First girl I loved
Time has come I will sing
This sad goodbye song . . .
And I still sometimes think of you
As I lay here in the six of morning
And in the lonely midnight . . .
— The Incredible String Band from “First Girl I Loved”
I am, as it turns out, referring to my first motorcycle. It’s called a metaphor, people. Not the bike, the bike was called a 1969 Triumph Daytona T100R
Take my word for it, a ’60s era Triumph is a very cool motorcycle to start out on. It’s a very cool motorcycle, period. In those days, most rider’s first bikes were something like a dorky Suzuki 90 or a small displacement 2-stroke dirt bike. Not this boy-o. Thanks to my long-time riding buddy, Terry, my introduction to motorcycles was a classic hunk of Her Majesty’s iron.
I went on to own three more bikes — a 1982 Yamaha 650 Maxim, a 1989 Harley-Davidson 883 Sportster and, lastly an 80 cubic inch (1340 cc’s) 1992 Harley Fat Boy.
I just plain like motorcycles and don’t much care what country they were born in, although I prefer the USA, Great Britain, Germany and Italy.
“Hey, what about . . . ?” I can hear many of you say. Yes, they make very fine motorcycles in Japan, I even owned one. The fact is, it is probably due to the manufacturing excellence of Japanese machines like Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki and Kawasaki, that bikes from all over are well-built and reliable as they are today. These days, nobody makes a crappy motorcycle.
That said, it was cheap, fast, reliable Japanese bikes in the ’60s and ’70s that pushed the once dominant British motorcycle industry into oblivion and very nearly spelled doom for Harley-Davidson, as well. That is the bone I have to pick with “rice burners,” they killed off all the magnificent English bikes (Hint: Japanese motorcycles do not really run on rice, that’s just a derogatory moniker the rest of the nearly moribund motorcycle world hung on them. But you knew that).
Today, if we don’t count a few small hand-made custom machines, America has only Harley and, thanks to the deep pockets of Polaris Manufacturing, a Minnesota powerhouse, better known for snowmobiles and ATVs, the born-again and beautifully-built Indian.
Prior to WW2, America had a number of other motorcycle brands, Crocker, Curtiss, Thomas, Mustang, Henderson and Excelsior to name a few, all gone, baby gone.
But English motorcycles, once ruled the motorways. So, for the benefit of you younger motorcycle enthusiasts who may have never heard of the mad machines that once roared around Limey Land with brake pedals on the right, here is as complete a list as my ’60s-damaged memory can dredge up:
Triumph, Norton, BSA, Vincent, Royal Enfield, Vellocette, AJS, Brough, Matchless. Greeves, Ariel, Douglas, James, Panther, Rudge, Scott and Sunbeam, every damn one of them, as beautiful as the bloody day is long. I’ve doubtless left a few off a couple. If so, my good friend, Dr. David P. Knight, owner of BMWs, a Norton and two Triumphs, will most assuredly let me know.
My Triumph Daytona was a moto-masterpiece in silver and green. The T100R was not an overly large motorcycle. It was a 490 cc vertical twin with one sketchy Amal concentric carburetor for each cylinder, but it shared an identical wheelbase with the larger 650 Bonneville. Although the motor was smaller, the Daytona only weighed 337 pounds, dry, compared to the Bonneville’s 363, so the power-to-weight ratio was nearly the same. Top speed was around 96 mph, compared to 112 with the Bonneville.
One warm summer evening in 1977, I pulled into a 7-11 and parked next to a lad astride a Honda 450, a mere 40 cc’s smaller than my Triumph. “I’m gonna get a big bike like that someday,” he told me, wide-eyed with admiration over what he imagined was the massive displacement of my Daytona. His Honda weighed well over 400 pounds.
“Follow your dreams, my man” I told him, nodding sagely, “Follow your dreams.”
And so it went.
Don Negus is a Morning Sun columnist. Email: dhughnegus@gmail.com