Manney Meets Motorcycle
MANNEY MEETS MOTORCYCLE
Being the war-time adventures (some) of an American Serviceman
HENRY N. MANNEY
HENRY N. MANNEY is automobile racing’s most eloquent reporter and commentator. Through the pages of Road & Track magazine, he follows the European Grand prix and sports car racing scene in a literate style and manner that sets him apart from his fellow motoring journalists and contemporaries. The following is a narrative dealing with Manney’s first of many encounters with motorcycles. Written in 1958, his high-humored way of handling the retelling of such adventures reveals the touch that eventually led him to international fame and the position as the world’s number one motoring journalist. I first met Henry N. Manney III in 1950 when he drove into the shop of the late Ernie McAfee with the first Ferrari just about any of us had ever seen. My position was that of a lowly parts department fixture, but we grew to become enduring friends, each enduring the other.
Joe Parkhurst
MY MOTOR CYCLING experience, like those of so many kindred souls, ’ commenced during the war when I was misrepresenting myself, albeit unwillingly, as a member of Uncle Sam’s Air Force. The radar school which I was sleeping through had been sited by some politician with an eye for real estate values smack in the middle of the most desolate section of Florida’s scrub-pine wasteland between Miami and Palm Beach and being some miles off the nearest stage route, left us soldatos dependent on the Army’s bounty for transport to civilization.
The Brass’ generosity in such matters being what it usually is, we were soon casting around for alternative means of transport; this search having peculiar impetus as we had formed a Dixieland band and as such were much in great demand at the U.S.O. and similar fleshpots.
Purchasing a car was out of the question as fantastic prices were being gotten for dinged-up dogs that ordinarily would be difficult to dispose of to one’s friendly scrap merchant. Besides, the large quantities of petrol that would be necessary to propel these ringless wonders had already been fiddled by the more permanent members of the base personnel. Bicycles were scorned, especially the" 2 cwt. singlespeed Government variety, as being worse than an albatross around the neck in a climate which approached 98 per cent relative humidity.
Roller skates were out for the same reason, although one bright corporal (no relation to the missile of the same name) did achieve fame by concocting a combination shooting stick and power-driven bargepole from an old gasoline lawnmower. It worked just peachy until the eventful day when he was crossing one of Florida’s famous plank bridges at high speed and seized a bearing in his left front skate.
The resulting pas seal, besides affording endless amusement to the inevitable octogenarian fishermen, resulted in spectacularly large areas of his hide being exchanged for an asphalt and wood mixture that crackled when he walked. Therefore, the more thoughtful and/or desperate among us perforce settled on cycles (meaning motor cycles, but pronounced “sickles”) as a means of getting from one broad acre to the next; a step not lightly taken for social reasons as in them days only the more one-syllable types were to be seen whizzing about the streets astride what was referred to as “Murder cycles.” However, for once the end justified the means. Want-ads were scanned assiduously by all members of the band in an effort to come up with something both reliable and cheap. The break came when we heard through the grapevine that a second looey was being shipped out unexpectedly to regions where personal transportation was redundant. He had to unload his Indian Scout, a snappy item in gleaming red with full fender skirts front and back, leaf spring front and plunger rear suspension, and, as I found out later, a V-twin engine of some 750cc.
After we had made a lightning deal for more money than I care to think about, the little gem was mine MINE MINE and all I had to do was to get it home from his house. Inasmuch as I had never ridden one before I had to get the lootenant to check me out on the various controls, start the thing, point me in the right direction, and push.
Gad! It was invigorating . . . booming along under sunny skies, surrounded by palm trees, balmy breezes blowing in my face, wobbling from lock to lock . . . the blasted thing was a hand-change model with foot-operated clutch. Every time I would take my grip off the bars to grab a handful of second, the bicycle would take a firm dive toward the other side of the road. Finally I managed it by putting my left hand over to work the twistgrip whilst I shifted with the right a la minute waltz. Fine and dandy; eventually I even found third and blew along at a mighty 30 mph, master of all I surveyed.
After ten miles or so I became somewhat dry from breathing only out of the fat left corner of my mouth and decided to pull into the next roadside stand to restore the water table. Duly said palace of pleasure hove itself into sight; I ground down into second gear, heeled hard over, and entered the gravel forecourt at speed in a succession of horrifying broadslides.
This had the fortunate effect of getting me slowed down enough so that just before scoring a direct hit on the front door I yanked it straight, stopped dead, smiled sweetly at the gaping faces inside, and fell over with a resounding crash. I had forgotten to put my feet down.
Ten minutes and three beers later I emerged, ready to do battle with the monster once again. Carefully setting the controls as I had. been instructed, I painstakingly flooded it and then gave the so-called kickstarter an exploratory prod with my toe, only to find myself doing a handstand in mid-air. Disregarding the smell of burning flesh, I wrenched the horrid thing off me, stood it upright, leapt on the kickstarter, and was almost dumped on my seat once more as the bike attempted to bolt out from under me. Left it in gear, naturally.
Time has drawn a merciful veil over the eons during which I leapt like a chamois trying to get one miserable pop from that wretched Indian. Eventually, however, it decided to fire and then came the dreadful business of attempting to select bottom gear; as those of you who have owned Indians know. The clutch drags incurably and if you keep the revs low enough so that low cog can be eased in without making a noise like a buzz saw hitting a pine knot, the engine dies. However, by this time, having tried every possible combination, I had the starting problem knocked and after only, say, twenty-five tries I finally got under way again, not to stop until I reached our barracks and an allenveloping cedar bush.
I was understandably a little tense after such a long ride, but I did think at the time that the ribald comments of my friends who unwound me from the shrubbery were a bit too much, especially since we were playing a date that night and alto man “Breathless” Mahoney’s Harley, and my steed were the sole transportation for a six-piece band. Fat shape they would have been in without me.
In between sessions of starting-and-stopping practice we tried to figure a method of packing six bods (with instruments) on to our two cycles. It was essential that neither come to a horrible death, nor get picked up by the flics for undue care and attention and all that jazz. Regretfully we shelved a plan to lay boards across the two bikes and go Roman fashion as being likely to scratch the paint.
When we finally departed the Indian bore me, sitting on the tank, Woody the cornet man in the middle with his horn and music, and IV^ac the string bass on the rear, sitting backwards, clutching his instrument with arms and legs not otherwise occupied like Mother Tarantula. Good thing the drums were already there.
Fortunately, we knew a back way out of the camp where we did not have to stop in the usual endless queue of cars, but whizzed by the sentry instead, saluting simultaneously as we went; thus our progress was unimpeded until we arrived at the town of Lake Worth, a not altogether unfortunate circumstance, as due to our rather cramped position, Woody and I were sharing out the controls. Needless to say at the moment of truth in the parking lot of the USO there became apparent the shortcomings of a too radical division of authority and witnesses do talk to this day about the time the god Shiva, his six arms ablur, descended with his fiery steed on the Athens of the lower Everglades; said second coming not resulting in a Reformed Hinduism but only a lot of begonias being dug up.
To this day I will remember the deadly silence, broken only by the strings of the bass viol vibrating, that followed our finally coming to rest. Needless to say our agricultural predicament was not to last for long, as Breathless and the boys, anxious for the safety of our instruments and Woody’s cola with the benzedrine inhalers floating in it, rushed over and weeded us out.
The only tangible sympathy was handed out by our self-appointed canary Evalene Purcell, (referred to inevitably by our bass men as the Strumpet Voluntary), who had arrived in time to see the whole proceedings and was so shook up that she couldn’t sing with a straight face all night.
I really don’t remember how we played, but I do recall that when it came time for the band to go home, Szchokke and I were both tired and sleepy, a condition perhaps accelerated by the various bottles that had been surreptitiously passed around the bandstand. Mac flatly refused to ride back with me and was toted home by Purcell in her Model A Ford, the bass sticking out of the boot with a liberated red lantern swinging from its scroll.
Woody went off with his girl friend to try a few new scales, Breathless and Lo Monaco, the tailgate man, roared off with two local gals sandwich fashion, and Szchokke, the piano and I were left regarding each other sourly. However, the good Aloysious (who could play Lieberstraum in any key, tempo, and fashion, up to a passable imitation of the Emperor Concerto but could play blues only in B flat) was a man of many parts and Knew Something about motorcycles.
Straightaway he had it running, in gear, the lights turned on, handed it over to me with a brave smile, and climbed trustingly on the back. Now I don’t know how many of you have driven a motorcycle at night the first day you bought it, to use an Irishism, but it is a pretty terrible proposition getting away from rest as the light goes where the wheel goes, which is not exactly always where you want to see.
I needed a nice firm light showing the gap in the hedge where we had come in, but instead it looked as if Beachy Head lighthouse had gotten itself loose on roller skates and was banging around inside the parking lot like a miller moth.
Finally Szchokke got fed up, reached forward, and gave the throttle a lusty tweak; that solved the whole problem, but we were now motoring down the sidewalk, scattering greenery and pedestrians impartially, not an altogether good idea from the legal point of view. Therefore, as soon as we found a low curb we rejoined the highway, and in spite of the double hazards of oncoming and outgoing traffic were straightaway shaking the shrubbery of Lake Worth from our boots.
Florida is nice and balmy some seasons of the year, but a large percentage of its motorcyclists have big screens fitted and we had often wondered why. The answer was BUGS; big ones, little ones, crawling ones, flying ones, colored ones, black ones, they were all out. You had to be careful about breathing or talking! One also had to button up the sleeves and collar to keep the litle varmints out. We were doing fifty or so between shoals of gnats when a large June bug caught me right between the eyes with a thwack that you could hear a country mile away.
If it wasn’t for my piano playing friend’s grabbing the bars I probably wouldn’t be here today, as there was lots of traffic at the time and the hard-shelled little monster had knocked me half silly. After that we needed some coffee, so we dropped in at the next drive-in to refresh ourselves, inspect my bump, and clean the insects out of our clothes.
Waiting to greet us was the local Golden Eagle MC, who had been to a barbecue at a friend’s house, triggered off by said friend inadvertently slaughtering a calf on a back road near his home with his singlecylinder Harley JD the night before. Florida is open range country in most parts, which means that the cattle roam around loose, and this joker had been belting down a sand track through the swamp on his way home, traveling on the pilot bulb only, as the moon was out and he was taking advantage of the white sand’s reflecting properties. He was pounding along on his prehistoric popper in his usual dirt-track fashion when he rounded a corner to find seven scrub cows staring at him, all of which he managed to avoid, but the last, smallest, and stupidest, which jumped the wrong way. He caught it broadside and promptly went off over the bars to do a torpedo act in the swamp, until he fetched up with a thump against a cypress knee.
Spitting leaves and mud, he sloshed back to the Harley, which was coughing spasmodically, to find the calf deader than J. Caesar and figuring that he might as well not try to explain things to the owner, who wouldn’t believe a word anyway. He slung the corpse over the tank of the JD, which had suffered no damage except a bent front wheel and forks and lolloped home with the corpus delicti. The stiff had obviously to be disposed of before the gendarmerie came snooping around, hence the barbecue.
All this came out in the normal course of conversation with the cycle hounds, who are friendly as the day is long and always ready to welcome another motorcyclist into the tribe. I found them fascinating as I had never before seen any up close. As a generalization you could say that they were not outstandingly neat and clean but made up in variety what they lacked in slickness. Some wore cowboystyle shirts with bandannas around the neck, others the usual sports shirt with the tails out.
Those who did not wear leather jackets, with many bright studs, zippers running at all angles, and the club eagle painted on the back, boasted the black and white football jerseys with HARLEY-DAVIDSON on the front. Practically all hands, including the girls, who reminded me of the Kazakhstan Olympic wrestling team, wore those black billed caps with a thousand-mission crush and like as not kidney belts, great wide things with reflectors, tassels, and studs spelling out their names on the back.
Their steeds were equally mishmash, as this was still before V-J day and what you could scrounge you scrounged. Clapped-out WD Harleys, some still in their olive drab, stood cheek by jowl with those gutless little 500cc W.D. Indian V twins attired ditto. Most rode those thunderous old flathead “74” (about 1200cc) Harleys with oil plungers sticking up through their flat tanks.
The privileged few had smart, late prewar models, including one gentleman who had a sparkling white Indian Four with white leather buddy seat and fringed saddlebags; this charger will always live in my memory for the peculiar angle it used to assume on take off to counteract the flywheel torque.
Equally oddball was one of the rare Indian transverse V twins with shaft drive, developed for desert warfare. It had either not worked out as well as expected (through some difficulty in keeping head gaskets, I gathered) or had fallen victim to the Army fiendishness for standardization.
Center of interest, however, was an ancient Excelsior four that had been unearthed in a chicken house in the last few days and still bore ample evidence of its late tomb. It was a real prize, with long flat tank, cowhorn bars, and a vast gap in the frame in which reposed the long-suffering engine, looking for all the world like four corncobs sticking out of a log, covered with spiderwebs, chicken feathers, and part of an old croaker sack tied around the air intake to keep the bigger objects out.
The first time the new owner had used the hand shift, it had fallen out of the rusted-through tank bracket, and so he had to bend over and fiddle around with the whirring machinery as he rode, a process enlivened by the fact that whenever his arm or knee got close to the now perished spark plug leads, he got the treatment from the still healthy coil that the State now reserves for hardened criminals; a further similarity being that the leather seat covering had wilted and he was perched on the steel frame, thus providing an excellent earth. As they fired up and rode off into the night, we could hear the staccato rap of the plugs as he fished for second, and see the St. Elmo’s fire playing around his ears.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, Reddy Kilowatt had not been idle in our electrikery department, for as we roared along the highway, fortunately now devoid of traffic, I began to marvel about how well we could see and how efficient the headlight was; what was all the difficulty about night driving? The moon was out, sure enough, but we could recognize every ripple in the road, every rabbit’s startled face, every cat’s shining eye. Brighter - and - brighter - andbrighter it got and then suddenly ... nowt. No rabbits, no cats, dad-rat it, no road!
Fortunately, I got back some semblance of night vision before we wobbled off into the swamp and we carried on at reduced speed without further incident until the barracks hove in sight, where I was only saved from toppling over by Szchokke’s big flat feet.
After he thoughtfully drifted my “motorcycle hands” off the bars endways, we stumbled into bed, only to be roused barely our heads had touched the pillow by horrid squelching noises which made visions of science fiction monsters swim in our heads. Whassat? Mahoney ... the nitwit (hereinafter referred to as the Beast from 1/10 Fathom) had missed the bridge and gone slap into the Inland waterway with Harley, broads, Uncle Gaetano LoMonaco, and all. Now, frogs in his pockets and mud in his boots, he had come muttering home for sympathy, a ride down to dry out the Harley, and something heatish to drink.
Showing him where the shaving lotion bottle was, I turned over, covered my head with the pillow, and meditated on the problem of transporting the entire band back and forth with no lights tomorrow. O Lord wotta day. ■
