The Norton
I don’t feel I’ve missed a thing. At least nothing that mattered. Grandkids---I’d like to have grandkids. So far I’ve missed that. So I just contradicted myself.
In October I fell going up the steps to our front door---my second serious fall. I had another fall a year and a half earlier. I broke my wrist both times, collarbone first time and shoulder second. Previous falls/heavy lifting, etc. have made a mess of my back. My shoulder is shattered and I can’t use my left arm. These facts present a lot of challenges now. As insignificant as it may sound one of the most difficult things for me to face is the fact that I will never ride a motorcycle again.
I own two motorcycles. One is a Harley Davidson Sportster that my wife Charlotte encouraged me to buy when I turned 50 back in 1999. We had been driving to Tobermory on the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario, where Charlotte’s family owned a cottage---a house really---on Lake Huron, and as we passed through the tiny community of Shallow Lake she asked me to stop in front of an old stone-clad shop. Virtually every building in Shallow Lake, Ontario is made of stone thanks to a local quarry that kept folks in Shallow Lake employed for decades.
It was a small building; I think it once was a butcher’s shop. But in 1999 it was Bob McKay’s Harley Davidson. We went inside.
There was some clothing and jewelry for sale, fancy chrome parts, an old juke box to add to the decor, a cat asleep in a rocking chair, and a total of two new Harley Davidsons on display. Those two bikes amounted to all the motorcycles that would fit in that little shop with the rest of the stuff they had for sale. Later I found out that Bob made his living building custom bikes in a large wooden building that resembled the Alamo out behind the shop, and shipping them all over North America, so selling ordinary factory-built bikes wasn’t a big passion for him, but the official association with Harley Davidson was useful. In fact the advertised price on the two bikes he had on display was precisely what Harley Davidson had listed for them on their website. Other Harley shops would add up to 50 per cent on top of that since they had no problem selling every Harley that was ever produced. His fair prices were noticed all over North America.
Anyway, one of the two bikes on display was a Harley Davidson Sportster---an 883---the basic Harley. And it was black. If you wanted one with a gas tank and fenders in a color other than black that would cost you 200 dollars more. Charlotte told me to climb on board, declared it looked perfect for me and, just like that, I became the owner of a Harley Davidson. I guess she figured it was the best alternative to any other mid-life crisis that may surface for a 50 year old art teacher.
It’s been fun for all of us---a little garden tractor of a Harley with an electric starter, and we’ve all gone places on it, with me driving of course. Cary and I circumnavigated Ohio, riding three hundred miles past corn fields, along rivers, over covered bridges, through little towns---one in southern Ohio that was holding its annual “Moonshine Festival”---to the magical Hopewell Indian archeological site known as Serpent Mound, and the Wright Patterson Air Force Museum in Dayton, headquarters of the US Air Force. We also toured Nova Scotia together on another occasion, doing our best to avoid the rain. One time Maggie sat in front of me and steered it when she was 12, while I still held the handlebars as we steamed along, “just in case”. And Charlotte and I have taken numerous trips around Newfoundland over the years just putting along at 55 miles per hour, winding through the mountains and through the forests.
The other motorcycle I own is a 1972 Norton Commando. The model is called a “Fastback” due to it’s gas tank, seat, tail and handlebar configurations, and with some other basic accoutrements, it is the quintessential factory-built “café racer”. For over forty years motorcycle manufacturers all over the world have been trying to replicate the looks, the sound and the handing of the Norton Commando. It was the fastest production motorcycle in the world when it was introduced and to this day it is still competitive in certain events thanks to its handling characteristics, effective and useful power range, and it’s dependability on a short racing circuit. In England they used to say you could ride it to work during the week and race it in Clubman events on the weekends. A Norton won the first Isle of Man TT race in 1907, and a hundred various TT events since then, and “placed” first, second and third over 400 times. A single cylinder Norton was the first to lap the Isle of Man at an average speed of over 100 miles per hour. In 1950 the company introduced the famous “Roadholder” front forks that revolutionized handling, and in one form or another, is still used by all motorcycle manufacturers to this day. The “Hogslayer”, a twin-engined Norton Commando, was the world’s fastest dragster in the 70’s and 80’s---engineered by amateur guys---not factories with hundreds of millions of dollars to invest.
I dreamed of owning a Norton from my teenage years onward. There was no Norton distributor near my hometown in Ohio but there was a BSA dealership, the rival to Triumph. Both of those British manufacturers must have agreed to stake out US territory because where one dealer was established the other was not to be found. Both companies produced cool bikes, the coolest being the Triumph Bonneville and the BSA Hornet and BSA Spitfire, but Nortons were something else---rare, exotic, legendary.
As the years went by, beginning in 1965, I always owned a motorcycle, the first being a Ducati Diana when I was 16---a pretty cool bike, today worth a lot of money---a 175 pound, 250 cc bike that was the fastest production bike in the world in that category at the time as well, and a racing legend.
As a university student in California I bought a 500 cc 1954 BSA “Iron Barrel”, a road-going version of the famous BSA Gold Star, and eventually I bought a 650 BSA Lightning.
In my opinion, the feeling of freedom, of exhilaration, is simply unparalleled when riding a motorcycle and frankly, contributes to a motorcycle enthusiast’s personality/character. It helps identify who they are. And “the brand” contributes further---from the original advertising slogan “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” to whatever the public thinks of the members of various Harley Davidson clubs.
I found myself in England in 1972 as a post-graduate student in Visual Arts at The Slade School of Fine Art in London. I lived in North London—in Hornsey. When I headed for Central London and art school in the morning I often walked to Tottenham to catch the Underground at Turnpike Lane station.
Not far from the Underground station---on Green Lanes---was the motorcycle dealership of Coburn and Hughes. And in their big picture window for over a year sat a fire-engine-red Norton Commando, beckoning to me like a Siren. God, I wanted to own that bike but secretly I hoped it would be sold and removed from that window since I couldn’t afford the price of 509 pounds, 50 pence that was clearly marked on a sign taped to the handlebars. I thought of that Norton daily.
Then I got a break. It came when I had my graduate exhibition at The Slade. I sold virtually every artwork I had made and I thought, “That’s it. I’m an art star.” Never mind that I didn’t sell another artwork for ten years---I earned over 500 pounds in one evening. So the next day I went straight down to Coburn and Hughes and bought the Norton.
I didn’t have enough additional funds to license it for the road or buy insurance so it sat in the front room of my flat in Hornsey for months before getting shipped to my parents’ home in Ohio. It stayed in the basement there until 1977 when I returned from New Guinea earlier than I had planned---my wife and I were running out of grant money that she had secured to send her, an anthropology student, and me, to Papua New Guinea for field research. In Ohio I bought a 1970 Chevy Kingswood Estate station wagon for $270, removed the back seats, loaded everything I owned---including the Norton---in the back of it and headed off to California where a friend had promised me a job at New West Magazine in Beverly Hills. I left Ohio in December 1977, six hours ahead of the worst snow storm in history in the Midwest, drove 29 hours non-stop to Amarillo, Texas, where I was safe from the storm, which was moving east, stayed over night, and then drove 21 hours non-stop to Los Angeles where my friend Jeff Earhart had an apartment in Burbank.
And that’s where the Norton started life. I remember the day I first fired it up. Third kick and it sprang to life. I shifted it into first gear and slowly let out the clutch. I remember the feeling of exhilaration as it surged down the street and I remember thinking, “Damn, this thing is pretty fast” when I cranked the throttle back.
That motorcycle was my sole transportation during several periods I lived and worked in Southern California. I would yo-yo back and forth between Britain and California, following my first wife, Debbora, a PhD student at Cambridge, then, after we split up, going wherever someone would employ me---different places in Britain and different places in California. Whenever I’d leave California, Jeff would store the bike for me in a garage with his Datsun rally car. When I’d return, Jeff’s employer, John Morton, a Scot who had raced Nortons in Europe in the 1950’s, would have mine tuned and ready to roll, and always with new Pirelli tires. And he wouldn’t take a penny for his effort. Hey, it was a Norton.
One year when I was hired to teach at the University of California at Santa Barbara, I arrived at Jeff’s from London on a Saturday morning, collected the Norton from John Morton’s shop and headed for Santa Barbara the next day, 120 miles north of Burbank.
As I cruised along near Ventura, with orange groves flanking me on both sides of the freeway, I didn’t notice I was running at around a hundred miles per hour, it was so smooth. The Norton hummed along with it’s throaty note, the huge sprinklers in the orange groves were producing their percussive chunk-chunk-chunk noises and the orange blossoms mingled with the smell of high octane gasoline and the Pacific ocean.
That’s when the Highway Patrol guy got me---pulled me over and handed me a ticket for speeding. A “hundred” in a “seventy”. I tried to talk my way out of it but it didn’t work. I also remember the patrolman’s observation when we were speaking. He told me “I had to give you the speeding ticket because you were just going too fast. And I had to see your bike.”
It was always like that wherever we went. Like Moses parting the Dead Sea I parted a crowd who were attending an opening of an art exhibition in Venice, California one night while I was just creeping along looking for somewhere to park. I came to a stop in front of Marisa Berenson, flanked by tons of her followers. She was walking towards me dressed like a bellhop from the 1920’s---red satin top and leggings and a little red cap with a strap under her chin. She looked at the Norton, and she and her crowd moved to the left and right and let me carry on through.
Once I encountered Nudie Cohn of Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors at a stoplight on Sunset Boulevard. Famous for the outrageous rinestone suits he designed for folks like Porter Wagoner, Roy Rogers and Elvis, he was driving one of his white Pontiac Bonneville convertables, complete with longhorn antlers on the hood. He pulled up beside me and as I looked towards his car I noticed everyone in the car were craning their necks for a look at the Norton.
Over the years in California I rode it through the Santa Ynez, San Rafael and Sierra Madre Mountains, over most of the Pacific Coast Highway, as far south as Laguna Beach and north nearly to San Francisco, and on virtually every freeway in Los Angeles. At moderate speeds it was accountable, at higher speeds it was “on the edge.” And, every time, I was invigorated riding the Norton---I was really “brought to life.”
One night after too many gin and tonics at the bar in the Hotel Bel Air a former Miss Yugoslavia hit me with “Where’s the last place anyone in California would want to go?”
“What?” I said.
“Where’s the last place anyone in California would want to go?”
“Uh, Victorville” I replied, after some thought.
“Let’s go” she said.
Twelve hours later we returned to West Hollywood after an all night ride through the mountains and the high desert---Route 2 out of Pasadena, through the San Gabriel Wilderness, past Mount Baldy (Mt. San Antonio---10,000 feet), through Big Pines to El Cajon Pass, all the way to Victorville. The stars. Jesus, the stars. The cool mountain air in the Wilderness and then the cool desert air between Cajon and Victorville was so fresh, and the fragrant smell of Desert Lavender and Jimson Weed (Sacred Datura) has been unforgettable.
My friends rode on the Norton with me: Bob, Jerry, Dominic, Elisa, Rip, Ricky, Karen, Wayne, Carole, Jeff, Susan, Nancy. More. I won’t drop names here but movie stars and rock stars were passengers on the Norton. Strangers wanted their photos taken with it. Over the years dozens of people have wanted to buy it.
To make sure Charlotte was “the right one for Kent”, as determined by “Bob and Jerry”, we rode from Santa Barbara to Laguna Beach for a weekend with Bob (an art consultant) and Jerry (a nurse), my dear friends who were known to so many to be the haven of Rest and Relaxation for artists. Bob installed us in the apartment beside the pool, where we found the bed strewn with rose petals and a Champagne bucket standing on the bedside table with Moet and Chandon on ice. We had such a great time we stayed an extra day, then headed back up the coast too late one night to get to Santa Barbara before 2:00 AM, but we were reluctant to leave those wonderful guys sooner. So we steamed up the Coast Highway at a steady 90 miles per hour and roared past the September surfing mecca at Rincon and the oil derricks, through the fog and mist, the Norton steady and rumbling along.
The Norton ended up back in Ohio at some point in the 90’s. I brought it to our home in Newfoundland in a trailer with a few significant family things when my mother had to move into a nursing home. My childhood friend, Roger MacClellan, helped me put it in the trailer. We muscled it aboard, cinched it down, had a laugh, embraced, and I took off for Newfoundland.
In Newfoundland I rode it for several summers. When I was first getting it ready to go, and over subsequent summers, neighbors I never saw before would stop by to look at it---Mr. Genge at 85, whistling through his teeth and shaking his head, and Dr. Ross, an Englishman and an eye surgeon, after looking at it for a long time, declaring quietly “They were very fast.”
So I’ve had the Norton for 47 years. It has 15,238 miles on it, every one of them clocked by me. The last time I rode it, it started on the third kick, just like the first time back in Burbank. I put two hundred miles on it that day, riding down to the Port aux Port Peninsula and then up to Woody Point in Gros Morne World Heritage Site. Wherever I stopped people would gather to look at it. I was followed on the 15 mile leg from Wiltondale to Woody Point through the mountains by a guy who just wanted to see it when I finally stopped at the wharf in Woody Point. The next night I had a fall carrying stuff up the steps to our house and that signaled the end of my motorcycle days.
I have one 40-second video clip of me starting it, and riding up the road that leads away from our house in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, and a few photos taken above Ojai in the Santa Ynez Mountains from 38 years ago. And I have some memories I can share, and I have some I can’t.
It’s for sale now and it will likely be gone in a few months, but it was sure a thrill to ride when I could manage it.
© Kent Jones 2016-2019
I don’t feel I’ve missed a thing. At least nothing that mattered. Grandkids---I’d like to have grandkids. So far I’ve missed that. So I just contradicted myself.
In October I fell going up the steps to our front door---my second serious fall. I had another fall a year and a half earlier. I broke my wrist both times, collarbone first time and shoulder second. Previous falls/heavy lifting, etc. have made a mess of my back. My shoulder is shattered and I can’t use my left arm. These facts present a lot of challenges now. As insignificant as it may sound one of the most difficult things for me to face is the fact that I will never ride a motorcycle again.
I own two motorcycles. One is a Harley Davidson Sportster that my wife Charlotte encouraged me to buy when I turned 50 back in 1999. We had been driving to Tobermory on the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario, where Charlotte’s family owned a cottage---a house really---on Lake Huron, and as we passed through the tiny community of Shallow Lake she asked me to stop in front of an old stone-clad shop. Virtually every building in Shallow Lake, Ontario is made of stone thanks to a local quarry that kept folks in Shallow Lake employed for decades.
It was a small building; I think it once was a butcher’s shop. But in 1999 it was Bob McKay’s Harley Davidson. We went inside.
There was some clothing and jewelry for sale, fancy chrome parts, an old juke box to add to the decor, a cat asleep in a rocking chair, and a total of two new Harley Davidsons on display. Those two bikes amounted to all the motorcycles that would fit in that little shop with the rest of the stuff they had for sale. Later I found out that Bob made his living building custom bikes in a large wooden building that resembled the Alamo out behind the shop, and shipping them all over North America, so selling ordinary factory-built bikes wasn’t a big passion for him, but the official association with Harley Davidson was useful. In fact the advertised price on the two bikes he had on display was precisely what Harley Davidson had listed for them on their website. Other Harley shops would add up to 50 per cent on top of that since they had no problem selling every Harley that was ever produced. His fair prices were noticed all over North America.
Anyway, one of the two bikes on display was a Harley Davidson Sportster---an 883---the basic Harley. And it was black. If you wanted one with a gas tank and fenders in a color other than black that would cost you 200 dollars more. Charlotte told me to climb on board, declared it looked perfect for me and, just like that, I became the owner of a Harley Davidson. I guess she figured it was the best alternative to any other mid-life crisis that may surface for a 50 year old art teacher.
It’s been fun for all of us---a little garden tractor of a Harley with an electric starter, and we’ve all gone places on it, with me driving of course. Cary and I circumnavigated Ohio, riding three hundred miles past corn fields, along rivers, over covered bridges, through little towns---one in southern Ohio that was holding its annual “Moonshine Festival”---to the magical Hopewell Indian archeological site known as Serpent Mound, and the Wright Patterson Air Force Museum in Dayton, headquarters of the US Air Force. We also toured Nova Scotia together on another occasion, doing our best to avoid the rain. One time Maggie sat in front of me and steered it when she was 12, while I still held the handlebars as we steamed along, “just in case”. And Charlotte and I have taken numerous trips around Newfoundland over the years just putting along at 55 miles per hour, winding through the mountains and through the forests.
The other motorcycle I own is a 1972 Norton Commando. The model is called a “Fastback” due to it’s gas tank, seat, tail and handlebar configurations, and with some other basic accoutrements, it is the quintessential factory-built “café racer”. For over forty years motorcycle manufacturers all over the world have been trying to replicate the looks, the sound and the handing of the Norton Commando. It was the fastest production motorcycle in the world when it was introduced and to this day it is still competitive in certain events thanks to its handling characteristics, effective and useful power range, and it’s dependability on a short racing circuit. In England they used to say you could ride it to work during the week and race it in Clubman events on the weekends. A Norton won the first Isle of Man TT race in 1907, and a hundred various TT events since then, and “placed” first, second and third over 400 times. A single cylinder Norton was the first to lap the Isle of Man at an average speed of over 100 miles per hour. In 1950 the company introduced the famous “Roadholder” front forks that revolutionized handling, and in one form or another, is still used by all motorcycle manufacturers to this day. The “Hogslayer”, a twin-engined Norton Commando, was the world’s fastest dragster in the 70’s and 80’s---engineered by amateur guys---not factories with hundreds of millions of dollars to invest.
I dreamed of owning a Norton from my teenage years onward. There was no Norton distributor near my hometown in Ohio but there was a BSA dealership, the rival to Triumph. Both of those British manufacturers must have agreed to stake out US territory because where one dealer was established the other was not to be found. Both companies produced cool bikes, the coolest being the Triumph Bonneville and the BSA Hornet and BSA Spitfire, but Nortons were something else---rare, exotic, legendary.
As the years went by, beginning in 1965, I always owned a motorcycle, the first being a Ducati Diana when I was 16---a pretty cool bike, today worth a lot of money---a 175 pound, 250 cc bike that was the fastest production bike in the world in that category at the time as well, and a racing legend.
As a university student in California I bought a 500 cc 1954 BSA “Iron Barrel”, a road-going version of the famous BSA Gold Star, and eventually I bought a 650 BSA Lightning.
In my opinion, the feeling of freedom, of exhilaration, is simply unparalleled when riding a motorcycle and frankly, contributes to a motorcycle enthusiast’s personality/character. It helps identify who they are. And “the brand” contributes further---from the original advertising slogan “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” to whatever the public thinks of the members of various Harley Davidson clubs.
I found myself in England in 1972 as a post-graduate student in Visual Arts at The Slade School of Fine Art in London. I lived in North London—in Hornsey. When I headed for Central London and art school in the morning I often walked to Tottenham to catch the Underground at Turnpike Lane station.
Not far from the Underground station---on Green Lanes---was the motorcycle dealership of Coburn and Hughes. And in their big picture window for over a year sat a fire-engine-red Norton Commando, beckoning to me like a Siren. God, I wanted to own that bike but secretly I hoped it would be sold and removed from that window since I couldn’t afford the price of 509 pounds, 50 pence that was clearly marked on a sign taped to the handlebars. I thought of that Norton daily.
Then I got a break. It came when I had my graduate exhibition at The Slade. I sold virtually every artwork I had made and I thought, “That’s it. I’m an art star.” Never mind that I didn’t sell another artwork for ten years---I earned over 500 pounds in one evening. So the next day I went straight down to Coburn and Hughes and bought the Norton.
I didn’t have enough additional funds to license it for the road or buy insurance so it sat in the front room of my flat in Hornsey for months before getting shipped to my parents’ home in Ohio. It stayed in the basement there until 1977 when I returned from New Guinea earlier than I had planned---my wife and I were running out of grant money that she had secured to send her, an anthropology student, and me, to Papua New Guinea for field research. In Ohio I bought a 1970 Chevy Kingswood Estate station wagon for $270, removed the back seats, loaded everything I owned---including the Norton---in the back of it and headed off to California where a friend had promised me a job at New West Magazine in Beverly Hills. I left Ohio in December 1977, six hours ahead of the worst snow storm in history in the Midwest, drove 29 hours non-stop to Amarillo, Texas, where I was safe from the storm, which was moving east, stayed over night, and then drove 21 hours non-stop to Los Angeles where my friend Jeff Earhart had an apartment in Burbank.
And that’s where the Norton started life. I remember the day I first fired it up. Third kick and it sprang to life. I shifted it into first gear and slowly let out the clutch. I remember the feeling of exhilaration as it surged down the street and I remember thinking, “Damn, this thing is pretty fast” when I cranked the throttle back.
That motorcycle was my sole transportation during several periods I lived and worked in Southern California. I would yo-yo back and forth between Britain and California, following my first wife, Debbora, a PhD student at Cambridge, then, after we split up, going wherever someone would employ me---different places in Britain and different places in California. Whenever I’d leave California, Jeff would store the bike for me in a garage with his Datsun rally car. When I’d return, Jeff’s employer, John Morton, a Scot who had raced Nortons in Europe in the 1950’s, would have mine tuned and ready to roll, and always with new Pirelli tires. And he wouldn’t take a penny for his effort. Hey, it was a Norton.
One year when I was hired to teach at the University of California at Santa Barbara, I arrived at Jeff’s from London on a Saturday morning, collected the Norton from John Morton’s shop and headed for Santa Barbara the next day, 120 miles north of Burbank.
As I cruised along near Ventura, with orange groves flanking me on both sides of the freeway, I didn’t notice I was running at around a hundred miles per hour, it was so smooth. The Norton hummed along with it’s throaty note, the huge sprinklers in the orange groves were producing their percussive chunk-chunk-chunk noises and the orange blossoms mingled with the smell of high octane gasoline and the Pacific ocean.
That’s when the Highway Patrol guy got me---pulled me over and handed me a ticket for speeding. A “hundred” in a “seventy”. I tried to talk my way out of it but it didn’t work. I also remember the patrolman’s observation when we were speaking. He told me “I had to give you the speeding ticket because you were just going too fast. And I had to see your bike.”
It was always like that wherever we went. Like Moses parting the Dead Sea I parted a crowd who were attending an opening of an art exhibition in Venice, California one night while I was just creeping along looking for somewhere to park. I came to a stop in front of Marisa Berenson, flanked by tons of her followers. She was walking towards me dressed like a bellhop from the 1920’s---red satin top and leggings and a little red cap with a strap under her chin. She looked at the Norton, and she and her crowd moved to the left and right and let me carry on through.
Once I encountered Nudie Cohn of Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors at a stoplight on Sunset Boulevard. Famous for the outrageous rinestone suits he designed for folks like Porter Wagoner, Roy Rogers and Elvis, he was driving one of his white Pontiac Bonneville convertables, complete with longhorn antlers on the hood. He pulled up beside me and as I looked towards his car I noticed everyone in the car were craning their necks for a look at the Norton.
Over the years in California I rode it through the Santa Ynez, San Rafael and Sierra Madre Mountains, over most of the Pacific Coast Highway, as far south as Laguna Beach and north nearly to San Francisco, and on virtually every freeway in Los Angeles. At moderate speeds it was accountable, at higher speeds it was “on the edge.” And, every time, I was invigorated riding the Norton---I was really “brought to life.”
One night after too many gin and tonics at the bar in the Hotel Bel Air a former Miss Yugoslavia hit me with “Where’s the last place anyone in California would want to go?”
“What?” I said.
“Where’s the last place anyone in California would want to go?”
“Uh, Victorville” I replied, after some thought.
“Let’s go” she said.
Twelve hours later we returned to West Hollywood after an all night ride through the mountains and the high desert---Route 2 out of Pasadena, through the San Gabriel Wilderness, past Mount Baldy (Mt. San Antonio---10,000 feet), through Big Pines to El Cajon Pass, all the way to Victorville. The stars. Jesus, the stars. The cool mountain air in the Wilderness and then the cool desert air between Cajon and Victorville was so fresh, and the fragrant smell of Desert Lavender and Jimson Weed (Sacred Datura) has been unforgettable.
My friends rode on the Norton with me: Bob, Jerry, Dominic, Elisa, Rip, Ricky, Karen, Wayne, Carole, Jeff, Susan, Nancy. More. I won’t drop names here but movie stars and rock stars were passengers on the Norton. Strangers wanted their photos taken with it. Over the years dozens of people have wanted to buy it.
To make sure Charlotte was “the right one for Kent”, as determined by “Bob and Jerry”, we rode from Santa Barbara to Laguna Beach for a weekend with Bob (an art consultant) and Jerry (a nurse), my dear friends who were known to so many to be the haven of Rest and Relaxation for artists. Bob installed us in the apartment beside the pool, where we found the bed strewn with rose petals and a Champagne bucket standing on the bedside table with Moet and Chandon on ice. We had such a great time we stayed an extra day, then headed back up the coast too late one night to get to Santa Barbara before 2:00 AM, but we were reluctant to leave those wonderful guys sooner. So we steamed up the Coast Highway at a steady 90 miles per hour and roared past the September surfing mecca at Rincon and the oil derricks, through the fog and mist, the Norton steady and rumbling along.
The Norton ended up back in Ohio at some point in the 90’s. I brought it to our home in Newfoundland in a trailer with a few significant family things when my mother had to move into a nursing home. My childhood friend, Roger MacClellan, helped me put it in the trailer. We muscled it aboard, cinched it down, had a laugh, embraced, and I took off for Newfoundland.
In Newfoundland I rode it for several summers. When I was first getting it ready to go, and over subsequent summers, neighbors I never saw before would stop by to look at it---Mr. Genge at 85, whistling through his teeth and shaking his head, and Dr. Ross, an Englishman and an eye surgeon, after looking at it for a long time, declaring quietly “They were very fast.”
So I’ve had the Norton for 47 years. It has 15,238 miles on it, every one of them clocked by me. The last time I rode it, it started on the third kick, just like the first time back in Burbank. I put two hundred miles on it that day, riding down to the Port aux Port Peninsula and then up to Woody Point in Gros Morne World Heritage Site. Wherever I stopped people would gather to look at it. I was followed on the 15 mile leg from Wiltondale to Woody Point through the mountains by a guy who just wanted to see it when I finally stopped at the wharf in Woody Point. The next night I had a fall carrying stuff up the steps to our house and that signaled the end of my motorcycle days.
I have one 40-second video clip of me starting it, and riding up the road that leads away from our house in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, and a few photos taken above Ojai in the Santa Ynez Mountains from 38 years ago. And I have some memories I can share, and I have some I can’t.
It’s for sale now and it will likely be gone in a few months, but it was sure a thrill to ride when I could manage it.
© Kent Jones 2016-2019