25 Years Ago November, 1969
25 YEARS AGO NOVEMBER, 1969
ROUNDUP
Cycle World paid homage to the Brough Superior and its most famous rider, "the hard-riding, tire-flaying” Lawrence of Arabia. Scholar, author and mystic, Col. T.E. Lawrence was nothing short of poetic in his description of a first encounter with his SS100 “Brufsup." “The burble of my exhaust unwound like a long cord behind me,” he wrote. “Then my speed snapped it and I heard only the cry of the wind, which my battered head split and fended aside.” The CW staff was a bit less lyrical in extolling the virtues of another legendary bike, the Harley-Davidson Sportster. “It is still that man’s machine of man’s machines,” the editors gushed. “A rider needs absolutely no class at all to do 90-mph quarter-miles with this beast.” But even the Sportster would surely have been left in the dust-or sand-of the 1969 Bonneville National Speed Trails, an event profiled in this issue. The fastest one-way motorcycle time of the meet was posted by roadracer Don Vesco, who managed 227-plus aboard a streamliner of his own design. If Vesco’s speeds were hot, so was the weather, as the article’s authors, Dan Hunt and CW Publisher Joe Parkhust, were quick to complain: “The only free shade is found in a pair of portable johns.”
At least Bonneville had bathrooms. A feature on motorcycle rallies was titled, “People Standing in Line for Nearly an Hour Up There, Just to Use the John!” Not even the poetic Col. Lawrence could have captured the situation any better.
-Brenda Buttner
