Chapter 8

While we're chatting ... I should talk about my motorcycle (s).

Bill is just enough older that he had his license. His dad owned a bar south of Saint Johns. A Roadhouse kind of place. There's a commercial lake to the west and a golf course across the road. It sets on the top of a hill. It's pretty successful ... Bill had a Zundap 250 motorbike, a '40 Ford sedan and a couple of others I don't recall.

I was just 14. Bill and I were cruising, as was our accustomed habit, the back roads of Clinton County. We were west of Ovid-Elsie but east of 27 ... a huge area but old age and the County Road Commission has modified that area and I'm no longer sure. On one of those gravel jokes they called roads we came across a real find.

At the time, there was a 'Flying Farmer' in the area. During the war he flew P-47's and racked up enough kills to make double ace ... and a couple more. 109's... 190's ... a single Ta 152 and a Storch. After that war, he was called up for Korea and flew F-51's until a Mig shot him down. Invalided out, he came back to the oh so boring family farm ... put in a runway and started collecting. Of course he was killed in a J3 Cub... 65 horses and molasses in January.

Down the road a piece was a little trash home with a scrounger living in it. The pilot ... deader n' dead ... left everything to the Little Woman and She was a mean spiteful wench.

"Get this worthless crap outta my barn," she told the scrounger.

So ... eventually the P-47, P-40, P-38 and the Grumman Duck ended up at the scroungers house ... and all the crap from the barns ... all of it ... boxes and crates and buckets ... and three Harley motorcycles ... disassembled down to the spokes out of the wheels, the petcocks out of the tanks and everything in one big crate. There wasn't one single bolt, screw, lever, gear that wasn't taken apart ... down to the nubbins.

A WW2 Canadian Scout, 45 cubic inch flathead, a 1938 sixty-one cube knuckle and a 1948 Pan ... all in one crate and nothing labeled.

"$200.00 and it's yours," she said.

"Which one?"

"The crate."

Two hundred bucks was a lot of money for a kid who got fifty cents a week to take out the garbage. But I'd sniped, hauled groceries for the Nuns, washed cars and shoveled snow, raked leaves and mowed lawns ... with a push mower ... a reel push mower. and talked her down to a hundred bucks.

Fortunately ... all those parts are different ... parts from a knuckle won't fit a pan or vice versa. This was all going on while I was still looking for an engine for the '36. Seems like every time I'd get a little ahead, someone would come up with the deal of the century ... and I'd buy it.

Dummy.

So ... I had these motorcycles ... and daddy's Mercury wasn't long enough to fill up the garage

... uh huh.