When I was a boy, the nearest thing I had to a motorcycle was equipping my bicycle with a fl apper made from a cereal box and fastened to my fender brace with a clothes pin.
When positioned just right it made a motor sound as I pedaled along. It soon wore out, and I would have to cut another one from the cereal box. I also tried making a soundmaker of baling wire, bending it so that it clicked against my bike spokes. But that didn’t sound right, and I was afraid it would break my spokes.
We didn’t see many motorcycles around Pea Ridge in the 1940s and 1950s, but there were some. A man from the Jacket, Mo., area used to ride by our house every day on a big Harley Davidson, and I came to love that Harley rumble.
I have come to think that bikers love the sound of their bikes as much as they enjoy the travel, the power, the wind and the companions on the road. Many of us love a bike that has that deep hearty rumble to it; and if it bellows right boldly when it takes off hard and fast, then all the better! Sorry, but I cringe at the whiny scream of those two-cycle bikes.
When I first began as a preacher, we moved to Oppelo, Ark., where I became pastor of the Oppelo Methodist Church and the nearby Perry Methodist Church. Our family at the time was just three - me, my wife Nancy, and our 1-year-old son Jeff . Jennifer would be born a year later on the day we moved from there to Conway. It was the summer of 1962 when we moved into the Oppelo Methodist parsonage. Oppelo is across the Arkansas River from Morrilton. It is a crossroads community where one turns west to goto Petit Jean Mountain.
In the fall of 1962, I started to college as a thirdyear student at Hendrix College, Conway. I was on a salary of $200 per month, so it was urgent that we keep spending down. I was driving an 11-year-old 1951 Ford car at the time. It was a car I really enjoyed, but the V8’s gas mileage was not that good. I thought if I had a small motorcycle, I could get much better gas mileage commuting to college and save money. After hearing of a Little Rock dealership with several used motorcycles for sale, we drive down to little Rock, some 50 miles from Oppelo. They had a Honda 150cc bike that I liked. The two-cylinder motor had just been overhauled, and everything was like new.
We couldn’t really aff ord it, I suppose, but I thought we could handle the payments, so I signed the sales contract and made the downpayment.
So, I became a motorcycle owner, in the middle of busy late day rush hour traftc in Little Rock, having never ridden a motorcycle before, and having only a faint idea of how to work the gears. I would need to ride Ark. Hwy. 10 and Ark.
Hwy. 9 north to get home, and it would be dark in 30 minutes. The salesman, realizing my inexperience, offered to ride the bike to the edge of town for me. I was thankful for that.
My new bike came with bafie inserts in the mufflers, so it was very quiet.
I thought, I’ll have to take those out and see how this bike sounds. As we passed by Lake Maumelle, we weregetting into bugs and mosquitoes. I had no helmet, no visor, no windshield, no protective gear of any kind, and I found that at 50 miles an hour, bugs in the face didn’t feel good at all! I cut back to 35 miles per hour.
That eased the pain of the bugs in the face, but it was now dark, and the road home was looking long.
Nancy and Jeff were behind me in the car.
Soon we got into the hills, and I found myself needing to shift down. The little motor didn’t have torque enough to lug up the steep slopes in top gear. On my little bike, the clutch was on the left handlebar, and the shift lever was operated by the left toe, a ratchet type shifter. Pushing it down shifted the transmission to a lower gear, and putting your toe underneath and lifting up shifted to a higher gear. I had not had much trouble with the up-shifts, but the down-shifts called for a knack that I didn’t yet have. A couple of times I almost stalled out before finally making the shift and getting up the hill. I was getting better at shifting, but then I noticed that my motor was missing and cutting out. Before long one cylinder of my motor had quit running, and instead of
that steady T-T-T-T-T sound I was doing Pop-Pop-Pop, running on just one-cylinder. We had another 20 hilly miles to go. Anyway, my one running cylinder held in there the rest of the way, and even with my still awkward shifting, we made it in home at 10 o’clock at night.
Back in those days, when a motor was overhauled, with new piston rings, etc., we had to “break it in.” Thenew rings had to wear a bit to fit to the cylinder walls, to “seat in,” as we called it. The rings in my newly overhauled bike motor hadn’t yet “seated-in” and one cylinder fouled out the spark plug. A bigger concern was that back then many people
thought Methodist preachers shouldn’t be riding motorbikes. It was beneath their dignity. So I wasn’t sure what would be the reaction to Brother Jerry’s new motorcycle.
(To be continued)◊◊◊
Editor’s note: Jerry Nich
ols, a native of Pea Ridge,
is an award-winning col
umnist, a retired Methodist
minister with a passion for
history. He is vice president
of the Pea Ridge Historical
Society. He can be contacted
by e-mail at joe369@centu
rytel.net, or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 09/11/2013