08/02/06

Motorcycling (1948-1959)

My first motorcycle was bought in 1948 when I was a sophomore and had earned enough money running my translation service to buy the smallest motorcycle, a Harley 125cc, two-stroke single cylinder. I spent much of the summer touring Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, and made one trip to Philadelphia to visit my parents. It didn’t really have enough power to keep up with highway traffic. I was constantly being passed with marginal clearance, which made it a rather dangerous vehicle. It also wasn’t very stable at highway speeds. I envied my friend and classmate John King, who had just bought a Vincent Black Shadow, the fastest machine in existence, and another friend who had an Aerial Square Four, a 1200cc machine with four vertical cylinders.

My second motorcycle was bought in about 1953 shortly after I met Elizabeth and needed a larger machine. It was a 500cc Indian Scout. We used it for camping trips to Cape Cod and the Green Mountains and White Mountains, and its low ground clearance became a serious hindrance on rough roads and sand. On a trip with full camping gear from Millinocket, Maine to Roaring Brook, the base camp of Mount Katahdin, along what was then nothing more than a dry creek bed three miles long, I broke my left big toe, when it got itself between the low spindle and a protruding rock. It made for a painful hike up and down Katahdin. We clearly needed a more capable machine.

My third and last motorcycle was bought in 1954, shortly before we moved to Weir Meadow. It was a Triumph Tiger One-Ten, a 750cc vertical twin, capable of doing 110 mph, with enough torque to spin its rear wheel at 60 mph, an awesome machine. It only weighed 75 pounds and had won all the road races that year. One of its first trips was memorable: Elizabeth and I went from Cambridge to Weir Meadow right after the 54 Hurricane when car travel was impossible due to fallen trees, closed roads, and pavements ripped up by uprooted trees. All of eastern Massachusetts was without power, water or gasoline. We were worried about the Warrens, but found them unaffected with their own 32 volt generator and batteries, l listening to the news on their 32 volt radio. Technology has made the world vulnerable.

There was a traumatic and very sad episode in my motorcycling career. While working at Lincoln Laboratory in about 1956 a summer student named Robin had become a racing enthusiast. Bill Andrews, a motorcycle dealer in Cambridge with a large following of fans, mostly college students, had lent Robin a stripped-down and souped up Harley twin, and Robin was determined to race it in Laconia that summer. He ran it every lunch hour on the newly finished and not yet officially opened route 3 in Burlington and wanted to race against my Triumph Tiger. I refused many times because I didn’t consider his racer very stable, nor him very experienced. . I warned him, but finally gave in. "Don’t kill yourself to win" is the last thing I told him as we lined up. My Tiger stayed ahead until it leveled off at about 115 or 120, and he passed. He was about a hundred feet ahead when his Harley started to snake back and forth across the entire width of the empty three-lane highway. I think he had enough torque to spin his lightly loaded rear wheel, and that is a fatal mistake at high speed. He tightened his hold on the handlebars instead of relaxing, ricoche’ed off the left guard rail, and spun several revolutions flat on his right side. His helmet and leather suit and the motorcycle’s spindle and handlebar had protected him against severe abrasion, but his spine had been broken at the cervix. He never regained consciousness and he died of shock while the ambulance doctor was injecting adrenalin. It fell to Si Foner’s lot to inform Robin’s parents in New York City. they were acquaintances.

The tragedy gave me second thoughts about motorcycling. After my office moved from Lincoln Lab in Lexington to the MIT campus in Cambridge in 1961, I had enough close calls to stop commuting by motorcycle. We continued motorcycling weekends with little Margaret between Elizabeth and me, but in 1959 when Margaret turned two and Juliet was born I sold the Triumph and concentrated on flying. I renewed my motorcycle license in the mid-seventies when I helped launch Juliet on her first motorcycle, but my own motorcycling days were over.

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