Happy Father’s Day!

My father, Marty Berk, at the Grand American trapshoot in Vandalia, Ohio. This photo was taken in the mid-1960s.

A special day, indeed. To all of our good friends out there, our special wishes to you on Father’s Day. It is one of the best days of the year, and it is always a day to reflect on our Dads. I do. My father has been gone for more than 30 years, and I still find myself thinking about him at least once a day. Heart disease, the family curse, is what took him on that day in back in the early 1980s, at the very young age of 56.

My father believed in living life to its fullest, and I do, too. He instilled a lot of things in me, and like all of us, I guess I am pretty much the product of the values he passed along.

My Dad was a world class trapshooter. I was never any good at that game (put a shotgun in my hands and the safest place to be is on the clay pigeon), but I most definitely picked up my lifelong fascination with firearms from Dad. He was a rifleman and a reloader, too, and that apple sure didn’t fall far from the tree. Dad was a craftsman who created his own gun stocks, and I a still get giddy when I see a rifle with nice wood. I’ve tried stocking a couple of guns myself, with barely acceptable results. My efforts pale in comparison to what Dad could do, which was nothing short of amazing.

Dad didn’t much care for handguns, but I sure did (no doubt the result of a misspent youth watching too many westerns and Army shows on TV). I remember the day I came home with a big old Colt .45 automatic. When I came home with the Colt, my Dad gave me “the look” (I can still see it). But he was a good sport, and back in those days, if you wanted to shoot you just walked out in the backyard and started shooting. We did just that on a humid New Jersey afternoon, tossing a soda can about 20 feet in front of us for a target. Neither one of us could hit it. It was pretty funny. We went through a box of ammo and the can of pop was untouched. We knew a guy who knew how to make a handgun do what it was told, though, and after learning the lesson about focusing on the front sight, it was pretty easy to keep a can dancing. Good times.

One thing my Dad inherited from me was a love of motorcycles. Yep, you read that right. That fascination went from me to him. When I was a kid in junior high school one of the big kids had a new Triumph Tiger, and I was mesmerized by the thing. I started sending letters to all of the motorcycle manufacturers asking for literature, and before long our house was a motorcycle sales literature library. To my astonishment, my Dad started reading the brochures from Triumph, Honda, BSA, Harley, and others.

One day, one of Dad’s trapshooting buddies stopped by on a Honda CB-160 (the baby Super Hawk). To make a long story short, Dad bought that bike from old Cliff Leutholdt. He rode it for two months and then traded it in on a brand new 305cc Super Hawk. The Super Hawk lasted another short two months before Dad traded it in on a Triumph Bonneville. As a kid in junior high school, I was in hog heaven. A brand new 1966 Triumph Bonneville…in our garage! There were a lot of times when Dad wasn’t around that I fired the big 650 up and…well, those are stories for another day.

One more quick photo of three more Dads.  When I was in the new factory last week Ed was out for a visit, and I grabbed a photo of Ed, Steve, and Josh (yep, three generations of moto men!).   It’s one I wanted to share with you…

Ed, Steve, and Josh. Josh joked about being able to see himself in the future when he saw this photo!

For now, enjoy the day, and again, happy Father’s Day to all of you!