When I was a young kid of about 12 or 13, I worked a a gas station after school and on weekends pumping gas. The boss often left me on my own for hours on end, and one Saturday when the boss was away a huge hairy biker on a Matchless 500 stopped by and asked me if he could use the workshops oxy/acetylene torch to braze a clutch cable?
The boss' rule was we didn't loan tools, and no-one was allowed in the workshop, so of course I said "Yep, no worries". I watched him as he worked, and he asked me if I liked bikes? I said, yeah, I think I had a Yamaha GT50B back then, so we chatted about bikes as he worked.
When he was finished he asked me how much he owed me, and I told him it was on the house, so he asked when I was knocking off work, and I told him 5pm. He rode off, and I returned to the drudgery of a quiet Saturday afternoon in a little country town in 1972.
At 5pm, just as I was walking home, he roared up on a big black Vincent Rapide! It turns out that was the bike that he was making a new clutch cable for, so he told me to get on the back, and I saw "The Ton" for the first time, clutching his leather jacket. He didn't wear a helmet, he took it off and gave it to me, and I had a wonderful 30 minutes or so sitting behind this massive biker who had absolutely no regard for road laws or anything else.
He dropped me off at my place and waved at my dad who just glared back at him, it turns out that he was my dad's cousin, but a "bad seed", a member of the Gipsy Jokers MC, and he'd done time in prison for various acts of violence when he came back from Vietnam. He and his brother lived in an old house a few blocks from my folks place, and between them they had 2 Matchy's, 3 Vincent's and an Ariel Square 4.
Back in those days, Vincents were just old brit bikes and not expensive, and he and his brother (who was also a Gipsy Joker) rode them because there were way more Brit bikes than Harley's available. One of the Vincents was Chopped! Good times...........
