My name is well lets call me Jo for right now. I am a 28 yr old white male that grew up in the country just north of Pittsburgh PA. I have an older brother a younger brother and a younger sister who are all wonderful people... Well as wonderful as siblings can really be. My father is now in his mid 50's and my mother is just trailing behind him. My fathers parents are dead and we as a family have all but severed all ties to his sisters (my aunts). My mother's parents are in relatives good health for being in their 80's and they travel to exscape the cold north east as much as they can. My Aunts and Uncles are pretty cool people some still live in eastern Ohio some are in FL some IL and some AL... my moms family moved up and out of eastern OH and western PA for warmer climents. We on the other had did not.
When I was growing up we didn't have much (we were poor) but we never went with out either. My father and mother both worked very hard to give my siblings and I all that we could have ever wanted. Granted when you are 6 yrs old one toy just is never enough but we learned the hard way that money does not grow on trees and that even if they are not always by our side they still loved us very much. We moved a lot pack it up and rent something else until mid 95 when my grandmother wanted us to move next store to her so that she could die in peace. She knew it was her time and she wanted someone to watch over my grandfather, so we did just that and settled down calling this beat up old yellow gas station, store, house a home.
Now the point of this blog is to tell my story, my trials and tribulations but feel the need to give a proper back ground to who I really am. I grew up like that, we had some great times, we never went hungry and we never where left out in the cold by my parents (others, wow that's a whole different story to go into).
I grew up with my father always talking about Motorcycles, always being around motorcycles and always working on someones motorcycle. You see my father had a standing deal with his friends, you bring the beer and Ill help you work on your bike, than Ill bring the beer and you'll help me work on my bike... that's how things always went, beer gets things fixed he use to say. So when I was 12 it wasn't that odd that I just had to ride one for myself, so my older brother and I found a guy a few miles down the road that was selling a beat up 74 Honda 250 2 stroke that need to be fixed up a bit to be ridden and that's just what we did. Everyday after school we would raid our grandfathers tools and try and figure out how to fix this bike (we had no idea in the beginning what the hell we where doing) but soon things just started to fall right into place... The bike and our grandfathers hand. He would slap us everyday after school for sealing his tool and we never could seem to put them back where they belonged so we would get smacked...
After we finely got the bike running my father helped my older bother learn to ride it than a few days later said it was my turn.... "Get on, kick it over with a little bit of gas, once it starts get on the bike, pull in the clutch and shift on gear down. Good you got it now slowly ease off of the clutch and give it just a little bit of gas......... BAM." My ass was laying right in the middle of his garden and he was not to happy with me. "What are you looking at me for," he said "pick it and get it the hell out of my garden." I asked him how he proposed I would do such a thing all by myself and after just crashing it into the garden. "You have two choices, ride it out or push it out, either way your going to get it out of my garden." So for run number 2 I would ride it out... Clutch, gear, gas, clutch, hold on, less gas, hold on.... I did it, I did it! thats all I could remember thinking and my father almost looked proud of us for getting the bike running and learning how to ride it.
Well that's how all this started. From than on I could see what my father loved so much about motorcycles. Why he had an obsession with them and what they meant to him. He began to start telling more of his stories about the "good ol days" and about his adventures that he had on his bikes. How he was in the Navy for a few years back in the 70's about what he did after high school and how he just got on his 41 Harley Davidson and blasted into the wind not looking back for almost 5 yrs. He would talk about guys he'd met, beers he'd drank, places he'd been and jobs that kept him going. It was different back than too you could walk up to a gas station and ask for a job and they would decide if they wanted to higher you right there, no applications, no lines, no back round checks, no home of records, no a lot of things. So he said he would work and gas stations, on farms, as a laborer in the city's doing construction for a week or so or until he could get enough money saved up to just blast out of that town too. This went of for a few years and he tell stories like when he beat up a guy that was almost 7 foot tall because he was told that he couldn't... so he hit him in the Adams apple and down he went... some of the stories I dont know if they can be true but they are always great to listen to.
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