Category: Motorcycles

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Motorcycle Heroes: My Life in Motorcycles Part 2

During my childhood, many of the people who became icons to me were athletes. A few were, of course, ballplayers in various sports. Most of them, however, were motorcycle racers. I loved playing sports but had almost no ability to excel in any team sport involving a ball. I did have a fanatical love of motorcycles.

My introduction to motocross was a product of a Fourth of July celebration in Rabun County. The location of the Covered Bridge Shopping Center in Clayton was a vacant parcel of land during the 1970’s. As part of the (I think) Bicentennial celebration, a temporary motocross track was bulldozed and a day of racing commenced. Mama and Daddy loaded us up with a picnic and went to check it out. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I remember Mike Penland’s amazing ride, and I think Perry Thompson raced as well. I was hooked. I bought my first mini-bike a few weeks later with my own money and started reading Dirt Bike magazine whenever I could beg Mama to buy a copy for me.

In the days before the Internet, and with only three television channels, reading magazines was my only link to the stars of motocross. I spent half of my childhood ripping around the woods at home on my dirt bike, pretending I was racing with Marty Smith, Mike Bell, Bob “Hurricane” Hannah, and Andre Malherbe. They were who I wanted to be when I grew up.

By the early 1980s, the coolest event in the sport for me was known as the Superbowl of Motocross. In later years the format simply became called Supercross. Held in NFL sized football stadiums across the country, the venues made for excellent viewing. There wasn’t a bad seat in the house. By 1984 the event had made its way to Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium. It was scheduled for the first week of March. It was also the week of my birthday. To this day I can’t believe that I begged and conned Daddy into taking me to Atlanta for the race. We’d been to several Braves games with my grandparents, but Daddy never, ever went down there. Unless he was hauling a load of liquor, but that’s a story for another time. He didn’t want to drive us himself, so he bribed a young guy who worked with him to drive us. Steve Coleman also rode dirt bikes, and being a fun-loving guy himself, agreed to haul us to the big city.

For the week leading up to the race I couldn’t contain my excitement. I was up a daylight on Saturday morning. The races were at night and Steve was to pick us up in late afternoon. By twelve noon I was ready to go. By three o’clock I was pacing the floor. The rotary-dial Bakelite phone on the living room table began ringing. Mama grabbed it. She rolled her eyes as she hung up the phone. It was Steve. He was at Toyota of Easley buying a truck and running late. Really late. He was still signing papers. Back in those days it took two hours at best to get back to Clayton.

Steve finally slid into our driveway around dusk and we piled into his new and tiny regular cab Toyota pickup for the drive south. About 20 miles from the stadium, we hit gridlock. Steve tried out the off-road capabilities of his new truck and drove several miles on the shoulder of the interstate. We parked in the lot with minutes to spare, and the race was amazing.

Even after I achieved the dream of all teenagers by getting a license and a car, I kept up with the sport well into my thirties. I’ve managed to stay into motorcycling since age four, and still ride every chance I get. I moved away from motocross, into enduro bikes, and later began riding dual sport and adventure bikes. I’m constantly amazed by how quickly time slips by. The race seems like yesterday.

I saw awhile back that motorcycling legend Marty Smith was killed in a dune buggy crash at the age of 63 last April. Just days ago Mike Bell died while riding his mountain bike. He was also 63. Their generation of racers is rapidly fading away and some great memories of my childhood along with them

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When Camping Became Work

Early Spring 1985… It was supposed to be an unseasonably warm and beautiful weekend. My buddy Alan and I, along with another friend John, decided to go on a camping trip on our dirt bikes. The predicted weather was just too good to pass up. We loaded up our random bikes. I was on my fairly current Suzuki DR125. Alan, owner of a shed full of eclectic bikes picked up by his dad, was on an old Kawasaki 185 Enduro. John showed up with his trusty Suzuki TS185. We strapped our junk onto the bikes as best we could. Our camp site was, as usual, on Popcorn Creek. That time we camped close to the old homeplace of Alan’s family. His Uncle Juke still lived there, but otherwise there wasn’t a neighbor or house for miles in any direction.

            We set up camp after school on Friday evening and spent the evening lying around the biggest campfire imaginable. I’ve seen school pep rally bonfires of less magnitude. We talked away the night, eating Cheetos and guzzling Mountain Dew while solving the word’s problems. That’s what thirteen-year-old boys did back then. I don’t think we’d quite discovered girls yet. The night was warm; the weather stayed tolerable, and we awoke on Saturday morning without frostbite.

            About the time we finished cleaning up from breakfast we heard a vehicle coming down the old logging road to our camp. It was Joe Thompson. Alan’s daddy. I’ve said many times that he was a spectacular hunter and fisherman. Unfortunately, Joe had another extraordinary skill. He had an unbelievable knack for getting men to work. Furman Kilby also had this trait. They could get men to work like absolute dogs for them without the men even realizing it was happening. I mean, seriously, at the end of the day, men would actually thank Joe and Furman for the opportunity. It would always start with a casual comment… “Let’s see how this new axe handle feels on this oak firewood…” Next thing you knew, it was dusk and you’d just split a cord of wood while Joe or Furman sat in a lawn chair with a cold drink.

            Looking back, had us boys been camping under the pretense of hunting or fishing, the Weekend of Blisters would have never happened. But in Joe’s eyes we were just being lazy. He got out of the truck and looked us over. He shook his head at our laziness, cocked his cap back on his head, hiked up his britches and said, “Boys, I have an opportunity for y’all today.”

            He instructed us to mount our dirt bikes and follow him back to their house a few miles away after a short span on the highway. Yep, thirteen-year-olds on the highway on dirt bikes. Things were different then. Once we turned down the driveway we veered right to the home of Mr. Melton, known to everyone as just “Melt.” Melt wasn’t there, but three or four fruit trees with their root balls wrapped in burlap were. After we got our helmets off and walked over to Joe, we noticed a few stakes driven into the ground at precise intervals.

            “Melt’s gone to town. We need to help get these trees planted before he gets back,” Joe said.

            I looked around. My uncle had a commercial apple orchard on our old family homeplace, so I knew a little about setting out fruit trees

            “Who’s gonna run the tractor and auger?” I asked.

            “Y’all are big strapping men. Y’all don’t need no auger to dig ‘em,” Joe countered as he threw three shovels on the ground.

            Alan, John, and I thought it would be nice to surprise Melt when he got home with the trees planted for him and figured if we worked wide open, we could be out riding our dirt bikes within an hour. We dug like crazy and cut the burlap from the root balls with our pocketknives. Every boy always had a pocketknife handy back then. We finished just before Melt turned down the gravel driveway. Pulling a trailer. With a lot of fruit trees bundled on it. Really a lot, like thirty or forty. It was then that us boys noticed that the whole yard and surrounding area was dotted with stakes in the ground.

            We looked around for an escape route.

            “You mean there’s more?” one of us asked.

            “Yeah, I just needed to make sure you could do it without screwing up before we let you do all of them,” Joe responded.

            The word ‘let’ wasn’t lost on me. We spent the entire rest of the weekend under the beautiful blue sky on the warmest weekend of the year digging until our hands actually bled. At some point Melt or Joe dropped us off some Lance crackers, Vienna Sausage and Mountain Dew, but otherwise we worked until Joe decided that we should call it a day so we could get back to camp before dark. We then worked all day Sunday until it was time to head home. I was never so ready for the school week to begin in my life.

            Many of the snowflakes and younger people in general probably think we experienced child cruelty on that perfect weekend back in 1985, but I’m thankful for it, just as I’m thankful for many things our parents subjected us to. We didn’t once think of saying “no” and pitching a big fit like kids now would do. Never once did we think about quitting. We didn’t want Joe or Melt to think bad of us. We did the work because Alan’s daddy told us to. Times like that helped shape the work ethic I grew up to have. Thirty five years have passed and I’m not sure if any of those trees survived, but we planted every single tree on the trailer that weekend.

            Joe, thanks for the opportunity.

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Riding With the Popcorn Gang

For some reason, the changing of the seasons brings retrospective feelings for me every year. I tell everyone who listens that my favorite time of year is autumn. That’s not true. It’s actually the weeks leading up to autumn. The older I get, the more this time becomes a period for reflection on my life. I have a special fondness for the camping trips and dirt biking during late summer and autumn. I simply love motorcycling during the transition period between summer and autumn.

 My buddy Matt bought a 2009 Suzuki V-Strom a few years ago. Maybe it was a midlife crisis, but for whatever reason, he got a case Motorcycle Fever. I’m sure his wife is pleased… After looking at virtually every bike from Harley 883s to BMW GS 1200s, I finally sold him on the V-Strom. He had it for several months and we ventured out for several day rides. He later sold the Suzuki and replaced it with a Harley, but it was fun while it lasted.

Matt and I grew up in Rabun County, Georgia and rode dirt bikes together sometimes as kids. I believe he had an XR100 and I had a Honda XL75, followed by a DR125, then a couple of ATVs. We rode all over the west end of Rabun County.  Although I was a town kid, Daddy took me to an area called Popcorn almost every weekend, where he spent most of the day panning and sluicing for gold in Dickerson Branch. Later, we would buy a couple of acres just over the mountain at a place called Plum Orchard. We had a tiny camper that we parked on the property and spent weekends there for over ten years before selling the property during the late 1990s. Daddy began spending time over on Dickerson Branch panning for gold in recent years, and with Matt getting back into motorcycling, I find myself thinking of all the weekends I spent on Popcorn and Plum Orchard riding motorcycles, camping and fishing with my friends.

At the risk of sounding like my parents, things were safer and simpler back then. Daddy was usually busy building houses or boathouses on Lake Burton, and during the summers he would often unload me and my dirt bike with a gas can and I would head off for the day, usually checking in around lunchtime to let him know that I was still in one piece. I would meet up with some of my buddies, Alan or my best friend Billy most of the time, and we would explore the countless miles of dirt roads and trails in the Persimmon and Popcorn areas of Rabun County. We were generally respectful, used good sense while riding, and almost never got hurt while on the bikes. I only ended up at the doctor’s office twice in all of the years that we rode, and one of the ER trips was from an allergic reaction to a bee sting. Looking back, we would all have been arrested if we even attempted to ride dirt bikes in those areas today. When I get nostalgic, I either ride some of the old logging roads in the area on my mountain bike or hike them with Daddy. Most of us were not “rich” kids by any stretch of the imagination, and our bikes proved it. Alan probably had the most eclectic batch of bikes through the years. His dad Joe always managed to find some obscure, quirky bike for Alan to ride. Several of his bikes were Honda Trail 90s and 110s. Neat bikes, but even when we were 12 or 13 years old, Alan was like 6’2” and 200 pounds.  He also had an old Kawasaki KE175, but his Trail 110s were great. When a tree had fallen across the trail behind us while we were riding one day, he simply picked up the bike and sat it across the tree on the return trip while the rest of us had to figure a way around the deadfall.

Many summers and weekends were spent on Popcorn and Persimmon on the bikes, and much money was spent on snacks and gas at the two old community stores on Persimmon. When I was growing up and riding over there during the 1980s, there was a store at each end of a straightaway on Persimmon Road. On the left at the turnoff for Plum Orchard Road was Welborn’s Store, or “Mae’s” as us kids referred to it. Mae Welborn was a wonderful old lady who ran the store with her sister, and both women always had kind words for us annoying kids on our loud dirt bikes. One quarter of a mile farther down the road was Carlos Nichols’ store, which by the time I was terrorizing the area was run by Mrs. Etrubia Hooper. She was one of the neatest folks I ever met, often cutting up with us and telling stories about the old days. Daddy has told me stories of Mrs. Hooper buying new Ford cars with alarming frequency down at Duvall Ford and hot-rodding around in them back in the late 1950s and early sixties. She might have even hauled a little liquor in them, according to Daddy. As Persimmon and Popcorn were always notorious for the moonshiners in the communities, there is likely some truth to the allegation.

By the late 1980s, my friends and I had all acquired the dream of every teenager… Drivers Licenses. The ability to go wherever we wanted while pretending to be adults. My dirt bikes quickly gave way to a 1967 Camaro. By that time, local law enforcement officers had finally cracked down on us kids riding around all day on the unpaved county roads and forest service roads on our dirt bikes. We didn’t really notice at the time, as we were busy chasing girls, cruising town and illegally drag racing anyway.

Looking back on a period of time more than half a lifetime ago, my childhood coincided with the end of an era in Rabun County. Although parents nowadays will likely cringe at the thought of having their kid running around all day in the woods completely unsupervised on a dirt bike, none of us was ever seriously injured, and we gained a large sense of trust and responsibility that children of later generations seem to not have.

Both stores on Persimmon from my childhood are long gone now, having closed down about the same time I started driving, and Mae and Etrubia passed away many years ago, their untold stories dying with them. The Popcorn Gang has also suffered tragedies. Alan and Billy died almost exactly a year apart, neither having reached their fortieth birthdays. They won’t be forgotten during my lifetime. Every time I ramble the backroads and trails on Popcorn, I think of the great days we had, the campouts, the hunting and fishing trips with them. Guys, thanks for the memories. You are missed.

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My Life in Motorcycles, Part One

I’ve had a lifelong love of motorcycles.  I bought my first mini bike when I was four years old. I bought it myself, with my own money. I had received money for my birthday and had saved chore money. Yes, four years old I already had chores to do. We weren’t special snowflakes back then.

When I was little, Mama, Daddy, and I would go on weekend drives. We never had much money, but we always went loafing on weekends on the backroads around home. One Sunday afternoon we were riding some dirt roads between Highway 76 and Germany Mountain and came across a yard sale. Sitting among glassware, clothes, and castoff furniture was a little red mini bike. Not a real motorcycle per se, but one of those funny looking things that was popular in the 1970s. They generally came from places like Sears or Western Auto, had rigid frames, a rectangle-shaped seat, and used the same engines, wheels, and tires as the go-carts of the era. I believe the bike I bought had a whopping three horsepower Briggs and Stratton engine.

I quickly learned that three horsepower was enough to get me hurt. The first time I got on the mini bike, Daddy pulled the cord to start it and showed me how to work the throttle. I revved it up and took off. Unfortunately he had started me from the upper back yard with the bike aimed straight towards a forty foot deep ravine. Not great planning on his part. Not to mention that I zoomed away before he showed me how to apply the brakes.  Luckily those old Sears bikes had foot pegs that were really wide and close to the ground.

It was early in the morning when I made my motorcycling debut and the grass was wet with dew. When I saw the ravine coming up, I tried to turn the bike at full speed. The bike slid on the wet grass. One of the foot pegs caught the ground and I was catapulted off the bike into the yard. Disaster averted, and I didn’t even have to go to the ER.  After making sure I wasn’t dead, Daddy just stepped back and waited. He figured I was going to start crying and run to Mama. Instead, I sat there until I caught my breath, stood the mini bike up, and started pulling the cord. I looked at Daddy and told him to aim me away from the giant ravine the next time.

I rode the wheels off that little bike until I was eight or nine. Then I moved up to a real motorcycle. Daddy bought me a used Honda XL75 that had belonged to Jack Carpenter’s daughter Lisa. It was a fun, reliable little bike and was a huge leap forward from the mini bike. With that bike came my first taste of freedom and independence. Daddy would load the bike up on weekends and we’d go to our property on Plum Orchard. We’d spend the weekends camping on the property and I spent the whole time riding every dirt road and trail in Persimmon.

As I got a little older I’d take the XL on my own little camping trips with my buddies who rode with me. We’d go camp all over the Popcorn Creek area, free from parents. We thought we were pretty big stuff. Looking back, we were very responsible, never did anything stupid, and all managed to stay in one piece. Parents nowadays would never turn their kids loose like that. It was a great time and place to grow up.