wind driven vehicle in 1939.

This in itself is remarkable, but what I find more remarkable is that 70 years later International Truck files several patents for wind driven energy generation, which cite Reuben's patent from 1940. Crazy stuff, I can't quite get my mind around it. Here's a man that was so far ahead of his time yet he was ridiculed and outcast, tho most of the kids I knew back then probably secretly admired him.

"Although this trained automotive mechanic chose to exclusively ride a bicycle for the rest of his life, he powered the two wheeler with a small gasoline engine. Whenever he required its aid, which was seldom, he'd pull the rope and start the engine and off he'd go.
He also "rode the rails." Reuben welded two flat steel pieces on each end of a telescoping steel rod. He then drilled holes in those flat pieces and inserted two large U-bolts in them. He secured one U-bolt end to a stud he had welded to a flanged steel wheel that turned easily on greased bearings. He secured the other end of the rod's U-bolt to the bike's top cross bar."

I saw him often in Rapids when I was a kid, but never had the courage to talk to him. My dad told me that when he was a young kid, Reuben used to come to his school and play marbles with the kids, that would have been in the 40s.

There were many rumors that he eventually felt unwelcome in Rapids and for a while lived in the caves at Devil's Lake. (This mind you, if only a rumor)

He eventually moved to Madison, but I never realized he lived on Willy St, or maybe the halfway house on Baldwin. The first two photos by photographer Jack Greene are of Reuben from 1982. The best thing is the photo includes a caption in Reuben's own words.
'I used to work around the railroads in Canada, roundhouses, locomotives, steam days then you know. I've been here in Madison I guess six years. They're doing a lot of fixing up on Williamson Street. I don't know how it's all going to end up. They used to have two railroads side by side here, you know.'

He died in 1988 at the age of 91 and is buried in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery

Memories of Meikal And as found on Forgotten Wisconsin.