The Bikes of My Youth

    I spent much of my life on bikes when I was a kid, so it was natural for me to want motorcycles when I became an adolescent.  My first motorized biking was on a Cushman scooter that a high school buddy owned.  The throttle on this thing worked opposite how those on other bikes work -- to accelerate you twisted it away from you rather than towards you.  This caused me problems when I started riding other motorcycles.  My first motorcycle was a little 80 cc Yamaha, two-stroke.  It did not take me long to put in down in a corner when I twisted the throttle way back going into the corner, expected to decelerate, but instead giving it full throttle.

    The 80 cc did not satisfy me for long.  I constantly had it at full throttle and was itching for more.  I was one of the first to buy a Suzuki X-6, a lightweight 250 cc six-speed demon.  It was great for blowing off muscle cars around town -- it would zero to thirty in about a second, if you could hold on to it.  It did a respectable zero to sixty, about six seconds, but had little after that, so  the muscle cars would soon leave me in the dust when out on the open highway.

Cushman Scooter	Suzuki X-6 and Friend

    I developed a taste for off-road riding, especially hill-climbing.  The X-6 was not really designed for that, but I did not really know any better at the time.  While in the Navy, stationed in southern California, I discovered "thumpers" -- single cylinder, 500 cc, British bikes with so much torque that you could stop halfway up the hill, listen to everybody laugh expecting you to have to back the bike back down the hill, and then just chug your way up the hill to everybody's amazement.  These bikes had a magneto ignition, with a control on the handlebar to advance or retard the spark.  When stopped at a traffic light I would sometimes retard the spark until the engine was turning so slowly that you could count the revolutions.  That thump, thump, thumping always got the attention of those nearby.

    My first thumper was a delightful street machine that was also good on hills and dirt, a 1958 AJS.  My second thumper was a Matchless dirt bike, which was a real beast.  When I got out of the service I took it with me to upstate New York, but that was not a very good place too be biking -- the weather was nowhere near as good for biking as was that in southern California.

    Then I got married.  I sold the Matchless and bought an Austin Healey Sprite in Watkins Glen.  It was almost as much fun to drive as the bikes.  Then I became a father -- no problem, we just stuffed the baby in the little space behind the seats -- there were no laws against that back in the old days.  Then the baby grew too big to fit back there.  Before I knew it I was driving a station wagon.  Oh my.

Austin Healey Sprite	Station Wagon

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Dr. Karl L. Wuensch


This page most recently revised on 11. January 2007.