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This article has been published in Topical Time, the bimonthly magazine of the ATA, the American Topical Association.
Through mediation of our USA member Tom Noonan we have permission from the author, George DeKornfeld, to publish it in the MFN newsletter. This time the first part.
Half the Wheels, Double the Fun (1)
During my junior year in college, Chip, a buddy of mine that lived near me back home, brought his motorcycle to school following summer vacation, a move that to me made extraordinarily little sense. The four-hour long road trip seemed arduous enough in my comfy Dodge Charger, so I couldn’t wrap my brain around why anyone would spend equal time picking bugs out of their teeth, having their joints rattled out of place, and (saints preserve us) no David Bowie to bop along to for the entire length of the journey.
What’s worse, Chip rode a Can Am 250, a dirt bike built for trails and short jaunts, not for comfort and certainly not for long highway road trips. I mocked him then, and mocked him some more when he nearly froze his butt off during the ride home for Thanksgiving break (it gets kinda chilly in Upstate New York in late November), and really gave it to him when he had to bum a ride home and back for Christmas vacation, heavy snows that year precluding any chance of traveling on only two wheels.
By the following Spring, Chip was back to riding and after all this time, I finally picked up on that he always seemed to have a smile on his face while he was riding. He even took some rides for no other reason than to discover some previously untraveled country roads near school. This revelation, along with his constant urging (nagging), found me finally agreeing to giving his bike a try. After several stalls trying to get a feel for the clutch, I suddenly found myself motoring down the street, albeit it only in first gear... I think it only took me about one-quarter of a mile to realize that I was totally hooked!
With Chip’s tutelage and the use of his Can Am, first semester of senior year had me going for my road test (an odd situation where the applicant travels a designated route followed by the examiner in a car) and I was happy to have won my license on the first try. Then, the summer after graduation, it was showtime! I walked into Reggie Pink’s motorcycle dealership in White Plains, driven there by my father who spent the short ride from home making one last—ditch effort to try to talk me out of what he considered to be a crazy and dangerous move (neglecting completely that he had ridden at my age, a clear reiteration of the old "do as I say, not as I do" ploy), and rode back out on my spanking new, black 1979 Suzuki GS750E (Figure 1).
Figure 1
I rode everywhere and like Chip, smiled doing it. I even commuted into Manhattan with it (and yes, I was one of those bikers that did 30mph on the FDR Drive going between all the cars at a standstill during rush hour traffic that y’all hate… whatever) Eventually, with "responsibility" rearing its ugly head, I switched over to admittedly safer pick-up trucks and never looked back. Well, until recently. It may just be a late mid-life crisis, or it may even be the effectiveness of those endless television motorcycle insurance commercials, but if I could, I’d be back on a two-wheeler in a heartbeat. However, due to advancing age and leg issues, that ship has sadly already sailed, so to placate this deep yearning I’ve recently developed, it is with a nostalgic tear in my eye that for this issue of TT I thought we’d all take a ride together to look at some pictorial postmarks featuring motorcycles.
Figure 2
We start our journey in Traisen, Austria, where a pictorial has been applied to a stamp honoring Rupert Hollaus on its First Day of issue in 2004. Rupert raced motorcycles and was the only Austrian to ever win a World Championship, a feat he accomplished in 1954 in the 125cc Class, which was pretty remarkable since he had only entered Grand Prix racing the year prior. Sadly, on September 11th of the same year, he died in a crash during a practice run for the Italian Grand Prix. Rupert was awarded his World Championship trophy and was named 1954 Austrian Sportsperson of the Year, both posthumously. OK, so just maybe this wasn’t the best example to start off with, but the pictorial of his bike, a purpose-built racing machine that wouldn’t come close to being street legal, is after all, kinda cool (Figure 2).
Figure 3
Since we’re at the races, lets hop on over to France for a pictorial machine cancellation used at Le Mans Gare in 1979 for an Endurance motorcycle race of 1000 km contested upon the Le Mans Bugatti circuit. Sanctioned by the Automobile Club de l’Ouest (Automobile Club of the West), the ACO had organized its first bike race way back in September of 1912, long before the birth of the Bugatti circuit which opened in September of 1966.
The "24H" in the pictorial indicates the length of time in hours that this European championship takes to complete, making the word "endurance" seem perhaps a wee bit understated (Figure 3).
Figure 4
Still in France and on a more safety-minded note, we next visit Paris for a First Day pictorial used in 2002 that depicts a trio of motorcycle helmets. Now, I get how delightful it is to ride ala Easy Rider, with the wind blowing through one’s hair (back when I had hair #%&##!!), having sneaked in a few neighborhood jaunts in my time, living in a state where helmets are mandatory. But when you get right down to it, riding without a helmet is just plain nuts. During one of those "I told you so moments" that my father seemed to enjoy way too much as I was growing up, when I hit loose gravel coming off of the Sprain Brook Parkway at Jackson Avenue doing around 50mph, and my Suzuki laid itself down, the first part of me to make contact with the highway was my noggin which, fortunately, was safely ensconced in my full Bell helmet. The helmet ended up with a crack in it (better it than my skull) and needed to be replaced, but I was able to walk (ride) away from that unfortunate mishap (additional take-away: roll bars are worth their weight in gold). Note that our pictorial mentions "Cylindrées et Carenages" (Displacement and Fairings), referring to a series of motorcycle stamps issued by La Poste, in our case, depicting an American classic, the Harley Davidson Hydra Glide and the Terrot, a French classic brand not made since 1961 (Figure 4).
The Harley Davidson name is surely known around the world as one of the premier motorcycle manufacturers, something the company has been doing handily since 1903, when it started off in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Currently, with factories in three U.S. states as well as in Brazil, India, and Thailand, Harley is truly an icon of the two-wheeler world, with its machines having been used by the Army in both World Wars, by police departments and, of course, by bikers and racers the world over.
On a general interest note, starting in 1920, a group of farm boys found themselves dominating the American racing circuits riding Harley-Davidson motorcycles. At the end of each race, they would run a victory lap with one of their farm hogs, a beloved team mascot, perched upon the gas tank of the winning machine, a stunt that spawned the nickname for these bikes: "Hogs". Harley-Davidson eventually adopted this nickname officially, turning it into the acronym HOG, standing for "Harley Owners Group", even changing the company’s ticker symbol on the New York Stock Exchange from HDI (Harley-Davidson Industries) to HOG in 2006. The Harley Owners Group became an official company club in 1983, and today claims 1400-plus chapters worldwide with many more than 1 million members, many of these clubs having already been in existence well before the company got into the act.
In Figure 5 we find an attractive postal card issued to commemorate the 84th anniversary of the Prague, Czech Republic Harley Club, the 2012 pictorial postmark sporting the familiar spoked motorcycle wheel along with a Harley logo. The "A" in the indicia indicates the postage fee for local use within the republic, a "forever" value currently worth CZK26 (26 Czech Koruna).
Figure 5
George DeKornfeld
(to be continued)
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