She hung with her daddy’s custom Softail all day in the blistering sun. Her bikini matched the color of the scooter. Nice bike, I think.
I’m not sure where to start. Last weekend was a heat wave whirlwind of seven hour plane rides, two hour putts on a 113 inch Ultra, good hearted people on roads of which I never knew the names of. The photos you see here from the Run for Breath and the Smoke-Out are all from Paul Davis, a Bikernet Correspondent and master mechanic at Harley-Davidson of Charlotte. He’s also an avid Buell fanatic and resource. In one weekend we attended two events and a couple of parties. The weather was a mild 100 degrees with matchin’ humidity that even Hawaiian shirts wouldn’t help. The Run For Breath is a American Lung Association charity Poker Run established by Mike Pullin as a tribute to his Son who died of Asthma complication four years ago. One of the most memorable and moving aspects of the event was the cemetery run to pay tribute to his son Justin. It strikingly brought home the meaning and dedication for this event. This is the second time I attended this event as the proud Grand Marshall. I was proud to be rumbling along on the custom Softail the guys from Cycle Sorcery were kind enough to loan me for the weekend, while the Charlotte Police gave escort to the pack. Okay, goddamnit, let’s get to the news in which I’ll scatter some shots from the Smoke-Out, a wild event sponsored by the HORSE, and the Run For Breath which was sponsored by Bikernet, Harley-Davidson of Charlotte, the Booze Fighters M/C and Ben’s V-Twin just to name a few:
Helen Wolf and her son Garrett.
Northwest Correspondent Checks In
My son Garrett just called me. Says everything’s fine and the XT-250 is running great – “It’s Japanese” my son jibes. He’s in Wheatland, WY and about to head east on a little road 160. He got wet yesterday and hid out in a campground bathroom until it passed. He’s been dodging the bad weather systems and for the most part staying dry. He’s got a brown coated canvas coat he wears all the time.?
He’s got a tent and a sleeping bag, food and maps in his backpack. I asked if he has been taking pictures and he said he does have a couple of disposables – one already used. He’s been taking pictures of his bike in front of things. I asked him to have someone take pictures of him too. Hasn’t been making many acquaintences, tho. Says he travels maybe 12 hours a day, probably eight actually moving. Putts about 35-40 mph.
He left on July 18th from Tacoma, WA and went to the X-games on Hood River, OR. From there he went to Gilroy, CA and the coast. Next time he checked in with me he was in Carson City, NV on?August 2nd. Now he’s in Wheatland, WY and heading to Sturgis, ETA tonight or tomorrow.
He’ll turn 21 on August 15th, so I hope he’s home for that. Apparently the weather is fantastic east of Wheatland. Sturgis may see some T-storms on Monday and Tuesday, but the temps will be in the high ninety’s all week long there. Looks like he’ll have a good trip home. I looked up weather forecasts for him into next week for his possible route home. He’s avoiding the interstates as much as possible, just staying on country roads.
–Helen
This was one of the cleanest customs of the weekend and a winner during the Run For Breath Competition. It was home built by a member of the Booze Fighters M/C.
Sick Husband Saga
The sick husband was laying on his death bed. He had only hours to live when he suddenly smelled tamales. He loved tamales more than anything else in the world, especially his wife Chepa’s tamales which were known through out the land as “Lo mejor de lo mejor.” (The best of the best)
With his last bit of energy, the sickly husband pulled himself out of bed, across the floor, down the stairs and into the kitchen. Here, his wife was spreading the masa for a new batch of tamales. As he reached for one of the freshly steamed tamales, he got SMACKED across the back of his hand by the wooden spoon his wife was holding.
“Leave them alone, pendejo! she said, “They’re for the funeral!”.
–from Bob T.
Okay, so I can’t resist the touch of a woman. A Run For Breath Cutie, just can’t seem to remember her name.
Bikernet Reports From NASA–
When NASA was preparing for the Apollo Project, they did some astronaut training on a Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona.
One day, a Navajo Elder and his son were herding sheep and came across the space crew. The old man, who spoke only Navajo, asked a question which his son translated. ” What are these guys in the big suits doing? ”
A member of the crew said they were practicing for their trip to the Moon.
The old man got all excited and asked if he could send a message to the Moon with the astronauts.
Recognizing a promotional opportunity for the spin-doctors, the NASA folks found a tape recorder.
After the old man recorded his message, they asked the son to translate it.
So the NASA reps brought the tape to the reservation where the rest of the tribe listened and laughed but refused to translate the Elder’s message to the Moon.
Finally, the NASA crew called in an official government translator. He reported that the Moon message said, “Watch out for these f——s: they have come to steal your land!”
Will Harley-Davidson Hit the Wall?
It redefined the motorcycle industry as it roared through 16 years of growth. But as its customers age–and the stock market slides–the ride could get uneasy. By John Helyar
Wearing black leather and riding huge Harleys, a motorcycle gang thunders through northern Georgia as if en route to a rumble. But the only rumble for this gang–the Atlanta Harley Owners Group (HOG)–is the one in their stomachs. It’s another Sunday ride in the country for the group, and as usual it ends with a feast. “We live to ride, and we ride to eat,” says club assistant director B.K. Ellis, a systems analyst.
Ellis is one of 55 HOG members on the outing, mostly white-collar types with secret lives as bikers–and total devotion to their Harleys. “It’s the imagery, the mystique,” says Ellis. The group was gearing up for a huge national rally of HOG chapters in July: 20,000 owners were expected to ride into Atlanta for a three-day party to mark the start of Harley-Davidson’s 100th anniversary celebration. Some would be hard-core guys with big tattoos and bad tempers, the sort who once typified the Harley customer. But most would be playing hooky from $78,000-a-year jobs (the average salary of today’s Harley customer), riding $16,000 motorcycles (the typical cost of Harley’s biggest bike, a cruiser), and pledging fealty to an open-road cult that doubles as a $4-billion-a-year company.
This is the motorcycle world that Harley-Davidson has reinvented, one that seems–and is–a century removed from the Milwaukee shed where William Harley and Andrew Davidson first collaborated in 1903. Harley today has more to do with fraternity than with machinery. You buy a Harley, you join a ready-made motorcycle gang: the 600 U.S. HOG chapters, operated under the dealers’ aegis. Style is as important as speed. On dealers’ floors, leather-draped mannequins can outnumber the bikes. Harley has artfully parlayed the romance of the road and the independence of the biker to capture baby-boomers. Its core customers have reprised their 1960s rebelliousness with a product that bespeaks their 1990s success.
By selling a lifestyle while competitors sold mere motorcycles, Harley left others in the dust for leadership in the most lucrative segment of the market, the big cruiser bike. It has a 45% share in the U.S., vs. Honda’s 23%. Harley hasn’t built better bikes than its four main Japanese competitors–it once had persistent quality problems–but it has built a far better brand. It licenses its logo to more than 100 manufacturers, which gives the company ubiquitous exposure. It fosters the HOG clubs, which are rolling convoys of free advertising. So even though it sells a niche product, Harley consistently ranks among the ten best-known American brands, in the company of Coca-Cola and Disney.
Harley also ranks among America’s top growth stocks since its 1986 IPO. Its 37% average annual gain runs just behind the 42% pace of another ’86 debutante: Microsoft. While the earnings of so many other companies have gone into the tank, there’s still plenty of gas in Harley’s. During the first half of 2002 net profits rose 27%, to $264 million, on an 18% gain in revenues, to $1.9 billion.
Yet even as Harley is posting those robust results and beginning its centennial bash, some of its key growth engines are sputtering. Its customer base has grayed, as the average age of a Harley rider has risen from 38 to 46 in the past decade. Moreover, customers’ ardor may be cooling along with the economy. “It’s an upper-middle-class toy,” says Chad Hudson of the Prudent Bear fund, one of a number of prominent short-sellers convinced that Harley will skid. “As people run out of disposable income, that’s going to hurt.”
Plenty of people who make and ride motorcycles would savor the comeuppance of Harley, despite all it has done for the industry. When Harley accelerated out of near bankruptcy in the mid-1980s, it revived the whole motorcycle industry. Following 15 long years of decline, it has now had 11 straight years of sales growth. Yet old-schoolers still can’t forgive Harley for its introduction of yuppie poseurs and high-style duds. To them, it’s a company of fancy-pants bean counters and marketers, with the only remnant of the old Harley being vice president of styling William G. Davidson, grandson of the co-founder, biker to the core, and known to all as Willie G.
Willie G. dismisses the charge without quite denying it. “There’s a lot of beaners, but they’re out on the motorcycles, which is a beautiful thing,” he says, noting that he recently co-led a national rally of Canadian HOG groups with Harley’s top suit, CEO Jeff Bleustein. He isn’t exactly of biker stock, being a former engineering professor at Yale. But Bleustein made his mark as Harley’s chief engineer, leading an engine redesign that ended chronic problems like oil leaks.
Harley’s appeal still lies more in image than in performance, however, and fashion-driven companies are vulnerable to changes of fashion and generation. The future of Harley’s business is in Gen Xers and Yers, not exactly the forte of a company attuned to baby-boomers’ rhythms and values. Naturally the boomers’ kids want to ride anything but the old man’s model. They’re drawn to machines that are the anti-Harley. American sales of light sport bikes, aimed at 25- to 34-year-old men, increased 90% from 1998 to 2001. Suzuki, Honda, Yamaha, and Kawasaki have a combined 92% of that market. The 114,000 bikes sold in the category still pale beside the 262,000 in Harley’s cruiser segment. But the youth of America have spoken. They prefer sleeker, sportier machines than the Harley hog, and Harley’s brass had better listen.
The company needs to make inroads with today’s twentysomething bikers because of the dearth of thirtysomething ones. The prime age for motorcycle customers is 35 to 44, according to Donald Brown, a consultant to the industry. Brown says this age group’s numbers began to decline in 1999 and will continue to do so through 2016. Since Harley can’t replace all its boomer customers from a limited pool of busters, it must reach deeper than before into the youth market. The result, says Brown: “It will have to compete more head-on with the Japanese.”
Give Harley credit for not burying its head in the sand, as the Japanese did when they were atop the market in the early 1980s. They wrote off a near-bankrupt Harley, failed to respond to its resurgence, and then ceded to it the boomers and cruisers. That won’t happen at Harley, vows Bleustein. His message to a national meeting of 650 dealers in July: “The only thing that can stop us is if we get complacent. Even though we’ve been successful, we can’t stand still.”
To that end, Harley has poured money into developing new, youth-oriented models. The $17,000 Harley V-Rod–a low-slung, high-powered number known formally as a sport performance vehicle and colloquially as a crotch rocket–is meant for hard-charging youths. Harley has also tried to go young with the Buell Firebolt ($10,000), its answer to Japanese sport bikes, and the Buell Blast ($4,400), a starter motorcycle. But Buell, a subsidiary Harley bought in 1998, has captured just 2% of the sport-bike market, and Harley will make only 10,000 V-Rods this year. Bleustein insists that those numbers aren’t the point: “These aren’t one-shot deals. These are whole new platforms from which many models will proliferate.”
Making changes is tricky for a company with Harley’s cult following: They risk alienating current customers. The V-Rod’s water-cooled engine is a big departure from Harley’s traditional air-cooled one, and to some uneasy riders a portent of additional unwelcome changes to come. “If they ever do anything with that [roaring] sound, they’ve lost their customer base,” says B.K. Ellis.
Harley has designed its year-long, ten-city 100th-anniversary bash to appeal to both the old riders it has long satisfied and the new riders it needs. On the first day of Atlanta’s party, the HOG clubs were to mingle and get their first look at the anniversary models. On the weekend Harley would invite the public to its Open Road Tour, featuring country singer Tim McGraw and other draws for nonbikers. The company was hoping for daily weekend crowds of 40,000 to 50,000. But it had never staged anything like this and was counting on a whole lot of people having a whole lot of curiosity about Harley–plus a whole lot of cash to pay $55 a ticket.
The people who catch Harley fever will be directed to a hometown dealer. Many offer Rider’s Edge courses for novices. Bleustein began the program two years ago because he felt that lots of people were interested in motorcycling but intimidated by the bikes. About half the Rider’s Edge graduates are women. Harley’s proportion of woman customers has about doubled in the past decade, to 9%, partly because the company required dealers to transform their grimy bike shops into retail emporiums. Dealers who reaped the benefits of directives like that seem confident that the company can keep reinventing itself. “They’ve done an awful lot to be forward-thinking,” says Chris Houghton of Harley-Davidson in Atlanta.
Yet privately, some dealers worry. The customer waiting list for new motorcycles has shrunk from as much as two years to a matter of months. Dealer premiums that used to range between $2,000 and $4,000 have disappeared for most models. Dealers are grateful the company is playing the centennial to the hilt. But the question, says a dealer, is “What’s going to happen in 2004?” The answer: Harley must get ahead of the demographic curve with new customers while somehow keeping faith with its fanatical old ones. If it doesn’t, the born-to-be-wild company will begin its second century with profit growth that is doomed to be mild.
–from Rogue
Editor’s note. We have always been a country of new beginnings and better mousetraps. It was the American Way until recently when CNN and others began to point out the flaws in any success story. I would like to think that the above missed the point.
The young rider will come because Harley-Davidson represent something entirely unique in our society of products–freedom. Harleys will always represent freedom and the outlaw spirit to the young and old.
The wild custom bike represented at the Smoke-Out were in flat-black contrast with the newer scoots at the Run For Breath. Whether flat black or adorned with 40 coats of pearl urethane, they were all cool.
Words of Whiskey
When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading. –Henny Youngman
Quick, Don’t Miss Mike’s Party In Sturgis
The reception for “Bikes, People, Attitude – Motorcycle Art by Ness, Mann, Jacobs, Uhl and Lichter” will be Tuesday, August 6th from 4 – 8pm at The Journey Museum in Rapid City, SD. The show will feature ten custom motorcycles by Arlen Ness, original paintings by David Mann, Scott Jacobs and David Uhl and photography by Mike Lichter and is timed for the peak of bike week. There has never been a group of original paintings like this on display before. Most people are only familiar with reproductions but you can see the real thing thanks to the many collectors who have loaned the originals to the museum (Many thanks to John Parham, Mike Corbin, Joe Teresi and many others.)
We believe there will be a big turn out for this event based on last year’s response. Discovery Channel will be there filming as Arlen Ness rides his original custom into the gallery. This is a bike that was loaned back from the Oakland CA. Fine Art Museum just for this exhibition. There will be plenty of food and drink, even some live music, and all the participants displaying work will be present. Various media including radio and TV news have also committed to attending.
If you can’t make the party, the artwork will be on display July 27 through August 10, 2002. The museum is located at 222 New York Street, two blocks east of the Rushmore Plaza Holiday Inn and the Civic Center where Harley-Davidson is headquartered.
Please visit www.lichterphoto.com to view 100’s of images of Harley-Davidsons and the Biker Lifestyle from more than twenty years of photography. There are also posters, post card books and prints available along with free “E-cards.”
This Smoke-Out knucklehead was built by Young Choppers and Hot Rods from Marietta, GA. Check out their frames at Youngchoppers.com.
Two Prostitutes
Two prostitutes were riding around town with a sign on top of their car which said, “TWO PROSTITUTES: $50.00.”
A police officer, seeing the sign, stopped them and told them they’d either have to remove the sign or go to jail. Just at that time, another car passed with a sign saying, “JESUS SAVES.”
They asked the cop why he let the other car go and he said, “Well, that’s a little different, it pertains to religion.”
So the two ladies took their sign down and took off. The following day, the same cop was in the area when he noticed the two ladies driving around with a large sign on their car again.
Figuring he had an easy bust, he began to catch up with them when he noticed the new sign which read: “TWO ANGELS SEEKING PETER: $50.00.”
–Bob T.
Darwin Award Competitors
Cantina Flying Lessons
Three Brazilian men were flying in a light aircraft at low altitude when another plane approached. It appears that they decided to moon the occupants of the other plane, but lost control of their own aircraft and crashed. They were all found dead in the wreckage with their pants around their ankles.
–from Rogue
The one and only girl responsible for cleaning all the rat bikes at the HORSE Smoke-Out. I don’t know why she’s smilin’.
Let’s Ride
Look, the world is nuts and life is even more bananas, so it’s incumbent on all of us to set down the bills, the rakes, the brooms and vacuum cleaners and get out on the road where the sky is clear, the earth is within reach and the touch of a woman is just around the bend. Ride forever–Bandit.
