Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1970's

WHITTI. HONDA DC;C;~@:) Motorcycle Trailers • Bell Helmets Full llore Products .. M M "eon.-ily" - What is _it? Who needs it? We do. iI' l1. M f"- en '0 WHITTIER HONDA 14324 E. Whittier Blvd. (213) 69/l-C055 '" ;: w Complete stOCk of parts and accessories for street and C1irt Z W ...J •••**.* •• *********************** U MOTORCYCLES SHOULD BE SEEN AND NOT HURT! > U ••• ******* ••• ****************. FACTORY OUTLET FOR PREMIER HELMETS STREET - DESERT - MX .DYNO-TUNING PREMIER YAMAHA 19721 BEACH BLVD. HUNTINGTON BEACH,CA. 714 536·7555 NOGUCHI PRODUCTS GO FAST AND SELL FAST... Ask Dick or Fred Cycle Trend West. Inc:. 709 W. Stuart St.• Fresno, Calif. 93704. (209) 439-3330. Cll"YCY~ caw .... 8423 Rosemead Bive!. Pico Rivera, Ca. g (213) 8614139 b (213) 861~217 From Beginners Professionals Whatever You Need You'll Find It Here I TARTAN I PERFORMANCE • IS • Exclusive U.S. Distributors of Quaife 5 & 6 Speed Kits Quaife Norton Crankcases Quaile Velocity Stacks Tartan Timing Kits Eastern Distributors of Krober Ignition Systems Krober Tachometers Tartan Performance Products 2445 Derbyshire Road Cleveland, Ohio 44106 Write for Free Catalogue Finally, a sltp-by-step ,ntroductlOn to motorcycling's new colollul sport MOle-Cross ThIS bOOk taUs the beginner where 10 Degtn, wlth chapte" on MOlo-Crou elke AnalysIs P,eparallon & Mamtenahce, PhY5lcat Condlhonmg, Whal To Weat Racmg Techniques, What To hpect. Race $Iralegy. Race Oayl II's aU Ihere m IhlS 112,plge 8'".11" bOok. cr.mmed wnh photos and Inform.lIon liS yOu,s. postp'ld. fOr $595 (Add $ 1 II yOu wiSh II' mall servlc.e I Order from lAGNALL I'UllISHING CO. 80x 507, lake Arrowhead, Colif. 92352 HANDLEBAR EXTENSIONS ADD 3 INCHES. To the width of your present handlebars for Increased leverage, better contrOl, stability and safety. Install easily with just a screwdriver. $3.95 per pair complete. Check or money order to: LAMPRO PO Bo)( 96 Garden Grove California 92642. MEvery Saturday and Sunday All classes ~APE COUNTRY (714) 586-7964 by Lane Campbell Way out in California's high desert, there's a tiny one-street town that's so far out in the tules as to be virtually inaccessible except by air. Oh, the're're roads in and ou t, bu t few use them. The place is inhabited exclusively by people who own and fly their own private airplanes. How come all the airplane drivers? Well, each of the otherwise typical high-class split-level homes has a "T" hangar attached where the garage should go, and each fronts on Main Street (the main drag, so to speak) which is actually an East/West runway. Papa taxies the family flyer down the driveway every morning and flies off to L.A. or Santa Barbara to earn the daily bread. Evenings, he lands on Main Street, taxies home, shuts the hangar door, and pokes his head in the kitchen to see what's cooking. After dinner, he may go up again to stooge around and watch the sun set while his supper digests. On weekends, the family says "Hell with the freeways", packs everything into the plane and flies off to Arrowhead or Big Bear for a day. Neat, huh? What these folks have done is created a Utotal life style" community, engineered from scratch to cater to the specialized needs of people who dig airplanes. People who dig bikes have specialized needs, too, but to say "total life style" for bikers covers a lot of teHjtory. You've got to be thinking about touring riders, street racers, trail riders, motocrossers, chopper folk, and all the diverse promoters, clubs, and business interests that make our sport possible today. 1 hope this article will bring some response and news of people who've started to build a community around the life-style of motorcycling. Such a thing is well within the realm of possibility. To my way of thinking, it's all a matter of bringing together the key factors: land, jobs, reasonable housing, and people. LAND One thing nearly all bikers suffer from is a form of land hunger. Dirt riders hunger for lots of rough, cobby, uninhabited ground wi th no fences. treet bikers hunger for twisty two-lane blacktop where traffic is scarce and cops are scarcer-tor friendly). What we get is land closure and one-owner cycle parks that are often a drop in the bucket compared to the need. And the closest place I know of where the cops are friendly is Italy, where the caribinieri on their big 01' Moto Guzzi 500cc Singles will still race you for the fun of it. That leaves us- to do what we can. Nobody is going to do for us. "Us" is the 60,000 plus registered cycle owners here in Iowaj or some five million nation-wide. We're willing to let state and Federal governments take $1,000 or more a year out of our pockets and give us next to nothing. What are we willing to do for ourselves? Most guys, if they have to, can s rape together $500 to SJ,OOO in one chunk. Now would it be worth it to the individual rider/cycle owner to sink that money into stock in a land holding company? Let's assume (say) a couple hundred guys within a 300-mile radius would pony up $1,000 a piece for 100 share of stock. So you've got a corporation with 200 K in cash. He're in Iowa, that would buy abou t a thousand acres of really cobby, non-fann"ble land. Other places, it would buy more - or less. Now the 200 stockholders own their own thousand-acre cycle turf outright. Or if they like to live dangerously, they could go in hock for I 0,000 acres. . Whoopeel So they go ahead and put m a motocross course, and a hillclimb and lots of trails; promote a lot of races: host camp-outs. The thing can go along more or less self-sustaining - even turn back a dividend. Yet this is only a piece of the puzzle. So far, it's just a big cycle park. The stockholders can realize a profit from it, but they still have to trailer out in.to the coun try to ride there, and they stIll have to work and Jive in humdrum surroundings to earn a Jiving. Total life-style it's not - yet. JOBS: Business, industry, and all that. Suppose th~t instead of buying 1,000 acres out In the boonie-weeds OUf imaginary corporation buys (saYi 400 acres of suitably cobby land near a small to mid-size industrial town. Then maybe an 80-acre plot can be developed as a light-industrial park. Might even get lucky enough to adjoin an existing industrial pLot, so as to buy or lease a piece of that. Next the company jOins the local Area Developmen t Commission (0 r similar group whose main job is to attract new industry to the old home town). Then, it's a matter of persuading existing makers of bike parts (like Bassani) or distributors (like We.bco) to bolt the high-rent, high-wage environment of places like L.A_ and relocate. Also to attract investors in whole new companies to lay down their roots on the community's property, or at least to locate in or near the same town. Most of tbe firms I'm talking abou t will bring in a trickle of jobs. Even the well-known "goodies" makers seldom emply more than 200 people. Yet in their ones and twos, they can come in to the area and help create a kind of "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" in tegrated business communi ty that's based on cycle parts and equipment. Building on this foundation, the community would soon be ready to go for the real plum: one of the half dozen or so firms that are going to spring up in the next couple of years to assemble their own version of the Great American Motorcycle. It's coming, just as sure as the next dollar devaluation. There's a two bilJion-dollar market about to switch from Japanese to A merican sources if the price is right. There's room 1n that market to support .60,000 jobs; and there's no reason why our hypothetical Hcommunily" shouldn't grab a piece of the action. OK, with our imagination running at fuJI-bore, we've got a group of some 200 stockholders in a kind of community-corporation that owns a huge cycle park and is leasing industrial land and/or buildings to a bunch of cycle-oriented businesses which, taken together (directly or indirectly), create 400 to 500 jobs. This means more people; an opportunity for growth; and a need to look at another piece of the puzzle: HOUSING You 've got the land; you've got the beginnings of an industrial base to keep money circulating in the system. Now you need a place to live. Speaking for myself (and maybe I'm a glutton for punishment), I'd as soon live in a modest house on a wood~d lot, wi th the cycle park at my back yard, a street racer for my next-door neighbor on the right side, and a motocrosser for a neighbor at my left. Think co-operative built housing a dumb idea? In what is now greater Miami, there's 'a solid little moderate income neighborhood that was built that way during the Depression. It was done by migrant workers who bought what was then a large cow pasture west of Miami Beach, staked out and divided it for their own lots, and then huilt each other's houses on a shared-labor basis. You dig my foundation; I'll help tar your roof. Ln the gathering gloom that was the Depression, they helped each other create a little patch of security that they owned lock, stock and barrel; that they could hang on to during the dark years. If there was much griping along with it, the old gal who told me the story d.oesn't remember it. She was a young glTl when her folks did it. Her mother stiJI Jives there. So. fa: I've .talked money, land, orgaruzatlon, bUSIness. There's nothing I've talked about that hasn't already been done a thousand times over by the business world wherever there was a need to be filled and jobs to be done.. You readers are the missing ingredient. PEOPLE OK. Time for the understatement of the year. People make it happen. This ill-defined quantity called "community" brings people together to do the things that one person, or one bike club, or one shop owner finds impossible. It's the thing that makes us wave at each other on the road, at a time when sports car people (who usee! to wave) no longer remember how or why_ It's the thing that makes a semi-stranger's pad a flop-house for you and your cotton-pickin' family when the race is over late and the road home is long. Now - take this community of in terest one step further and build something with it. Something that will h~ve meaning for road and dirt riders, ahke. Maybe sports car people, too. Hard times make people reach out in need to each other. We face together repressive and ill-advised government policy, land closure, insurance hassles, screwed-up public attitudes, and a national economy that is once again in a dangerous state of flux. Earlier I casually mentioned a figure of 500 people involved. 1 think that .the kind of community-corporation I've proposed couId function with up to 1,000 more or less equal shareholders operating through an elected Board of Directors. They could create community and job opportunities to attract 1,000 more. What's the point in these numbers? -I live in a city of 35,000. In the last d ty council election, 3,400 votes were cast. The top vote-getter out of six candidates (to fill 3 seats on an 8-seat council) polled about 1,800 votes. Even 500 people voting as a bloc could swing an election like this. What could 2,000 do in a place like this? If you'll agree that most of our hassles trace back to a government that's staffed by non-riders and acts at the whims of non-riders, my point is made. In spades. So, people. Rap about it. Better yet, pick the whole idea apart, put it back together to suit yourself, then rap back to CYCLE NEWS about it. But think about this idea of a "total life-style" community. You might even want to spark plug one in your own area. You migh t wan t to ge t in touch with a group that's already doing it, or you might be a member of a group trying to attract stockholders. You might be a lawyer, or a man with real estate management experience for hire. Whatever you are, I'm assuming you're a serious biker, and you need an information clearinghouse on life-style communities for cyclists and other motorsports people. Your approach migh t be purely capitalistic, or communal, or a let-be mixture of economics. I don't care but I wan t to hear from you, by way of CYC.LE NEWS or direct to Box 504, Burhngton, Iowa 5360L Why should a bunch of rich airplane drivers have all the fun?

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