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VOLUME 56 ISSUE 46 NOVEMBER 19, 2019 P101 'Boom!'—love at first sight. I spent so much money on it, I didn't have enough money to get back home, so I had to borrow money from my dad to get home." Flying on Aer Lingus, Neil didn't even have to crate the bike. They simply rolled it on a pallet, cinched it down, and covered it up. "It was a 100 bucks air freight," Tolhurst recalls, before adding with a laugh. "As a naïve 20-year- old, I thought I'd land at JFK, get my motorcycle and be able to ride out of JFK! Well, no, cus- toms had it for a few days." The Norton was Tolhurst's daily ride for many years when he lived in Boston, going to college, and even after college. He rode all over New England and also made a cross-country trip in '72 on the bike from Boston to San Francisco. "That was quite an adventure," Tolhurst says. "Me and the Com- mando and one of my co-workers from the motorcycle shop in Bos- ton, Herb Scheffer, on a [Honda] CB750. And of course, his bike didn't have any breakdowns, mine had several. We had a great time, visited a lot of friends, and sometimes just stopped and set up camp in some random field off a side road." Once in California, Tolhurst was visiting a buddy in college in Palo Alto. Together they crated up the bike and had arrange- ments with a trucking company to pick it up the next day. "The next morning, these guys were attempting to pick up the motor- cycle, but it was not the company I had hired," Neil said. "We're looking at this from Mark's dorm room window, and we go run- ning downstairs to confront these guys, and it turns out they'd been hired by somebody who'd ob- served the bike being crated and sitting outside the dorm, and they were trying to steal it." That was the first survival story for the bike. Then, in a moment of weak- ness in '73, Tolhurst decided to sell the bike. "The buyer didn't come through with the money, and then I changed my mind. I decided if it ever came down to needing money for food, then I'd sell it. It never came to that." Survival number two. In 1974 the Norton was in a garage that caught fire, but fortunately, it suffered mainly just smoke and soot damage, along with melted control cables and various other rubber and plastic bits. Tolhurst was a motorcycle mechanic, so he was able to re- store it back to nearly showroom condition. It had survived once again. "And then I got a job with a rider's ed program in northern Illinois, and I didn't ride the bike much because the roads there were flat and straight and I'd been spoiled by New England roads. So, the bike sat." Then yet another fortuitous survival episode. Tolhurst began road racing, which often drains bank accounts and causes rac- ers to unload all non-essentials. "Fortunately, at that time I was married, we had a two-income- and-no-kids situation, so I didn't have to sell off stuff to go racing." The Norton was stored for years, but, again, being an expe- rienced mechanic, Tolhurst gave enough attention to the machine to keep it in good running order. The bike even got camera time in a film Tolhurst had a hand in producing for Northern Illinois University, called "Ride Safe." You can see the Norton at the beginning and end of the video in this YouTube link, ridden by none other than TV personality Dave Despain. Today Tolhurst is living back in New England and occasion- ally takes the Norton out for a ride. It's 80-90 percent original and has never been crashed. "I'll pass it along to my son. He keeps saying he wants to come over and learn how to take care of it, but he hasn't followed through with that." Here's to Neil and the Com- mando, hopefully having a lot of good years left together. It's not that uncommon to find people who are fortunate enough to own a 50-year-old Norton Comman- do, but it's undoubtedly rare to find someone who is the original owner and has the kind of story Neil has with his machine. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives