A Trip To the New Barber

A trip to the new Barber

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

WELL, THIS CERTAINLY ISN’T HOW I’D hoped to arrive.

For years I’ve imagined a sportbike ride from Wisconsin down to the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum near Birmingham, leaning this way and that through the shaded green hills of the South, dressed in full leathers and dialing on the throttle in a road-narrowing rush of speed.

Instead, I arrived on four squishy wide whitewalls in my huge green 1953 Cadillac Fleetwood, wearing cowboy boots and a big white Stetson.

Yep.

Last week, you see, I was on a crosscountry trip with this fine automobile, doing a Road & Track feature story about Hank Williams’ final road journey from Alabama to West Virginia. Luckily, Hank’s old route passed only about seven miles from the gates of the museum, and the Cadillac unaccountably veered in that direction like a compass needle detecting a major iron deposit (or another Fleetwood) when we got close. It was fortunate, too, that my co-driver, Richie Mayer, is a lifelong motorcycle fanatic, so he was not averse to this short diversion. In fact, I think his exact words were, “If we don’t stop at the Barber Museum, I’ll kill you with this tire iron.”

So our big Fleetwood glided into the expansive Barber parking lot and wafted to a halt in front of the museum. I’d been down here several years ago, when the racetrack and new museum were still under construction-and the bikes were housed in downtown Birmingham in the old Barber dairy truck building-but had never seen the finished product.

By now, you’ve probably already seen pictures of the museum with its 650-plus bikes and fabulous surrounding racetrack, or have been there yourself and are well aware that it’s an impressive place. It’s brilliantly realized on a vast scale, as if Dr. No or some other Bond villain had suddenly rejected the dark side and put all of his boundless energies into Doing Good-as we understand that concept.

I met George Barber a few years ago and found him to be a calm, polite and charming gentleman, but when you look at the track and the museum, you know there’s a lot of voltage humming through the man’s soul. The whole facility is a tribute to the ability of a single human will to make life a lot more interesting for the rest of us on this planet.

Richie and I parked the Caddy and ambled into the museum’s air-conditioned coolness. We were greeted at the door by Jeff Ray, executive director of the museum. He shook my hand and grinned, “Your old friend Brian Slark has been trying to get you to come down here for two years, and when you finally arrive he’s gone to his son’s college graduation. But I’ll be glad to show you around.” Brian Slark-an expatriate Brit who used to ride on the Greeves ISDT team-works full-time for the museum, acquiring new bikes and managing their restorations, and we talk on the phone weekly about his latest adventures.

Yes, somebody has to drive all over the country attending auctions and sizing up classic old bikes in barns to see if they belong in the world’s most dazzling motorcycle museum, and Brian is the guy who bears this cross “Let’s start on the top floor and work our way down through the other four,” Jeff said.

So we took a glass elevator up past tall columns of motorcycles suspended from aluminum scaffolds. We got out at the top level and I stopped in my tracks.

“Good Lord,” I said to Richie. “Standing right here, I can see half the motorcycles I’ve ever owned-or ever wanted to. What a collection.”

And the bikes were nicely mixed, scattered around on elevated stands and well separated so you could stroll around and look at them.

“We’ve tried to get away from the ‘nice collection of front brake drums’ you see walking down a row in some museums,” Jeff said. “And we’ve made a conscious effort not to group them by marques. We’ve found that if you put all the Harleys, BMWs or Ducatis in one spot, the owners of those bikes tend to gravitate toward that corner, without seeing the rest of the museum. When you mix them up, people are constantly surprised, and they look at everything.”

Good plan. Though as the Will Rogers of Motorcycling (I never met a brand of bike I didn’t like), the effect was more of unfolding delight than forced enlightenment. I stumbled across a nice example of my old Harley XLCR Cafe Racer and stood transfixed, then turned and faced similar problems with a Honda CBX. It’s a terrible burden, liking so many bikes.

But during the two or three hours we spent touring the museum, a strange metamorphosis took place in my thinking.

When we first got off the elevator and I beheld so many of my favorite old motorcycles, my first instinct was to think / need to collect more bikes and hang on to them. I must have another late-Sixties Bonneville like that one...and another CB550 like that one over there...

But as the hour hand moved around the clock, I began to feel somewhat overwhelmed by it all, a victim of what a psychologist once called “option paralysis.” So many bikes, so little time. I found myself doing a slow segue from unrequited desire to a mood of contented simplicity and restraint in only a few hours. From restless agitation to a strange sense of peacefulness.

As we said good-bye to Jeff and walked back toward the Cadillac, I suddenly remembered something my friend George Allez had said to me years ago.

I told him I needed money and was thinking of selling my beautifully restored Ducati Mach 1-which was not running at that moment because it had a fried voltage regulator-but couldn’t bring myself to let it go because “it looks so good, sitting in my garage.”

George just smiled and said, “It’ll look just as good sitting in someone else’s garage.”

And maybe that’s the real function of a place like the Barber: It’s the world’s most perfect someone else’s garage.