Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/665065
CN III ARCHIVES BY LARRY LAWRENCE O ne of the best known motorcycle shops of the 1960s and '70s was Boston Cycles. The dealership's sup- port of leading racers of the era spread the Boston Cycles name nationwide. And this wasn't by accident. The shop was owned by John Jacobson and he became one of the truly innova- tive dealership owners of his day. The legend of Boston Cycles only grew when one of its alumni, Kevin Cam- eron, became a renowned motorcycle journalist. Of Boston Cycles, Cameron once wrote in Cycle World magazine: "Boston Cycles became a center of life for me in the mid-1960s. I rebuilt crankshafts there. I bought parts there. I collected there the rumors that fed my two-wheeled imagination." On that paragraph alone you could conjure up in your mind's eye a cast of characters who might have worked at Boston Cycles, and by all accounts they were in fact a motley crew. And Jacobson was the ring- leader of this band of characters and the shop became an epicenter of motorcycling in New England. For Jacobson it all started shortly after he arrived in college in 1956 when a friend, who had a Vespa Allstate, was going into the military. He handed the scooter over to Jacobson to ride and look after while he was gone. Jacobson ended up commuting on the Vespa for a couple years. In the course of having the machine maintained, he came across a couple of Harvard Business School students who were running a repair shop in Harvard Square as part of a course they were taking. The scooter shop had one employee who would go on to become famous. "The store was handed down each year from class to class, but these guys liked it enough that they kept it after graduating," Jacobson said. "I managed the shop for them and eventually became a partner in the busi- ness. It was basically a Mobile gas station waiting room and we had three or four scooters and inside we had a repair area. We had a gentleman who would come and do repair work in the evenings and I would come over from the Naval Air Station (where Jacobson was serving) and sell them in the afternoon and we had one other employee and her name was Joan Baez." It was, in fact, the legendary folk singer Joan Baez whose part-time job at the Vespa shop was to show new riders how to ride the scooters. Her dad had owned a Vespa shop for a time in California and Baez was an experienced rider. "She going to school and singing in coffee shops in the evenings and I was unaware of the scope of her brilliance at the time," Jacobson added. "She had some guys hanging around, a couple of them who were unseemly in my estimation. We were trying to maintain a respectable image and I told Joan she would have to choose between her job and her friend Curly. She chose Curly." The shop moved and expanded and by the early 1960s; Jacobson had bought out his other partners and began selling motorcycles for the first time. Over the years Boston Cycles would sell 30 brands of motorcycles. "Just about everything but Suzuki and Harley," Jacobson said. "Through my work in the MR. BOSTON CYCLES P112