Up Front

UP FRONT

Allan Girdler

J.R. RANSOM: A TRIBUTE

Got a call from a man back east, a good guy who agrees with me that people who only like one kind of motorcycle are missing all the other kinds of fun. He has a CBX and a Low Rider, nice illustration of extremes, and in the course of our talk he mentioned that he bought both from the same dealer. Great shop, he said. He lives 60 miles from this agency but makes the trip happily because he knows he’ll get parts and service. Even takes along a shopping list, so he can get stuff for friends.

Gosh, I said, this sounds like a great dealership. Who is it?

Fella named J.R. Ransom.

Son of a Gun.

Ol’ J.R. Ransom.

My first dealer.

This was a long time ago. Not only didn’t you meet nice people on Hondas, you didn’t meet anybody on Hondas because there were no Hondas in the U.S. I may be a bit figurative here but seems to me Mr. Honda and Mr. Ransom back then probably had the same number of employes, two or three, and the same working area.

Ransom’s was a small shop. More like a converted garage, whitewashed years before this, in a rundown section of a small town on a busily industrial highway. The signs were old, the windows unwashed and although I know it couldn’t have had a dirt floor, my memory says it did.

I had my first bike, a dilapidated flathead Harley 74 three years older than me, so the Harley store was the place to go.

It was a wonderful place, piled high with new motorcycles, old ones, cylinders, pistons, jackets, gearboxes, wheels, tires, magazines, patches, tools, all stacked in corners and pushed onto corners of workbenches, a trove of cast-iron treasure and an education for me, who had stumbled into a place where machinery was appreciated.

There were three of us. Me, a kid named AÍ who owned a nearly new K model, and a kid named Karl with an Indian even older and more battered than my Harley. AÍ was a kid from a solid working class family down by the docks, so he had the best bike. I was from a nice neighborhood, so mine was merely tired, while Karl’s was junk because he was heir to one of America’s great fortunes; you’d know the name so I won’t say it. One never snitches on one’s childhood friends.

We were not the most polite nor the cleanest kids in town, and one look would tell a blind man we didn’t have 3 dollar among us.

We were welcome at J.R. Ransom’s Harley store. We got advice, used parts, riding tips and we heard all the wonderful legends, the motorcycle folklore that—I realize now—gave me the taste for history I retain to this day. That we were scruffy, ignorant kids didn’t matter.

That was rare. W hen I was a kid we were always being run out of places; the drug store, the restaurant, the bowling alley, the gas station, because we had more time than money.

But not at the motorcycle store.

There’s more here than the story of my youth.

I like motorcycle dealerships and motorcycle dealers. I like to look at bikes and parts and talk to the parts men and the mechanics. I was a bike nut for 20 years before I became rich and famous and all this time I’ve been going into motorcycle shops and I’ve been treated right.

J.R. Ransom did it. The Zen people say what goes out, comes back. Or it’s a modification of the Golden Rule: Others do unto you as you have done onto them. Okay, I know there are bad shops, poor and careless mechanics, lazy parts departments but for me, back east, then in the midwest and now three miles short of falling off the west coast. I’ve had better treatment from motorcycle stores than from any other form of business I can think of. I’ve always gone through the door of a shop expecting to find friends, so I’ve found them.

Another odd thing about this. Friend of mine who is a dealer told me one day that when he first went into business, he was scared. He intended to run a good shop, fair prices, fair treatment, no double-dealing and no discounts. There was a highpressure store, same brand, 15 miles away. He knew that in the car business the fastbuck store drives out the good store, and he was afraid he’d be unable to compete with the hustlers.

The fast-buck store went broke. So the factory handed the franchise to another shady outfit. My friend has access to the sales records for the make and as of last month, the good store was outselling the bad by seven to one.

This is still a sport. We ride motorcycles because we want to, instead of because we have to. We ride despite social pressure while millions of people buy cars because of social pressure.

My kids can go into the local dealership and get treated fairly. I can send them for parts and they’ll come back with the parts.

If they take more time than I expected, it'll be because they got talking about bikes.

In short, we customers appreciate good, dealers, dealers who like motorcycles and the people who ride them. We shop the good places and because we do, the good places prosper and they, in turn, treat us right.

I had to change the ending of this story. I haven’t been in my home town for years and somehow, hearing about J.R. Ransom on the telephone, I assumed that Mr. Ransom and Mr. Honda have grown together, that the store now would be one of those gleaming emporiums with a giant showroom, piped in music, gleaming service bays, the whole show.

My brother still lives there, in my parents’ house in fact, and his wife who makes sculpture out of old iron visits Ransom’s on expeditions to collect raw material. No, my brother said, it’s still there on the Post Road, still the same small garage with faded whitewash. But don’t worry, he added, they’re selling motorcycles by the truckload, the place is packed. Ransom probably has invested his money in office buildings or oil wells.

I hope so. If it hadn’t been for him, and the other dealers like him, the people who are in the motorcycle business because they like motorcycles, who treated kids like people and paved the way for Mr. Honda and his strange little scooters and the nice people who rode them, we'd be in trouble.

I mentioned car dealers. When the reformers took on the car industry, they won the battle almost without a fight. The factories made great products. But the public didn’t know that. All they knew was that to buy a car was to be gulled, fleeced, bamboozled and tricked. The public hates car dealers and when they ruined cars as sport, it was because the public ached to get even.

But when the reformers mention motorcycles, they get tons of letters, defending bikes. We aren’t all that good at politics yet, but we’ve been good enough to fight the blue-noses to a standstill, and it’s in part because we like machines and the men who sell and repair them.

What became of Al, I don’t know. Chances are he grew up, got married and sold his K. I leafed through a book about Karl’s family a while back and according to that, he renounced materialism—a privilege reserved for people with billions of dollars—and now lives in a leanto or beneath an abandoned fishing boat or something like that in the wilds of Maine.

So we’ll never ride up to J.R. Ransom’s again. If we did. he’d never recognize us. probably never even knew who we were back then.

But. If we did go back, we’d get good service.