Publisher Description

Take an exhilarating ride through the history of the American bike, biker, and the biker nation in this fascinating and comprehensive chronicle of the biker era and today's ever-expanding legion of motorcycle enthusiasts. Impassioned, idiosyncratic, and razor sharp, Born to Be Wild traces a century's worth of the culture, the bikers, and the bikes themselves. Who are these bikers? Are they those hard-living, leather-clad, tattooed guys often associated with images of the Hells Angels and Satan's Sinners? Or are they those clean-cut, suit-and-tie wearing riders with the sporty helmets you pass on your daily commute? In fact, they are both, for what began as a subculture of misfits and outlaws has grown into a flourishing society of men and women who celebrate the freedom of the open road and the brotherhood they find among bike enthusiasts of all stripes. Today's biker has evolved from the rough-and-tumble antihero to a vast and vibrant biker culture populated by a new breed of rider including the RUBs, or Rich Urban Bikers, and championed by everyone from titans of industry like the late Malcolm Forbes to media celebrities like Jay Leno.And while elements of rebellion still remain intrinsic to the biker mystique, the culture has in fact expanded to include a plethora of riders from the American mainstream -- doctors, lawyers, and executives -- who love the freedom they find on their bikes and the camaraderie they find with their fellow devotees. It is also a multibillion-dollar industry that draws hundreds of thousands of participants and spectators to its annual events. Born to Be Wild, written by motorcycle journalist Paul Garson and the editors of Easyriders magazine, captures as never before the spirit and evolution of the biker era. Beginning in 1895, Born to Be Wild traces the development of the modern bike, with special attention to Harley-Davidson's supreme contributions to the quality of the machines as well as the aesthetics of biker society. Featuring numerous fascinating sidebars that highlight the particular characteristics of the culture, the book also explores the socio-political events that have culminated in the great biker nation that we know today.With more than two hundred photographs of bikes and bikers across the decades, Born to Be Wild is a definitive work that will open readers' eyes to a thriving society, one whose celebration of freedom and the open road precisely reflects what is best about our country as a whole.

Author Biography

Paul Garson is a twenty-year veteran of motorcycle journalism. The author of over a thousand articles on biking, he has published work in more than fifty magazines, including Easyriders. The first editor of Hot Bike, Garson is the former Editor-in-Chief of VQ. In partnership with Jim Lensveld, he published Harley-Davidson: Factory and Custom Dream Machines. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Table of Contents

Contents Introduction Welcome to the Brotherhood Chapter One The Prehistoric Biker: 1895-1946 Chapter Two Hollister, Roswell, and a Brave New Bro's World: 1947 Chapter Three Don't Bogart That Bike: The Late 1940s and On into the Eisenhower Years Chapter Four One-Percenters vs. the "Nicest People": The 1950s Chapter Five Dressers vs. Choppers: The 1960s Chapter Six Tora! Tora! Tora! The 1970s Chapter Seven Harley-Davidson Reclaimed: The 1980s Chapter Eight Harley Rules (and the Ruler Ain't Metric): The 1990s Chapter Nine "We Saw the Future, and It Was Ours" Bibliography Books We Thumbed Through to Write This Book

Excerpt from Book

1895-1946: The Prehistoric Biker History is what the winners say happened. In this case, the winner was Harley-Davidson. The Milwaukee Marvel alone survived the Hundred Years'' War, a century of innovation and most often extinction. Scattered across the scrapyard battlefields of the first few decades of the twentieth century, you could count the rusting steel bones of around three hundred different American motorcycle manufacturers. Well, let''s call them motorcycle builders, since some built only a handful, literally. So where have they all gone? We gave these machines names -- colorful, even memorable names like Apache, Argyle, Black Diamond, Buckeye, Comet, Crouch, Duck (put the latter two together and it described what pedestrians found themselves doing when the spindly things came blatting around the corner on a muddy dirt road) -- and so personified them, glamorized them. Then there were the Dusenberg, Elk, Hemingway, Herring, Kokomo, Mack, Marvel, Flying Merkel, Nelk (an Elk relative?), Pansy (don''t go there), Pirate, P-T (don''t pity its passing), Ruggles, Schickel (not the gruber model), Thiem (remember them?), Thor, Torpedo (yep, it sank from sight), and you certainly can''t forget (or pronounce) the Twombly. Built from the late 1890s to roughly 1915, these bikes were all brilliant glints in the eyes of their creators and if found today are regarded still as brilliant, and valuable, jewels. And they do occupy a special niche in a Bro''s left ventricle, because they''re part of the family, the lineage, the bloodline that holds it all together. Only a silver spoke driven through the carburetor of an old bike can kill it, but its memory can never be done away with. It was the best of times and the worst of times, technologically speaking, these early spawning years when bicycles met the internal combustion machine and evolved seemingly overnight into motorcycles. The early motorcycle gene pool was afroth with great experimentation and mutation, during a time when blacksmiths and shade tree mechanics and teenage tinkerers conjured up chimeras of two-wheeled locomotion, as often as not H. G. Wells chitty chitty bang bangs that ran on a wild assortment of fuels: kerosene, steam, gasoline, moonshine, you name it. No multimillion-dollar R & D facilities required, no patents, no DMV rule books, no smog certificates, and no limits. It was a wild, open time, when inventors and dreamers harkened to the Gold Rush Fever of motorcycling. A Brief but Somewhat Tweaked History of Davidson-Harley Time Most people call them Harleys. But if you read the chrome strip on the tank it says, "Harley-Davidson." What if you had a twin brother named George and your name was Spivey, and people always called both of you George? Well, maybe that would be a good thing. But there''s no mistaking a Harley-Davidson for anything else, unless you''re one of those uninformed types that say, Hey, all those V-twins look alike to me. So maybe it''s time to get the names straight relative to the guys that started the whole ball of wax rolling about a hundred years ago. Their first prototype bike appeared in 1903, then further developed and eventually sold in 1904 as the "Silent Gray Fellow," a 475-cc, single-cylinder model that would set precedents echoing down to this day. But it was a couple years earlier, in 1901, when William "Bill" Harley and Arthur "Art" Davidson, aged only twenty and twenty-two respectively, started banging away, mixing together little motors and bicycles. While they kept their day jobs, they spent weekends and nights in the little old laboratory, or should we say shed. One of their early accomplishments was a rude form of a carburetor fashioned from a tomato can, something that almost turned Mrs. Davidson''s kitchen into Chernobyl. Bill''s dad built the ten-by-fifteen-foot shed in the backyard. So with the Davidsons building the "factory" and supplying the real estate, not to mention the tomato can, how come they didn''t put their name first? In any case, Bill Harley was handy with the pencil, a draftsman and the actual designer of the earliest bikes, so maybe he deserves first billing. His 1907 design for the springer front end was part of the package for many years, all the way to the first-year Panheads. A few bikes got sold, and with sales came expansion, so the new H-D company nailed some more buildings together. Not exactly monolithic structures, one was literally picked up and moved by eight Bros when it was learned that the structure infringed on some railroad right-of-way. Five years into their efforts, Bill Harley and the Davidsons were pumping out around 450 bikes. Yet another brother, Walt Davidson, was coaxed into joining up. In 1909 he garnered some good press when he squeezed 188 miles to the gallon from a single-cylinder Harley-Davidson during a Long Island Reliability Run. Reliability became associated with the new company''s machines, and H-D began sharing the limelight with Indian, which had been founded in 1901. As a result police motor patrolmen became customers and fostered more sales. By 1912 the Harley-Davidson Motor Co. of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, employed almost five hundred workers, production having been spurred in 1909 by the introduction of their trademark forty-five-degree V-twin-powered bikes producing 7 horsepower and capable of 60 mph. Further glory, press, and sales were garnered when a factory rider clocked the then blazing 68 mph at a Bakersfield, California, road race. Wins at the racetracks, then and today, translate to winning sales from the public. As a result H-D created its own R & D skunk works, designing and building purpose-built racers and prototypes to go against the likes of Indian, Excelsior, Cyclone, and the Flying Merkel. Spearheading the attack was the Model 17, usually referred to as the Eight Valve because it featured four valves per cylinder. That number of valves, a common enough configuration today, provided for better engine breathing (yes, they are alive!), enabling the fearsome Model 17 to grunt out close to fifty fire-breathing horses in 1916, the same year Henry Ford built 500,000 cars and dropped his price to $250. Keep in mind that a 1913 Pope (Hartford, Connecticut) V-twin had a price tag of $250. Some twenty years later H-D would build one of its most beloved motorcycles, the 1936 Knucklehead. (We''ll get to the nicknames in a minute.) The factory built a monster Knuck to race at Daytona Beach, Florida, a name now synonymous with March''s Bike Week (and maybe with Biketoberfest in October). They fitted the works racer with full aluminum streamlining, stuffed in Lightning cams and gear wheels, bolted dual over-and-under carbs, and let ''er rip, to the tune of 65 hp, and it cleaned house. The racing glory mantle would later be passed on to the legendary KR 750 flathead (1952-1968), which battled the Brit and European bikes on the road race circuits. Occasionally an oddity migrated out into the dealer''s showroom; for example, the 1919 Sport Model W, with its BMW horizontally opposed engine layout at complete odds with the traditional H-D vertical and V-twin designs. The Model W had one cylinder facing the front wheel, the other pointing rearward. The sewing-machine-smooth-running 584-cc (37-cubic-inch) power plant combined with a weight of 257 pounds allowed this scooter to set some impressive long-distance records. In June 1919, a Model E blitzed from the Canadian border to the Mexican border in a tick shy of sixty-five hours, and that was on roads more aptly called dirt ruts in the summer, mud bogs in the winter. But the competition in the form of the better-selling Indian Scout spelled the demise of the Harley Sport Model. Weird didn''t sell, and the Suits at the Factory clamped the lid on nontraditional designs, although another boxer motor did appear during World War II, when the War Department wanted a motorcycle for courier work that resembled the vaunted BMW of the German Wehrmacht. But it barely saw the light of day even then. From that war, however, the new generation of bikers would emerge. Hardened by the global conflict, disenchanted, perhaps disenfranchised from mainstream America, they would be the pathfinders for the Bros to follow. The Name Game Let''s get the Founding Fathers'' names right for starters. They were William A. Davidson, Walter Davidson, Sr., Arthur Davidson, and William S. Harley. Like we said, heavy on the Davidsons, light on the Harleys, but who knew? Can we all say Schebler? After 1909 that tomato-can-inspired carburetor was replaced with a more refined design, the Schebler. Of course, now we have carbs with more easily pronounceable names, like Weber, S & S, and Mikuni. And Now for Motor Mnemonics We like to give ships and planes names. Remember the Lusitania and the Enola Gay for example. So it''s no wonder Bros conjured up monikers for the various engine configurations generated by the Factory. The intrinsic uniqueness of each evolutionary step lent itself to such personification. In the beginning there was the Flathead. Simple enough, the top of the cylinders were flat, like the world, right? The 45-inch motors were used in both the solo and the three-wheeled Harleys during the 1940s. (There was also a K model 45-inch Flathead that eventually begat the famous Sportster model.) The early 80-cubic-inches also were "flatheads." The next evolution appeared in 1936 in the form of 61- and 74-cubic-inch power plants. Because the new overhead valve motor had the look of a clenched fist, with the rocker covers forming the knuckles, it took on the appellation of Knucklehead. Retaining the OHV form, the next generation of motor designs

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