atomsplitter
Living Legend
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2007
- Messages
- 2,774
- Location
- Keller, TX
- Ride
- 17 T-120 Black, 20 Bobber Black, 98 Trophy 1200
A few years ago I was attending a family reunion and to mark the occasion I wrote a story for my siblings that they might or minght not have remembered as well as I since it was from the 1970's. I ran accross the piece the other day while rummaging around my computer files and thought I'd share it with the rest of humanity. The story was too long for a single post so I've broken it up to meet the word count limit. For your reading pleasure I present:
The Good Old Days
A few years back I read a book by Patrick McManus entitled, "How I Got This Way." I then ran across the book again on my shelf recently and that prompted me to thinking.
Back in the mid 1970's I was a poor college student attending Kansas State University (and before anyone jumps to a conclusion about my exiguous cortical functions, grades were not the reason I was a poor student). I was fresh out of a 3 year enlistment in Uncle Sugar's OD Green Club (i.e. US Army) and in need of some entertainment to assuage my lack of convivial female companionship. That's a somewhat euphemistic way of saying I was bored and lonely. At this time in history my older brother Mark had just gotten out of the service as well and had moved his family into a small farm house just outside Junction City, Kansas. My sister Mary had at that time a boyfriend named Ralph, a thin blonde headed kid. Ralph was not in my particular predicament (i.e. he wasn't in college, he had a girlfriend (obviously), and wasn't particularly bored since he worked for a living) but he empathized with my monastic condition (since he'd been there himself until somewhat recently as it happened). Ralph would accompany my sister, Mary, to my older brother Mark's abode from time to time for general fun and frolic on weekends. It was during one of these occasions in the Spring of 1976(?) that Ralph mentioned to me in passing that he had a contact in Manhattan that was looking to sell a basket bike. He was pretty sure it was a dirt bike but not really sure of what it was or its current condition. My interest was immediately piqued since I have a passion (bordering on fanaticism) for two wheeled mayhem. I should note that at this time my entire riding experience had been limited to the rare occasion when some neighbor kid in Albuquerque, NM dropped by our family homestead on his hot new motorcycle and allowed me the opportunity to put-put-put up and down the street in first gear on some beast of 90 to 100 cc's of pure adrenaline pumping power. I think I had managed to find second gear only once during my puberty. So I was pretty amped about getting a dirt bike.
I requested Ralph look into the particulars and asked if he'd be interested in maybe going in halvsies to acquire it (Ralph was about as financially solvent as myself at the time). He agreed and a week later had the information. It was a Suzuki TS400, a 2-stroke thumper designed for trail and street, it was totally disassembled but all the parts were there (he was assured) and we could acquire it for the nominal sum of $400.00 (a small fortune in 1976). Ralph said he'd put in two hundred if I would and we'd share the bike. Since we had no intention of ever registering it, or riding it on public roads it seemed a match made to order. I coughed up a lung and 200 bucks a week later and sent Ralph on his merry way to purchase the bike. The next weekend he showed up at Mark's with a motorcycle junk yard in the back of his Chevy Tahoe. If there was anything missing you couldn't tell by the pile of mechanical distress heaped into the back of the truck in dilapidated boxes. Well this looked promising, it was late April and now I had something to keep me occupied during my 3 month summer break from school, sweet. Riding a dirt bike.
This was to be my first ever foray into motorcycle reclamation, little did I know that it would be the spark to a life long obsession that has resulted in countless hours of frustration, busted knuckles, missing fingernails and consternation of biblical proportions. That my modest $200 purchase has ballooned over the decades into a river of cash flowing out of my accounts to fund a parade of mechanical miscreants that never fully satisfied an apparent need to "have fun" with two wheels. It likely started when I was a grade school kid in Albuquerque when the next door neighbor kid got a shiny new Honda Trail 90 for Christmas (and I got a Lite Brite). He would tease me with short rides around his front yard, tearing up the Bermuda and thrilling me with the power and torque of his hot new motorcycle as I desperately tried not to slide off its luggage rack. (I was kid, what did I know?) It could also have been that time Mark gave me a Vespa for free, the one that he had been given for free by our next door neighbor when he couldn't fix it. I spent days dreaming of wind in my hair and hot girls hugging me so as to not fall off under thunderous acceleration (which accounts for my poor academic grades in Junior High and High School). I also managed to reduce that contraption to elemental bits that had no hope of ever being reassembled, which allowed my father a golden opportunity to regale me about tool useage as we hauled the resulting oily scraps to the local dump.
The Good Old Days
A few years back I read a book by Patrick McManus entitled, "How I Got This Way." I then ran across the book again on my shelf recently and that prompted me to thinking.
Back in the mid 1970's I was a poor college student attending Kansas State University (and before anyone jumps to a conclusion about my exiguous cortical functions, grades were not the reason I was a poor student). I was fresh out of a 3 year enlistment in Uncle Sugar's OD Green Club (i.e. US Army) and in need of some entertainment to assuage my lack of convivial female companionship. That's a somewhat euphemistic way of saying I was bored and lonely. At this time in history my older brother Mark had just gotten out of the service as well and had moved his family into a small farm house just outside Junction City, Kansas. My sister Mary had at that time a boyfriend named Ralph, a thin blonde headed kid. Ralph was not in my particular predicament (i.e. he wasn't in college, he had a girlfriend (obviously), and wasn't particularly bored since he worked for a living) but he empathized with my monastic condition (since he'd been there himself until somewhat recently as it happened). Ralph would accompany my sister, Mary, to my older brother Mark's abode from time to time for general fun and frolic on weekends. It was during one of these occasions in the Spring of 1976(?) that Ralph mentioned to me in passing that he had a contact in Manhattan that was looking to sell a basket bike. He was pretty sure it was a dirt bike but not really sure of what it was or its current condition. My interest was immediately piqued since I have a passion (bordering on fanaticism) for two wheeled mayhem. I should note that at this time my entire riding experience had been limited to the rare occasion when some neighbor kid in Albuquerque, NM dropped by our family homestead on his hot new motorcycle and allowed me the opportunity to put-put-put up and down the street in first gear on some beast of 90 to 100 cc's of pure adrenaline pumping power. I think I had managed to find second gear only once during my puberty. So I was pretty amped about getting a dirt bike.
I requested Ralph look into the particulars and asked if he'd be interested in maybe going in halvsies to acquire it (Ralph was about as financially solvent as myself at the time). He agreed and a week later had the information. It was a Suzuki TS400, a 2-stroke thumper designed for trail and street, it was totally disassembled but all the parts were there (he was assured) and we could acquire it for the nominal sum of $400.00 (a small fortune in 1976). Ralph said he'd put in two hundred if I would and we'd share the bike. Since we had no intention of ever registering it, or riding it on public roads it seemed a match made to order. I coughed up a lung and 200 bucks a week later and sent Ralph on his merry way to purchase the bike. The next weekend he showed up at Mark's with a motorcycle junk yard in the back of his Chevy Tahoe. If there was anything missing you couldn't tell by the pile of mechanical distress heaped into the back of the truck in dilapidated boxes. Well this looked promising, it was late April and now I had something to keep me occupied during my 3 month summer break from school, sweet. Riding a dirt bike.
This was to be my first ever foray into motorcycle reclamation, little did I know that it would be the spark to a life long obsession that has resulted in countless hours of frustration, busted knuckles, missing fingernails and consternation of biblical proportions. That my modest $200 purchase has ballooned over the decades into a river of cash flowing out of my accounts to fund a parade of mechanical miscreants that never fully satisfied an apparent need to "have fun" with two wheels. It likely started when I was a grade school kid in Albuquerque when the next door neighbor kid got a shiny new Honda Trail 90 for Christmas (and I got a Lite Brite). He would tease me with short rides around his front yard, tearing up the Bermuda and thrilling me with the power and torque of his hot new motorcycle as I desperately tried not to slide off its luggage rack. (I was kid, what did I know?) It could also have been that time Mark gave me a Vespa for free, the one that he had been given for free by our next door neighbor when he couldn't fix it. I spent days dreaming of wind in my hair and hot girls hugging me so as to not fall off under thunderous acceleration (which accounts for my poor academic grades in Junior High and High School). I also managed to reduce that contraption to elemental bits that had no hope of ever being reassembled, which allowed my father a golden opportunity to regale me about tool useage as we hauled the resulting oily scraps to the local dump.
