My First Motorcycle

My obsession began with the Sears & Roebuck catalogs of The Fifties. Immediately after perusing the bra and panty departments, the next place to go in the new Sears catalog was always the Allstate Motorcycle department. Back when the most common motorized two-wheelers were Cushmans, Whizzers, and Simplex Motorbikes, the Puch/Allstate lineup sold by Sears was pretty doggone excitin’! The next big event in my life was when my best friend got a new Harley-Davidson Super 10 in 1960. This was followed only months later by my favorite cousin’s new acquisition, a black 1960 Honda 150cc Benly Touring. Not only were the Allstates beginning to look klunky in a hurry, but this turn of events put me in on the ground floor of what I would later name The Tiddler Invasion. The next Honda I had a close encounter with was a Super Sport Cub with its 3-speed transmission, manual clutch, and cream tank. Within a couple of years, America was covered up in small Hondas, Yamahas, and Suzukis. Kawasaki would not arrive until a few years later, beginning under the Omega nameplate. I was quite a Yamaha fanatic in those early days, at least partly because I have always enjoyed rooting for the underdog. This is a website dedicated to those wonderful little machines from the days of our youth. The gamut includes the ubiquitous Honda 50, the unknown Pointer Super Lassie, and all those in between these two extremes. For the purposes of this site, the bottom of the line is the Allstate Moped and the top is the Honda CL Scramblers. Let’s consider anything in the 500c and up class as serious motorcycles instead of tiddlers. These parameters place the beginning in the ‘50’s and the end in the very early ‘70’s with the last production of the Honda CL-450. Honorable homage should certainly be paid to the early Cushman scooters and the ‘40’s DKW 125 that inspired the H-D Hummer, but the principal business of this site is to disseminate information about the Japanese invasion of The Sixties.

My first motorized two-wheeler was a 1957 Allstate Cruisaire. Other than the fact that I ran into the house while circling my own back yard during my first day of ownership, my relationship with the scooter was uneventful. My dad traded the scooter in for a brand new, red and silver Yamaha Rotary Jet 80 YG-1 in the summer of 1963. That relationship was a bit tumultuous. I loved that tiddler with everything I had. I also hit a car, another motorcycle (a '62 Honda Super Sport 50), and a downed powerline with it. The last incident occurred after a storm knocked a line across the street, and it caught under my neck and dragged me off the YG-1. I looked like a criminal who had escaped the hangman for a week! After this third trip to the emergency room, my dad took the Yamaha away from me and gave me a pool table as a consolation prize. Obviously, I never know when to quit while I'm ahead!

Three years later I managed to talk my parents into letting me cautiously back on two wheels. The black and white '66 Honda 50 Cub looked so innocent to my loving parents, and I did at least manage to keep its tires on the ground. A few years later I graduated to a red Kawasaki G3-TR 90. I didn't keep this one long before visions of Easy Rider sent me upmarket for a trip to California (where else?). Since I had been quite enamored of trail riding from the very beginning of my motorcycle experience, only one machine would do both very well. Although I strongly considered a 1970 Kawasaki Mach III in red with white stripes on the tank for my long excursion, a friend talked me out of it, and he was absolutely right. The blue 1970 Honda CL-350 was a much better choice, and it offered me a passable trail ride, too. After two trips to San Francisco from Starkpatch MS, I finally bought a Mach III, one of the especially pretty blue ones with the laser decals on the tank. One of the strange parts of this story is that a friend had talked me out of the Mach III for my long journey, but two other motorsickle buddies of mine bought a matching pair of new '71 blue Mach III's and made a similar trip. These were the good old days, no doubt. There were young men of college age on Hondas and other brands crisscrossing the USA as if Captain America and Billy had rolled right off the big screen. I personally knew five other guys who drove across the country in 1970-71, mostly on what we would now call tiddlers. Those were the days....