"Mother's" first ride ... Short Lived Dream.

After listening to my Mom telling me for years, "no motorcycle while your living under this roof" and my Dad hiding behind his newspaper whenever the subject came up... I decided on the only alternative: I would enlist in the USAF, buy a bike and start having the adventurous life I had always dreamed of! ( how romantic, huh?! )

After being assigned to my first duty base in Wichita, KS., one of my fellow barracks rats said," Hey man, my brother has a bitchen' BSA 650 chopper for sale for 500 bucks and he lives down in Oklahoma City." I thought, FAR OUT! That's only a month and a half's pay, I can use the time to learn how to ride! So, for the next month we spent many a stoned nights in the barracks, me seated on a folding chair, taking instruction and practicing control locations until the day I boarded a Continental Trailways bus for OK. City. Upon arrival, his Bro met me at the bus station and drove me out to his parent's farm where, under a war surplus parachute was ... my first ride... and a CHOPPER, no less!

I didn't care about the rusty, old narrow square-stock girder front-end or the torn up King-Queen seat that had a dining room chair pad for extra cush for the rider and a sissy bar that was taller than me... I LOVED the look of the hardtail frame , peeling metal flake yellow paint and those outtasight 6-bend pull-back handle bars! Here's my money- where's the key?! And after 10 or so kicks and the smell of flooded carbs, she sputtered to life and as I rode off I heard him say, "Hey man- have you ever ridden before?" I turned my head, waved, and promptly dropped the bike! "No problem-I'm cool!" I said, as I picked her up, kicked her to life and headed north to the Turnpike, my thoughts full of the adventures ahead. I had made it about 20-25 miles, when a white, early 60's Chevy station wagon crossed the highway in front of me, causing me to grab a handful of front drum brake in panic mode, which in turn caused that girder front-end to start hopping and skipping all over the place... I froze at the controls, ( so much for all those practice rides in the barracks!) and slammed into the second door passenger side of this old pig farmer's Chevy, scaring the hell out of the piglets inside as I catapulted over the roof on impact and tumbled to a stunned halt 50-60 feet down the road.

Thank GOD I was wearing an old Arthur Fulmer helmet borrowed from a fellow G.I.! The pig farmer and I agreed it was better to not call the cops or file a report since I had no motorcycle license and he had been drinking- no serious injury to me or the piglets- just one totaled BSA 650 chopper, one caved-in side door, and pig crap everywhere... we put what was left of my bike on the roof of his station wagon, took it to his farm with intentions of salvage at a later date, but in March 1975, events in Vietnam and the USAF precluded that. To this day,the sound of squealing piglets makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up! 

"Mother"

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