When did it start for you?

My good buddies Josh and Ron posted a question on the Pro One blog not too long ago:

          What was your first bike?

That elicited some very interesting responses.   It made me think about my first bike and when my interest in motorcycles first emerged.  Harley even had an ad along the same lines a few years ago, with the great tag line:

          When did it start for you?

Take a look at the photo in that ad…

The tag line says it all...

I remember for the first time I ever took a hard look at a motorcycle.  I was maybe 7 or 8 years old, and it was in Pennsylvania.  My Dad was a world-class trapshooter (seriously, he held most of the state trap shooting titles in the northeastern United States back in the 1960s, he was a 27-yard shooter, and he was on two U.S. Olympic trap shooting teams).   What that meant for me as a kid was that I tagged along when he went to many of the events.

When my Dad wasn’t shooting, I kind of explored the areas around the shooting clubs.  One time at a shoot in Pennsylvania, there was a restaurant across the street from the trap club, and one day a motorcycle club was at that restaurant.  Those guys rode Harleys, all were full dressers, and they were mesmerizing. 

A Harley from "those days..."

I wish I had a photo of those Harleys so I could show them to you, but I don’t need it for me to remember the scene.   The photo above is of a Harley from that era and that’s about what they looked like back then.   I can see those bikes in my mind today as if I was seeing them in a 24-megabyte digital photo.  I remember everything…the paint, the bicycle-pedal kick starters, the studded saddlebags, the serrated exhaust pipes, the tinted lower windshields that matched the paint on each bike, and more.  It was awesome.

That, boys and girls, was when it started for me.

Let’s now fast forward to the 7th grade.  I would have been 11 or 12 years old.  I grew up in a rural area, so our high school housed both junior high and the high school (grades 7 through 12). 

There was a senior in my high school (his name was Walt Skok) and old Walt had a 1964 Triumph Tiger.  In those days, the 500cc Triumph was called the Tiger.  It had a single carb and it was white and gold.  It was magnificent.   It just dripped with power, a sense of adventure, and coolness.   It had a chrome luggage rack on the gas tank (Triumph called it a “parcel rack”), a big tach and speedo, and chrome wire wheels.  It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I was out in the parking lot staring at it every chance I had. That’s another one I can still see as if I had just looked at it this morning.

A 1964 Triumph Tiger, just like the one Walt Skok rode...

That’s when it really started all over for me again.   Hard to believe it was 50 years ago.  It seems like it was yesterday.

And that’s it for now. I’m on the Cal Poly campus this morning and I’m headed over to the CSC plant this afternoon where I’ll see Steve and talk to him about the upcoming Hollister event (there will be lots of great bikes there).  If you have a cool recollection you’d like to share with us, shoot it to me in an email (jberk@californiascooterco.com), and we’ll put it here on the blog.  If you have a photo, send it along, too!

Ride safe and I’ll talk to you later.