You asked for Easy Rider stories… here’s mine…
Bear with me.. I get to the Easy Rider parts in a while… In ‘59, my mother rented a house that had two garages… My sister’s friends & boyfriends immediately took possession of one to build cars and store tools. Tommy Patterson had a BSA that he’d keep INSIDE the house when the garage was full… he let me ride it on the lawn once for about 50 feet, and when I didn’t crash it, I knew I needed one of my own… then my mom rented out one of the garages to Eddie Nelkin and his son .. They had a business in the diamond exchange in NYC, and bought matching Harley DuoGlide full dressers.. They were loaded with chrome and painted a pearlescent white that was so stunning, you almost needed sunglasses to look at them… That’s when I decided that I had to have a Harley when I grew up… I used to ride my bicycle up to Ghost Motors (the biggest Harley dealer at the time) to drool over the bikes… I started on my own motorized 2-wheelers in 1962 – a Rupp/Dart minibike… My brother and I raced Dart Karts – semi-professionally in the IKF, but I always preferred 2-wheels… I went from the minibike to off-road bikes; hare & hound, trials, whatever I could ride while being too young for a license…. Still raced the 4-wheelers; quarter midgets, TQ’s, dirt ovals.. Whatever…
My first street bike in ‘66 was a metric, because that was all I could afford… A friend – Eric Teidt – said he was getting a bunch of surplus Army/Government Harleys from a friend, still in crates, and was selling them for $250.. I ordered two!
Unfortunately, “surplus” wasn’t exactly “surplus”; the guy bringing them in ended up doing a few years in a small metal cage, and I didn’t get my Harleys… I kept the metric…
Fast Forward to ‘69.. A good friend, Jake Jason (who also started me on minibikes) said he got tickets to this oddball music festival upstate, and I should go with him… the catch being that we had to go on Thursday, and my boss at the IGA wouldn’t give me the time off… so, I missed out on the “Three Days of Peace, Love & Music” at Max Yasgur’s farm…
Instead, a friend talked me into going to this new movie that was supposed to be some counter-culture adventure movie about two guys on motorcycles…
The lead actor shared my first name, and was riding the type of bike I was dying to own…
Mind blown…
There were no Harley dealers anywhere near me, and no one around was building Harley-style bikes, so I gravitated to racing 500’s and 750’s Kaws with Jake for a team called CamRod out of Outrider Motor Sales in NYC…
When 1970 hit, a small bank account left to me by my aunt was released… I had bikes, but no car.. My VW bus self-destructed.. My brother just bought an AMX, so I ordered a Boss 302 Mustang… The dealer’s idiot sone crashed it before I took possession (and killed a passenger), so I took my money back and bought a Plymouth Superbird… Best car ever… Go 110 and floor it, and the beast would DOWNSHIFT and spin the tires up to 145… Made it from NY to Miami once in just over 12 hours.. Averaged 117 for the trip…
Oh, yeah.. Easy Rider…
There was a Norton and a Triumph along the way, and by ‘75 I’d had my fill of road racing – and got tired of all the speeding tickets (like 126 in a 35) and was looking for a way to forcibly slow down and smell the roses… That night, that old, strange, counter-culture movie was on TV, and I instantly knew the answer… What had hit me like a ton of bricks in ‘69, now reaffirmed my inner 2-wheel vagabond… Visions of Nelkin’s dressers danced through my head as I imagined riding alongside those two maniacs… It was Harley time…
I stripped-down – but not chopped – shovelhead was close to Hopper’s bike, but that stretched chopper was still a goal… And if a shovelhead that leaked and burned as much oil as I could pour into it didn’t discourage me (along with the burned valves and pistons), nothing would…
This is the 50th Anniversary… I’m looking at finally getting that stretched chopper – even if I have to sell the Ultra Classic – and following in the tire tracks of the movie that shaped my 2-wheeled soul…
Twice…
Peter “Fixer” Burrascano
Southern Cruisers Riding Club
1st Officer, Chapter 49/Houston
Have Bike – Will Travel
2005 Screamin’Eagle Ultra Classic
