Fans can view Pee-wee Herman's bike at Pittsburgh's Bicycle Heaven museum

Aug. 1—With the July 30 death of actor Paul Reubens, also known as Pee-wee Herman, Craig Morrow is expecting an increase of visitors to Bicycle Heaven.

The museum and bike shop in Pittsburgh's North Side is home to one of the the prop bikes used in the 1985 film, "Pee-wee's Big Adventure."

The Tim Burton movie recounts Pee-wee's cross-country journey to recover his iconic red Schwinn DX cruiser after it is stolen.

Morrow said he was taken by surprise by word of Reubens' death from cancer at age 70, but he is thinking of a way to honor the actor's memory using the bicycle.

Morrow bought it about 10 years ago at a bike swap in Portland, Ind. He declined to share how much he paid for it.

"I met someone who knew someone who had the bike in Michigan, so I went to Michigan to get it," he said.

Recollections vary, but it's one of 12 — or maybe 13 — built for the movie.

"They destroyed some of them after the movie and there's only four to exist," Morrow said. "I was told that Paul Reubens had two of them, the Bicycle Museum of America (in Bremen, Ohio) has one and we have the other one."

While his purchase didn't come with written provenance, Morrow said he is confident it is authentic.

"Talking to the guy I got it from and the movie prop people who built the bike, it's definitely the bike," he said. "They never sent the bikes out with any kind of paperwork, but there are a couple things about it that nobody would know except the prop people, so it's definitely legit."

Those details aren't divulged in order to keep someone from trying to build and sell a counterfeit, Morrow said, but "it's something about the lights, something about the line, the lion head and a couple of other things."

He doesn't know how his bike was used in the movie, either, but he suspects it was in the scene where Pee-wee dreams that the bike is stolen by evil clowns who break it apart, take it to an operating room, set it on fire and feed it to a giant claw machine that drops it into hell.

"Which one did he ride in this scene or that scene, nobody knows and nobody cares about that. There's no way to tell," Morrow said. "The movie prop people who built the bikes and were there for a lot of the scenes couldn't even tell you."

Morrow said he missed a chance to meet Reubens when the actor canceled a scheduled appearance at the 2019 Steel City Con in Monroeville.

"He was gonna sign it when he was coming here for (Steel City Con), right before covid, but he was doing a commercial or something and never showed up," Morrow said. "We would have brought the bike to him and had pictures with him, and now we won't be able to."

Shirley McMarlin is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Shirley by email at smcmarlin@triblive.com or via Twitter .