One small problem. Well, about six small problems. I didn't have a driver's license. There was no way I could title the thing so I had no license plate. And my folks were death on motorcycles. A big NO. End of discussion. So I bypassed them, kept it at Ray C.'s house, a two-block walk from my own. My paper route got me up at 5am--after throwing the route (from Mr. Ehlers' paper truck; I had the right side and a left-handed kid took the other. We could lead a dog with these flat sailing Kansas City Times and bounce one right off his head. We were good.) I had free time until school and it was still dark at that time of year. I'd coast down Ray's driveway and jump-start the knucklehead halfway down the block. And I'd cruise Brookside and all around mid-town, the wind in my face, the Harley thrumming a deep, dirty sound bubble all around me. Dark, chilly freedom. Citizens slept unaware of the grinning, budding menace in goggles invading their streets.
I don't think any non-biker can know the...theosophy of this. The zen. Maybe a surfer would know. A skier alone on an expert run with that once-in-a-season rhythm on the moguls. Yeah there are parallels. But, in the main, it's like the t-shirt says: "It's a Harley thing. You wouldn't understand." I don't think the graying, paunchy baby-boomers, the Rolex Riders, understand, but I could be wrong.
I was fifteen. Elvis and James Dean and Catcher in the Rye would help mold my persona a bit later. For now I was putty in the hands of William Harley and Walter Davidson.
Later in my life I would move my family to Milwaukee for the chance to work on Harley-Davidson advertising. To this day I own a Harley. There is no antidote.
I digress. There was, as I said, no license plate on the knucklehead. Fortuitously, at that time, Wheaties cereal packaged small license plates in their boxes for a premium. These plates were embossed metal and about the size of a motorcycle plate. Missouri motorcycle plates were white with black letters back then, and the only ones that Wheaties offered in that color combination were Maine, Quebec, British Columbia and a couple of other oddball plates. My memory tells me I got Alaska, even though they weren't a state until 1959 but I'll go with that. I hung it on the back of the tractor-type saddle with hanger wire. I was never stopped. My folks were a bit puzzled at my accelerated appetite for Wheaties (until the plate showed up), but dismissed it; "He's a growing boy."
Memory. This is the strange part; I can't even remember the knucklehead's color although I think it may have been red. I'm pretty sure it was. What I recall in detail is the total and complete emancipation from the humdrum, the routine. The liftoff. I had no loyalty to brand or configuration or fine points back then. I was in it for the fix, the release. The Harley loyalty came later, and it was always tied to my first, albeit brief, ownership experience.
A few weeks and about thirty bucks more of payments into this adventure, Maury and I took the Knucklehead over to Loose Park with a stopwatch. Loose Park had a paved sidewalk all around it in 1953, and we used it for lap timing runs. He'd clock me and vice versa, and we'd try to beat one another's times. That day, under a cloudless, sparkling blue sky, on my third or fourth attempt, I decided to wind out low gear much faster, and pop it into second, get up to speed early. The clutch was referred to as a beartrap and it wasn't made for such shenanigans. Something sickening happened. I missed the shift, the bike lurched as though I'd hit the brakes and the sound of gear parts and transmission crunches were evident. Then it freewheeled. We walked it home.
Later that week I called the kid I'd bought it from. Said my folks wouldn't let me keep it and something was broken in the transmission anyway. He said no refunds, I agreed. And he came and picked it up in a panel truck.
#
But I was hooked. And beginning to figure out that Harleys had magical properties built into them at the factory, probably with incantations and ceremonies. I wasn't far off.
I visited the factory back in the 60's having moved to Milwaukee and signed on to Harley-Davidson's advertising agency. I'll never forget two things about that visit. The first was, Walter Davidson, son, or maybe grandson to the original Davidson I believe, despised any changes to factory Harley-Davidsons so he made all the chopper owners park their machines outside the chain link fence to the parking lot. This effectively advertised the choppers and called attention to their modifications and bizarre designs, propagating more of the same.
The other thing that imprinted on me was what I call "The Skronk Effect." On the tour I was led past a bearded and tattooed worker with a chain-drive pocketbook and a weathered leather jacket. He would affix a two sided flyweel counterweight in a vise, then take a two-by-four, insert it in between the two pieces of iron and force the pieces apart with a noise that sounded like "skronk." Then he would un-vise it and toss it atop a growing pile of these things.
I asked my guide about this operation and he said, "Well, ol' Ernie is adjusting counterweights so they don't wobble and shake the bike too much." My next question was, "Are they adjusted further somewhere down the line?
"Naw. Ernie's got a purty good feel for this."
I only vaguely recall their museum. In my memory it was a big, dark unheated room with broken factory windows and old motorcycles parked along the walls, then above these, was a shelf-like rack where more were jammed in together. I believe there was one for each year since their inception but it was such an agglomeration of frames, pipes and motors that the initial visual effect was that of a parking lot at a biker bar at night.
