The Triumph Motorcycle Story

                                                       The Triumph Motorcycle Story
                                                                       1956
                                                                  A true story
                                         Written 2010 and re-written 04/2016 unedited
                                                                 Howard Yasgar



     I was 15 years old when I ended up owning a 1950 Triumph motorcycle for $500.00
     Originally my friend Ritchie Andrade had wanted to buy it.
     But then Ritchie let me try it out, I got on, but because I had never rode a motorcycle before, I became confused and I squeezed the clutch lever thinking it was the brake lever, and that’s how I drove the bike right into a Bocce ball court maintenance shed.
     Fortunately I was lucky and didn’t  get killed, but the bike was a mess, and like it or not, I now had to buy the bent up Motorcycle. 
     When I called to tell my father, didn’t like it at all when he heard what happened, but he came with his 1952 Pontiac and we brought the bike home sticking out of the cars trunk.
     He didn’t ask and I didn’t tell him how much the motorcycle was costing me.
     Any way, once I got it home, I looked it over closely.
     The front wheel was bent like a pretzel, the tire was cut, and the front fender was all bent to hell.
     The headlight and it’s shroud were broken. Also the fuel tank had a few dents in it.
     After reading my hot rod books, I had always wanted something to fix up and now I had it.
     I had read in the magazines how to do body work, but I had never done any of it.
     So, using the tools we had, I took the bike apart, then using a hammer from my father’s workshop, I hammered out the headlight shroud and the fender as best I could.
     Back then plastic auto body fillers like “Bondo” hadn’t yet hit the market, and auto body work was all done using lead.
     My friend Ritchie drove me to an auto body repair store, and that’s where I became exposed to all the special tools that were used in doing bodywork, it was a whole new world for me.                         
     They had hand held metal anvils that you used when hammering out dents, and they had all the tools
to use to straighten and reform bent metal.
     It was at that same store where I first saw horse hair pinstriping brushes.
     Pinstriping was all the rage in California and I saw pin striped cars in the magazines, but I never knew how they did it.
     The brushes were only $1.50 each, so I couldn’t resist buying a few different sizes.
     The store people gave me a quick education on how to use lead to repair dents.
     I bought 4 sticks of lead, a couple of wooden paddles, a block of  bees wax and a bottle of acid.
     There was no You Tube in those days so I had to learn everything by trial and error.
     I dug into my savings account, (My mother) and bought a small torch set and a mini compressor to spray red primer.
     I heard that up the road in Bethany Connecticut there was a grizzly old fellow that had a body shop, his shop was in an old barn behind his house. everyone told me to stay away from him, but I went to see him anyway.
     I told him about the motorcycle accident, and he had a good laugh, he couldn’t believe I was a kid that wanted to learn how to do bodywork using lead, so he gave me some pointers, and he said he would paint my motorcycle when I was done fixing it up.     
     My friend Ritchie had heard about a Triumph motorcycle shop located in West Haven, so we went there. It was owned by a short wiry Italian fellow he moved so fast we had to chase him around just to talk to him.
     We couldn’t understand why he was so hard to pin down, he just didn’t want to pay attention to us.
     But now, many years later, I realize that he had sized us up as no money customers, and we were just wasting his time with a million questions.
     Once he realized he couldn’t get rid of us, he eventually slowed down and helped me find what I needed, he had a good used wheel and tire, and head light bulb.
     Once I was ready,  I brought all the repaired motorcycle parts to the auto body guy in Bethany, he painted everything in multiple coats of beautiful black lacquer, and he only charged me $10.00.
     Then I put the motorcycle back together.
     It looked good but was very plain, so it was my opportunity to try my hand at pinstriping.
     I bought cans of white and red enamel and gave it a try.
     I found that I was a natural at doing pinstriping designs, so I did the entire motorcycle.
     Everyone that saw my pin striping liked it and the next thing I knew, guys were bringing their cars and I was pinstriping them.   
     My father had brought home two pieces of stainless steel 2-1/2 inch diameter tubing, so I took off the
 original mufflers that were dented anyway and I welded the stainless tubing on in place of them.
     This made the bike more than twice as loud as it was before.
     I was sure that everyone within several miles of my house knew I had a motorcycle, and some started complaining to my parents.
     Once I was 16 years old I got my drivers license.
     By now there were so many neighbors complaining that I started walking the bike down the hill from my house onto Whalley Avenue, before starting it up and riding it.
     With those stainless steel straight pipes, that Triumph motorcycle sounded really powerful.
     So everywhere I went, guys wanted to race me.
     They all thought that because that bike looked and sounded so hot, that it was fast.
     Unfortunately the bike wasn’t all that fast, and I don’t think I ever won a race, it was really embarrassing.
     So I asked the owner of the Triumph motorcycle shop how I could make the bike faster.
      He showed me a Triumph motorcycle like mine that he was building for a customer to race.
      He told me I could make my bike fast, I could bore the engine from 650 CC to 900 CC, and he said that I could raise the compression and install racing camshafts.
      Winter was coming, and I was now earning money working in a gas station, so I decided to take the motorcycle all apart and bring it down into our cellar where the oil burner was and it was nice and warm.
      My dad had a nice workshop bench all set up.
      So over that winter I did everything the Triumph dealer told me to.
      The problem was my Triumph Motorcycle had all metric hardware, and my father didn’t have even one metric tool. I don’t think anyone had a metric tool back then, so I just used an old adjustable wrench to disassemble and reassemble the entire Triumph engine.
     Over the winter in 1957, I worked every evening souping up the engine on that motorcycle.
     When I was done, I had a real sense of accomplishment.
     Come spring time, I enlisted my father’s help and we tried to walk the motorcycle up the cellar stairs.  But it wouldn’t fit.
     Like a jerk, I had assembled the motorcycle never thinking we couldn’t get it up the cellar stairs.
     It reminded me of the story of the fellow that built a boat in his cellar, never thinking how he would ever get it out. Now I could see how it happened.
     I disassembled the motorcycle again we and brought the pieces upstairs from the cellar, and I reassembled it.
     It was now 1957 and I had spent every penny I earned on that motorcycle, but at the time I felt it was all worth it as I now had a motorcycle with a 900CC Triumph racing engine. 
     I will never forget the week I took my souped up bike to the parking lot at Jimmy’s hot dog restaurant in West Haven.
     That‘s where everyone that had a fast car or motorcycle hung out.
     There were a couple of fellows that had brand new Harley Davidson Sportster motorcycles. Those
Sportster bikes were about the same size of my Triumph, and I had never seen one before.
     They said the Harley Sportster was a brand new model.
     Well that evening I raced one of Harley Davidson’s new Sportsters and I think it was about twice as fast as my Triumph.
      So that’s when I realized that my Triumph motorcycle racing days were over before they had even started.
      So to avoid the embarrassment of losing any more races, I avoided Jimmy’s restaurant and I started riding mostly on the rural back roads of Woodbridge and Bethany, Connecticut.
      In those days you hardly ever saw another car or motorcycle on those beautifully paved country
 roads.
      The Triumph motorcycle had a knob that allowed you to tighten the steering, it made it easy to ride the motorcycle straight with no hands on the handlebars.
      I found that the motorcycle could be ridden with no hands simply by simply leaning to one side or another.
      I had never thought that I would be riding a motorcycle for miles with no hands on the handle bars, but I did.
      When that started to get boring I started standing up on the motorcycle seat. I did it just as I had seen it done in the circus.
      I never gave it a thought as to what would happen if I hit a bump and fell off the bike.
      One evening, I decided to go again to Jimmies Restaurant in West Haven.
      At about 11:PM while I was on my way home, it began pouring rain.
      I was riding behind a two tone brown 1954 Chevrolet that was loaded with a bunch of girls, I could see that two were sitting in the back seat.
      I saw them watching me riding in the rain right behind them.
      We were in West Haven, heading towards New Haven and going along at about 40 miles per hour.
      Suddenly for no reason the 1954 Chevrolet slammed on their brakes.
      I was perhaps 75 feet behind them, and it was still pouring rain.
      When I applied my brakes, the motorcycle, it didn’t stop, the road was too wet.
      I was wearing motorcycle boots, and as the motorcycle slid out from under me, it fell down on the left, so I pushed the ground with my left boot and it righted the bike, but then I was already out of control and the bike fell down onto the right side, so I hit the ground hard with my right boot.
     The motorcycle was now wildly spinning around out of control.
     Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a big plate glass window of an car sales agency. And there was a
small alley about four foot wide next to it.
     I just knew I was going to crash through that plate glass window.
     They say that when you are about to die, your whole life flashes before you, and at that very moment I saw myself in a hospital bed hanging there with casts on my arms and legs.
     The motorcycle was now spinning fast and out of control, and it was still pouring rain.
     The last thing I remember was seeing my reflection in the plate glass window.
     Don’t ask me what happened next, because I don’t know.
     I was in the alley, the bike was laying down underneath me and I was still holding onto the handlebars, but both the left and right handle bar had been ground down about an inch.
     The motorcycle was still running underneath me, and it had stopped raining.
     So here I was straddling the bike, and besides from shaking like a leaf, I appeared to be alright, there was no blood, and no broken bones.
     I lifted the bike up and I could now see how narrow the alley was, I couldn’t imagine how the spinning motorcycle had ever fit in there.
     I drove back onto the road and again I headed towards New Haven.
     As I got to the intersection of Derby Avenue and Forest Road, and the 1954 brown two tone Chevrolet was sitting there in front of me, they were waiting for a red light to change.
     When they saw me coming, I saw them locking their car doors. They must have thought I was going to kill them, they knew that they had slammed on the brakes just for the fun of it.
     This near catastrophic accident got me to thinking about just how dangerous motorcycles can be. I had survived the crash into the Bocce ball shed, and now I had survived this spinning crash into the alley way. That was two strikes against me.
     I was several months later, I was at home in my yard doing general maintenance on the motorcycle.
     I had lubricated all the areas that needed lubricating and I had loosened the knob that tightened the steering, I had intended to re tighten it, but I forgot.
     I then took the motorcycle out for a test ride around the block.
     I drove down the street in front of my house and took a left turn, I intended to make another left turn at the next corner.
     I could see a milkman’s truck coming towards me.
     In those days the milk delivery trucks were all Divco’s. They were popular for milk delivery, as the driver could stand up while he was driving.
     Since there was plenty of time for me to make my left hand turn before the Divco milk truck would be at the intersection,  I sped up to about 40 miles per hour, and sharply turned my handlebars to the left.
     Because I hadn’t tightened the steering knob, the handlebars turned completely to the left and the  Motorcycle completely flipped over with me on it.
     I don’t know exactly what happened, but I was laying on the ground, completely entangled with the motorcycle.
     I  didn’t feel any pain and  the Divco milk truck pulled up next to me. The milkman looked down at me and said, “Are you hurt”?
     I said, I don’t know, as I tried extracting myself.
     he Milkman said, “I never saw anything like that, do you know that you completely did a flip in the air, are you sure you are alright. 
     I wasn’t hurt, or burned or anything, so I stood the bike up, and walked with it the rest of the way home. That was three strikes and I was out.
     I put the bike in front of my house with a sign $600.00, and I never rode a motorcycle again.