Looking for Matadors in Madrid
There are literally thousands of street-parked motorcycles in the Spanish city of Madrid. Like many places in Europe, two wheeled moto-culture is outpacing four wheeled options. Barcelona - the place of origin for the legendary Bultaco brand - has the highest number of motorcycles, with over half a million registered there. That's partly due to its large population, and partly because it's Spain's second-largest metropolitan area, where motorcycles are more practical than cars. Madrid has the second-highest number of bikes registered: 301,324. Scooters, or Vespa-type vehicles, are ideal for Spain, especially its warmer regions, and particularly its urban areas. Ownership of scoooters has risen by 50% in the past decade [partly due to older/cheaper cars being regulated off the road - ed.]. Beyond the influence of a forgiving climate, economics and demographics, some wonder if there are deeper cultural undercurrents in Spain…could the relationship between rider and motorcycle reflect the classic Spanish dyad of the poised matador and the dangerous, wild bull?
La corrida (or corrida de toros) refers to the Spanish-style bullfight that is still legal in Madrid, and since 2016 throughout the entire country of Spain. A few regions and cities like Barcelona have banned bullfighting on animal rights grounds, but most of those bans were overturned by the national government. The historic bullring in Madrid, Plaza de Toros deost Las Ventas (las Ventas) was built in the Guindalera quarter of the Salamanca district in 1931 with a seating capacity of 23,798: it's the largest bll ring in Spain and third largest in the world, after bull rings in Mexico and Venezuela. It was designed by architect Jose Espeliu in the Neo-Mudejar style with ceramic tile incrustations that refer to a Moorish historical past [Spain (Al-Andalus) was part of the Moorish empire for 800 years! - ed]. [2] The bullfighting season starts in March and ends in October and during the San Isidro Fiesta, fights are held every weekday and every Sunday or holiday. The fights unfold as a formal, layered and complicated ceremony that start at 6 or 7pm and last for two to three hours.
In 1963 Bulto went all-in with his competition MX/Enduro plan, and production of Bultaco street bikes was cut back dramatically to the Metralla and Mercurio models. That year Bultaco produced 11,836 bikes, with 885 bikes exported - predominantly to the American market. Production continued to increase and in 1966 20,042 bikes were produced, with 7,199 going to the US. At that time there were four Bultaco distributors in America; one in New York and three on the West Coast.
The Bultaco racing record in the early years
Motocross
1st in the I Motocross International of Barcelona in the categories of 125 National and 250 International (Joan Soler and Don Rickman);
1st in the Great XII Motocross Spain Grand Prix (Pomeroy);
1st in the VII Motocross Bay of The Naranjos (Pere Arpa);
1st in the Championship of Spain of Motocross (Toni Elías);
1st in the 37th Six International Days of Trial (Oriol Puig);
Gold and silver medals in Spindleruv Mlyn in 1963 (Joan Soler Bultó and Jose Sánchez).
Trials
1st in the Six Scottish Trial Days of 1965, 1967, 1968, 1973, 1976, 1977 and 1978;
1st in the British Championship of Trial (Sammy Miller) Four European Trial Championships in 1968, 1970, 1973, 1974;
Five World Championships (Sammy Miller, Martin Lampkin).
Road Racing
Seven of the top ten positions at the IX Spanish Grand Prix,
1st and 2nd in the XV International Speed Prize of Madrid (John Grace and Marcelo Leg);
1st in the 24 hours of Montjuïc (Marcelo Cama);
Five world speed records in 175, 250 and 350 with the Bultaco 175, organized by the Streaker Cup: Sito Pons, Carles Garriga, Carles Cardús
Four World Cups with 50cc Ex-Piovaticci 50 (Àngel Nieto).
1965 Scottish Six Days Trial (Sammy Miller)
1968 Trial of Tarragona (Ignacio Bultó) [5]
[2] The term "Moor" does not pertain to a specific ethnic group. Instead, it is a blanket term used to refer to the Berbers of North Africa and Arabian Muslims who invadd and conquered Spain from the 700s to the 1490s. The traditional blue tiles seen throughout Spain refer back to Moorish, Islamic cultural influences, as does the remarkable Moorish architecture found across central and southern Spain.
[3] Ernest Hemingway explored themes about masculinity in his writing and explored bullfighting and matadors in ‘Death in the Afternoon (1932) and ‘The Dangerous Summer’ (1960), a non-fiction piece he wrote for a Life Magazine cover article. The full story was published posthumously in its entirety in 1985.
Hemingway’s words skillfully describe the complexity of the bullfight:
'He made two series of eight naturales [passes with a small red cloth] in beautiful style and then on a right-hand pass with the bull coming at him from the rear, the bull had him. . . . The horn seemed to go into his body and the bull tossed him a good six feet or more into the air. His arms and legs were spread wide, the sword and muleta were thrown clear and he fell on his head. The bull stepped on him trying to get the horn into him and missed him twice. . . . He was up in an instant. The horn had not gone in but had passed between his legs . . . and there was no wound. [He] paid no attention to what the bull had done to him and waving everyone away went on with his faena [work].'
[4] The majority of Spaniards are against bullfighting. According to official data from Spain’s Culture Ministry, there has been a sharp decline in the number of bullfights since 2015. Only 8 per cent of Spaniards went to a bullfight between 2018 and 2019. In addition, we know that 90.5 per cent of Spaniards did not attend a bullfight in 2018. Even though more than 90 per cent of Spaniards do not go to bullfights, more than 9,000 bulls will be killed this year. More than 50,000 bulls will be hired and exploited during bull festivals
[5] From Club Bultaco Australia 2016-2021
[6] From Classic Motocross Iron: Tom White, 2024, MXA Motocross Action.
[7] On the flight from JFK to Barcelona the sixty-nine year old man sitting next to me (a computer hardware designer), rode a Bultaco Matador as a kid. He was fluent about the brand and told me the Paco Bulto story verbatim.
Keeping Time - the Bulgari Car Collection
Most gearheads would jump at the opportunity to oversee and care for an esoteric collection of historic cars. It's an opportunity to go deep with each car and its idiosyncrasies: the brands and models, their dates and location of production, the designers and particular materials used in their manufacturing, the choices made - the what and why - and the specific personalities of the individual cars in the collection. Those certain noises, the pings and knocks of under- or over-fed combustion chambers, the clicks and creeks of springs, the tapping of valves and lifters: it's like studying a private language. A schooled ear can decode a novel from the noises each individual car makes.
inherited and lives with a deep sense of appreciation about the history and culture of automobiles.
[1] During the early days of World War II in Italy, there are numerous stories of owners of American cars in Rome who secretly buried their cars to prevent them being confiscated by the Germans. A young Nicola Bulgari saw the cars that survived.
Forever Two Wheels Siena
'The Vanishing Point' and Keeping Your Balance in an Old Town
"Jimmy Kowalski: Listen, I need some gas.
Vision Quest Indian: You need more than gas to get where you're going." - Vanishing Point, 1971
There are motorcycles and bicycles everywhere on the picturesque, medieval streets of Siena, Italy. It's a UNESCO World Heritage site, which means it has rules about preserving local history. Four-wheel vehicle parking lots are strategically located out of the way, and motorists that park there are expected to switch to two wheels or walk. Siena is the most intact medieval city in Europe, and like other Tuscan hill towns, was first settled in the time of the Etruscans (c. 900–400 BC) when it was inhabited by a tribe called the Saina (there are still traditional basement restaurants in Siena with Etruscan vaulted ceilings). A Roman town called Saena Julia was founded at the site in the time of the Emperor Augustus. Siena acquired a Gothic appearance between the 12th and 15th centuries, which has remained its flavor through the centuries. The visual contrast between modern two-wheel transport and the narrow old streets with 700-year old buildings provides food for thought about the pros and cons of different eras.
[2] During the Middle Ages in Europe; 500-1400AD, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire church controlled (subdued) artistic and scientific expression. Art was not supposed to explore observable reality but instead reflect the cannons of the church.
[3] Berger believed a spatial relationship is the arrangement or connection between objects or elements in a physical space. It can also refer to how an object is located in space in relation to another objects.
[4] Berger believed- The convention of perspective, which is unique to European art and which was first established in the early Renaissance, centers everything on the eye of the beholder. It is like a beam from a lighthouse - only instead of light travelling outwards, appearances travel in. Perspective makes the single eye the center of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God. Berger argues that the vanishing point is not just a technical aspect of perspective but also reflects societal power structures, as it positions the viewer as the central point of observation, often at the expense of the depicted subjects
[5] The dizziness and disorientation experienced by people who worshiped at the basilica were attributed to metaphysical religious powers.
Vargo Raceway: A Dragstrip Lost in Time
The gentle, rolling farmland near Allentown, Pennsylvania is not where you'd expect to find a drag strip. There are cows and barns with silos and good ol’ boys riding green John Deere tractors down picturesque dirt roads … and in the middle of the farmland there’s a half-mile strip of faded black tarmac, reflecting the heat of the morning sun. The strip is weathered and cracked and surrounded with low scrub growth. It’s obvious the strip hasn’t been used in a long time, but it’s still there, and has a special history of high-speed eighth- and quarter-mile elimination racing that stretches back to the late 1950s.
'Big Daddy' LeBlanc and Staten Island Racing
For New Yorkers who drive, being hopelessly stuck in rush hour traffic is a part of everyone’s nightmare dreamscape, drivers aggressively competing for position through the dense gridlock on city streets. Even non-driving residents of The City have an (understandable) love/hate relationship with cars.[1] It’s hard to imagine, then, that New York City had its own NASCAR sanctioned stock car track, Weissglass Speedway on Staten Island, from 1953 to 1972. George ‘Big Daddy’ LeBlanc (1947-2023)[2] built and wrenched his own stock car, raced at the track in his youth, and with the track’s closing became the raceway’s historian. Without George’s dedication to collecting stock cars, track ephemera and the histories of cars and drivers, there is a good chance Weissglass Speedway's obscure story would have faded from view.
[2] The expression 'Big Daddy' is traced to North American English, informal slang: a man who is powerful, important or rich, or all of these. He is usually a man who acts like a father to people who work for him or depend on him. In downtown Manhattan 1940s-50s Bohemian/Beatnik coffee house culture, the man in charge of making the coffee was called the 'Big Daddy'. The Beatnik use of the term was picked up by car and motorcycle culture Bohemians in the 1950s, like 'Big Daddy' Don Garlits and Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth.
[3] 1960s footage of racing at Weissglass Speedway- Youtube Weissglass Speedway- Staten Island, NY kingdezign
[4] From: A Little Background on Weissglass… from George LeBlanc, www.weissglassspeedway.com
The Iron Triangle, NYC
The 1980s saw the beginnings of a new economic process for places like New York City. Old, neglected, and crumbling post-industrial neighborhoods, where people had found cheap rent refuge from the 1940s through the 1970s, suddenly saw an influx of capital, otherwise known as gentrification. In short order, affordable living and working spaces were renovated and became astronomically expensive, and a way of life was eliminated.
"About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air."
By the 1930s the area segued to become the final resting place for smashed cars and other hard-edged industrial refuse. Slowly, impromptu fix-it shops appeared, clustering around economic possibility. Word got out and a reputation took shape. City government noticed them during the early 1970s, and wondered what to do. Was any of this licensed? A push and pull contest between NYC government, property owners, business owners, sports stadium developers, affordable housing advocates and real estate carnivores tumbled through the courts for decades. Redevelopment plans included a mall, a hotel, parking lots, a school and parks. Under the threat of eminent domain, many businesses have already been razed, evicted, or relocated. Streets have been closed and the remaining businesses have lost customers. A final solution was approved by city government in 2018, but the Covid pandemic put everything on hold.
On Old Streets: The Motorcycles of Rhodes
Walking along the medieval streets of the storied town of Rhodes, Greece, the ancient and modern coexist in glaring contrast. Scattered at the feet of the 14th century Gothic gates of the Palace of the Grand Master are hundreds of sleek motorcycles. Inside the gates, behind time-worn limestone city fortifications, dozens more bikes owned by residents and workers sit in quiet corners of the cobblestone alleyways. A few years ago, Greece topped Italy and Switzerland to become the number one European Union country for motorcycle ownership. A gentle climate, a demographic skewed towards youth, and affordability have all fed the trend. Since 2014, Greek motorcycle ownership increased 0.5% year on year, with 150.24 Units per thousand persons. In 2019, the country was ranked number one compared to other EU countries in motorcycle ownership; Italy, Switzerland and Spain respectively ranked number 2, 3 and 4. The Motorcycles market in Greece is projected to generate a revenue of US$734.3M in 2024, and the BMW Motorrad is expected to have the highest market share there in 2024.
In the Darkness: Langdon Clay’s Cars, NYC 1974-76
“Time seemed stationary, yet the painful pressure of time was constantly felt.”
Hubert Selby Jr. The Room, 1971
"The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding."
John Updike. The New Yorker, 1976
The 1970’s in New York City were a dangerous, dystopic, but also a liberating time, when a beat-up, two-bedroom East Village apartment was one hundred dollars a month. A glass of Rheingold Beer in a Bowery bar was twenty-five cents (and came with lively bartender conversation). Photographer Langdon Clay was born in New York City in 1949, and at twenty-five, after schooling in New Hampshire and Boston, returned to New York City - more specifically lower Manhattan in 1971. In New England he had experimented with making 8mm movies and began to develop his eye. A friend suggested a few photographers he should look at: Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson. He learned about the camera’s capacity for documentation.
Langdon Clay (LC): I was born at St. Vincent’s Hospital. I don’t think it’s there any more...it’s some condo building now. I lived in Princeton, NJ in the ‘50s and then we moved to Vermont. I went to some fancy boarding school. In school we were making 8mm movies without sound. But scheduling got complicated. On a trip to New York I went to Olden Camera at 34th Street and bought a Pentax. I was familiar with cameras to a degree. I was familiar with the notion of recording things. I did not migrate to still cameras as a complete neophyte.
I was reading Camera Magazine and seeing all the European people, but wanted to get away from it. I didn’t want to be an imitation of it. I wanted to do something that was mine. I understood the difference between an impressionist and expressionist perspective. I wanted to record. If photography is one big tree, one branch goes off and it’s realistic and it’s recording things and the other is expressing things from an artistic point of view using light sensitive material. For me, using the camera is to record. That’s always how I’ve felt about it.
LC: You know what they say… If you are a writer, write about what you know. So if you are a photographer follow where you are. You can always find something. To photograph something which I had done for a long time in Black and White is one thing, and then to turn it into a project where you are going out a couple nights a week kind of hunting, is kind of another level. So it brings you to the whole question in photography of how do images and sequences, how does the ordering, compound the meaning and questions like that. Photographing the cars was the first time I had put together that I was actually kind of on to something not so random.
LC: I knew they wouldn’t always look like that. In fact, I took those photos in ‘74, ‘75, ‘76 and we’d already had the gas crisis. Several things had happened with cars: they had to get smaller. And the other thing that had changed is the design engineers had come up with the wind tunnel and probably some early computers. Instead of being designed by a sculptor, who would make a life sized model of what the car would look like with no regard for the cost of gas, the gas crisis [meant] the design of cars was going to change. And the cars I was photographing on the street were still from four, five or eight years earlier. And the ones I picked were the cool designs but by they were all rusting out and banged up. I knew to that degree, since things were changing, that those cars and my photographs would be a little bit of history. In ‘79 I did something about 42nd Street and that really was done for history. The newspapers were full of stories about the need to renovate (read clean up) Times Square and I thought, 'fuck I better do something about that', to make a record.
MM: You said about the older car designers, “At the time designers were crazy. They were real artists. They could do anything they wanted but above all they were drawn by hand.” So at the time did the cars seem important and worth documenting? And why at night?
The French were early on the weirdness of design. The Nordic types and Germanic ones had a different approach to cars. Most of their designs were better I would say. That’s just me. Now as far as photographing them, I don’t have much interest now. The only ones I like around where I live (down South) are those same cars from the ‘70s.
MM: At what point do you think as you are walking around and noticing these cars, like that Lancer, your personal sensibility… You realize you have stumbled onto something. It’s dark, the streets are not congested. You were using existing light of the Sodium Vapor street lights.
LC: During the 1970s Mercury Vapor was used to illuminate places like basketball courts at night. Then to save money, the city switched to Sodium Vapor which is much warmer and more golden light and it works very well with Kodachrome. I tested different films and that one worked the best. The problem for the city is that it’s cheaper to use that light but the trees keep growing at night. So then you’ve got to get the tree people in to trim the trees. So there’s always something. I tested all that because I was just learning about color and switching from Black and White to color. I tested different color films but the best one was Kodachrome. I am glad I picked it. There is a permanence and some weird richness in Kodachrome.
LC: I was hoping to find the right technology for the aesthetic. I could tell, I got to a point where out of a roll of film, I could use everything on it. The pictures found me at a certain point. So I knew when I had a match between a car and a background.
MM: You said, “To see what it is, to record clearly and pass it on faithfully to your children and their children or inquiring Martians or leave it to posterity. It became kind of a calling. I had to see it for myself.” Was this some kind of a calling?
LC: Yeah, it was kind of, and the Village along with those cars had a similar effect to Paris. The scale of the West Village or Hoboken which then was an easy run under the World Trade Center on the Path train. And it wasn’t scary to be in those places. The East Village had a different feel from the West Village. So, I was living on 28th street and the Village was a walk, I took a couple in Murry Hill, the highest I got was 59th street or something. If there was a calling it was to my own neighborhood. I had a sense of place. I didn’t have a lot of money. I’d paint apartments. I could do that for a couple weeks and then take two weeks off and go to the movies with my friends. Hang out and play cards.
MM: Did you have any precondition about what kind of car you wanted to photograph? You are walking down the street and you see an old banged up Studebaker and you’d say to yourself, “That’s a good one. I better take that one.”
LC: Yeah, I passed by a lot. And of course I went past the same streets and same buildings over and over and over again. But the cars changed, so that’s why I went back again and again, because something might turn up that would work. In the beginning I did even wider sort of streetscapes where there might be two or even three cars, like a red car and a green car right next to each other. I pretty quickly got down to just one car and one background as an aesthetic approach. At the time I was learning more about Renaissance styles.
When I first showed these photos in Paris in ‘76, the French thought I had just moved the cars. They thought it was an arrangement thing. But that would be pretty theatrical and I didn’t have either the money or the imagination to do it. Nothing was particularly planned other than I would roam the streets.
LC: Yeah, but actually, I don’t care all that much about cars. I cared about the whole picture. You know, for photographers when near, middle and far line up in this way, you want to comment on other things in the picture. Sort of like a poem I guess. You need something happening where the parts of the picture are talking to each other in a way. There were photographers like Brassai who photographed Paris at night who was an inspiration. You can go further back into French painting- Georges de La Tour did a bunch of night scenes with candle light, with gloomy shadows. And there was Edward Hopper. I don’t know why I gravitated to that. Another thing was, not so many people were photographing at night at the time. Now with digital, it’s much easier; the lighting works better. You don’t need all the filters, etc. And now, you can tweak them in the computer.
For most of my time in New York at least until the early ‘80s I didn’t even own a car. Even back then, to keep a car in a parking lot cost as much as having an apartment. Before, when I lived in Vermont everyone had VW bugs. I was a little partial to them because I knew if you got stuck in a snow bank, it only takes two people to lift them out.
LC: Well, you know what it means. From living in that city in particular. Back then, you weren’t always safe. There were three guys coming at you down the block and you’d cross to the other side to save yourself a bunch of grief.
Photographing at night in that light was a different thing. Particularly during the summer- the humidity and the night are protective layers, so you don’t have to worry about the sky. You are focused to the street level. Basically, photographing the cars was very objective. I was also very keen to maximize any detail in any given image. The issue of recording evidence. Yes, there are the cars but there is also all the other information in the frame. For me that’s what’s important. In one-hundred years that’s what I hope people will get out of these things. I guess some of what is in the background of the photos is still there but many of those places are no longer there.
LC: I guess a lot of it is still there but they have painted over the buildings. Some of the buildings are gone. I was in the city recently and went looking for some of the places where I took the photos; like the White Tower hamburger place I photographed with a car in the snow… That’s gone. There is a big apartment building there now.
MM: You as a young man, you were twenty-five, you were impressed with this city, you had a camera- you could have taken pictures of so many different things. You could have taken pictures of store fronts.
LC: Atget did this in Paris. He wasn’t afraid to show the mannequins in the windows. There’s another part to it for the photographer which is- to make an image and then later- a week, ten days later after it was developed and came back in the mail, to look at it and to discover what it was you took a picture of. Especially what you didn’t see at the time because you were worried about the guy down the street or getting run over by a car. Then later at your leisure project it on the wall and think about it. So that’s still for me the fun of photography. Although now with a digital camera you can see it immediately. I am not complaining about that but I have to train myself not to fall in love with what I just took and put on my computer. Just give it some time. It’s kind of like when you are angry with someone and you want to write a mean letter - before you send it, give it a few days. So that is a kind of wonderful thing about even recent history; you have to give it a little time to become history.
LC: Yeah, absolutely. And there is another part that involves the darkroom. Which I didn’t do with these transparencies; the issue of switching from negative to positive. That’s another drill to add to the mix. I always liked that. And if you are using large format with ground glass, everything is upside down and backwards. Seeing is in your brain not in your eyes. It’s not the lens you are using, it’s your perception.
MM: I remember you described how you felt as a young guy in the city. Borrowing from an old 1964 Roger Miller song, Dang Me- “My Pappy’s a pistol, I’m a son-of-a-gun…” You said, “We were all pistols on fire, New York was ours in the 1970s, so we thought…” That sense of freedom walking around as a young person back during the ‘70s.
LC: Well you know what it’s like, when you are twenty-five and sort of cocky. That song used to be on a ten-inch reel in the darkroom that went on for hours. That’s why I put in the last part- “So we thought…” Now at my age, the things I thought as a kid would become more clarified, are now more muddy. There is no linear way to progress through old age, retirement and complete understanding. You just have to look in at any given stage in your life and see what’s up. So that’s what I was doing when I was twenty-five. Those years in New York during the 1970s were pretty incredible - life was affordable, creative.
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[1] Source: John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
[2] Source: Publication of New York Women in Criminal Justice in collaboration with Prostitution Task Force.
A Girl and Her Scout - Josephine Vandell
The twentieth Century was marked as the age of the machine and a revolution in human history; for the first time human beings partnered with noisy, greasy and powerful machine technology.[1] Josephine Gomez was born October 16, 1921 in Baltimore, to a family that used a motorcycle as transportation. Her father, Luciano Gomez, was born in Spain in 1889 and had apprenticed in his home village to become a cabinetmaker. He saved his money and, like many of his young friends, felt the urge to buy a bicycle, and explore this novel means of transportation. While riding with friends a few days after his purchase, he was shocked to encounter his first motorcycle. Of course he wanted it, but with all his money spent, how could he possibly get his hands on one? America…surely if he went to America, he could afford a motorcycle. He joined the Merchant Marine and traveled the world. At port in Bayonne NJ, a friend with a motorcycle let Luciano take it for a ride. Just as he'd imagined. He jumped ship and settled among other Spanish immigrants living on Cherry Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Suzanne Vandell Quinn, Josephine's daughter, pipes up: “My grandfather was a carpenter and he had a carpentry business on Pearl Street in Manhattan, and he had an Indian with a sidecar. He would come to Staten Island on the ferry and work on building his house by hand. After the house was finished, my grandfather and grandmother moved to Staten Island[2]. Back then, there were very few people on Staten Island. There wasn’t any transportation. They used the motorcycle. They didn’t have a car ‘till many years later.”
Josephine: “My father had the whole family on the motorcycle. I used to ride with my brother in the specially-made sidecar, and my mother rode behind my father. You know, when I lived in the other end of the island, in our neighborhood, we were the only ones with a vehicle, and it was a motorcycle (laughter). Transportation has changed since I was younger. In this part of the island there was no bus… you walked to the train station. My father Luciano Gomez was from Spain. There were many Spanish people living downtown Manhattan around Cherry street. They all had motorcycles. During the summer we’d all go off on our motorcycles, crabbing or something. And on the way we’d stop and somebody would make a fire from twigs, and they would make a paella. In those days we didn’t have refrigeration; we used to cook rice with whatever we coudl find, and snails. Oh, I used to love them.
“There were no maps, no tour guides, nothing. Maybe we had a compass. There was the Lincoln Highway [dedicated Oct. 31, 1913. Ran from Times Square NYC to Lincoln Park in San Francisco]. And there was one road that went from Maine to Florida [The Florida Highway was first built in 1938]. Many parts of those roads were paved. It was a pleasure driving then.
“I was nineteen, twenty-two, twenty-three when I got my first motorcycle. I bought an Indian Scout around 1939. I was the only woman with a motorcycle in my area. Then there were a couple women in the Richmond club [Richmond Motorcycle Club] who had motorcycles. There was a woman named Wanda and she had a motorcycle. This was not a question of being cool. There was no such thing as cool.
“I felt independent… You’d get that breeze… I was so used to that. It was great… That’s how I met my husband. He was in the men’s Richmond Club and I was in the auxiliary. We used to have nice parties. Lombardi had his shop in the back, they had a little shack and we had all our parties there. That’s where I met my husband. It was good clean fun. None of the girls were married but the men were gentlemen. We’d all foxtrot around the floor. It was like a family outing. Beach parties, BBQs.
“It was motorcycles and our sense of transportation. Having fun…there was no issue of bad behavior...no. When I see that place in the Dakotas - Sturgis - when I see those girls on the back of the motorcycles, they are half-dressed, and they have those thongs on their feet, and short shorts, I say, Oh my God, if they ever fall down boy are they gonna be scraped. We all wore boots. Even in the summertime we wore leather jackets. We wore jodhpur horse riding pants.
“We wore Buco leather jackets. We were into style. I paid attention to how I wanted to look. We wore certain clothes that we always wore when we rode. We wore blue cotton pants but they weren’t jeans. There was no such thing as dungarees. Not then. We wore heavy cotton pants.
“This is what my family did. We rode motorcycles. Nobody ever said anything in the neighborhood. In the house I lived in, my father built that house. He’d come every night by motorcycle and dig the foundation by hand. There were no bulldozers… When I was young there wasn’t a lot of money. There wasn’t any transportation in this area. There was a bus we could take to school but it cost a nickel. We didn’t even have a nickel. So we walked. Two miles.
“When we used to go riding, we’d meet up with a dozen motorcyclists. Different kinds of people we wouldn’t usually see. They’d be from a club all going. There was a club from the Bronx and they were a good bunch. There were all different races of people riding in New York. This is how we met each other. As a kid I had a sense of confidence. The motorcycle helped me to have this as a woman. A lot of this confidence was passed to me by my mother. She had been an orphan since she was 13 years old. She had to figure everything out by herself. I learned this independence from my mother. It was a natural thing. I was prepared to take on the world. Whatever I needed to do, I went ahead and did it. I was the only young woman I knew who rode a motorcycle. This helped me be who I am.”
[1] One reason the 20th Century exploded in economic advancement is connected to the automobile. Economists will tell you that when a developing economy introduces the automobile, that economy will double in GDP in ten years.
[2] New York City has five boroughs- Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, Staten Island. Early 20th Century, Staten Island was rural farmland (dairy farms that supplied milk to the city). Underpopulated. It has been referred to as the ‘Forgotten Borough’. Population during Josephine’s day, 1930, was 6,930. By 2020 the population was 495,747. The construction of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge (1959-1964), along with the other three major Staten Island bridges, created a new way for commuters and tourists to travel from New Jersey to Brooklyn, Manhattan, and areas farther east on Long Island.
[3] In 1900, around 130,000 horses worked in Manhattan--more than 10 times the number of taxicabs on the streets of New York City today. A typical city horse produced up to 45 pounds (20 kilograms) of manure and 2 gallons (7.5 liters) of urine a day. Many city horses died young, sometimes in the street. By the early twentieth century, the number of horses in the city began to diminish. Technology, in the form of motor vehicles—cars and trucks, gradually reduced the city's reliance on horsepower. Between 1910 and 1920, the number of horses in the City declined from 128,000 to 56,000.
[4] The baby boom that began after soldiers returned from the war in 1945 was an important demographic shift that occurred during the 1950s; there were more than 70 million births between 1946 and 1964 in the United States. By 1960, an estimated 60 percent of the U.S. population was under age 30. This demographic shift towards youth changed the tone of American culture.
My thanks to Arthur Vandell Jr. (Josephine Vandell’s son), Tim Quinn, and Suzanne Vandell Quinn (Josephine’s daughter, married to Tim), for their generous help with this article, and for the use of treasured family photos. This interview was conducted on 7/25/2014.
Nagoya Kustom Life - The Breezy Biker Camp
Tatsuya Fujii and his Nagoya-based Osu Naka-ku crew were sitting with their bikes in the morning light as he tightened the springs, clutch hub and release disc on a crew member’s ’72 Shovelhead. With the final twist of Tatsuya’s wrench, everyone fired up and pushed off towards the Breezy Biker Camp event located just outside Takashima City. It was a straight-shot 123 Kilometers (76.5 Miles) from Nagoya in Aichi Prefecture to the Makino-Kogen recreational park in neighboring Shiga Prefecture. Tatsuya had rebuilt most of the AMF-era Shovels and XLCH Sportster Iron Heads his young crew rode; no more cylinder head oil pooling, chronic overheating, blown gaskets, bad valves and guides, worse wiring and sheared head bolts. He dropped his rebuilt motors into rigid frames or short stance, high Frisco peanut tank frame set-ups he designed and fabricated. “I been working on these old motors for a while,” Tatsuya said. “I understand the problems and know what they want.”
Last of the Old School - Frank Voto
“I feel an attachment to something like a Shovelhead engine. It goes back to where I started from. After market companies still sell parts for these old engines but they don’t know nothin’ about them. They don’t know how to make them run. I like to change the parts around to make them run better. I put the whole valve train from an Evolution on a Shovelhead. They told me I was dreaming. It couldn’t be done. Oh ya? In that case I am going to make a stroker to boot. So I made a ninety-two incher out of a seventy-four. It was a challenge. I’m dreaming? Don’t think so. Fucking thing purrs like a kitten.” - Frank Voto
My Coney Island Baby
Bob Peterson grew up in Edgewater, New Jersey less than twenty miles from New York City. He remembers as a kid during the early 1960s being intrigued by groups of motorcycle club riders like the Aliens[1] he saw on the highway near his home. The no-frills, chopped-down style of the bikes the Aliens rode was both radical and impressive. They projected a seductive sense of power as they split lanes and blasted through the traffic. He got his motorcycle license and started to learn about the culture of motorcycles.
[3] Coney Island- THE UPS AND DOWNS OF AMERICA'S FIRST AMUSEMENT PARK. PBS 1991
[4] Burton Benedict, The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915. 1983
[5] Joe McKennon, ‘The Pictorial History of the American Carnival’, 1977.
[6] At the time (1911) the New York Times described the new Wall of Death attraction as, ‘the biggest single sensation at Luna Park’.
[8] Ernie Barkman, owner/fabricator of ‘Black Swan’, 1950 Panhead Coney Island style build commenting about the style: “Coney Island MC style- History of an Accessory Expression to Full Dress Harley Davidson motorcycles”:
“Guess you could say it started with adding 2 or 4 extra marker lights for blinkers on your Panhead. That seemed satisfying and you added 4 more hooked for extra brake lights.
Now Joe says that looks great, I’m adding a light bar over my rear license plate, and an extra set of horns. And so it started, more lights, more bling, more chrome, bigger horns, added spot lights. There was no stopping the trend to get more stuff. People made money customizing bikes and trying to out- do the next person. The 57 car style influenced the tail fins seen chrome plated on the rear of these bikes. Rear chrome decks were next making a place for rows of lights, and chrome shift knobs for show. I once seen a guy with rows of motorcycle trophies bolted to the rear of these type shelves on his Panhead. Extended exhausts with tips that resemble rocket ship tail fins. Guys would have over 100 added taillights and AM radios, in fact, I knew a guy with a small portable TV between the handlebars. Speaking of handlebars 18” high with chrome scroll work or a name of the bike in Chrome letters. Seat rails became mounting points for added rails and owners names welded in the seat back, or hearts and other scroll work. Chrome hub caps, some with little lights in the spokes, not to mention wide white wall tires. Custom paint jobs turned into an acid trip of colors and sweet design. Pinstripe went from simple to extravagant with some pretty outlandish shows of the painters talents. You had so many lights you needed a special generator from a police bike with extra amperage. Some guys ran an extra car battery in the saddlebag for the added juice. If two rear view mirrors was good… why not 4 mirrors. Sometimes you would see fox tails off the rear for style. There was no end to the creativity a proud motorcycle owner could muster up! I remember in the 60’s going to hill climbs, and scrambler tracks and looking thru the motorcycles for the big Coney Island Style dressers with my Dad.
So why call them Coney Island Style?"
May the style be with you.”
[9] Custom seat rail fabricated by Ernie Barkman.
Mike's Ride in Rome
As a visitor, when you ride the streets of central Rome for the first time it’s impossible to keep your eyes on the road. The layers of the city run three thousand years deep and demand attention. Soft, pastel earth tone buildings blur into rough, bumpy hundreds of years old gray cobblestone streets that weave around hard-to-believe architectural masterpieces like the Colosseum (72 AD), Piazza Navona (86 AD), the Trevi Fountain (1700s) and the Pantheon (118-28 AD)[1]; these are the literal backbones of Western architectural history, both in their design and remarkable construction.
[1] The most fascinating part of the Pantheon is its giant dome, with its famous hole in the top (The eye of the Pantheon, or oculus). The dome was the largest in the world for 1300 years and to present remains the largest unsupported dome in the world. Its diameter is 43.30 meters (142 ft). [The Romans perfected building with concrete and used it extensively for 700 years, from 300BC to 476AD. As they 'cooked' their slurry with warm seawater and used crushed volcanic rock, their concrete is self-healing and thus much longer-lasting than contemporary concrete - ed.]
[2] Chigi was a banker from Siena known for throwing incredible dinner parties that ended with him asking his quests to throw all the priceless dinnerware out the window into the river as testimony to his wealth. Unknown to his quests, Chigi had nets below the windows to catch the pricy dinnerware.
[3] Apertivo refers to an after-work Roman tradition where bars put out a spread of tasty appetizers for their customers to eat while they are drinking. This early evening meal is one reason why Romans are known to eat their diner late.
[4] “Freni e Frizioni Bar Selection is a Draft Punk project, a beverage research and development company that values innovation and focuses on continuously redefining the product. For us, creative cocktails is synonymous with freedom; we mix and match flavors to create drinks to share with our costumers”.
[5] Riccardo, Manuel, Alessandro, Michele, Christopher, Fabrizio, Alice, Cristian, Silvia and Andrea.
Qun Hung - One Hand Made
Thankfully it doesn’t happen often, but sometimes motorcycle riders go down. In his early twenties while living outside Taipei, Qun Hung was just beginning to explore his interests in racing, modifying sports cars and building custom bikes. One day, while riding to his studio he was slammed by a car and hit the street hard. When he bounced off the pavement, and life as he had known it changed radically. His right hand’s nerve plexus was shattered and the doctors told him he would never again have full use of his right hand and arm. With the help of physical therapy and his dedicated girlfriend (now his wife), Qun got out of bed, literally re-tooled himself and dove back into his building career full force.
Winston Yeh and Rough Crafts Motorcycles
Winston Yeh and his Taipei, Taiwan based Rough Crafts custom motorcycle brand is no longer the new kid on the block of the international custom bike building community. For more than a decade, Winston has repeatedly demonstrated mastery with a series of impressive builds, using a diverse mix of brands and models. He has developed a reputation for his ability to reshape a bike in the distinctive Rough Crafts style: low, blacked-out, and mean machines with a highly finished sophistication. A few of his early head-turner standouts include: His 2009 Guerilla Harley Davidson 883, his 2015 Bavarian Fistfighter BMW R nine T, his 2016 Ballistic Trident MV Agusta Brutale with an innovative fairing, his 2017 Flying Phantom Yamaha XSR700 and his 2018 The Noir King customization of a 2012 Harley Davidson Road King. All these builds share a family resemblance, and were shaped by Winston’s stand-out, unique design style. He will tell you there is significance in his Rough Crafts name: he sees building a bike as a process connecting rough basic materials to the craft required to refine them. The Rough Crafts website features Winston’s builds, and an impressive selection of custom parts.
Jeffrey’s Finishing Touch - Taipei, Taiwan
From an early age during the 1980s Taipei kustom painter Jeffrey Chang was attracted to artistic expression. In school he excelled in art class and developed knowledge and skill with a brush and paint. Unlike in the West where pens and pencils are put into the hands of young students as writing tools; in Taiwan, the brush is the common denominator of graphic communication. Young students are taught how to hold their brush, load it with black ink, then the stroke order needed to reproduce more than fifty-thousand characters in the Mandarin language[1]. The subtlety, complexity and power of black ink (heise moshui) combined with the brush (shuazi) runs deep in Chinese culture.
[2] Von Dutch (Kenneth Howard) was a So/Cal visionary fabricator and artist who is credited with creating the term Kustom Culture in 1949 while working at the Barris Brothers Atlantic Ave., Lynwood hot rod customizing shop. “The first job he (Von Dutch) did for George (Barris) was to paint the sign on the outside of his building. Dutch fooled with the spelling and came up with a ‘K’ instead of a ‘C’ to spell custom. Thus establishing the Barris’ phrase ‘Kustom Car’. Temma Kramer- Hot Rod, 1977. The ‘wise ass’ changing of the C to a K was no simple act. It symbolized the influence of the new California youth demographic to change the course of history.
Miki Rides in Beijing
“Motorcycles can help young people in China find a creative life!” Miki says. She is 26 years old and compact in size but she blasts around Beijing on her Zero Engineering Type 6 with force. The bike’s 92.63ci, air-cooled S&S Shovelhead and Baker 6-speed, combined with the Zero's frame geometry, works for smaller riders like Miki: A rigid Gooseneck frame with a 33.2 degree rake drops the bike to a closer 3.9 inch frame to street and 26 inch seat to street clearance. The classic Zero design Springer front fork and larger 5.00-16 tires reflect a nostalgic history that Miki appreciates. The bike’s 63.0 inch wheel base, 36.6 inch height, and 28.3 inch width frame squeaks through her neighborhood narrow Hutong[1] streets.
Miki uses Google Translate: “I live and work in Beijing,” Miki says. “I am a make-up artist for fashion, video, movie. There is a group of young people like me who also do the creative life and we ride together. My Beijing tattoo artist friend, Zhou Xiaodong (AKA: Dong- Mummy Tattoo) is an example. I live in second ring road Dong Cheng district where life is traditional chuantong open courtyard house style. Everything looks a thousand years old. It was affordable here ten years ago but now it’s difficult. My friends and I work and then we meet up, ride and relax,” Miki continues. “I have been riding a motorcycle for 10 years, and I have ridden other brands of models and favorites. I have never found what I like in my heart. I felt something was wrong, until I met my Zero, I fell in love with it at that first moment. Because I love retro, no matter the design. The style, or the sound of the engine, all I want, retro to the extreme, exquisite to every detail, call it a perfect work!”
The Chinese economy took off during the early 2000s with unprecedented 12% annual GDP growth. Miki, Dong Dong and their friends worked hard to be a part of that new opportunity. Chinese society continues to be closed off from the rest of the world by government filters but young people like Miki use proxy servers to navigate on the Web and see what other young people are doing: The internationalism of fashion, consumerism, trend, style, and a new sense of self that includes motorcycles. If you ride in Beijing, most world bike brands from aggressive, Ninja-style speed machines to up-scale Euro and H-D are now on the streets. During the 1930s-49 the Nationalist Chinese Kuomintang Army rode Indian but sighting one of those is unlikely. The Chang Jiang side car bike had a military history in early Communist China. Today there are urban myth stories about warehouses full of dusty, abandoned 1949-1970s Chang Jiangs. The bikes are not allowed in many areas because of air quality regulations but they are seen on outer-ring Beijing streets. Trendy younger-set kids sneak them on lower ring roads and it’s common to hear their boxer opposing-twin 750 engines blowing smoke on warm summer weekend nights[2].
[1] Hutong refers to the traditional, narrow alleyways that are a part of traditional Beijing neighborhoods.
[2] The Chang Jiang story is a great history lesson in early moto-globalization. First developed in Third Reich Germany during WWII, then after the War to Eastern Germany, then to Russia, then to China.
[3] A hierarchy of age is a part of Chinese culture that is reflected in how people eat and drink. It is impolite to hold a glass above the level of a senior person when toasting. Younger people at the table serve food to the older first. It is impolite for a younger person to commence eating before an older person.
Mark Huang - Building Customs in Taipei
Mark Huang's Learning Curve - Building Custom Motorcycles in Taipei
The semi-tropical island nation of Taiwan might be small but custom motorcycle building in the capital city of Taipei is impressive. Mark Huang (Mark’s Motorcycles) has a noteworthy international reputation, and his work reflects the historical and cultural place of motorcycles in the country[1].
Thank you to my wife, Tzyy Jye for her help translating Mark’s interview.
[1] Two additional builders, Winston Yeh (Rough Crafts) and Qun Hong (One Hand Made) and a kustom painter Jeffrey Chang (Jeffrey’s Finishing Touch) are also key members of the Taiwanese Kustom community. Their work will be explored in future articles.
[2] Why are there so many scooters in Taiwan? David Wu 2019. In-depth analysis about the economics and culture of motorcycles in Taiwan.
[3] The Cost-Insurance-Freight (CIF) Import tariff of 24%, harbor charge of 0.0415%, Commodity tax of 17%. When you see a foreign bike parked on the street in Taipei, it represents an expensive proposition.
[4] The minimum age to drive a car in Taiwan is 18 as well as light and medium motorbikes (49cc to 249cc). The minimum age to ride large motorbikes (250cc-550cc and bigger) is 20 years old.
[5] It is estimated today that 50% of Harley Davidson Knucklehead engines are in Japan. The Knucklehead was manufactured from 1936-1947.
[6] In the United States the Kustom Kulture movement took decades to formalize into something tangible. Originally in Southern California the exploding post-WWII youth population refashioned old throw-away cars and bikes into new creative statements. Today in Taiwan, the youth population does not have the power to reshape public opinion about the creative potential of customizing.