Leanings
LEANINGS
Bridgestone summers
Peter Egan
NOT EVERYONE IS ABLE TO THROW HIS BACK out merely by sneezing, but I managed this difficult feat about a week ago. Since then, I’ve been shuffling around like one of those zombies from Night of the Living Dead. But-luckily for all concerned-I have no appetite for human flesh and have been getting by quite nicely on my usual diet, which is based on the premise that ancho peppers and dark beer are the basic building blocks of life.
In other words, productive garage work has pretty much come to a halt. Last night, however, I did manage to Boris Karloff my way out to the workshop and was pleased to see I was still walking fast enough to trip the motion detector light in the driveway. Never mind that I had to swing my arms around like a sailor waving off a bad carrier landing.
Once inside the workshop, I turned on the heat, sat down on a shop stool and soon found myself basking in the radiant beams of guilt from several unfinished projects.
Most radiant of all, of course, was my Bridgestone 7, a sporty little red 50cc twostroke almost exactly like the one I bought new in 1964. I wrote about this bike a while back but should probably reiterate:
About two years ago, in a rare weak moment of nostalgia, I made the mistake of telling my friend Rob Himmelmann that I’d like to have another one of these machines “someday.” About 15 minutes later, he called me from a motorcycle shop in Wisconsin Rapids and said he’d found one. No title, non-running, but almost complete. How can you resist a combination like that? One Ford van trip and $200 later, I had me a Bridgestone 7.
And I’ve still got it.
When I first brought the Bridgestone home, I went through a flurry of work to get it running. The inside of the gas tank was a seething mass of rusty scale and brown smut, so I ran two doses of chemical tank cleaner through it, with only moderate results. Experts in dilapidation and decay have told me the next step is to rattle a mixture of small stones and tank cleaner around for a couple of hours, like someone shaking a toxic martini. This I will have to try, just as soon as I can locate the very worst clothes in my closet. Which shouldn’t be too hard.
It also needs a new phenolic carburetor mount, one upper motor mount and “a little electrical work.” I installed a new battery, but nothing lights up when the key is turned on. I don’t know where the stray voltage is going. Maybe fish are
leaping out of a nearby pond. Probably just a ground problem-or many ground problems.
In any case, none of this promises to be very difficult. All I have to do is get to work and get it done. Which I may yet do this winter, vertebrae permitting.
In the meantime, the Bridgestone is still doing an admirable job in its main role, which is to act as a kind of threedimensional photograph from the album of life. And, like an old photograph, it projects a sensory sweep much wider than the non-mind-reading bystander might suspect.
When I bought my original Bridgestone 7 in 1964-straight out of the display window of Lee’s Hardware in Elroy, Wisconsin-I had to get a small bank loan, and my dad laid down strict conditions before signing off: The money I was making in our family printing office ($ 1/hr. ) would go exclusively into my dreaded College Fund. I would pay off the Bridgestone using money earned elsewhere, working evenings and weekends.
So I found two other jobs. One was mowing the local Catholic Cemetery and the other was working as a line-boy at the nearby Wonewoc Airport. The latter job suited me perfectly. I was a tri-polar motorcycle/car/airplane nut (picture St. Patrick’s famous Holy Trinity allegory, using the shamrock), and I had just taken a winter ground school and passed my FAA written pilot’s exam. My dream was
to become a professional pilot-fighters first, of course, and then the airlines.
With this new job, I’d be able to ride my Bridgestone to the airport on the weekends, work around airplanes and possibly trade a little of my labor for a short flying lesson now and then. During the long summer evenings, I’d ride to the cemetery and mow until dark
And that’s exactly what I did. The Catholic Cemetery was dutifully mown, and my original Pilot Log-which I am still using-shows that I had three flying lessons of 15-, 30and 20-minute duration in 1964, the first flown in an Aeronca Chief, the last two in a 7AC Aeronca Champ.
Then my dad made me quit flying to save more money for college and pay off the Bridgestone. He didn’t believe in the full Trinity, apparently. By the time I went back to high school that fall, the bike was indeed paid off.
So that Bridgestone 7 sitting in my garage now may look like a cheap Japanese two-stroke and smell like stale gas to the average onlooker, but to me it still looks like a reasonably bright future and smells like fresh summer grass clippings, premix smoke, av-gas, airplane fabric and nitrate dope.
Not to mention the aroma of the carefully hidden Camels I used to smoke while leaning on a tombstone at the cemetery, watching the sun go down after a hard day of printing or working on airplanes and mowing.
Strangely enough, I just finished a check ride last month in an airplane called a Citabria, which is nothing but a higher-performance, aerobatic version of the Champ in which I took some of my first lessons. I’m renting the plane now, and flying it about one hour a week.
I’ve been trying to save for a Citabria of my own this year, but haven’t made much progress in this brave new economy of ours. There’s no college fund anymore, but reality keeps intruding in fascinating new forms-car repairs, roof trouble, vet bills, retirement “investment” plans, etc. The less said about that last expense, the better.
Maybe I’ll have to get a bank loan for the airplane and find a couple of part-time jobs to make the payments. Then I could save on gas by riding my Bridgestone 7 to the airport when I go flying next summer.
In some lives, progress is so faint as to be indistinguishable from regression.
