Motorcycling

I got into motorcycling as a kind of mid-life crisis thing.
I almost bought a motorcycle when I was in college in the mid-1960s but my parents and my girlfriend (later my first wife) talked me out of it. Probably a good thing. That was an era when hardly anyone wore a helmet, what helmets there were were not very effective and the Motorcycle Safety Foundation's courses of instruction were still more than a decade in the future.
But I never quit thinking about motorcycling. I remember how fascinated I was when I ran into an Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity brother some years after college and he reminisced about his motorcycle experiences. A fellow reporter had bikes and occasionally rode over to my place and I was extremely envious.
Then, in 1978, I persuaded my wife that I needed to buy a moped - a cheesy little 50cc Tomos moped from a nearby bicycle shop. It had an automatic transmission, got about 100 miles to the gallon and could do all of 30 mph with a good tailwind. Nevertheless, I rode the hell out of it, even using it to commute the 7 miles from our house to my downtown office.
Then a wonderful thing happened. Someone stole it from our garage. I remember dozing in a back bedroom early one morning when I heard a familiar sound that I couldn't quite place. By the time I floated up to full waking state of consciousness, I realized it was the sound of the centerstand coming up on the moped. I peered out the window and saw wheeltracks and footprints in the dewy grass, leading to the back alley gate. Sure enough, one of the little neighborhood dirtbags had stolen my moped.
It didn't take long for me to realize this was my opportunity to step up to a motorcycle. I cashed the check from the homeowners insurance claim for the Tomos and put a few more dollars with it and bought a 1977 Kawasaki KE-175, a dual-purpose single-cylinder two-stroke bike. I bought a cheap polycarbonate helmet from a discount store and somehow managed to keep from crashing while I learned to ride, kind of...
Fate intervened again a few months later when a guy who was spearheading the Motorcycle Safety Foundation's rider education effort in my state contacted the newspaper looking for someone to write about the MSF's Rider Course. Naturally, my coworkers steered him to me and I signed up for the course.
It was held over a weekend in an auto dealership about a mile from my house and by Sunday evening I had become an MSF-certified trained rider. I was astonished at how much I had learned and horrified at how little knowledge and skill I'd had in the months I rode before taking the course.
A few weeks after taking the course, some hosehead pulled out in front of me and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I reflexively did a controlled stop, using both brakes. I did exactly the right thing in those 2 seconds before impact would have occurred and, in that instant, decided this was probably the most useful course I'd ever taken.
So I became an MSF instructor the next spring and ended up teaching the beginning rider course to about 1,000 students over the next decade.
I stepped up to my first BMW - a '71 R50/5 in 1981. I bought a '78 Kawasaki KZ650 a year or two later and rode it and the aging Beemer until 1985 when I sold some Third Reich militaria (we'll get to that later) to buy a graphite gray '81 BMW R100RS - a serious sport touring machine that was to change my life. (Of course it was forever, but I hate that cliche.)
But now I must shut this off to meet some friends for dinner.