Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1970's

a By Ron Schneiders A hundred years or so ago, a shuck was only the green and gold wrapping on an ear of com. You pulled the shuck down to see if the com was eatin' corn or horse com . Every once in a while some shop keeper would put up a sign prohibiting peeking, or he'd package the co m in sealed bags and his sales pitch would be that "this corn wasn't co ntam inated by people ha ndling it." Bu t women knew that wh en it was good, sweet com the grocer forgot to put it in bags . Co nversely, if it came in bags and she couldn't pull the shuck, she could be pretty sure it was n 't worth much. Lately the word "shuck" has come to mean a lo t more things for people. Poli ticians are so used to feeling supe rior to everyone else tha t th ey do n't bo the r to examine their schemes very critically any more . They just assu me th at everyone else is too d umb to see through it . Thus you have a -polit ician who promises mo re schools, more h ighways, more hospitals, more parks an d lower taxes. A man listens to a few mi nutes of that and he says, " T h a t' s a shuck!" I'm not sure of all the connotations of the word "shu ck" but it seems like it's only used to refer to schemes that are at o nce h op elessly egotistical an d artless. A couple of weeks ago I went d own to th e AMA's Political Frontiers Workshop. According to the b lurb our club received , the PF workshop was designed to teach co ncerned motorcyclists how to operate effectively and efficiently in their local political are na." Now this was a fine goal. Unless we have adequate political rep re sen tation, we will have one p iece after ano the r of restrictive or repressive p olitical representation forced down our throats. There are, however, ways by which eve n a tiny minority ca n make its presence felt and make legisla tors wary of tre adin g harshly. That this workshop was no t to be all th at I hoped for, I realized almost immediately . from the choice of meeting place: T he A irpo rt Ra ma da Inn. Now I' m not much of a political organizer, but even I kn ow th a t if you w an t people to come to an organizational meeting , you p ic k a spot where they will b e comfortable and that's not to o inconvenient to get to. You don't pick a location that's only convenient and comfortable for the organizers. Most motorcycle clubs meet in school playgrounds, people's homes, small restaurants and such. The dress is generally club-jacket casual. It's not necessary to wear a suit and tie at the Airport Ramada, but if you don't you'll wind up saying "sir" to the bellhops. No way could man y of our most active people be comfortable there. Some th in g else most any fledgling political o rganizer knows is that if you're organizing in a strange neighborb ood, you get some body who lives th ere to p ro mote the me e tin g. A blurb sen t to a motorcycle club asking them t o send a representative to a mee tin g of uncertain value in a strange H •• • By Maureen Lee Just when 1 th ough t I wa s all th rough with h ospitals I de vel op ed a fla t in ner tube, requiring a qui ck emergency patc h and even under th e circum st ances so me th in g interesting o u t of the situation aro se. My ' husband was spending a lonesome vigil reading C ycl ~ News wh en a very cu te nurse approached to see if he 'd like som e coff ee. Well, he d oesn' t drin k co ffe e but she did get him fre sh o ran ge juice aft er seeing what he was read in g 'cause her husband Randy Buxton rides a Mo n tesa , therefore we were " bi ke people" . She ch ecked on me regularly , to o. Then I happened to talk to Tom Nyland on the phone. Phil , his son is th e Stumpjumper who go t lost in the desert and m ad e it o u t on foo t a couple of weeks ago and what a surprise that turned ou t ' to be. Tom and I naturally recogn ized accents, we started off establishing the fact that we came from • I place some ' 10 to 50 miles from home just abou t guaran tees failures. A me re handful of p eop le , 30 at most, sho,",:ed up at the meeting. The meeting was opened by Mike Hinshaw, the o nce forceful ex-president of District 37. When Mike was president of the District, h e often ran rough-shod over the mee tin gs and I quite often disagreed with h im on issues, but I always respected him. Now he's had a taste of AMA affluence and decided he likes it. He flies around the country, eats good food, and smiles a lo t. Whenever Mike Vancil or Chet Winters calIon him, he delivers an AMA commercial. Mike, knowing the District as he does, could have undoubtedly contributed many valuable ideas to the group on the subjec t of o rganizing the' L.A. area into an effective political group. Mike's role, however, was lim ited to th e telling of one joke and the introduction of Chet Winters, the AMA's legisla tive lio n. Winters completely ignored the stated purpose of the meeting in order to make a pitch for President Nixon's now famous off-road vehicle order. According to Chet we should embrace this order and sell it and President Nixon to our friends and neighbors with the object of generating some 500,000 letters of support, praising the President for his great wisdom in trying to sell us down the river. With the support of both the off-road vehicle users and the Sierra Clubbers, Nixon would be sitting p retty in November. The big ques ~to:'n :-:t ' =-:w=a"'s,""""'W"'hLa "'t's in it for use?" Nixon was trying to make points with the Sierra Clu bb ers and such. Why congratulate him? Winters' first ploy was an unimaginative scare tactic. We would wind up with nowhere to ride. It so happened that I was in a particu larly good position to deal with this bit of hooey. I had just finished a tour of several states doing research fo r a book. I had contacted either personally or by questionnaire more th an half of the land managers in the United States. I knew that the Pres iden tial order had tri ggered an ac tio n, b ut that action was fo r all p ractical purposes now o u t of the hands of the President. He cannot reasonably affect the outcome. Land ma nagers ac t within rather specific guidelines and those lines are established by Congress and they include us, just as they include timber and mining interests. But unlike timber and mining interests, we have not been around long enough for them to establish ground rules for our use of public lands. Because of the President's order, these will not be established, but whether they hurt us or help us is out of Nixon's control. Many land managers were already in the process of doing exactly what Nixon ordered when the order came along, and many others have such slight impact that having to comply with the order is a waste of time and money . Some of these managers actively resen t Nixon for meddling in their in ternal affairs. We'll hardly mak e any points with these men if we congratulate Nixon for meddling in Lo ndon bu t the freaky thing is we ac tually lived within a few streets of each other in a far-o u t suburb. Now, th at is a sma ll world , bu t it shows wbere Phil go t that toughness tha t pulled him th rou gh. Lo ndone rs can survive any th ing, from Blitz krieg to the Califo rn ia desert. Mad e th e Ascot TT , p atch an d all (hope my d oc doesn ' t fin d out) an d wen t up in to the press b ox. If you've nev er b een in th at hall owed p lace, we n ow eve n h ave carp eting. Things th a t ca ugh t our eye while watching the racing th at it was good to see the Novice s u sing the w h ole tr ack again ; ~o~ to tell some of ' em but they ' re gomg to h ave to watch how much they eat , we didn't see as many skinn y on es as have in past years and as C.R. A xtell says, "It's one horse for every ten pounds", so remember that boys when you sit down at the table. And did y ou notice how much body their affairs! . There are sorric oth er . rhet o ric; including so me th at I could h ave sworn I had hear d word-for-word in a board mee tin g of the MIC n o t many days before. I mentioned this and the temperature of the- room - d rop ped several degrees. 1 also mentioned that while I could see no reason for us, as riders, supporting Nixon, I co uld see lots of reaso ns why the industry should try to dig up some support for him . While the President isn't going to exert much influence in the land use area, he'll exert, through his staff, quite a bit of influence in many areas of concern to the industry. It would b e very nice for the industry, for instance, if the President overlooked this industry for the time being in the questions of noise standards, emission standards, safety standards and such. Finally I suggested that President Nixon's Presidential order was "a paper threat" and that while we had quite a lot of urgent business to conduct with land managers, we would be best to ignore Nixon. He just isn ' t a friend. Chet Win ters said, "I agree that it's (the President order) a paper threat.. .' and then he went on to say that we still needed to generate 500,000 letters in support of Nixon! I think Chet Winters needs the letters because if he doesn't m ise some support fo r Nixon he's going to be out of a job. . Finally we got to the main speaker of the n ight, the very smooth and elaborately coiffed Bill Low. Bill started by asking in a very conspiratorial tone of voice if there were any members of the regular press in the room. There weren't any, but after a huddled conference they asked me in what capacity I was p resent! I felt like laughing but I didn't. I told them in the scariest voice 1 could muster that while I was there as a representative of my club, " ...I certainly reserve the righ t to print anything that I hear in an open meeting in Cycle News!" Big Deal. Finally, after that nonsense, we got to the main course. The AMA has a little booklet out describing the political process at approximately junior high school level. Low. read from or paraphrased that en tire little booklet and that's all! For Bill Low and Chet Winters to present that simple, naive, little booklet to us, we as S 7-a-year paying members of the AMA had flown these twb flakes halfway across the country. Low h ad n' t even bothered to familiarize h imself with the California election code. When 1 broug h t up the very elementary fact that there mi ght be strong differences of political opinion on unrelated subjects existing in a club that wo uld make it very d iffi cul t to organize behind a candidate, Bill Low asked very naively, "Is there really that much difference of political opinion in motorcycle clubs?" To this political strategist it comes as a surprise that there are both hawks and doves in the same motorcycle club! Low did do one thing, however, to demonstrate that he is a real honest-to-gosh political manipulator. According to a usually reliable source, he tape -reco rd ed the meeting, edited out all the banalities that had been mouthed by himself and Chet Winters and presented th e re mainder, my completely ou t-of-context remarks, to the MIC Board of Directors. Bravo! Those gentleme n were reportedly very upset. Sorry about that. Like I say, there is a word for all this. Shuck. contact there was when they we re bunched together in th e tu rn s? Wonder if this could he b ecau se a lot of them now are coming from the "mini-tracks" where space is at a premium inste ad o f th e b ig scramb les tracks we used to h ave whe re you co uld bl as t aroun d allover th e p lace ? . Speaking of b ody con ta ct, there's on e Junior w ith a fam o us last name who has no doubt earned the nickname "Elbows" by this time. This y oungster can look like a B-52 at take-off time when company gets around. Hope he gets out of this h abit by th e ti me he 's an Expert (n o t that a little elbowing isn't ju stifia b le at tim es) but if h e doesn't, th e Exp erts will teach him h is manners ab ru ptly . Bar t Mar kel found out th-e Ascot TT regulars we ren't to be fooled with an d spen t a Nation al TT in th e p its so m e ye ar s back after a spill in a crowded tu m in a heat. Bart was carrying number one in those days and who can eve r forget_those- cu:,o,,:!! shots ~f his off the '" i!l> ~ c, AMA, MIC Blacklists Schneiders, Clayton Quits By Ch uck Clayton With charisma befitting a modern Machiavelli, AMA's Russell March marched in on the Motorcycle Industry Council last week and persuaded them to scuttle the Land Use liferaft in midstream. Although he only met the man once, very briefly, March told MIC directors that Ron Schneiders is bad news. Hearing this, the MIC board put on their Torquemada hats and voted to blacklist the free-lance writer. This means that the long-awaite d "Do's & Don'ts" book written by Ron for MIC customers will not get published. It also means that Schneiders gets a telephone call from the now ex-Land Use Chairman, telling him to knock off work on the trail management book and come home. Ron is in Atlanta, diligently pursuing his MlC assignment. He's out of pocket because the MIC checks have been slow. Ron's first worry. whe n I to ld him the bad news, was not about but, characteristically, himself about the sources who had cooperated with his surveys these past two months. It is bad form to conduct research and then not divulge the results. Makes people think yo u're a flaky organization. Naturally, on hearing the news of the MIC blacklist (through their attorney, the chickens) I immediately sent them my resignation from chairmanship of the Land Use Committee. They had approved both of the projects I hired Ron for. I don't blame Russ March so much for expanding his AMA empire at the expense of the only national organization with state representation, but 1 do condemn the board's wishy-washiness at a time when motorcycling needs more organizations working on its problems than just one. As fo r the principal victif!! in this mess, Ron Schneiders will continue to grow in the estimation of his fans. Rejection by knaves is a proud endorsement to the wise. Ron's stature as a pro fession al writer needs no defending. His role in Cycle News is that of an irritant. When he writes for other books, he adjusts his style to suit what the editors are paying for. AMA doesn't like him for a bunch of reasons a \I complimentary to his journalistic integrtiy. Ron will survive this smear in good shape. The other victims are the dirt motorcycle riders and our friends in government. Ron's MIC books are wanted by public land managers across America, not only for the information they contain, but as a show of good faith by a motorcycle organization. I am afraid it will be a long time before anyone can overcome the damage that the MIC has done to itself. cras h walls in the half-miles! My gaw d, but ain't racin g grea t? N otice another thing, too . Once upon . a tim e a TT H arley c ou ld barely ge t o ff the ground on the jump, I mean it was like trying to get a Sherman tank in the air! Last night Mark Brelsford was jumping h is like it was a Triumph and it was running like a freight train . The new Harley 750 a t th e Cycle World Show gave me the quivers. I offered it a biscuit to see if it would foll o w me home although what the hell we'd do with it I don' t know except gaz e at it, but wh a t a machine! Lik e everyone else, we 're aw aiting word on the outcome of the protest at Road Atlanta. The tech co mmittee was on its toes compared to the d ays when a cer tain machine used to pass regularly with whatever changes the factory deemed necessary from week to week. Ah, the AMA has come a long way , and hurray for that. N .... '" ",' . > ::;; ~ w Z W ..J U >U

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