T.G.I.H.A.F.

The Harley-Burly; Opening a Charity Run at the Lincoln Memorial

By Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer

June 15, 1988

STYLE

Down by the Lincoln Memorial yesterday, along with about 150 Harley-Davidson motorcycles heading part or all of the way to Milwaukee for the 85th anniversary Harley Homecoming (and the benefit of the Muscular Dystrophy Association, i.e., Jerry's Kids), there were:

A Waldorf, Md., bank vice president named Corliss King and his spoke-wheeled Electra Glide; a Gaithersburg truck driver named Craig Beamer, his wife (and mother of three) Lyn, their 1984 Super Glide and his T-shirt reading "We Mutually Pledge Our Lives, Fortunes and Sacred Honor" (remember? from the Declaration of Independence?); a lot of people with potbellies, tattoos, flashlight holsters and wallets on chains; Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch USA, Joe Sixpack and Harry Homeowner; a lot of black T-shirts bearing Harley-Davidson winged wheels and legends like "God Is a Biker" or "If I Have to Explain, You Don't Understand"; WRC-TV anchorman Jim Vance with a 1984 "dresser," as the big fancy ones are known, and a black T-shirt with the Harley emblem and "Till Death Do Us Part"; a Montgomery County police officer (repeat-offender unit) named Herb Cahalen with shoulder-length hair, two earrings and a 1986 Electra Glide Classic; a lot of shade-tree mechanics with big beards and huge faces, faces the size of watermelons, the kind of faces they looked at you out of rather than with — a lot of good Americans just like yourself, in other words, and they were gathered there together to assume an all-American position.

Not the position of attention, or prayer, or flat on their backs, but a posture no other country has mastered the way we have: the Harley slouch.

"Harleys, you sit in the bike, not on the bike," said Stan Robinson, a C&P Telephone lineman who'd ridden his 1987 Heritage Softail down from Maryland to stand around in his Harley-Davidson South Australia T-shirt.

The Harley seat is low, like a hammock slung between the wheels, and the foot pegs are forward and up, so you can hardly avoid the Harley slouch when you get on one — a leisurely, speculative sprawl, as if you were perpetually riding over the crest of a wilderness ridge and surveying the land to be tamed.

"I had a Honda for a year but I never felt comfortable on it," said Jim Couzantino, 57, of Bowie, who arrived on a 1988 Electra Glide in his 38th year of riding Harleys. "I guess it's what you're trained on. I've had seven back surgeries, I'm fused from two inches above my waist all the way down, and I can ride a Harley 300 miles a day. You just float."

It's not that you feel good going fast on a Harley, people will tell you, but that you feel good going slow, or comparatively so. "You can do 55, straight down the road …," said Dick Gilliam, 29, a manager for a Maryland computer firm.

Words cannot explain.

"How can you put it in words?" said Randy Turner, 42, an auto mechanic from Dover, N.H., who nonetheless decided to try: "Let me tell you how it is. Every bike is as good as every other bike. They're all different answers to one question: Why ride? They all sing a song — this one sings a song to me. Show me a Suzuki rider, a Kawasaki rider, a Honda rider who's willing to tattoo their motorcycle's name on their arm. Harley riders represent the last of the Mohicans, the Pony Express riders — we're the last of the truly independent free breeds."

His daughter Maria, 17, who was wearing a complicated little red blouse with an open part that made you think the next female body part to get national attention will be the navel, said: "It's like patriotism. It's a statement about being an American. You won't find a more patriotic bunch."

"I'm a registered Republican," said her father, who does not have a Harley tattoo among the ones on his biceps but implies that he will someday, though he's not quite ready for it now: "A tattoo is a very personal thing."

The Harley-Davidson company likes to call these people the "real Harley riders" and point out that they "could very well be your doctor, dentist or next-door neighbor. Although some B-grade movies of the past stereotyped Harley riders as 'Outlaw Bikers,' demographic studies reveal …"

That Harley riders are not all Hell's Angels, wild ones, easy riders, Benzedrine problems in Nazi helmets and Jiffy-Lube hair — that compared with other motorcycle riders, the median Harley rider is older, richer, maler, marrieder, more educated and more white-collar, a lot of which is understandable when you learn you can spend $ 13,000 on a Harley, when you throw in the chrome and hard-mounted fairings, the Tour Pak luggage boxes, the pin striping, the privilege of owning a limited edition (of which there seem to be as many as there are Harley T-shirts and belt buckles) and so on.

On the other hand, Harleys don't have nearly the gew-gaws the Japanese bikes offer: the liquid crystal display readouts for engine temperature, four valves per cylinder and all the stuff that seems calculated to evoke fighter planes in the movies.

"It's considerably different in the area of simplicity," said Vaughn L. Beals Jr., Harley's chief executive and chairman of the board. "We build it so a shade-tree mechanic can service it — one carburetor, two valves on each cylinder. That's what motorcycling is all about — back to the fundamentals. If you want to be in touch with the world, you ride a motorcycle."

Instead of vaulting into the future, Harley is dedicated to preserving a past, manufacturing copies of old motorcycles with the great thick tires and mammoth mudguards like Spartan helmets, Wide Glides with Fat Bob gas tanks, that sense of inexorable heft, manifest destiny on wheels. There was some sprightliness, too — the Sportster 883 and, in 1977, a machine with the wonderful name of the XLCR Cafe Racer.

"Now this one here," says Beals, squatting down by a Heritage Softail, "you don't see any shock absorbers on the rear wheels. The old Harleys were called hardtails because they didn't have any shocks on the rear wheels, they just welded the frame onto the wheels. In 1983 we reintroduced that hardtail model but with hidden nitrogen shock absorbers underneath where you can't see them." Hence, the Heritage Softail.

Beals, who would lead the caravan out Route 50, was one of a group of executives who in 1981 bought Harley back from the American Machine and Foundry Co., which had bought it in 1969. As he tells it, "AMF bought a small family company just as demand went up. They tripled production in three or four years. Quality went in the tank, labor relations went in the tank. We had a bad strike in 1974."

By the 1980s, Harley was getting killed by the Japanese. It asked for government help. In 1983 President Reagan approved five years of higher tariffs on imported heavyweights (700 cc engine displacement and above). Harley retooled and reorganized. Four years into the tariff program, having recaptured the heavyweight market from Honda, it told the government it no longer needed help. Reagan toured the Harley plant in York, Pa., and called the employees the "All-American A-Team."

One rider walked up to Beals yesterday and said, "Congratulations, you turned the company around."

"Thanks," said Beals, who wore black leather pants and a vest reading "An American Success Story."

Randy Turner said he makes a pilgrimage every year to Colebrook, N.H., where "we have the only stone monument to motorcyclists in the world, where they have the blessing of the bikes. I'm not religious, but …"

There's a T-shirt in the crowd whose motto is obscured by a huge beard belonging to Bill Burkett of Capon Bridge, W.Va. It reads "God Is a Biker — Free Brotherhood Church."

"It's a long story," says Burkett, who rides a 1986 Liberty Edition FLHT. "A few years back we had a motorcycle club, but that sounded bad, that 'club,' so we had one member who was a minister and we started the Free Brotherhood Church. We were going to go for that tax-free status, but the government wasn't going to let it happen."

A religion!

Then it's time to head out Route 50. Some police Harleys fire up, that nice throaty rumble, a comfortable baritone snarl, and in a minute or two all the riders are astride their Harleys, parading down toward the Capitol, leaning back, getting in the wind, as they say, masters of the Harley slouch.