Last spring I rode over to my local multi-brand dealer and parked outside was a Harley Electra Glide—not unusual, since many Harley owners have other bikes as well. The store was (past tense, now a victim of the economy) huge, carrying six lines, and had a display area covering more than 30,000 square feet. Off in the distance I could see a gent with a Harley shirt hunkering over some little dirt bikes, the kind made for kids. And he had a kid with him, about 10 years old, and the kid was throwing a leg over several small machines, looking very excited.
We need these kids, because the demographic proof is that we motorcyclists are an aging population, and that ain’t good. I don’t know what 15-year-olds are into these days, but back in my benighted youth we were all waiting to get our driver’s license and buy our own wheels.
At that age I was fortunate enough to have a friend, also 15, who bought a well-used Harley 125, the one with rubber-band front suspension. We couldn’t ride the beat-up 125 on the street as it didn’t have a license plate and we didn’t have licenses, but our houses backed onto woods that went down to a river. There we had lots of space to practice our skills, most of which had to do with avoiding trees, not always successfully. If we put too much oil in the gas and fouled a plug, and hadn’t thought to bring a spare, we could push it back to Dick’s house.
It was a good beginning for us, and Dick and I both still ride. That first taste of two-wheeling got into our blood and has kept on propelling us for the next few decades. Today few kids have the same opportunity as we had, as it’s harder to find unpopulated and unpoliced areas to ride when you are pre-license.
I would like to see Harley offering a model aimed at real beginners, like that “dollar and a quarter,” as it was called back then. The 125 was a great bike for an incompetent like me, who never had a lesson, other than Dick’s showing me where the clutch was, and the throttle, and the gear shift, and almost as an afterthought, the brakes. We learned from the school of hard knocks and falling down, and while I don’t recommend that method of instruction, it seemed to work.
Back around 1920 Harley dealerships sold Harley-Davidson bicycles. These were not actually built by Harley, but by the Davis Sewing Machine Company, and painted with Harley colors and bearing the name. Big Bill would come in to look at the new 74-inch V-twin and have Little Bill in tow, as required by the parenting rules of the day. While dad lusted after the motorcycle, the boy stared at the bicycle. The kid got the pedal bike and thought that the Harley shop was a really good place, eventually moving up to a powered two-wheeler when he got a job and was earning money.
Move forward 30 years to 1950 and it had become an American boy’s right, almost, to get powered transportation as soon as he was of age. Have a paper route, save your dimes and dollars, and you could spend $325 (worth about 3,000 of today’s dollars) on a new Harley 125, or get a Cushman scooter. Harley had product to lure the young ones in and turn them into lifelong Harley fans. Which is what we need now.
That little 125 stayed around, in various guises and cylinder sizes for 15 years and was joined by the Topper motor scooter in 1960. That was a nice scoot, with clutchless “automatic” transmission, but came on the market too late, the Milwaukee execs having waited too long to have it built.
Milwaukee was also looking at the booming sales of small Japanese bikes and wanted a piece of that action. Rather than go through the time-consuming and expensive process of building their own, the company took the easy route and in 1960 bought half of the Italian Aermacchi company, which had a whole line of 50cc-to-250cc bikes. Although a number of American Harley dealers did not want to deal with these little “wopsickles,” these imports were soon selling well, and a lot of Yankee kids were tearing about on M-50s, Baja 100s, and Rapido 125s.
Then AMF bought H-D and decided that H-D should own all of Aermacchi. That deal was completed in 1972, just as the nation eased into the post-Vietnam economic doldrums. However, while Harley prices inched upwards, the Japanese were willing to bite the old bullet and sell their motorbikes cheap. Also, two-strokes were about to be ordered off the showroom floors by the U.S. government, and most Aermacchi models were two-strokes. AMF put the Italian outfit up for sale in 1978, and it was bought by an outfit called Cagiva.
Of curious note is the fact that Cagiva eventually came to own the MV Agusta marque, which Harley recently bought, 30 years later,
in 2008.
It makes one wonder about the good sense, or lack of, in Harley’s focus on solely building big bikes, leaving dealers with nothing for the kids. Vaughn Beals and his executive gang of 13 bought Harley from AMF in 1981, and then in 1985 the good times began to roll. By 1995 you had to wait in line, a long line, to get a new Harley.
But nobody was looking at the kids, and the average age of a motorcyclist began to crawl upwards.
Nowadays the non-H-D motorcycle shops are full of small bikes made in Europe or the Orient. And Harley dealers are more and more catering to the greybeards amongst us. Greybeards with money, as Harleys are getting more and more expensive.
So there was this Harley-riding dad showing his boy the latest in KTMs and Yamahas. I don’t really care what the boy rides, as long as he learns to love motorcycles. But it would be nice if Harley was offering a little 125cc four-stroke for $3,000.
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