Motorcycling is such a male-dominated activity that it’s typical for riders to cite a father, an uncle, an older brother, a male friend, or some other man who sparked their interest in motorcycles or helped them get started riding. My case is a little different.
My father had no real interest in motorcycles. My mother had an intermittent but long-term enthusiasm for riding. It started by accident, took a mid-life intermission, and returned after one of the charming episodes of my parents’ lifelong love affair.
I’ve written before about how, in 1967, as I was entering second grade, my father went to grad school at the University of South Carolina to finish his master’s degree. My mother took the one family car and went to work. My father just wanted the cheapest possible transportation to get across the city to classes. Back then, that was a Honda 50 (called the Cub elsewhere in the world, and more than 100 million have been produced in history), which he bought new for $245. He rode that scooter for a year and then we moved to Florida. He went back to work in the family car and hardly ever threw a leg over a motorcycle again.
Living in South Daytona, now a stay-at-home Mom, my mother decided that if she didn’t want to be a stuck-at-home Mom, she would have to learn to ride the Honda 50. It was super easy, after all. No clutch to deal with. Soon she was taking my sister to kindergarten on the back of the scooter. She got a temporary job working for the 1970 Census and made her rounds on the Honda.
My mother had a rebellious streak, and she enjoyed the “differentness” of riding a motorcycle, even if it was just a 50 cc scooter that barely topped 35 mph. That rebellious streak was held in check, however, by attitudes molded by a fairly strict and traditional upbringing as the oldest of eight children in a poor farming family. After two years in Florida, we moved back to our native West Virginia and both my parents went back to work as high school teachers. Blame it on the image born in Hollister, California, or in the exploitative movies it spawned, but she felt riding around on a motorcycle wasn’t the right image for a teacher in a small town and the Honda got parked in a shed. For years, she made her biggest impact, molding hundreds of high school students, but she didn’t ride.
My first solo rides were on that step-through 50, before I was old enough to have a driver’s license, just riding out and back our rural, unpaved driveway. At 18, I bought my first motorcycle of my own and I was the sole motorcyclist in the family for a while.
Then came the best part. Many years later, after my mother stopped teaching, my father knew she’d enjoy riding and he also knew she’d never go buy a motorcycle for herself, so for her 59th birthday he bought her a Suzuki GN125. My sister and I were skeptical. My father knew basically nothing about motorcycles. Nobody consulted me, though I felt I was the closest thing to a family expert that we had.
But my father knew what he was doing, or at least he knew my mother. She loved riding that little motorcycle around the not-even-two-lane country roads near their home.
After she retired from teaching, my mother worked as a proofreader for a couple of companies. In this clipping from the Chemical Abstracts Services company newsletter, she was the only woman in the photo on Ride to Work Day. Image from CAS newsletter.
Then it was my turn to boost her motorcycling involvement to the next level. When the first AMA Women and Motorcycling Conference was announced at the campus of my alma mater, Ohio University, I registered her as a birthday gift. Inspired by seeing and meeting so many accomplished women riders, she vowed that by the time the next conference rolled around, two years later, she would have a highway-capable motorcycle she could ride there. By then, I was working at the AMA and worked the conference as staff. Beforehand, I helped her buy a Suzuki GS500E and she kept her promise to herself, riding it to Buckhannon, West Virginia, to be among fellow women riders as she felt she should be, on two wheels.
My mother’s second motorcycle was this Suzuki GS500E. She didn’t own it long, but she used it to fulfill her pledge to herself to ride to the second AMA Women and Motorcycling Conference.
The GS500 eventually was sold to the son of a friend and she made an impulse purchase of a used Suzuki GZ250 (more manageable for her with its lower seat height). She explained to me that she saw it sitting by the road for sale and felt sorry for it.
She kept riding into her mid 70s, but at some point she no longer felt comfortable and she quietly stopped. I sold the GZ250 for her and after my father died I took in the GN125 and fixed it up, to keep it a running, living member of the family. Later, I passed it down to the next generation.
In 2001, my mother and I get ready to take a short ride together. I’m on my 1997 Triumph Speed Triple and she’s on her 1996 Suzuki GN125. Many other motorcycles have come and gone since, but these two are still in the family. Photo by Ivonne García.
My mother stopped riding but she never stopped looking at every motorcycle that passed by. Every time she met someone who rides she would be sure to let them know she used to, as well. She would show photos of herself with one of her motorcycles to the new friends she made when we moved her to Maine last year to be close to my sister. She still reveled in being a woman who rode, something uncommon in her time and unthinkable for a little girl growing up in a poor and traditional family in rural West Virginia.
My mother died suddenly and unexpectedly last Sunday morning. Her heart gave out, in a physical sense, though in a figurative sense, she never lost heart. In very much the same way, though she stopped riding a motorcycle at some point, she never stopped thinking of herself as a motorcycle rider.
The pin my mother got at the 2002 AMA Women and Motorcycling Conference was one of her personal belongings we sorted through.
A wonderful tribute. My condolences for your loss.