First Bikes

First bikes

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

A FEW YEARS BACK, I FLEW TO YORK, Pennsylvania to do a story for our nowdeparted sister publication, Big Twin magazine. The idea was to interview Harley owners who work on the assembly line at the Harley-Davidson plant, find out which models they owned and what kind of modifications they’d made to their bikes. A visit with the welders, painters and assemblers who built their own bikes, in other words.

What I found was a very nice bunch of quality-conscious people with considerable technical depth, all of whom ride a lot and like to work on their own bikes. All very reassuring, especially if you own a Harley.

For me, however, the most interesting part was when I asked each worker what his or her first bike had been, and what motorcycles they’d owned since.

Proper American mythology would have Harley factory workers cutting their teeth, at high school age, on ratty old Sportsters or Panhead choppers lovingly built from parts scrounged at swapmeets, but what I found was quite different. With only a few exceptions, nearly everyone’s first bike (or first five or six bikes) had been from the small-bore Japanese family-generally some kind of early enduro or dual-purpose machine.

What we had in the background here were Honda 90s, CL 175s, XT250s and Elsinores, Yamaha DT-ls, Big Bear Scramblers and RD350s, Bridgestone 50s and so on. Most, in fact, hadn’t been able to amass the resources to buy a Harley of any kind until quite recently, during the Middle-to-Late Evo years. Only a few older hands had owned Harleys from the AMF era or earlier. Some still owned Japanese bikes, mostly off-roaders or dual-sports for a son or daughter to learn on.

I guess I found this interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it puts to rest the odd notion that a “real” Harley guy wouldn’t touch a Japanese bike with a 10-foot pole-these folks were quite open-minded about their Asian iron. And second, I am always intrigued with the chain of fate and enthusiasm that starts people on the road to lifelong riding. It’s the motorcycle equivalent of “Where did you grow up?”

On an Edelweiss tour of the Alps a few years ago, I brought out the same old notebook as a bunch of us were sitting around after dinner, drinking coffee and cognac. Making the rounds, as if in some sort of party game, everyone named his or her first bike for me. I still have the notebook and the list. As best I can discern through the spilled Karg Dunkelwiess stains, it reads, by the owners’ own descriptions:

Cliff: 1942 H-D 45; Paula: 1968 Triumph 650 Tiger; Alan: 1964 Honda 50 step-through; Frank: 1968 Honda CB125 Twin; Charles: Honda CB350 (stolen in Paris); Tom, BMW R1100GS; Peter: Honda Supcr-90 (with Hoover vacuumcleaner exhaust pipe); Randy: 1973 Yamaha LT-A3 lOOcc Enduro; Mike: Yamaha 100 Trailmaster; Alan & Sally: 1963 XLCH with high pipes; Rob: 90cc Ducati; Mike: 1970 Kawasaki 175 Bushwhacker; Cory: 1975 Kawasaki 250 Enduro; Dave: 3 '/2-hp Ruttman Briggs & Stratton mini-bike.

Our two guides, Fuzzy and Christian, had started on a Puch 250 and a Yamaha RD350, respectively. Editor Edwards said his first bike was a Yamaha HT-90 dirtbike, shared with his brother, but a Honda CB175 was his first self-owned streetbike. And mine, I confessed, was a Bridgestone “7” 50cc streetbike-which, not knowing any better, I also used for trail riding and sliding around in the dirt. My wife Barbara started on a WardsBenelli 125.

In many cases, people were quick to tell me what their second and third bikes had been, which revealed an interesting pattern. Some leapt off their tiddlers immediately onto Big Iron, such as Fuzzy, who traded his Puch in on a Norton 850 Commando. Others worked their way painfully up the displacement scale, a few cc at a time, as I did (Bridgestone 50, Honda S-90, Honda CB160, CB350, Norton 850, etc.).

Also of interest, some of the best riders in the group, such as my friend Tom Overby and his RI 100GS, had started late in life, with big-bore bikes. Tom is a natural, can ride with anybody. So much for your way up the totem pole. Reis me of a marathon-training book I in which the author says, “Running for long distances teaches you to run slowly for long distances. To go faster, you have to practice running fast.”

Still, most of us started young, and we needed cheap, small, unintimidating bikes to get us started-or, more often, to convince our parents to let us start. It’s also evident, looking at these lists, that the dirtbike explosion of the Seventies did much to get people of a certain age on motorcycles. Parents, again, probably had something to do with this. Many believed-and still do-that the dirt is a safer place to learn, what with rocks and trees being theoretically more benign than speeding cars.

Never mind that my own few lifetime motorcycle scars have all come from the dirt. Nevertheless, I am still here. With injuries, magnitude trumps frequency.

To get yet another take on the First Bike issue, I thought it might be fun to see what tiddlers or superbikes may have propelled our own CW staff into the business, so I called the office yesterday to find out. Here are the results of this scientific survey:

David: the Yamaha HT-90 already mentioned; Brian Catterson: 1975 Honda CR125 Elsinore; Jimmy Lewis; 1971 Honda CT70; Matthew Miles: 1976 Honda CB400F; Robyn Davis: 1971 Honda CL 175; Mark Hoyer: 1979 Suzuki RM 100; Don Canet: 1978 Suzuki RM 125; Elaine Anderson: Yamaha 250 Big Bear Scrambler; Brad Zerbel: 1982 Honda CR125; Kevin Cameron: 1956 BSA D1 Bantam.

Not so different from the Harley guys, or the Edelweiss crowd.

You can draw your own conclusions, but it looks to me as if the small-bore, user-friendly dirtbike may be the motorcycle industry’s original secret weapon, the unseen mechanism driving even the present boom in road-burners and big adventure bikes.

Let a kid slide the back tire, leap through space and raise a little dust, and you’ve got a rider for life. Often, a very good one.