MALCOLM’S MOMENTS

PART THREE THE LAMBRETTA

An Italian scooter opens my eyes to the wonderful world of motorcycling

BY MALCOLM SMITH

It is easily the great irony of my life…the story of me wanting that very first motorcycle to fix but not actually to ride, as I had no real interest in riding at first. Folks simply can’t believe I got into motorcycles for mechanical and not adrenaline-based reasons.

It all happened one afternoon as I walked home from school and passed a house that had what looked like a basket-case scooter sitting next to a box of parts in the driveway. It was a Powell scooter: American-made and sorta clunky, with a four-stroke engine and centrifugal clutch…probably a collector’s item now. And so, intrigued by the idea of making that carcass actually function, I asked the guy working in the garage about it.

He wanted $50, and I set about earning the money as fast as I could, mowing lawns, selling painted cattails,

whatever I could do. A couple weeks later I went back with money in hand, but he’d changed his mind, which nearly crushed me.

Mom, of course, came to the rescue, taking me to a shop called Valley Cycle in San Bernardino, where we spied a 125cc Lambretta scooter that’d been on the floor a while and was discounted to about $300, if I remember correctly. That was a lot of money back then, and I still don’t remember how she was able to afford it.

Once the manager discovered I was a rookie rider he rolled the bike into the alley, put me on the front seat, sat behind me, and showed me the basics. He rode me around for a while, and then let me try it. I got the hang of it pretty quickly, and soon we were on our way home with the Lambretta in the trunk of our ’49 Lincoln sedan.

For me, everything changed the minute we pulled into the driveway. Suddenly, making something run wasn’t as big a deal for me; suddenly, I could go places. And on my own! Looking at that Lambretta in the driveway, I got that feeling, one all riders know and remember, especially at the very beginning of their motorcycling career — a feeling of freedom. Now I could visit all those interesting places I could see from my house. I didn’t need a ride to get there, or to ride my bicycle, or hike it. It was all out there, waiting for me to discover.

I’d always loved the mountains, the hiking and fishing and camping and exploring, and now I could experience it all firsthand, on my own schedule, and in my own way. Suddenly, everything had opened up for me. I was very, very excited, even if my mother’s friends weren’t. “Betty,” they asked, “you got him a motorcycle?” She seemed ok with it, even though she never really talked much about her motorcycling son until after On Any Sunday came out years later. I, of course, was completely over the moon. I remember that first trip into the mountains like it was yesterday. Just behind our house was a trail that led to a floodcontrol dike, which in turn led to other trails that ran high into the foothills. The Lambretta made it up there pretty easily, and within ten or fifteen minutes I was a couple of miles and a few thousand feet above the valley, looking down on my neighborhood. I was King of the Valley!

Usually it’d take an hour or more to get this high, hiking or pushing a bicycle with my buddies. But here I was, in just a few minutes…and suddenly, the whole motorcycling thing made sense. I’m sure I became a lifelong rider in that moment. Freedom. Adventure. Amazing! Up until a few years ago I used to ride up there occasionally to poke around and find some of my old trails. I enjoyed seeing where it all started for me. I still think about what I might have done with my life if I hadn’t gotten into motorcycles.

Very soon had a partner in crime, too — my buddy John

Above: Scooters and go karts opened up a new world for me and my friends, and we did just about everything we could on and to and with them — and much of it was dangerous in the extreme. But eventually we lusted — me especially — over what we called real motorcycles like Mike Christensen’s BSA (top). That’s me on the trash can.

MALCOLM’S MOMENTS

“Bony” Moreland, who lived a few blocks away, and whose parents had gotten him a Lambretta much like mine. Suddenly, it was on. Moreland and I rode everywhere together, and raced each other everywhere we went, the testosterone flowing like snow melt down the hillsides. Every trip to the dikes was a sprint race; every run through the orange groves a TT; every run up into the hills a motocross or hillclimb.

We rode fast and crazy — and at times even a little out of control. But little by little we learned the skills of throttle control, traction feel, balance, body English and effective braking. We’d race each other on the fire roads up in the foothills, each of us cutting down between the switchbacks to gain an advantage over one another.

We discovered we could launch our scooters from ramps and fly into the air, just as we’d done on our bicycles. And once we learned that the only tires we could get for the Lambrettas at the time were street tires (no one made small versions of the knobbies we so admired on real off-road motorcycles), I figured out a way to attach screw-in discarded football cleats on our tires without puncturing the inner tube. The cleated tire was almost totally devoid of traction on pavement, but on soft dirt they were magic!

Once, while riding through an orange grove with Moreland in tow, I hit a wire that had been strung between two trees, obviously by an orchard owner who didn’t like the idea of two crazy kids using his grove as a makeshift TT course. I wasn’t going all that fast at the time, and luckily, the wire didn’t catch me on the neck, which could have crushed my larynx and killed me. It yanked me off the bike in an instant. Still, it was a good lesson: Not everyone was as crazy about motorcycles as we were.

And it was about to get even crazier. More to come next month…

This isn’t the exact Lambretta I owned, but it’s identical in year, spec and color. My son Alexander picked it up for me years ago, and I love looking at it these days. Above: Cousins Genevieve and JoAnne would visit during the summer.