Motorcycles

My first direct experience of motorcycling was riding on the gas tanks of my father’s war surplus Harley Davidson 45. I sat on the tanks behind the speedometer and held onto the middle of the handlebars. We got up to a speed around 40 miles per hour. It was an amazingly fast ride for a five–year-old. I thought I was flying. Our route took us around a large country “block”, perhaps two miles long, and lasted only a few minutes, but after that ride I was hooked for the duration.

When I was twenty-one I paid cash for my first road bike, a 1,000cc Harley Davidson Sportster in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The photo here was taken by Christine Anderson (sp?). It is slightly out of focus, and the color has mutated with time, but it is typical of the results of the consumer point-and-shoot film cameras of the time (1972). Chris took this snapshot minutes after I bought the Harley, and just before I rode it away from the dealership. Note my “groovy” t-shirt and hair spilling out of the helmet.

The Sportster suffered from manufacturing (quality control) problems. Just days after this photo was taken, I rode it up to New York State, then loaded it into my brother’s pickup truck for the trek back to California where I’d lived the year before. While riding this bike near San Luis Obispo in 1973 the driver of a Chevy pickup truck tried to kill me by turning into my path. It was a good bet on the pickup driver’s part, since the Sportster had drum brakes and was hard to stop at any speed above twenty miles per hour. The attempted murder didn’t work, but the bike was never the same after the crash.

In 1974 I bought the Harley Davidson Superglide pictured here. The Superglide was a huge step up in quality and comfort from the Sportster. With its 74 cu. in. (1,200cc) engine, it had plenty of power, too: It would chug along at 90 – 100 miles per hour all night on my trips from Riverside, CA to Tucson, AZ to visit my brother Joe. Later, hard times came like they always do, and I had to sell the bike. The Superglide photo, like that of the Sportster was taken with a consumer point-and-shoot film camera. The garage in the background was quite insecure. It would have been easy to steal it from the garage, so I kept it in the living room behind the couch. Susan, my first wife, was not particularly amused by the storage arrangement, but I figured it was better than losing the bike to one of the “biker outlaws” I knew at the time.

In 1978, having made friends with the former sales manager of the local Harley dealership who opened the first Kawasaki dealership in the area, I bought a KZ 650. The Kawasaki was a fine little bike. It was fast, quick handling, and comfortable on 400 mile rides. The only down sides of the bike was the need to adjust the valves every 3,000 miles and the sound. It never sounded “right” to me, because it wasn’t a v-twin engine. The v-twin engine was invented by Indian, and made famous by Indian, Harley, Crocker, Merkel, and Excelsior, among other manufacturers. There were enough v-twin-powered motorcycles around when I was a child in the 1950s and I was so favorably impressed by them, that otherwise perfectly good engine designs left me in mental neutral. The photo of the KZ 650 above, again taken with a cheap film camera, shows my son Aaron on the bike. He was 4 years old at the time. I rode the KZ for years. Eventually it just wore out, and it made no sense to perform the repairs necessary to bring it back to life yet again.

My next road bike was a 2002 V-Star 1100. My wife Lisa took this photo in 2005 with our Kodak DC 3400. The photo quality is a big jump from the film prints of previous eras, since it is in digital format and could not fade. The 1100 was a solid bike that required little maintenance beyond oil and filter changes and valve adjustments every 4,000 miles. Knowing that I was going to make a coast-to-coast-to-coast trip in the near future, I rode the 1100 “around the Four Corners” for practice in September, 2005, a 2,000 mile, 3 day test ride.

The 1100 held up well in every respect throughout the Four Corners ride, but I wanted a bigger engine, suspecting that it would cruise at lower RPMs at freeway speeds and vibrate less so it would be a more comfortable long-distance ride.
I began looking for a bigger bike when I returned home. I looked at Victory Kingpins, Indian Spirits, and Road Stars for several days. I liked the idea of an American-made motorcycle, but the Victory models would not physically fit me without extensive (and expensive) aftermarket parts, and the Indians were of questionable build quality.

I was quite comfortable with the build quality of the Yamahas after my experience with the V-Star, and I found my next bike sitting on the floor of Corona Yamaha: An early delivery 2006 Road Star. The bike fit me and the aftermarket parts on the 1100 would all work on the new bike, so setting it up for riding would not cost a small fortune.

My daughter Megan took this photo with my Panasonic Lumix FX-01. The ridges in the background are part of the Santa Rosa Mountain range, which runs from Riverside County in the north to San Diego County in the south.

I’d always been a solo rider, but within a few weeks of buying the Road Star, a group of independent riders in San Bernardino and Riverside Counties – the “Inland Empire” region began to form for the purpose of going on group rides once or twice a month. The River City Riders is not a club or “gang”, since we have no rules, and there’s no real “membership” list – we simply invite other riders to join us at times. We’re just interested in rides, and being largely long-time independent riders, we have a general disdain for rules. The Southern California-based day rides vary between 150 and 375 miles and anywhere between 3 and 12 riders typically attend.

The Road Star turned out to be everything I want in a motorcycle. It had plenty of power, it was very reliable, required little maintenance, and a wide range of aftermarket parts and accessories were available to make it fit the way the owner rides. Over a 3.5-year period it continued to perform very well. My longer rides on it were a 19-day, 7,000+ mile ride to Long Island and back, and an 8-day, 4,000+ mile circular ride to South Dakota and New Mexico. The only problems I had on it were operator problems.
I expected that I would keep rebuilding the bike’s engine and drive train and repaint it as needed, and keep it deep into my retirement years. But that didn’t happen.

In March of 2009, when I was riding home from a meeting of The Friends of Mount Rubidoux, someone tried to kill me with their automobile. Again. It was 36 years since the last time someone had attempted to murder me so effectively. The weapon for this second attempt was a Volvo, which also turned into my path. The Road Star was totaled.

I wasn’t totaled, but here is a helpful hint: If you want to be filled with fear, go to a hospital emergency room. Hospitals have a full complement of staff members who will tell you why you should be filled with fear about the activity that you love. Unlike a box of facial tissue, it is a free service. And you don’t even have to ask for it. They will try to give you fear without being prompted.

After the insurance payoff arrived, I bought another Road Star. It is an older model than the wrecked 2006, a 1999, but it has considerably fewer miles on it. A photo of the new-to-me '99 Road Star is shown above.