Back In The Day – Page 26 – The ExhaustNotes Blog

Genuine’s G400c and more…

I was up in San Francisco a week or so ago and I stopped by good buddy Barry’s San Francisco Scooter Centre for two reasons: To say hello to Barry, and to check out the new Genuine G400c motorcycle. It’s the bike manufactured by Shineray (in Chongqing, China), and I had seen two versions of it when I rode across China on an RX3 nearly three years go.

Brand new Genuine G400c motorcycles in good buddy Barry’s San Francisco Scooter Centre.

The new Genuine’s pricing in the San Francisco Scooter Centre. Like other Asian and Indian bikes from Royal Enfield, CSC, and BMW, the price is seriously lower than others on the market from the Big 4 and Europe. Unlike many other dealers, the San Francisco Scooter Centre’s setup, documentation, and freight charges are honest and reasonable.

I didn’t have the time or the gear to ride the Genuine G400c last week, but Barry said he wants me to try the new machine and he offered a ride. I’m going to do that later this month, and I’ll tell you more about the bike when I do.

The products available to us as motorcyclists sure are changing, and there’s no doubt the imports from China and India are rocking our world. Gresh and I have a bit of experience on Zongshen’s RX3, RX4, and TT250 (made in China and imported by CSC). I’ve had some seat time on the new BMW 310 made in India. Joe and I recently completed a week-long adventure in Baja riding the Royal Enfield 500cc Bullet and their new 650cc Interceptor (both made in India). I don’t have any time yet on Harley’s 500cc and 750cc v-twin cruisers (also made in India), but I’m working on correcting that character flaw. There’s an old proverb that says “may you live in interesting times.” We certainly are.

Hey, more good news: I finally received my printed copies of Destinations, and my story on Kitt Peak National Observatory is in the next issue of Motorcycle Classics magazine. You can see all of the Destinations pieces (and get your very own copy) right here. Good buddy Mike did. Mike and I graduated junior high school and high school together back in the day (as in 50 years ago), and we still talk to each other a couple of times each month. Good friends and good times!

Good buddy Mike, who knows a good thing when he sees it!

Aerodynamics, Roman baths, and the See Ya

Shortly after we passed this Alfa See Ya motorhome, we stopped at a rest area along Interstate 5. The coach pulled in behind us.

I was driving south on Interstate 5 this weekend, enjoying the Subaru and the wildflowers, and feeling good about the zillions of bugs splattering on the Subie’s windshield instead of me (as they had been doing with a vengeance when Gresh and I were in Baja on the Enfields the prior week). Various thoughts floated through my mind, one of them being that we had not done a “Back in the Day” blog in a while. That concept was Gresh’s…a series of blogs about past jobs, experiences, and…well, you get the idea. That thought drifted around in my noggin while we passed a long string of trucks and motorhomes, and Susie suddenly said “Look, Joe, an Alfa!”

Sure enough, it was an Alfa Leisure 36-foot, diesel pusher motorhome…the See Ya model, to be exact. If you’re wondering why this was a source of wonderment for both Susie and yours truly, it’s because I used to run the plant that manufactured that magnificent RV. That was almost 20 years ago.

Yep, I was the Operations Director for Alfa Leisure. It was one of the best jobs I ever had, and I worked for one of the smartest guys I’ve ever known. That would be Johnnie Crean, and I’ll get to him in a minute. Well, maybe less than a minute, because I’ll tell you about the motorhome first, and I can’t do that without touching on Johnnie’s genius.

The See Ya was a watershed product, and that was because it was one hell of a deal. Let me start by putting it this way…the See Ya’s MSRP was $184,600, but the thing was so good and demand was so high the dealers were tacking on more than $20K over list price and we still couldn’t build them fast enough. That’s because the See Ya was way better than the competition.

Johnnie did a lot of cool things. He put the air conditioner underneath the chassis, which allowed a higher ceiling inside the coach while still meeting Big Gubmint’s max height requirement for road vehicles. That may not sound significant, but that one feature alone sold a lot of motorhomes for Alfa. On any dealer’s lot you could go into any other motorhome and with their low ceilings they always felt cramped. You see, they all had their air conditioners on the roof, which forced them to make the ceiling lower. Walk into an Alfa, though, and it felt like you were in your house. The difference was immediate and obvious, and it was all Johnnie. And just to rub salt in that marketing wound, Johnnie put a ceiling fan in the See Ya. You know, a Casa Blanca, like you might have in your family room.

Next up was the color palette. For the exterior, you could have any color you wanted, as long as it was white. Johnnie realized that folks spend their time inside the motorhome, and they really didn’t care what the exterior color was. That little deal right there was a $10,000 price advantage. Another cool color advantage: Alfa only offered two interior carpeting colors (light tan and dark blue) and two cabinet color choices (light oak and dark walnut). We built the light tan carpeteted, light oak configuration almost exclusively. Johnnie knew that women preferred those colors (men preferred the darker colors), but the purchase decision was almost always made by wives, not by husbands.

One morning, Johnnie popped into my office early in the morning. “Put a spoiler on the coach,” he said, and with that, he turned to leave.

“A spoiler?” I asked. Johnnie always drove either a Porsche or a Bentley, but mostly the Porsche, and he owned a couple of race cars. I kind of assumed he was talking about a whale tail spoiler like his Turbo 911 had, but I didn’t know.

“A chin spoiler,” he said, showing through body language and tone that he was thinking I wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.

“A chin spoiler?” I asked. “That will take a few weeks, you know, to talk to the guy who makes the front fiberglass for us…”

“No, no, no…” Johnnie answered, frustrated by my inability to visualize what he had in mind. “Just cut a spoiler out of plywood and mount it under the nose with angle iron. Make it stick out about a foot.” He was drawing pictures in the air with his hands, tracing an imaginary arc in front of an imaginary coach. “Just tell your guys what I want. They’ll understand.”

So I went to our R&D shop, told the guys what I thought I wanted (Johnnie was right; they got it immediately), and 90 minutes later they were bolting a chin spoiler to the lower front face of a 36-ft diesel pusher motorhome. I thought it was an absurd idea, until I took that coach out on the freeway moments later. It felt like it was glued to the highway. Planted. Solid. Where before being passed by an 18-wheeler turned the See Ya into an E-ticket Disney ride, the coach now felt stable and absolutely unfazed when passing (or being passed by) a semi. I took it on the overpass from the northbound I-15 to the westbound I-10 (one of those high-in-the-sky elevated roadways where the winds were always severe) as an acid test, and I was convinced: The guy was a genius. The See Ya’s handling was dramatically better.

Another time, Johnnie came into my office and without sitting down, he told me he had just read a book about ancient Roman baths and he wanted to do the same in the See Ya.

“A Roman bath?” I said.

“No, no, no,” he answered. I didn’t know what Johnnie was talking about, but I knew it would be revealed soon. The trick was to dope out what the guy had in mind without appearing to be too slow. Sometimes I succeeded. This wasn’t going to be one of them.

“They heated their marble floors with hot springs, you know, geothermal stuff. It kept the floors warm so they didn’t get cold feet,” Johnnie explained, and again, the body language and tonality hinted that he felt like he was talking to a 5-year-old.

“You want me to park the coach over a hot spring?” (I can be kind of slow at times, people tell me.)

Johnnie just looked at me. Then he started drawing pictures in the air with his hands. “There’s hot water coming out of the engine, going to the radiator. Route that hot water through a zig zag pipe under the tile floors down the main hallway in the coach. Like a coil.” He was making zig zag motions in the air, that big gold Breitling watch flashing in front of me as he did so. I got it, finally. Son of a gun, the Roman bath idea worked. My guys had a prototype mocked up in a day, and the tile floor was satisfyingly toasty. Maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal to you, but trust me on this, it was. Try walking down the aisle of a motorhome with a tile floor in the winter in your bare feet. There isn’t much under that tile. It gets pretty cold. But not in an Alfa. It was a brilliant idea.

I could go on and on because I have lots of Johnnie stories like that. Those were some of the best days of my working life. Yeah, Johnnie’s a character, but damn, he came up with some amazing things. I think I learned more working there then I learned anywhere else, and building motorhomes was a lot of fun. They were like the Battlestar Galactica, huge moving things with features galore. When I started at Alfa, at the start of the See Ya production run, we were building one coach a week. When I left a couple of years later, we were building 10 coaches a week. Good times those were, back in the day.

Garelli!

At one time I owned a 1973 BMW R75/5 motorcycle. I traded 1300 dollars and a 1957 small-window VW van for the BMW. The good points about the bike were the suspension and the weight. For a 750cc the bike was lightweight and the thing had plenty of fork travel so it worked pretty good off road. The bad part was the charging system. I never could get the damn thing to electric start due to the battery being low. At the time I tried everything I knew to fix it but the little red discharge light was on constantly.

But this story isn’t about the BMW because I soon lost my driver’s license by wheeling and speeding around Florida on the German motorcycle. (It would do 110 MPH!) Maybe that’s the root of my animosity towards the brand. It had a bizarre ignition key to boot.

A year or two earlier Florida had changed the description of a moped and you no longer needed a driver’s license to operate one. I still had to travel 10 miles to my job at the JC Penny auto store so my mom drove me to the Garelli dealer on 49th street and I picked up their loss leader, Plain Jane Garelli moped for 399 dollars.

With no speedo and painted fenders the red Garelli was a study in thrift. It got 80 miles to a pre-mix gallon flat out at 30 miles per hour. Helmets weren’t required on a moped so I didn’t wear one. I wore a ball cap turned backwards.

My route to work changed to avoid busy roads. I crossed railroad trestles and scrambled behind Hialeah Speedway cutting across parking lots and running down alleys being chased by the exact same dog each day. The ride to work became an adventure and I learned to wheelie the Garelli for long distances. The moped’s lights were not exactly powerful but they always worked and the ride home at night kept the thrill going.

In the rearmost section of the luggage rack was a tin box containing the Garelli’s tool kit. The tool set was a spark plug socket and a couple wrenches of the cheapest thin steel so I used a letter punch to stamp ‘Snap-On” into the factory tools. This got huge laughs whenever I dragged the kit out to do what little maintenance the Garelli needed.

I rode the Garelli for three months and even after my license was reinstated I kept riding the moped for a while to save my driver’s license for a big cross-country trip my buddies and me had planned. I finally sold the bike for 300 dollars to an old man who could barely pedal the thing fast enough to get it started.

I hope to be that old man some day.

18 again!

Gresh left New Mexico headed for Los Angeles early this morning. What’s that white stuff?

Imagine you’re an old fart like Gresh and suddenly you could be again 18 years old again. That’s kind of what happened to me just a short while ago. Now, old Joe Gresh, he’s inbound from the Sacramento Mountains (don’t let the name fool you) in New Mexico, the Tinfiny Ranch, headed here. The guy wanted to make the drive in one day in order to be staged for our run into Baja tomorrow. Hey, that’s okay. It’s going to be warmer where we’re going.

Anyway, back to that 18-years-old-thing again. That’s what I want to be. 18 years old. And while I’m dreaming, throw in a new 1966 650cc, made-in-England, Triumph Bonneville, but let’s add electric start, six speeds, disc brakes, and a flawless finish. That’s my dream.

Only it’s not a dream. That’s where I am right now.

The bike is a new Royal Enfield Interceptor. It’s a 650. The styling is perfect, right down to the big tach and speedo that almost say “Smiths” (if I have to explain that, you wouldn’t understand). It’s made in India instead of England (hey, the current Triumph Bonnevilles are made in Thailand). My take? This new motorcycle has out-Triumphed Triumph in being more faithful to the original layout, displacement, and feel of the ’66 Bonneville I’ve lusted after for years. But with lots more refinement.

A brand new Royal Enfield 650 Interceptor in my driveway. It’s my ride for the next 10 days or so.

For my good buddy Orlando: See, it’s orange…the fastest color!

You can almost see where it says Smiths. This, folks, is what motorcycle instruments should look like!

Want to read another strong statement? On my 25-mile ride home from So Cal Moto in Brea, where I picked up the Royal Enfield, I decided I’m going to buy one. Oh, I’ll find some nits to pick over the next 2000 BajaBound miles and I’ll share them with you here, but this bike answers the mail. And the price? Well, a new Triumph Bonneville cost $1320 in 1966. I know, because my Dad bought one. A new Royal Enfield is $5799, I think. If you take that 1966 $1320 figure and adjust it for inflation to 2019, it comes out to $10,298. Buy a new Enfield 650 and you’ve already saved $4500. That’s the argument I’m going to use with She Who Must Be Obeyed. I think it will work, too.

I’m going to break our rule and post more than one blog today. We are living in exciting times, my friends, and I can’t wait to share the excitement with you. The 500cc Bullet is about 45 minutes out (it’s being delivered from the RE dealer in Glendale) and I’ll post an update about that later today, too!

I can’t wait to get on the road tomorrow.

Stay tuned, and hey, sign up for our automatic email blog updates!

The Warning

Check out these two men and what they did almost a century ago…folks, you couldn’t make a movie this exciting!

The monument above (The Warning, sculpted by Eric Richards) was erected in 2003 in Santa Paula, California, to mark a heroic evening in 1928. Motor Officers Thornton Edwards (on the Indian) and Stanley Baker (on the Harley) were on duty the evening of March 12, 1928, when California experienced the second worst disaster in the state’s history. The recently completed St. Francis Dam, 36 miles upstream in Santa Clarita, collapsed shortly after midnight.

The collapse released 52 billion gallons of water, and that water was headed directly toward Santa Paula. The Santa Paula Police Department learned of the impending danger shortly after the dam broke. Thornton and Baker spent the next 3 hours riding their motorcycles throughout Santa Paula, notifying residents and evacuating the town. Thornton worked for the State Highway Department, which later became the California Highway Patrol. Baker was a Santa Paula Police Department Officer. Although the records from this era are sketchy, legend holds that Thornton’s bike had to be repaired during his midnight ride when it ingested water. As a result of these two officers’ actions, the residents of Santa Paula were successfully evacuated, and few Santa Paula residents died that night.

The water released by the dam (the reservoir had just filled, and the poorly-designed dam was not strong enough to contain it) mixed with mud and debris to form a wall of slurry that advanced 54 miles to the ocean at about 12 miles per hour. The disaster killed an estimated 470 people, and to this day, it is the second worst disaster in California history. Only the San Francisco earthquake resulted in more death.

The Warning contains no mention of either motor officer’s name; rather, it is intended to honor all acts of heroism, and to honor those killed during the St. Francis Dam collapse. If you head through downtown Santa Paula, The Warning is hard to miss. It’s worth a trip to Santa Paula just to see it.

Special thanks for the above research to Peggy Kelly, a reporter for the Santa Paula Times, whom I interviewed for the above information.

Morgans and Mr. H…

A 1953 Morgan. This is a dream car for me.

I read the Wall Street Journal pretty much every day. The reporting is far more objective than what passes for journalism in the other papers I take (the LA Times and the NY Times), the stories tend to be better, and there’s A.J. Baime. Mr. Baime is an award-winning historian and a fantastic writer. He does a regular column in the WSJ about interesting people who own interesting automobiles, and the most recent one was about a fellow who fell in love with, and later bought, a Morgan.

A Morgan. Wow, that brought back memories.

Pete Herrington in 1963, when I was in the 7th grade. I was surprised at how easy it was to find this photograph on the Internet.

When I was 12 years old and in the 7th grade, our science teacher (Peter Herrington) owned a Morgan. It was 1953 Morgan, to be specific, and it was unrestored and magnificently original. I was just getting interested in cars and motorcycles back then, and that Morgan was riveting. It was one of the most interesting things I’d ever seen. I couldn’t quite figure it out, but I knew I liked it. In an age when everything was trying to look like a fighter jet, Mr. Herrington’s Morgan was a combination of an old car, a sports car, and attitude. It had sweeping fenders (like an old Model A Ford), it was low slung and a two-seater (like a Corvette), and it had huge louvers and a big leather belt to hold the hood down. Its appearance said I don’t care what I look like, I’m tough, and I’m built to perform. It was cool. To a 12-year-old kid like me, it was beyond cool.

To dive a bit deeper into this story, I was a bit of a problem, you see, when I was 12 years old. Actually, I was a pain in the ass, and I got detention a lot. You might say I was a confirmed detention recidivist, and as such, I spent more time in detention than any other class I had in those days.

Normally, detention would be a bad thing, but our principal rotated detention duty and one day Mr. Herrington drew the short straw. I guess it was inevitable that Peter Herrington would be the detention duty warden one day when I had detention, and this day was that day. The upshot of all this was that I lived about a mile and a half from school, and after cleaning blackboards and doing the other kinds of things kids in 7th grade had to do in detention, I started to walk home when my detention ended. Mr. Herrington was in the parking lot, he fired up the Morgan, and he offered me a ride home. In his Morgan. The one I described above. A ride. In the Morgan. This was punishment?

Now, I won’t tell you that I tried to time my recidivism to coincide with Mr. Herrington’s detention duty, but I will tell you that was not the last time I ever got a ride home after detention in the ’53 Morgan. That car was just so cool. It was a convertible, the door waistline was incredibly low, and it looked and felt like you sat above the pavement at a distance more appropriate for a valve gap than an automobile’s ground clearance. The effect was intoxicating.

Many years later (50 years later, to be specific), I received an email from good buddy Chief Mike (who lives in New Jersey, where I sort of grew up) with an interesting message. Whaddaya know? Mike had bumped into Mr. Herrington at a local mall. It seems our former 7th grade science teacher (still a gearhead and now long retired) had shoehorned an LS-2 Chevy Corvette engine into his Mazda RX-7. He had some questions about the care and maintenance of Corvette motors, and everyone in New Jersey knows Mike is the guy to see if you have a Corvette question.

As Mike was telling this story, a lot of memories flooded back. All of us have had great teachers, and Mr. Herrington was mine. Like I said above, I was a first-class pain-in-the-you-know-what in junior high school (and in high school, too, for that matter), but my 7th grade science class held my interest. Science was cool and so was my teacher. It’s probably why I became an engineer.

To make a long story a little less long, I Googled Mr. Herrington’s name. Yep, there he was. There’s his address. A quick 411 call and a few minutes later I had Mr. Herrington on the phone. How about that? Fifty years since I’ve seen this guy, and now I’ve got him on the phone.

You know, a voice is a funny thing. Mr. Herrington, then well into his 80s, sounded exactly as I remembered him. Strong, firm, and focused on gearhead stuff. He told me that the RX-7 was a good car, but the original rotary piston engines were only good for about 75,000 miles (he’d been through several of them, he said). Dropping a Corvette engine into an RX-7 was the way to go, and that’s what he had done. He spoke about it like it was changing tires (a classic Peter Herrington trait).

We had a great conversation. He told me he remembered me, which I kind of doubted until he asked me a question about my father. “Your Dad was the guy who designed and built his own swimming pool, including the filtration system, right? He made the filter tank out of an old wine vat?” That was so long ago I had forgotten about it, but not Mr. Herrington. Wow!

I told Mr. Herrington I felt bad about being such a bad kid and such a royal pain in the ass back in the 7th grade, and he said, “Ah, don’t worry about it. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re that age…” Just like that, years of guilt evaporated. It was a good feeling.

I sent Mr. Herrington a signed copy of 5000 Miles at 8000 RPM and we had a couple of great conversations after that touching on cars, motorcycles, careers, health, life, and other topics. And then one day his wife wrote to tell me he had passed away. That was a tough email to read, but I felt incredibly fortunate to have reconnected with Mr. Herrington, and I think he enjoyed it, too. A.J. Baime’s article in the Wall Street Journal made me think about him again. Thank you, A.J. Baime, and thank you, Peter Herrington.

Pawn Stars, Pellet Pistols, and Bond. James Bond.

When I wrote the CSC blog, I occasionally did a gun piece on it. This is one I did about a pellet gun I still own. I like pellet guns, and you can have a lot of fun with these things. You can set up a 15-ft range in your backyard or in your garage (15 feet is the distance for competitive pellet pistol matches), and shooting a pellet gun is a good way to keep your skills honed when you can’t get to the big boy range. It’s also a good way to pick off a gopher or a bird that wants to start singing at 3:30 in the morning, but we won’t go there. So, for today’s story…my Walther is a pellet gun with a rich heritage and bunch of cool stories. Here are a couple.

I was channel surfing the other night and I briefly clicked through a rerun of Pawn Stars. You know, that’s the reality TV number about these dudes who run a pawn shop in Las Vegas. I like that show but I blitzed right past it to subsequent channels when something clicked.

Wait a second, I thought as my thumb continued clicking channels on autopilot. That can’t be!

So I reversed my path through the zillions of channels we pay for with Direct TV (but never watch). I went back to Rick and the boys in Las Vegas. They were still on the bit that had caught my attention. Son of a gun. Almost literally…son of a gun! I saw what it was that triggered (ah, there it is, the persistent pun) a neuron and made me click back to the Pawn Stars show. Look at that!

What I saw on TV was a Walther LuftPistole Model LP53. Whoa! I actually own one of those! A real Walther air pistol (that’s what “luftpistole” means in German). And there it was…my gun, on TV!

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What further riveted my attention was something I had sort of noticed but never really recognized before. It became clear when the guys on the Pawn Stars show were giving their background spiel on the Walther. I suddenly realized what had captured my attention yet again. It was another thing that clicked! I’d been seeing it for decades and I had never connected the dots, even though I had owned a fine LP53 specimen for the last 50 years.

At this point, you should mentally key in the James Bond theme song. You know….da da, da dahhh, da da daaaaa. Bond. James Bond.

In all those early posters advertising Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and the early Sean Connery James Bond classics (and they were indeed classics; those early Bond movies were magnificent), the advertising had shown Sean holding an LP53. Even though I owned one and shot it extensively, and even though I am a big time James Bond fan (you know, the secret missions and all), it had just never clicked together for me. In all those early advertisements, big bad James Bond, Agent 007, with a license to kill, was posing with an air pistol. Take a hard look at that photo on the left. That’s a Walther LP53 he’s holding. Da da, da daaah, indeed.

So here’s the story. When the Bond franchise was just getting started, the movie folks scheduled a photo shoot in which Bond was supposed to pose with his iconic Walther PPk, the signature secret agent .32 ACP automatic Ian Fleming wrote about. The only problem was that whoever organized the photo shoot had all the props except, you guessed it, the Walther PPk. Whoa. The whole studio, the tux, the photographer, and James Bond himself all dressed up with nowhere to go. They forgot the gun. What to do?

As it turns out, the photographer (a lensmaster named David Hurn) was a pellet gun target shooting enthusiast (me, too, but I’ll get to that in a bit). His target pistol of choice was, you guessed it again, the Walther LP53. The LP53 is a physically large pistol, and it’s a high class, high-ticket item. Real steel, deep blueing, and all the good stuff that makes old guys like me get all dewey-eyed. Hurn ran out to his car and came back with the LP53, and the rest, as they say, is history. Much of the public is completely unaware that their hero, silver screen idol James Bond, posed with a pellet gun. Hell, I didn’t realize it until Rick told the story on Pawn Stars, and I’ve owned an LP53 for most of my life.

That actual pellet pistol, Bond’s stand-in Walther LP53, sold for a staggering $430,000 at auction a few years ago. That’s the story that Rick told while I was watching Pawn Stars. Whoa, hold the presses! $430,000, and I own one of those things!

Well, not so fast. Rick offered the guy $200. $200. Wow, I thought I would be able to retire on that one pellet gun, but not so. Maybe if James Bond had owned the one that was sitting in my closet, but mine had a less famous background. I checked around on the Internet, and $200 seems to be about the going price (as this screen capture from a recent auction shows)…

So, back to my LP53. It’s in immaculate condition. To a collector it would be cool. My Walther has everything except the owner’s manual. That includes the interchangeable sight blades, the wooden cocking plug (the big round wooden thing that fits over the end of the barrel to assist in cocking the gun), the original box, and mine even has the original factory test target. This is mine…

I guess the $200 going rate is a good thing, because I have no plans to retire any time soon and in any event, I’m hanging on to my LP53. It was given to my Dad by one of his shooting buddies (a fellow named Leo Keller, who, like my Dad, was a serious trapshooter). Dad passed it along to me when I was a kid, and I had a lot of fun with it.

One time I walked over to my cousin Bobby’s house holding that gun in my hand the entire way (Bobby lived a mile away from where I did, back in New Jersey). Imagine that…a young teenager like me walking down the road for a mile holding a pistol in his hand. If a kid in New Jersey tried that today, they’d call out half a dozen SWAT teams and maybe even the National Guard. Back then, it was a normal thing to do, and nobody got their shorts in a knot over it.

Anyway, when I got to Bobby’s house we sat on his back porch shooting the Walther, and then we got the bright idea it might make sense to have something to shoot at. Bobby looked through the trash and found an empty orange juice can. You might remember those cans…they were little (maybe an inch in diameter and about 3 inches tall). The idea was you took the frozen concentrate out and mixed it with water, and voilà, you had orange juice.

Bobby set the can out about 30 feet away and I took a shot at it. Bingo! The can went down.

“Wow, that’s pretty good,” Bobby said. Bobby was about 7 years younger than me (he still is, actually). He was easily impressed back then (today, not so much).

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” I said. “I’m going to shoot it again and make it stand up.”

Bobby looked at me in amazement. I was his big cousin. He thought what he saw in me was supreme confidence that I could make that shot. You know, that I did this sort of thing all the time. The truth is I had no idea if I could make that shot, but it was such an outrageous thing to claim I had nothing to lose. But….if I made the shot, we’d be talking about it for years.

I took careful aim at the base of the can and gently squeezed the Walther’s trigger. The Walther spit out compressed air and the little .177 pellet connected, catching the orange juice can right at its base. The can spun around, flipped up, whirled around a few more times, and came to rest. Standing. I couldn’t believe it. It was a one-in-a-million shot, and I made it! Pure dumb luck on my part. But I acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world for me to do. That was sometime in the early 1960s. I was back in New Jersey last month and Sue and I had dinner with Bobby and his wife, Sheree. And yes, we talked about that shot.

In researching the background of this unique handgun, I tried to learn what it originally cost. I checked some vintage gun books I own. In my copy of the 1974 Gun Digest, I actually found it. The retail price in 1974 was $59. I had to go through several old books to find it, and as I did so, I was amazed at the artwork on some of them. The 1956 Shooter’s Bible, in particular, stood out. I thought I would scan the cover and include it as a nice touch in finishing this post…

Want to see our other Tales of the Gun stories? Just click here!

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Dream Bike: Ducati 860GT

There are only a couple Ducatis that make my Dream Bike fantasy garage and the numero uno, top dog, ultimate Ducati is the springer 860. Unlike most Ducatis, this square-case, 90-degree, V-twin motorcycle eliminates the positive-closing desmodromic valve actuation system and in its place uses a conventional spring-return valve train. To some posers this change negates the whole reason for owning a Ducati. Not in my view: The ability to set valve lash with only a potato peeler on a motorcycle axle deep in cow manure plus the fact that I rarely run any motorcycle at valve floating RPMs means Desmo Ducks hold no advantage for me.

Is it wrong to love a motorcycle solely for its looks? Giorgetto Giugiaro’s Jetson-cartoon styling speaks of optimism and a bold stepping-forth into the future. It looks fabulous and slabby and never ages in my eyes. This is one of those motorcycles you can stare at for hours. Why stop there? I’ve never ridden an 860GT so I’m just extrapolating from Ducati’s past performance but I’m sure the thing will handle street riding without issue.

The bikes were available with electric start for the kicking-impaired and after 1975 Ducati exchanged the perfect angular styling for the more traditional, rounded Desmo GT look. It was an error that I may never forgive them for. The springer 860 stayed in production a few more years but Ducati decided to go all in with desmodromic to give their advertising department some thing to boast about.

These 860GT Ducati’s are for riders. The seating position is humane, the gas tank big enough and I’ve read of some pretty astronomical miles racked up on the springer engine. A few years ago at an auction in Daytona I missed out on a beautiful red 860GT. The thing looked like new and sold for $5000. Damn cheap for such a rare (built only 2 years) and cool motorcycle.

Dream Garage

If I had all the money, I’d be one of those crazy collector types, like Jay Leno or Anthony Hopkins, the Silence Of The Lambs guy. You know, the kind that has 177 motorcycles, their Great Paw-Paw’s washing machine motor and 42 washed-up old cars stored in three aircraft hangers. All of my bikes would be in neat rows, I’d have every color of every year of each model and they would all sit in my gigantic storage shed and slowly seize up. And when I die there’d be an auction where the stuff would sell for pennies on the dollar to a bunch of soulless flippers intent on making old motorcycles as expensive and annoying as the collector car scene is today.

Maybe I’d organize both cars and bikes by engine type. There would be a Kawasaki 750 triple, a Saab 93 triple, a Suzuki 750 triple next to a crisp, modern Honda NS400. Flathead Row would have a Melroe Bobcat with the air-cooled Wisconsin V-4, and all three Harley flatties: The 45- incher, the Sportster KH and that big block they made (74-inch?). You’d have to have an 80-inch Indian and the Scout along with most of the mini bikes built in the 1970s.

I love a disc-valve two stroke but I’ve never owned one. First bikes in that section will be a bunch of Kawasaki twins (350cc and 250cc). I’d have a CanAm because with their carb tucked behind the cylinder instead of jutting out the side they don’t look like disc bikes should. A Bridgestone 350 twin without an air filter element would be parked next to a ferocious Suzuki 125cc square-four road racer, year to be determined.

Besides the two-stroke Saab I’d have a two-stroke Suzuki LJ 360cc 4X4 with the generator that turns into the starter motor like an old Yamaha AT1-125. I’d need a metalflake orange Myers Manx dune buggy. It would be that real thick kind of metalflake that looks like some kind of novelty candy served only on Easter or found in table centerpieces at wedding receptions. A few Chevy trucks from the 1960’s would make it into the collection also. A mid-60’s Chevy van, the swoopy one, would be a must-have to go with one of those giant steam tractors, the ones with the steel wheels and the chain wrapped around the steering shaft and then to the center pivot front axle to make the beast turn hard.

To complement the Bobcat I’d have a gas-engined backhoe, something from the 1950’s with all new hoses and tires. I’ll paint it yellow with a roller and then hand paint “The Jewel” in red on both sides of the hood with the tiny artist’s brush from a child’s watercolor set. The backhoe would be a smooth running liquid-cooled flathead with an updraft carburetor and it would reek of unburnt fuel whenever you lifted a heavy load in the front bucket.

No one would be as into my junk as me, so I’d have to hire a guy to feign interest in the stuff. I think $10 an hour should get me a sidekick who would always be amazed at what I had found. We’d both marvel at how little work or parts the item would need to get it running and then we’d push it into an empty space. After a cold beer from a refrigerator plastered with Klotz decals he’d run his card through the time clock with a resounding clunk, leaving me and the shop cat sitting in my beat-up brown vinyl recliner to stare at my collection and wonder if I really had all the money.

California Speed and Sport Shop

Gresh’s post yesterday reminded me of a gig I had when I was a youngster back on the East Coast. This is a blog I did for CSC about 10 years ago, and it seemed like a good follow-on to the Mr. Bray story. Here you go, folks…

I’m a workaholic. I’ve been that way ever since I was a teenager. It all started with one of the two best jobs I’ve ever had and a traffic citation (more on that in a minute), and somehow, even though I grew up in New Jersey, California already had its tentacles into me (more on that in a minute, too).

Let’s get this story started with a dynamite photo I found of Joe Barzda on the Internet a short bit ago…

So who’s Joe Barzda?

Joe Barzda and his brother Eddie were two of the coolest dudes I’ve ever known, and they both were strong positive influences in my life. The Barzdas ran the California Speed and Sport Shop in New Brunswick, New Jersey. This place was Mecca, the promised land, the holy of holies for teenagers like me back in those days. It was the premier speed shop in the northeastern United States. They were the east coast distributors for all of the big performance brands, and it was cool. Way cool.

You have to picture the times…the late 1960s. For many of us, those were our formative years. The muscle car craze in those days was in full tilt. GTOs. Chevelles. The Oldsmobile 442. Roadrunners. The GTX. It was a glorious era, a real hey day for Detroit, back when American automobiles were at the top of the food chain. The muscle car craze was the logical continuation of a hot rod boom that started after World War II, and all of it seemed to emanate from southern California. Anything that had wheels was magical, and anything having to do with California even more so. In my circle of friends from a half century ago (many of whom I still stay in touch with…guys like Pauly Berkuta, Richie Ernst, Bobby Beckley, Ernie Singer, Mike Beltranena, Ralph Voorhees, and more), it all revolved around cars.

Our lives revolved around cars even before we had cars. We grew up listening to AM radio, with groups like the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, Ronny and the Daytonas, and others singing about little old ladies from Pasadena, Cobras, GTOs, and little deuce coupes. I’ll bet many of you did, too. Watch American Graffiti again. That was us. I feel sorry for kids growing up today…with what passes for music, the lowbrow nature of what’s on TV and in the movies, the abysmal jobs the public school systems are doing, the unhealthy fixation on cell phones and texting…we really had it good when we were kids. But I digress…back to the story…

CalSpeed&Sport — The California Speed and Sport Shop in New Brunswick

So, one day, I stopped in the California Speed and Sport Shop. The place was beyond cool…mag wheels, big dual pumper Holley carbs, headers and aluminum manifolds, and cams…all with exotic names like Weiand, Iskenderian, Edelbrock, Hedman, Cragar…you get the idea. I’m not sure what got into me, but when one of the crusty old dudes behind the counter asked what I wanted, I asked if they had any openings. I had a dinky little job as a stockboy at W.T. Grant (a department store), and it was boring. I would have worked for free in a place like the California Speed and Sport Shop. The guy who asked if I needed help at the California Speed and Sport Shop? Well, I didn’t know I was talking to royalty, but that guy was none other than Joe Barzda. I filled out an application and left. And I forgot about it. I had no relevant experience, and I couldn’t imagine a place that cool wanting to hire a stockboy like me from a five-and-dime store.

1965GTO — A 1965 Pontiac GTO…Richie’s was the same color!

Okay, more background information and let me back up another three years….Paul Berkuta was my next door neighbor in those days. He’s a cool guy. You know the routine…we were always getting into some kind of trouble or another. It was a grand time and a great place to grow up. Pauly’s cousin Richie lived in New Brunswick, and he was way cooler than either of us. One day, Richie rolled up in a 1965 Pontiac GTO. GTOs were beyond cool back then (and now, too, in my opinion). The GTO was the original muscle car. Literally. When John DeLorean shoved a big block Pontiac motor into a Tempest back in 1964, he single-handedly started the muscle car era. The GTO was the original. It was awesome.

I was 14, and Richie’s GTO was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. He gave me a ride, and when he floored that thing, he floored me, too. I was hooked. If there was one thing I knew with certainty at the age of 14, it was that someday I was going to own a GTO.

For the next three years, I saved. I scrimped. I found every nickel I could. I spent nothing. I had a little less than half of what I needed when I was old enough to drive to buy a GTO, but that didn’t slow me down. I went to work on my parents, and being the persuasive and annoying little dude I was (some folks would say I still am), I talked my old man into springing for the rest. I bought a GTO. I had reached Nirvana.

Hmmm. 17 years old. A GTO. You can probably guess where this story is going…

So, late one night I ran my car through the gears on Route 130. I saw a set of headlights way in the background, but they were so far back I ignored them. For a while. A short while. Then I noticed the lights were bearing down on me. Hmmm…the guy probably wants to run me, I thought. No way he’s gonna beat my GTO. Then he pulled up alongside me and turned on his interior lights. A NJ State Trooper. Yikes. A speeding ticket. My first. Oh, man, I was in trouble. That ticket was tough to explain to my folks, but a 17-year-old kid in a GTO…what would you expect? To say my parents were upset would be an understatement. You’ve probably been through this…lots of promises…I’ll be a good boy…I’ll never speed again…

Right.

Exactly one week later, I was stopped at a light on Route 1. Late at night. A guy pulled up next to me in an SS 396 Chevelle. Oh boy. It’s funny how circumstances can focus the mind. I literally forgot everything else. The light changed and we were off. I was smoking that Chevelle, too, feeling like the 17-year-old badass I knew I was, right up until the moment I spotted the cop. He saw us about the same time we saw him. Uh, oh. Racing on the highway. That was a big one…an 8-point ticket with a mandatory court appearance. My folks were about as angry as I’d ever seen them. And right in the middle of one of the worst “counseling sessions” I’d ever experienced from my old man, the phone rang. It was Joe Barzda at the California Speed and Sport Shop, wanting to know when I could start.

Now, you gotta picture this. Here I am, one step away from a life of crime, holding a traffic ticket for racing on the highway. My folks were mad as hornets, giving me hell for what was an admittedly boneheaded move. I’m wondering if I should run away or maybe join the Army (which I eventually did a few years later, but that’s another story). My parents were upset with the whole hot rod/muscle car thing, they were mad at me, and at that precise moment, the phone rings with a job offer to work at a place that’s smack dab in the middle of the whole car craze and performance movement.

I took that job, and it was one of the best breaks I ever had in my life, even though it turned me into a workaholic. I routinely worked 70 hours a week. At first, I put in those hours mostly because I was afraid to go home (my folks stayed mad for a long time about that racing ticket), but I loved the work and the California Speed and Sport Shop experience. It was the coolest place. It was one of the main places in the country for anything having to do with high performance automobiles. One day I looked up and my boss was talking to a guy with an Italian accent who looked vaguely familiar. When I asked Joe who it was, he told me: Mario Andretti. It was just that kind of place.

All of my friends knew I fell into clover working at the California Speed and Sport Shop. I worked there all through college, and for many years I stopped in to visit whenever I was back in NJ. The Barzdas I worked for are all gone now, but the shop is still there. A very cool place and a very cool job. It was just one of those lucky breaks, and I’ll be the first to admit I’ve had way more than my fair share of those in my life.

So there you have it. Gresh wants us to do a series of stories on past jobs, and he keeps hitting me up for stories about the aerospace industry (that’s where I spent most of my working life). Interested? If so, let us know, and we’ll push ahead.

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