Bob and his Beemers…

Let’s see…the subject of this blog is a partial display of my friend Bob’s vintage BMW collection, but I can’t jump right into it.   I need to first tell you a bit about how I came to know Bob. 

I guess it all starts with my buddy Marty.    I first met Marty through sort of an arranged marriage.   And I have to go back even further to tell that story.   So maybe it doesn’t start with Marty…it starts with Al.  

Al is my gardener.  Before you go making any value judgments about me or Al, you need to know I live in So Cal and I don’t like messing with the lawn.  Like everybody out here, I have a gardener.   My gardener has also become a good friend.  

Al is an interesting guy.   He’s rich.   No kidding.   If you’ve ever read The Millionaire Next Door (a fascinating book), Al is the exact kind of guy the book describes.   Al is a workaholic, and while doing his gardening thing, he noticed houses in the neighborhood that were not kept up.    When Al saw this, he approached the owners, he asked if he could tend to the yard, he heard the hard luck stories about why the yards fell into disrepair, and he wound up buying more than a few of those houses.  Now he has lots of houses, a few apartment buildings, and a hotel.   But he likes gardening, and I’ll see him once a week cutting my grass along with his helpers.  Al is a great guy and it’s fun chatting with him.  

During one such chat several years ago, Al recommended that I meet the judge who lived up the street from me.   Seriously, a real judge, and Al told me that the judge also rode motorcycles.   Al even gave me his phone number.     I didn’t do anything with it, though.  

All right, fast forward a bit.   I was home recuperating from a surgery that laid me up for a few weeks about a dozen years back, and with nothing better to do (Facebook and blogging hadn’t been invented yet), I passed the days watching TV.    One of the shows was a special on the Daytona Bike Week, and part of that was a feature about five guys who rode their motorcycles from Pomona to Daytona.   One of them was a judge.   Whoa, that sounds familiar.   How many judges can there be in Pomona who ride motorcycles?

I searched for the number Al had provided a year or so earlier, I found it, and I called Marty.   That was the start of a great friendship and a lot of great motorcycle adventures in three different countries.  

After we’d been on a few rides, Marty told me I had to start attending the First Church of Bob.   Uh oh, I thought.   A religious pitch.   I wasn’t expecting that.    That wasn’t what Marty had in mind, though.  Turns out that the First Church of Bob was the weekly Saturday morning gathering at Brown BMW, our local BMW dealership founded by…you guessed it, Bob Brown.   Bob became a riding buddy and I joined Mr. Brown and others (along with Marty) on a lot of great moto adventures.  

That brings us to the subject, finally, of today’s blog.   I hadn’t been attending the weekly lunch meetings for a while and when I started “going to church” again, I found that Bob had several of his vintage Beemers on display along the walls in the dealership.   Wowee, I thought…I have to get photos to share with you guys on the blog.   And without further ado, here we go…

This first bike is a 1928 BMW.   It’s a 500cc model, and like all of the bikes in these photos, it’s a boxer twin.  

The black-and-white paint themes on the first several bikes make these photos really pop.  This used to be the classic BMW colors until maybe the 1970s, and it works.   It’s a classic color combo. 

Bob’s dealership does a lot of police motorcycle work, and Bob will usually grab a black and white police motor that’s been turned in (I think he likes those bikes because they’re black and white, like the old Beemers).   That’s a police motor you see in the photo of Bob at the start of this blog, and no matter how many times I’ve ridden with Bob, my heart still skips a beat when I see that black and white motorcycle close behind me in my rear view mirror.    It’s also a good thing when we ride in traffic…Bob takes the lead spot and every body just sort of moves over.

Okay, back to the main attraction.   Here’s a 1936 750cc flathead BMW…

The bike above is really interesting.   It’s basically the model the Chinese copied, and there are still folks riding around on Chiang Jiang motorcycles in China that are, well, Chinese copies of the old 1930s BMW flathead.  Folks were still riding them the last time I was there.   Yep, you can go to China and buy a brand new 1936 BMW (made in China under the Chiang Jiang name).  It’s the bike my good friend Carla King rode around China for her next book.

Okay, I know, back to Bob’s bikes.   Here we go.   This BMW is a 1952 600cc model…

And this one is a 1951 600cc BMW (that, my friends, was the year I was born)…

Here’s one with a great story…it’s Bob’s personal 1961 600cc BMW…

Bob calls the bike above the original GS, and for good reason.   He rode it all the way to Cabo San Lucas back in the early 1960s.   Now you might be thinking hey, what’s the big deal.   You guys (meaning me and some of my friends) rode our California Scooters all the way down to Cabo a couple of years ago, and those were little 150cc bikes.  So what’s the big deal about riding a 600cc bike to Cabo?   It’s this, my friends…when Bob did it, there were no roads.  No kidding.    Bob rode down there on trails and for a lot of the way, by just riding along the ocean.   All the way down.  Sleeping on the beach.   Spinning the rear wheel in the sand to let the bike sink in so he wouldn’t have to use the center stand.   That, my friends, is a big deal and a huge adventure.    This guy was blazing trails in Baja while I was still in elementary school!

More good vintage stuff…here’s a 1971 R75/5 750cc BMW…

And here’s the same thing in a 1972 model…

Another beautiful BMW classic is the 1976 R90S model.   This motorcycle really turned heads when it was first introduced, and it is still a show stopper…

As you can see from the above, BMW started moving away from their black and white color combo in the 1970s.   The bikes you see in these photos are all in their stock colors.    Most amazingly, most of these bikes (including the early ones) are not restorations…they are original motorcycles!

These last two are particularly beautiful…the first is the 1000cc 1977 R100RS…

And here’s the last bike BMW did in the R100RS configuration, the 1983 1000cc model in a beautiful pin-striped pearl white color combo…

Fun stuff, boys and girls, and the results of a few minutes of shutter snapping and an enjoyable lunch with Bob and the boys hearing about these bikes.   Bob, thanks for letting us share these with our California Scooter blog buddies!

And all of you blog buddies…you might be wondering if there is more to the story than just a collection of beautiful vintage BMW bikes.    Well, maybe there is.   Steve has been talking about doing a custom California Scooter based on the old German style, and I think that would be very, very cool.   An all black bike with white pin striping…wire wheels with chrome spokes and black powder coated rims…and…well, you get the idea!

Stay tuned, my friends…as always, there’s more good stuff coming your way!