Young Chuck on a red bike on the Highland Ridge driveway, c. 1984–86

Chuck on a wet blacktop loop driveway under bare deciduous trees, in a gray quilted jacket over a red striped shirt and red sweatpants, balancing on the same red BMX-style bike with training wheels that appears in the indoor Hillcrest frame. The lighting reads as early spring or late autumn — the trees leafless, the asphalt still damp, the grass at the edge yellow-green coming back. A pale 1980s sedan sits at the edge of the loop at far left. He is grinning at the camera.

Where the loop is

The blacktop loop driveway and the wooded edge place the photograph at Highland Ridge Road, Lowell, Ohio — the next house the family settled into after the Hillcrest years, and the one Will the architect designed and built. The loop is the same driveway visible in the Highland Ridge house exteriors elsewhere in the archive and in the red-bridge winter frame.

The two bikes-with-training-wheels frames

This photograph pairs with the indoor Hillcrest BMX shot as the two earliest training-wheels frames of Chuck on a bike in the archive — the prehistory of the post-2015 charity bike rides. The training wheels are the only ones in the corpus.

Source: Eesley family album, shared by Chuck Eesley June 2026.