A Love Affair with Me and …

It started 54 years ago. And it started in Sears, Roebuck and Company.  Maybe you remember the store, half of it was in Montclair and half of it in Pomona, right there at the end of Indian Hill Blvd. In the middle of the store there was a wide lane running right through the store, and the county line between LA and San Bernardino ran right through it. If you were shopping, you had to purchase your items on the side of the store they were from. LA and San Berdu both wanted their taxes.

I can’t exactly remember which side of the store it was purchased from, maybe LA. But it started a love affair between me and…… Shoot, I forgot to tell you what I’m doing.  I’m practicing my writing. There will be no keen insights, nothing profound, the bible remains closed.  Wait, no, I can’t do that. Sorry, I will figure out something to say about the Bible and Sears, Roebuck and Company.  I’m not sure what, but I have a week of writing to think about it. So, where was I? Yes, the love affair.  A love affair between me and….I guess I need to acknowledge my dad who brought us together.  So, thank you Dad for my birthday present, a minibike. And it started a love affair between me and motorcycles and dirt. 

I decided to find a picture of a minibike, but I found this instead. Man, if you want, reminisce with me for a while.  It is a video set to “Everybody’s talkin’” which is cool in itself, but it’s the words on the screen that are perfect. I couldn’t express it better.  So here it is, A Boy and his Minibike in the 70s. It ends with this, behind every minibike is a dad who said yes.  Wow, that thought I was practicing writing frivolous things, instead I’m crying thinking about my dad. My Dad said yes.

I know, you should wear a helmet.

And it happened. I guess you could call it infatuation. A minibike and a 10-year-old kid. And it bloomed and grew into 20 years of dirt biking.  

I don’t have many memories of the minibike. For example, I can’t remember starting it. Tugging on the rope of that Briggs and Stratton motor. I’m sure I must have. And I can’t remember riding up and down the driveway. I’m not sure if a minibike would make it up the driveway. Maybe my dad carted it up with his truck? But I remember riding up and down the dirt road called the dike below our house. 

Eventually that minibike was replaced with something more substantial, a Honda Trail 90. And that was how I learned to ride. Riding back and forth to a friend’s house next to the bus stop for school. And often riding the dirt roads that headed up into foothills.   

The first legitimate bike I had was a Yamaha LT2 100.  I can’t remember if it was a birthday gift, or if I bought it.  Maybe it was both. I was 15. That first thing I did was take off all the lights, the headlight, blinkers, and the taillight, to turn it into a “dirt bike.”  A dirt bike, hmm. Actually not, it was just a street bike without lights.  But after some work. I had one.  A legitimate dirt bike, with knobbies, plastic fenders and gas tank, an expansion chamber, and a ported motor. That bike was how I learned to work on motorcycles. 

And it made me fast. It was the only way you could ride it. That happened because of the ported motor, it left a powerband so little at the only speed it had was full throttle. But boy did it scream, as long as you could shift the gears. And I joined the Motocross team at Upland high school. How cool it is that; we had a Motocross team and raced other schools.  

The next bike was actually a dirt bike. Actually, it was the quintessential dirt bike of the time.  Honda Elsinore 125.  Everyone was buying them.  500.00 bucks out the door at Pasadena Honda. I remember talking to one of my friends about our bikes, and came to find that we both purchased our bikes at the same store at about the time. With a little investigation we discovered we had sequential serial numbers. My bike ended up finishing the assembly line one place better. I actually can’t remember which friend it was, maybe Kennith Black? Whoever it was, but I’m pretty sure he finished after me as well. Just saying. The Elsinore was the bike that I rode when I started to win races.

There is more to be said, I should tell a story or two about my next bike, a 1978 Suzuki RM 125. It was a great bike, and of course, the 1982 Honda XR 500R, which was state of art, for one year anyway, and desert racing.  But that Word Count says no. What can I say, he’s a Count, I’m just a peasant. So, I guess no more stories about riding into the setting sun. 

Maybe you remember the film, On Any Sunday, well, I lived it. I lived during the renaissance of dirt biking. The film explores the world of riding and racing motorcycles. From flat track, to observed trials, to motocross, to desert racing, to hill climbing, to ice racing, to the International Six Days Trials, but what sticks in my mind is the last segment of On any Sunday. I remember how it made me feel, 50 years ago. It was so cool. It was just three guys riding their bikes. Having a blast with their friends, kiting around in the dunes by the ocean. It lit the fire, I wanted to do that, so I did, for twenty years, hanging out with my friends and my dirt bike. 

There is a passage in the Bible about time.  “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot”… a couple verses later is this, “a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them”.  I love my dad; he gave me my love for building houses.  You could say I spent almost all of my life gathering stones, making order from chaos. Taking stone and wood to make a house. There is a time for that. Yep, but there is also a time to scatter stones, and I am so grateful to my dad who said yes and to Sears and Roebuck, who gave me a way to scatter stones. 

For me it was a season. I know for some of you it has been more than a season, and I am a bit jealous. But regardless, I am happy with my stone spewing days. And I am grateful to all of you for scattering some stones with me as well.

I can’t believe that I have so few pictures of me and my bikes. However, I did do an artistic rendition in stained glass. And you see the resemblance?