The World's Most Famous Bike?

The world’s most famous bike?

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

DURING THE GEOLOGY 101 COURSE I took at the University of Wisconsin, I was always a bit disconcerted by the similarity between the shape of the last great North American glacier and the big blue peninsula of cold temperatures depicted on the Midwestern weather map during the winter months. It looked like a perfect overlay, as if winter were just practicing for the next Ice Age.

And never more than this past winter. It was pretty severe here in the heartland, causing a pandemic of cabin fever. So when my wife, Barbara, had spring break from the school where she works as a physical therapist, we decided to head South.

The airlines, of course, were over-. booked to all the really hot places on Earth, but we found a couple of tickets on a flight to San Antonio, Texas. Home of the Alamo, the River Walk, Tex-Mex food, etc. Not Cozumel, exactly, but warmer than Wisconsin, so off we went.

Nice city, San Antonio. We stayed, literally, right across the street from the Alamo at the famous old Menger Hotel (where Teddy Roosevelt once recruited his Rough Riders), took in the River Walk sights, drank margaritas, heard some live jazz at the Landing and ate well.

But as any sensible person will tell you, this kind of lightweight fun is good for about two days of diversion, and then you have to See Some Bikes. Or ride. Or something. To the mechanically minded soul, a hardware-free vacation is something of an oxymoron. Rub shoulders for a few days with throngs of non-riding tourists and you begin to feel like a timber wolf at the zoo. Too much zoo, not enough timber.

Luckily, I had an ace up my sleeve. Our friends Herb and Karen Harris had invited us to drive our rental car up to Austin and stay overnight.

Herb is a Vincent collector extraordinaire. I can hardly open a classic motorcycle magazine these days without seeing an article about one of his bikes or projects. He has a large collection of Vincent memorabilia and has gradually assembled what is doubtless the world’s best collection of famous racing Vincents.

I flew down to Austin three years ago to do a story on one of his daily riders, a 1951 Series C Black Shadow, and ended up selling virtually all the vehicles I owned to buy the bike-which I later sold to pay off our house loan.

Now I have a piece of paper called a

deed and no Vincent. Real smart. But, despite my faulty thinking, Herb and I have stayed friends ever since.

A few changes have been made since my last visit. In 1998, Herb had five or six bikes parked in his spacious living room, with a couple of daily riders out in the attached garage. Now he has a new addition to the house that includes a large motorcycle display room and a guest apartment upstairs. The display room has the aura of a men’s club in London, with dark wainscoting, polished wood floors and a bar along one wall.

I pointed out to Herb that the bar was sorely in need of a Guinness tapper, but he just smiled and said, “Everyone has a different idea of what kind of drinks should be served in here.”

Still, Guinness is fundamental. It’s the Black Shadow of dark, heavy stouts. I’m not even sure Vincents make any sense unless you’ve got one in your hand. No doubt Herb will come around and do the right thing.

In any case, this is the display room we all dream of. And there were a few new bikes. Herb has built himself a beautiful hot-rod Shadow with straight pipes, Lightning cams, high compression pistons and modern electronic ignition, and he has also acquired the famous Marty Dickerson 1948 Rapide “Blue Bike” speed-record holder.

Nearby stands the Reg Dearden supercharged Black Lightning, a factory supported land-speed effort that went unfulfilled when Vincent stopped production in 1955. He’s also got beautiful Series A

and B Rapides, a BSA Gold Star and a nice ’65 Bonneville. New acquisitions out in the “regular” garage are a Ducati 996 S (“The world’s greatest half-hour bike,” Herb says), a lime-green Triumph Speed Triple and a BMW RI 100RT.

But the centerpiece of the collection, to me, is still the Rollie Tree “Bathing Suit” bike, the Bonneville record-setter from 1948, on which Free became the first man to ride an unsupercharged motorcycle at 150 mph, while stripped down to swim Trunks and bathing cap and lying flat on the rear fender to cut drag. There have been many other celebrated VincentsGeorge Brown’s Gunga Din, New and Super New and so on-but the Rollie Tree bike is still The One. Lor me, at least.

After a nice dinner with Herb and Karen, Barb and I walked through the bike gallery on our way to the guest apartment and I stopped to look at the Rollie Tree record bike for a few minutes before turning out the lights.

There it was, menacing and many-jointed as a black widow spider, still with no seat and that Mobilgas Llying Red Horse emblem on the tank. Just like the Life magazine photos taken the year I was born.

I’ve got pictures of this bike in at least 12 Vincent books on my shelf, and in piles of magazines collected over the years. There’s a poster of it on my garage wall.

In this quiet moment of bike contemplation, I had to ask myself, Is this the most famous motorcycle on Earth?

Arguably, it is. What other bikes are in the same league?

Any of T.E. Lawrence’s Brough Superiors, perhaps. Particularly the one on which he was killed. The Hailwood Isle of Man Ducati, certainly, though there seems to be an ongoing dispute over which one was the real TT bike. In the Life Imitates Art Dept., I suppose the Captain America and Billy Bike choppers from Easy Rider are in this category, though both of those were stolen and parted out long ago.

But in the mythology of motorcycling, there aren’t many bikes that cast a larger-if you’ll excuse me-shadow than the 1948 Bonneville bike.

Before I left the room and went to bed, I rested my right hand for a moment on the twistgrip. But I didn’t twist it. Some things you just don’t mess with. You could be struck by lightning.

Or haunted by the ghost of Phil Vincent himself. Which, in a house like the Harrises’, can easily happen. And does.