Yeah, I know it's black and white, but it's the best we can do right now. Soon as Larry digs through his piles of files and finds his color slides, we'll get one in color on here.
I rode behind Larry and Mike on a number of occasions. All such rides were both thrilling and frightening. Thrilling because it’s a lot of fun. Frightening because, well, partly because it’s a very out-of-control feeling to be on the back of a bike as it leans this way and that, and as the acceleration tries to scoot you off the back of the seat and the deceleration throws you up against the rider’s back. But it was also frightening because both Larry and Mike were wild men aboard those machines, and it seemed they were bent either on crashing and killing me, or scaring me to death. They never did the former, but they sure did accomplish the latter! (To this day I can think of no greater scare than riding passenger on the back of a bike. I admire the many people who ride passenger for their courage, especially those who are crazy enough to ride behind me!) In spite of that, though, I still had the desire, the need, to ride.
My first ride on a two-wheeler came aboard a rented mo-ped. A place out on Indian Point Road had a fleet of them and several of us guys went out there and paid a few bucks to sample life "in the wind". We rode back to Branson on them at breakneck speeds reaching as high as 45 mph. It was great.
I learned an important lesson about motorcycles from that rented mo-ped, though. I learned they don’t handle like cars, or even bicycles. I learned this lesson once we got into town and I had to negotiate my first 90-degree city street intersection. I bent the little buzzer into a left turn at about 20 mph and promptly found myself running into the right-hand ditch. Realizing I was off the road, I went into panic mode and froze at the controls. The mo-ped proceeded through the ditch, into a yard, and directly into the side of a metal outbuilding. KA-BLAM!! The metal building reverberated with the noise of my impact.
I didn’t fall over, but simply sat there astride the still-running mo-ped, my ears ringing from both the sound and the whack my head had taken. Then three little kids came running around the side of the building, yelling at each other. "It was a bomb!" one was saying. "No, it was a big bird!" said another. Then they saw me and just stood there with their mouths open.
As quickly as I could, I backed up the mo-ped and got it pointed back at the street and took off. I didn’t want to have to answer any questions to an adult-type person right then.
That 20 or so mile ride was the second-longest ride on a two-wheeler I ever got in before I bought my first motorcycle. The longest one was when Larry (or was it Mike?) let me take his Ducati from Branson to Springfield one day - I forget why. I don’t remember much about that ride except that it disillusioned me about the Monza. It was a real vibrator. The bars jarred my bones clear up to my eyeballs and my feet would hardly stay on the pegs at speed. Somewhere along the way the clutch cable came adrift and I had to stop and re-attach it with the pliers Larry (Mike?) had given me for such an eventuality. I finally got it to Springfield, but it wasn’t as enjoyable an experience as I had anticipated. Nonetheless, my enthusiasm for motorcycles continued, and I vowed that one day I would own one. Many years passed before I did, but it finally happened.
It was the summer of 69. I was 23, newly married, just beginning to make my own way in the world. Ken, a coworker and high school friend, had just bought a new motorcycle, a Honda CL 350, the street bike with high pipes. Dan, another coworker, was looking at the new Yamaha CT1, a 175 two-stroke dual purpose bike. We were sitting in Ken’s apartment, talking about the bikes, and I made the comment that I had always wanted a motorcycle, but my father would never allow me to have one. A silence hung in the air while we all assimilated those words. Then I said, "Hey. I’m old enough to go buy one if I want to!" One of my first major independent decisions. The following day I rode home on a brand-new CT1.
Don't you just hate it when you have to rely on someone else to take a picture of you and they can't seem to get it centered? This is my first motorcycle, a 1969 Yamaha CT1, a 175 cc two stroke single cylinder dual purpose bike. It was produced to capitalize on the huge success of the DT1, its 250cc predecessor. I bought it because it was about 50 lbs lighter than the larger-engined DT1, and I intended to do some semi-serious woods riding where weight makes a big difference.
This picture was taken in Colorado, somewhere near the Royal Gorge, in August of '69. I had owned the bike about two months at the time three of my pals and I decided to go wander around in the mountains. What a trip!
If you want to relive that trip with me, you can do so by clicking here:
(CLICK to be inserted when those pages are ready)
After the trip to Colorado, the CT1 was stripped of its roadgoing equipment and turned into a strictly off-road bike. For the next several years it saw duty almost every winter weekend in the Mark Twain National Forest down around Chadwick, Missouri. While I had it stripped down, I got the bright idea to paint it as well. It was supposed to be a bright metallic red, but it came out more of a light purple - probably because of the dark primer I used under the main coat. As you can see, I painted the helmet to match. The missing "Yamaha" badge, lost somewhere in the woods, is conspicuous in this shot. The canteen came in very handy after a few hard hours on the trail.
The sharp eye will also notice the front half of the front fender is missing. All those bikes, you see, came standard with a regular street-style fender, mounted down close to the tire. Fine, as long as you were on pavement, but if you ever ventured onto a muddy trail you soon found out why true dirt bikes have high-mount front fenders. With an inch (or less) clearance, mud can pack tightly between tire and fender in as little as one rotation of the tire, making a very effective brake!
So, we all had to re-mount the fenders on our DT-1s and CT-1s. The stock aluminum ones, however, would soon crack and break off due to the vibration. Some enterprising individual started selling plastic ones on the aftermarket; they were semi-cheap, at about $5.00 each, but they had to be properly mounted to avoid the dreaded crack'n break syndrome. As you can see from this shot, I hadn't yet learned that secret.
Why not just run without one, you ask? Ha! Try it sometime. There's a reason for those fenders! I lost mine just after hitting the woods on the first leg of an enduro one morning, and by the time I got to the lunch stop, no one, not my fellow riders, friends, not even my WATT who met me with lunch, could recognize me. I was one big mud splatter!
The hitching posts shown here, by the way, were installed for people who rode horses of the more traditional kind. They didn't associate with us much, for some reason...
Snowmobile? I don't need no steenkin' snowmobile!!!
I never did get rid of this bike. A friend did it for me; I left it in storage in his garage while I worked in another town, and after several months he gave it away. Oh well. My woods riding days were over by then.
Click here to go to the page featuring my next two bikes:
Who says you can't go
again?