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I don't know the exact year, but it must have been in the mid '70s, and I was maybe 8 or 10 years old. My super-cool hooligan uncle (now a doctor - go figure) "borrowed" a friend's 750 Kwaka and took me for a ride around the block. I was hopelessly hooked, but being that young and dirt poor, there was little I could do.
Fast forward to the early '80s, maybe 1982, when my brother traded a go cart for a Sachs 125 scrambler of some sort. I have no doubts today that it had been stolen at some point, but we didn't care too much. We rode that thing around our back yard in endless circles until my brother blew the engine some months later, and my Dad had the carcass hauled off for skrap. (yeah, spelling, I know, blame the "naughty word" filter.")
Fast forward again to college in the early '90s. I was working as a cashier at a hardware store, and this tatooed guy comes riding up on a sky blue 1968 Bonneville, looking for all the world like he'd just rolled in out of "The Wild One" or a Mike Ness video. We got to chatting about bikes, and pretty soon he'd sold me a '67 BSA Lightning basket case that I worked on in his garage in the evenings.
Pretty soon it became obvious that I wasn't going to be able to rebuild it on my budget, so I scraped together a few more bucks and bought his (and by then mine as well) buddy's chopper - a '72 A-65 Firebird scrambler motor in a hard tail frame. It had a Kawasaki dual disk front end held on by a giant chunk of threaded rod, and a Yamaha rear wheel with a non-functioning rear brake.
An absolute death trap that I was lucky to walk away alive from, but I loved it and would buy it back in an instant.
A few different bikes later, and I settled on a Suzuki vx800 two years ago, when what I really wanted was a Bonnie.
And now, in just a few hours, I'm going to pick my new baby up from the dealer.
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