At Large
AT LARGE
Teachers
Steven L. Thompson
MRS. LA VILLE LOGAN, A 49-YEAR-old second-grade teacher at Westmore Oaks Elementary School in West Sacramento, California, sat on my sofa, sipped coffee, and soberly discussed the problems facing teachers today. Illiteracy as a national disgrace. Drugs sucking kids into the abyss. Continued failure of the state and federal educational establishments to agree on agendas for action. Next to her on the sofa, her husband counterpointed her observations with his own. Stan Logan is a science teacher at River City High, and, at 47 years old, has seen it all.
Like his wife, Stan was gracious in discussing the difficulties of the profession. But both Logans exhibited a little impatience. A fidget here, a glance at the watch there. It wasn't that they were bored with the topic. But the truth was, they were not here for my interview. They were in town to get their motorcycles tuned. By their oldest son. Who happens to be the service manager for a bike shop.
When Mike Smith, service manager of Honda/Kawasaki of Monterey, told me his mother had bought a new motorcycle, I was interested. Moms, after all, are the glue of our society. And when he told me she was a teacher, my interest intensified. Motorcyclists who are both moms and teachers are rare indeed.
It was when Smith added that the bike she'd just bought was a new hotpink-and-red, 147-mph Kawasaki ZX-6 that I knew LaVille Logan was someone whose story I had to hear. Not only because she had decided to buy a bike in a color the Editor of this magazine publicly declared “suitable only for those under 21” (CTT, March, 1990), but because the bike itself is an exemplar of the sportbike genre. A genre which has been, continues to be, and will probably remain under assault by the likes of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, certain members of the U.S. Senate and other would-be minders of the American public's welfare.
As I listened to LaVille shift conversational gears from the problems of education to life as a teacher who rides a hi-viz sport bike, I was pretty sure she'd confuse the safety-Nazis who want to ban them. After all, a major reason the safety freaks seem to want machines like the ZX-6 off the roads is that they think the only people who can’t wait to get their hands on 100-hp 600s are hormonally supercharged teenagers. Yet here was a serious teacher of young persons describing how. when this very magazine had run a cover extolling the bike (“Hot Damn!” avowed the cover blurb, as you’ll no doubt recall), she knew she had to have it.
Partly, LaVille admitted, that was because she was hardly the riskaverse type. She'd grown up riding thoroughbred horses on her family’s ranch, and had enjoyed a brief stint on a Bultaco 250 in 1966, only to quit when she realized that as a mother, she had responsibilities which precluded most potentially dangerous sports. But when the boys grew up and there was no longer a reason to abstain from the fun of motorcycling, she and Stan took Mike's advice to get a brace of TRAC 100s to use with their RV. And when that led to her buying a Kawasaki ZL600, neither she nor her family were surprised. Stan Logan least of all. But then, he’s a guy who rides a Honda Shadow to his school.
As I listened to the Logans, I couldn't help remembering another teacher. In 1962, Les Anderson was one of the two teachers at my high school who rode motorcycles. Anderson's Jawa 350 Twin was the veteran of three transcontinental rides and innumerable commutes, and it was the one he used to take me and my first bike—an 80cc Yamaha YG 1 —on wild onand off-road excursions. In the process, Anderson not only taught me everything in mathematics from geometry to calculus, he also taught me how to fall off a motorcycle, get up, kick everything straight again, and keep going.
You don't forget a man like that, or the lessons he teaches you, which is why people like Stan and LaVille are so important. When she parks her Kawasaki behind her classroom, what messages does it send to the children? Good ones, I believe, especially because she’s a woman, and a rider who wears all the protective gear we know (and now that she’s been down with a broken collarbone, she knows) to be vital.
Perhaps more importantly, how can the impressionable little girls who pass through her classroom ever again believe that they’re “supposed” to fear motorcycles, when the attractive and socially involved Mrs. Logan rides and so obviously enjoys them?
Had one of Les Anderson’s female colleagues ridden a Dunstall Dominator to our school in 1966, it would have been news. So the best thing about a conversation with a couple of today’s teachers waiting for their bikes to be ready is that their riding is not news. Even when one of the riders is a woman, and even when her bike is one of the fastest machines on the road. The Logans had no prejudice to report among colleagues, administrators or parents, and, in fact, were a little bemused that a guy like me found their new interest so intriguing. And I found their bemusment very reassuring, because of what it implies about the changes now going on in motorcycling.
Almost as reassuring as what they told me was their only motorcycling regret. It emerged when I asked whether they had allowed any of their boys to ride as they grew up. No, said LaVille, with an embarrassed smile. And what, I asked, did they think of that decision now?
“We were wrong,” she said. And then they left to get their bikes.
Moral: When teachers learn, everybody wins. Class dismissed. 0
