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 The Motorhead in Me
I’ve always been a hands-on sort of man; a man who enjoys tinkering with tools and all things mechanical. Some of my earliest memories are of watching with great curiosity as my father worked on the family car, and I can still vividly recall the quarter midget race car he purchased for me as a young boy. It was painted candy apple green (didn’t he know it’s bad luck to own a green race car?) and sported a decal of a road runner on the side. After attending the requisite driver training, I was almost immediately disqualified from my first race for being overly aggressive, and the car saw little track time thereafter because, try as we did, we just couldn’t keep the thing running long enough to make any real progress. The only thing we didn’t try was painting over that bad-luck green!
After my very short racing career, I was hooked on motorsports. In high school, I gave serious consideration to becoming a NASCAR mechanic. Fortunately, Dad talked me out of it by painting a mental image for me of a 40-something year old version of myself, bent over a fender in a cold garage with grease under my fingernails and an aching back. Having never much cared for the cold, that short conversation pretty well killed my passion for becoming a professional wrench, but it didn’t much diminish the pleasure I got from tinkering with cars and motorcycles, especially when it came to making them go faster.
That I’ve always had an affinity for motorsports should come as no surprise when considering that my early racing experiences took place at the beginning of the muscle car era. Muscle cars are those glorious, low-cost, powerful, V-8 driven, mostly two-door, American-made cars built in the late 60s and early 70s. My older sister’s boyfriends - and even my dad - drove them, and I loved the guttural sound of their exhaust and the way I was thrown back in my seat when the accelerator was stabbed.
There’s nothing refined about muscle cars; they are brute force at its finest. They are machines designed and built by men who said things like “when it doubt, bore it out!” and “there’s no substitute for cubic inches!” Muscle cars are the unmistakably primitive, club-wielding, Cro-Magnon man of the automotive world and I’ve always loved them for it. I suppose that’s why I’ve also come to love Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
Harleys are those guttural-sounding, sometimes obnoxiously loud (to some, but rarely to me), American-made bikes that cause many drivers to roll-up their windows at stop lights when one pulls up alongside. They produce mountains of torque thanks to having two garbage-can sized pistons rather than four smaller ones like more civilized bikes, and they are notorious for having just enough vibration, even when finely tuned, to never let you forget that inches below your manhood sits a fire-breathing beast that can be either your best friend if you take good care of it, or your worst enemy if you don’t give it the attention it demands.
 
When looking at the marvels of high-tech, two-wheeled wizardry coming out of Germany and Japan today, Harleys are, by comparison, idiot savants whose single talent is their unparalleled ability to be every bit as cool today as they were more than a hundred years ago when Bill Harley and the brothers Davidson first started building them. But I don’t like Harleys just because they’re brutish and cool: What I like most about Harleys is that they are uniquely, fiercely, and proudly American; sorta like me. Thanks to a healthy supply of after-market parts, these motorcycles are almost infinitely customizable to reflect the character of the men and women who ride them, and it’s the nature of Harley owners to express their individualism through at least minor customization.
Harley-Davidson motorcycles were used during the hunt for Poncho Villa in 1916. The American armed forces saddled more than fifteen thousand H-Ds during the Great War. The Motor Company was one of only two American motorcycle manufacturers to survive the Great Depression, and more than 90,000 H-D bikes rode into service during WWII (during which time Harley-Davidson received two military awards for Excellence in Production.) In the postwar years, even Dad rode Harleys and Indians. In the late 60s, the company experienced a horrible acquisition by AMF that damaged the brand and nearly bankrupted the company. Twelve years later it was repurchased by Willie Davidson and others, and the company has flourished, relatively speaking, ever since. The Harley-Davidson Motorcycle Company is fiercely loyal now to its heritage, and continues to maintain the handsome styling cues that have been the hallmark of their bikes since the 1930s. Tell me, how can a red-blooded American male product of the muscle car era like me, with a proud family history of military service, not love a story - and a product - like that?
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