The Museum of Prehistoric Helmets
The Museum of Prehistoric Helmets
LEANINGS
peter Egan
I HAVE THIS DREAM OCCASIONALLY that my wife Barbara and I will turn up missing and the police will come to our house to look for clues. After picking the lock or prying the door open with a crowbar, the chief detective and his assistant will wander around our house for a few minutes, hands thrust deep into their trench coat pockets, saying nothing. Then, finally, one of them will speak. “What do you make of it, Bob?”
“I dunno. You tell me.”
“Strangest thing I’ve ever seen. Helmets everywhere.”
“Pretty sick.”
We’ve all got our weaknesses, and one of mine is that I’ve probably got a few more motorcycle helmets around the house than I actually need for my own protection. There are four or five lined up on top of the bookcase, like so many beer steins in a Heidelberg fencing club, and at least one or two more lurking in every closet in the house.
Some of these helmets are perfectly modern things that I use daily, while others represent either a refusal to dispose of the past or a suspicion that I might someday need one for some kind of Halloween costume. (For the same reason, I’ve kept my Army uniform and a paisley shirt that looks like something from a “Monkees” rerun.) At any rate, there are too many helmets.
After trying to clean out my den room and closet this weekend, I decided I should do one of two things: either (A) give most of my helmets away to needy children in the neighborhood, or (B) get a grant from the Smithsonian to open a Helmet Wing of the science and technology museum, or at least have them erect a small display called “Twenty-Four Years of Progress in Head Protection, 1965-1989.”
I like the museum idea better than the notion of giving them away. A nice little display at the Smithsonian would get most of the helmets out of my den, but I could still visit them. They could be organized in the order acquired, as follows:
Exhibit A: We’d have an empty pedestal here, a memorial to the Missing Helmet. My first helmet was a Bell TX500, white in color, bought in 1965. I paid $38 for it, shunning the $ 19 metalflake discount-store variety, because I was sure it was the last helmet I would ever need to buy. It was stolen off a parcel rack in the mens restroom of the Chemistry Building at the University of Wisconsin in Madison while I stood nearby, helpless, in the vicinity of a tall porcelain fixture. The guy who stole it looked like a cross between Corporal Klinger (without the cocktail dress) and Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo. If you see a guy who looks like this, wearing a TX500, call me collect.
Exhibit B: Bell TX500, replacement for the above helmet, only I still have this one. It’s a beautifully made helmet with soft earpads of genuine leather and a 1968 Snell sticker inside. I painted it dark blue once, Dan Gurney fashion, but then my roommate borrowed it to ride his Triumph to Chicago and threw it through a plaster-and-lath wall after a fight with his girlfriend, scratching the paint, so I changed it back to white. I thought this helmet was cool at the time, but it looks dated and tight-fitting now, with the effect that the wearer’s head appears to have been shrunken by pygmies. I continued to wear it occasionally, until just a few years ago, when then-CIU Executive Editor John Ulrich told me I looked like a nerd. I checked in the mirror and saw that he was correct. Now the helmet sits on a shelf.
Exhibit C: One Everoak brand helmet, white in color, with the reassuring legend “Manufactured to British Standard” stitched into its red silk lining. This is without a doubt the oldest helmet I own, though I have no idea what year it was manufactured because it was thrown in free with a used Honda CB160 I once bought. It has a genuine cork inner shell, and the outer shell is made of some semi-flexible substance that looks like canvas impregnated with glue. I used to call this helmet “the Dive-Bomber” because its puddingbowl shape required that the accident victim arc through the air with a certain amount of precision and land directly on top of his head. Otherwise it was useless. My roommate Barry wore the trusty Everoak DiveBomber to a campus anti-war demonstration to protect his head from nightstick-wielding riot police. As I recall, the police caught right on to this little trick and poked him in the stomach. Not that the helmet would have done any good.
Exhibit D: A 1975 Bell Star. We’re getting into the modern era here. This was the first popular full-face helmet. I hated these things when they first came out because I thought they made you look like a propane tank with eyes, but I later grew to like them. Especially after I crashed my Box Stock KZ550 at Riverside. Without that chin piece, I’d still be eating oatmeal through a straw. This helmet has a big streak of Turn Seven blacktop embedded in its shell. It did its job, leaving me without so much as a headache, so I retired it and bought a newer version of same.
Exhibit F: A Bell RT, open-faced, blue in color. This was my dirt helmet, until a spinning back tire tossed up a piece of Mojave Desert, which I cleverly caught in my mouth like a dog going after a Milk-Bone. Now, for desert riding, I wear . . .
Exhibit G: A Bell Moto III, with chin protector.
I suppose I’d better cut the museum donations off there, or I’ll end up with only three or four helmets for everyday use. Which would be almost as bad as having only three or four motorcycle jackets.
Which brings up another terrific idea for a museum display . . . .
