Brian: Well, greetings everybody. As you may already know, Robin is away for the month building the MotorcycleTraining.us website. So filling his shoes this round is my friend and yours, Neil Sullivan.

Neil: Yes, hello. Today is a very special day at the TRO dot like podcast. We're clearing the decks to recap, appreciate, and discuss George Wyman and his incredible journey with Moto Historian Jordan Liebman. Did I pronounce that right, Jordan?

Jordan: You sure did. Did better than me.

Brian: So last time around, Jordan Liebman wrapped up the epic tale of George Wyman's incredible transcontinental journey from San Francisco to New York City aboard a motor bicycle from the California Motor Company. And aboard is loosely speaking, he pedaled it, he pushed it, he dragged it, he kicked it. I don't know. George took 51 days to accomplish this feat back in 1903, riding everything from railroad tracks, rutted wagon trails, mud, bad roads, rocks, fields, more mud, fence lines, and often no roads at all.

Neil: Pour yourself a bourbon or beverage of your choice and gather round as we welcome Jordan Liebman.

Jordan: Thank you. Welcome, Jordan. I appreciate that. That was very nice. I'm pouring my second now. Excellent. It's really growing on me.

Brian: I need to get a good ride and try it out. So Jordan, in five or 10 minutes, get us all on the same page. If you could kind of recap who George Wyman was and what he accomplished riding a one and a quarter power motor bicycle across the USA.

Jordan: Absolutely. He was born in 1877. He's from Oakland, California. By the time he was 16, he was racing bicycles. It was a big deal. Bicycles were a big deal back then. They weren't riding the bone shakers with the giant wheel in front anymore. They were riding things that look relatively like what we have today. Bicycles was a really big deal. This is supported by the fact that there was a magazine from 1876 that had been writing about bicycles and they ended up being the advertiser for his famed ride. In 1902, after racing quite a bit in California, in San Francisco, he went to Australia and circumnavigated the continent of Australia on a bicycle. The guy had chops. His endurance was unquestionable. He was not the first person to do it, but he was the first American to do it. He comes back from Australia to California in 1902 and reconnects with his California bicycling crew. Sometime in 1902, he is presented with a opportunity from a gentleman named Roy C. Marks, who at the time owned the California Motorcycle Company and says, you want to try out this bike? He's got his second motorcycle. We're calling them motorcycles. Motorcycles, motorcycle, bicycle with motors, whatever. And he is allowed to ride this thing and he decides to try to ride it a long distance. He was going to go to Reno for a bicycle race, an endurance race in Reno, Nevada. And so he takes this motorcycle and makes the trip. In this 1902, we're calling it one and a quarter. Some people say one and a half. Some people say it's 200 CCs. It's a single cylinder. Some people say it's 211 CCs. Some people say it's 212 CCs. Anyways, he takes this motorcycle with an engine that is a copy of a DDN engine and successfully rides it to Reno. And the story goes that on his way back from Reno, he decides that he wants to see how far he can go across the United States. Fast forward to 1903 and he has the full support of the California Motorcycle Company and the Goodman Magazine Company who is financing this. And on May 16th of 1903, he takes off from San Francisco at Kearney and something or other street in California. And that's the first beginning of his trip. It's a time of high expectations, I should say.

Neil: Well, so how did you become aware? What inspired you to kind of dig into it?

Jordan: I would say that Robin has the ability to direct me down rabbit holes. I built his first motorcycle for him many years ago. We have a usual friend named Wes and we were at a club in Chicago called Martyrs and Wes was opening for Tony Levin, I think it was. And Wes was going to go on stage, he says, Hey Beth, my friend Robin in the corner and there's Maggie and he wants to buy a motorcycle. Go talk to him. And next thing you know, I was building a motorcycle engine and a whole motorcycle for this guy. So that was the first rabbit hole. At one point I received a invitation for his ridiculously named website that you guys have all said the word, I can't even try to say what it's called. The Posse? Yeah, Incredible Power or something.

Brian: Super slick motorcycle posse. Yeah, I don't know.

Jordan: And, uh, you know, I just kind of lurked a little bit and I guess 10 years or so went by. And at one point he just reaches out to me and he's like, Hey, would you be interested in being on this podcast? And, you know, I remember when I was building this bike for him, he was asking me who invented sport touring? And I said, well, nobody, it happened. It was, you know, evolution really nobody and everybody. And he wanted me to try to explain it to him. And I said, I could probably tell you how we got to this point, but I can't explain to you what it is. Well, since then he's already explained what it is. And so I decided that if we were going to start, we're going to start at the beginning. And the beginning is really right around here. We, I calls it the Devonian period originally, but it really is the Cambrian period where we had bugs crawling around and we just, you know, didn't know exactly what body form to take before we decided we were alive. And these motorcycles were of that ilk and it starts with the DD on engine, which everybody copied, including this guy Roy C. Marks. And so the George Wyman story came up. Little did I know I'd already seen a version of it because the Yale, California is on display at the wheels through time museum in Maggie Valley, North Carolina. You guys might've been there. And it is the logical evolution of the California George Road. If we were going to do history, let's start with the beginning and work up. We'll be started at a point where there's guy who becomes a legend. And there's a backstory to that all before there were even roads. Then from there we go to a point where there are roads. And then from there we start getting more and more developments. So that's what kind of steered me towards George Wyman to start off with. And I already decided that road will be next, but finishing the George Wyman thing, he, uh, the high expectations leaves from, from, uh, Kearney street in San Francisco, crosses the golden gate on a ferry. Cause they didn't have a bridge and starts on this journey. You know, he makes it to Reno with almost no mishap, except that he snaps his handlebars and he flies 10 feet over the handlebars and nearly dies. But, uh, the motorcycle held up. And after we leave Reno, the motorcycle starts to not hold up. Things break on it constantly. It's just one ordeal after the other, all the way across America. But he makes it the, the really, the point of the story is that this guy makes it. Yeah. He crosses, um, every single state touches a toe in Colorado, makes it across the Rockies and across the great Plains. The things that broke on this bike, it would have ended every, any one of our trips. I counted 47 spokes that he had to replace. When you replace a spoke, you have to take the wheel off and then you have to take the tire off. If there's two, we can take the tube off. I mean, this is not minor. It's not a scratch. These are major things that he had to do. His crankshaft broke twice and bent once. Major, major stuff. His handlebars broke twice. Um, his forks broke and he makes it across the country. And a lot of this was pedaling. His belts broke constantly. If any of this happened to me on a trip, I'd probably just call the chase vehicle and order a beer somewhere. I'd probably stop. But this guy did not know when to quit and he makes it all the way across the country and makes it in 51 days to New York. He'd been being laid over for five days in Chicago and, uh, two days in Utah. He still makes it across the United States. So if you subtract the five and two from the 51, really he made it in 44 days. That's pretty good. The average train ride across America was seven days.

Brian: Yeah. I don't know if it was a bet or somebody offered a prize if he made it. I don't think he made it in time. Did he ever collect anything?

Jordan: Here's the thing. I've been holding back to get to my conspiracy theories about this. You're leading me into this territory where I have to talk about it. Did you ever see the movie smoking and the bandit?

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: Burt Reynolds, Jackie Gleason.

Brian: It was a formative moment of my childhood. Yes.

Jordan: These are the money bag guys that are basically saying, let's see if this sucker can do this. All right. This is how I see it going from the get go. I applaud the George Wyman project and, uh, this gentleman who is the head of it. Uh, his name is Tim Masterson. I applaud everything that they've done, but if you read the whole thing through and then you read the magazines, there was a couple of dubious things going on. So this guy, Roy C. Marks, he's from Toledo, Ohio, but he ends up in San Francisco and he starts his company and he ends up being the first person to put an engine on a bicycle, but a 90 CC DD on clone in a bicycle in 1896. So he in and of himself is the first to put a engine in a bicycle frame and call it a motorcycle, probably a moped if you really squint at it. So there's a first with him already. And I think that there might be a psychosis or whatever when you get a first of something and you end up wanting to get more and more firsts. So I think there's something there. Now here's the thing. Toledo, Ohio ends up in California, meets this guy who was an absolute champion, Wyman. Everybody's hanging out with the bicycle club out there. The bay city wheel that I think they called them. I keep wanting to call them the bay city rollers. He meets this guy, George Wyman in 1902, somehow hands him a motorcycle, which was worth 200 bucks, a ton of money back then. And this whole scheme of crossing the country starts. Now, George Wyman already certainly navigated Australia. The Goodman company, the parent company of the bicycle and motorcycle magazine had a correspondent in Australia at the time. Did George Wyman meet this correspondent while he was still riding around Australia? I think he did. So I think the seeds go way back before the ride even started. If you think I'm veering off into the weeds here, you can say so. But like I said before, I may be right. I may be wrong. I may be full of shit, but I will speak my mind. So I think that George was already in touch with some of these people while he was in Australia in 1902. Now I'm going to drink. Here's the thing. There was a lot of money moving back and forth between companies back in 1902 and 1903. Bicycles was a big deal. There was a company called Columbia. They're still around today. They have been around for a long time. Owned by this guy named Colonel Pope. Yeah. Pope, the Yale company becomes a motorcycle brand by buying out another company for three and a half million dollars in 1903 before George takes the first trip across the country. Okay. There's a lot of money moving back and forth. People call it being embarrassed. An embarrassment when your company has to go bankrupt. This is the words they use in 1903 in those magazines. The company that Colonel Pope, they call him a colonel. He was some kind of military colonel, but he was already very wealthy. He bought everything except for the buildings for three and a half million dollars, which is something like $168 million today, which these days people are throwing billions of dollars around. Maybe it was a good deal. I don't know. I think Roy C. Marx sees that there is money being thrown around like this and he wants to throw his hat in the ring and he wants to upstage Pope.

Brian: I see. So there's all this in the background. Yeah.

Jordan: There's a lot going on. Now, this is what I want to kindle the fire with here. Where was the Yale company based? Toledo, Ohio, where Roy C. Marx was originally from. I think he knew, I think that Roy C. Marx had already been in contact with the owner of Yale before any of this started. So he intended on selling the company to Yale, which is what they ended up doing, which is why we have the Yale, California on display at Wheels for Time.

Brian: Oh, okay.

Jordan: So that's part of my conspiracy theory. Now, number B, along the way he meets and is helped by these good Samaritans who happened to be in the industry and happened to be there to help him along. None of that was by accident. Every single one of these people that he met along the way, this is me saying after the fact, going back, had been in on the story before it started. There's a lot of money on the line here. They're not just going to take a chance. This is not two companies by saying, hey, cool, let's see what we can do. There's a spin. They want to make a lot of money on this. And so he ends up being the five episodes of this magazine and the whole world is following this. The magazine was a weekly magazine. You can get it for $2 a year for a subscription. And it was put out every Saturday. So that's, you know, 52 issues a year. They weren't just supporting him for rah, rah. They wanted to see where this was going to go and make some money out of it. You go through the magazines, these 122 year old magazines, which you could see on the George Wyman project website. And I would say at least half of the people that he met owned companies that had advertisements in that magazine. All right. You cannot take anything away from George Wyman. The guy was a beast. He made it across the country. He endured so much. He nearly froze his ears off that gets, you know, sunburned on the same day, nearly dies multiple times. And he makes it across the finish line. He is the champion for sure. You can't take any of that away from him, but there is, there is a backstory that hadn't been told.

Brian: Yeah. He did seem to run into fortuitous people who own bicycle shops every so often, which is great. Yeah. It's also interesting at that time, nobody knew the future would all be, you know, 99% cars. It seemed like a lot of people had a lot of money and a lot of resources were going into these bicycles and motor bicycles and nobody really knew about the Model T yet. No, nobody knew that was coming. Yeah.

Jordan: Yeah. It hadn't been out yet. Oldsmobile was already a company as we discussed before, because they gave him actual oil instead of this 80 weight stuff that he had to heat up, try to use. Another thing that I will say, do you remember the five days he had to spend at Chicago and how much he hated it?

Neil: I remember that. Yeah.

Jordan: Okay. He said the bedbugs were as big as canaries and all the people in Chicago were drunk and running around, uh, you know, screaming in the streets and. Sounds about right. He couldn't get out of there fast enough.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: Guess who didn't advertise in the magazine?

Neil: Anybody from Chicago?

Jordan: Schwinn did not advertise. And you know, who else didn't advertise that was already selling bicycles? Sears. So did the magazine put a spin on the story to take away some of Chicago's reputation that somebody looking for a bicycle or a motorcycle isn't going to look for something made by, uh, sold through Sears, which they hadn't sold any yet. They sold bicycles, but not motorcycles yet. Uh, but they eventually would. And Schwinn, which ended up being, was it Ace Henderson? Schwinn had the most innovations in bicycling period, and they don't get any cred for this. So I think that there was a spin on Chicago too. Yes, his crankshaft did break before Chicago, but in Chicago, the story now, this is the other thing. Where is George Wyman's actual journal? The paper copy of his journal. This is a big question to me because everything he allegedly said was sent to editors at the magazine and then printed as his story. I don't know how somebody can go through what he did and keep his chin up that much. You know, I think that, that everything was sugarcoated on, in the story all along the way. I'd hate to, you know, cast a shadow on any of this cause you can't take anything away from George, but I think there were things going on that aren't discussed.

Brian: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, this, this was just how it worked in that era too. I mean, the whole idea of journalistic integrity was a little bit of a later invention and the whole thing was a sponsored trip. Anyway, you slice it, you know, and the idea of saying anything bad about the company's products or your sponsors would, that's crazy. That's interesting. Yeah. That could be one reason why he didn't like Chicago. I mean, he was stuck there and it was amazing, like five days to put a part on a train and get it from San Francisco to Chicago was pretty good. What, what did he send a telegraph or something to?

Jordan: Yeah, they had telegraph, they had telephones back then, you know, but you had to find somebody with one.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: And like I said, it takes back in 1903, seven days to cross the country by train.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: So if he made the call and it went in a box, you know, like Amazon would be today, if he had Prime, it could be in your door the next day. This is the amount of time it takes to, you know, get on the very next train and get it to Chicago, which is pretty good. Now, the other thing is, is that the prize money that we discussed is nobody does anything for free. I suspect he got some money up front. You'll recall in the story that he didn't get in any fights. I mean, this guy probably could have scrapped with anybody. I mean, he was tough, tough as nails. Um, but he didn't, I suspect because there was a big wad of cash in his pocket, not because he was trying to protect this trip. And if I get injured or hurt or arrested, I'm not going to make it. It's probably because he had a big wad of cash in his pocket. You walk up to the, uh, whoever on the way and you may end up walking away without the cash in your pocket. You know, he didn't have a safe or anything. He just, you know, that's how he had to roll. So there's that.

Brian: You obviously had a lot of funds with them to, you know, to pay for the gasoline and all that.

Jordan: So this is true. Yeah. Now a lot of this was done on credit because he stayed at certain places. Some of them are pretty nice and they probably had established credit. You know, if it's a hotel, maybe they had a telephone, maybe they had a, a telegraph station nearby. And these companies said, we are going to guarantee this person's expenses. That's taken care of. He doesn't need to carry cash for that. Yeah. But yeah, there was, there's incidental stuff that he had to carry cash for. And he had a 38, a revolver too. Okay.

Brian: In case the cash runs. Yeah. One of the questions I meant to, I, and you alluded to this earlier is, um, are there any corrections to the tail as, as it was told?

Jordan: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. Starting, uh, going backwards, I was talking about the last 150 miles and how he was comparing the, uh, roads to climbing the Rockies. He was not using the engine. He did not fix the engine when he went to the Thomas company in Albany, New York and the owner of the Thomas company to also advertise in the magazine, had his mechanics work on it until nine o'clock at night. The crankshaft broke the next day.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: Okay. That's when he started pedaling. That's when he took it apart and realized that the piston rings were paper thin. So the correction there is that I was reading my notes wrong and I probably had a couple too, read too many drinks. Nicolette did to say he was pedaling. He pedaled this bike and I read the one point it was 120 miles of pedaling and 30 miles of riding.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: And another one says he pedaled for 150 miles and this is through the night. Okay. I wonder, did the Thomas company give him a because he didn't have one before that point or was there a light on the roads between Albany and New York city? I don't know.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: Well, we'd have to look at the phase of the moon or whatever, you know, it was dire for him, dire for him to get to New York city before the end of the next day. The guy nearly killed himself to do this. All right. I envision remember Blade Runner, the movie with Rutger Auer. Remember how at the end when his time is up and he's like stabbing his arm to force himself to keep living for another X number of minutes just to finish his task. This is like how I see George Wyman, like just killing himself to finish this thing. And along the way he meant to go to two endurance races. One of them was, I believe in Albany, New York before the 4th of July that he ends up not being able to go to. And another one before, I think it was after Reno. I mean, the guy circumnavigating Australia, he's pushing a 90 pound motorcycle across the country on railroad tracks and riding it and whatever. And you have endurance, local endurance riders. Who's going to beat this guy? Nobody's going to beat him. You know, it's like taking your next door neighbor who's run a half marathon against the best Canyon runner. It's not going to happen. This guy was an absolute beast. He really meant to, you know, put a couple of feathers in his cap along the way. It just didn't work out. Overall, the legend stands.

Brian: Now you mentioned there's a George Wyman project. There's a George Wyman Memorial Project website and they have just an amazing wealth of information.

Jordan: Yes, they do.

Brian: Are there any other sources out there of information? Because there's a lot that's missing still.

Jordan: Yeah, there, this really restarted in the 1960s. Now we're going to go over here with the discovery of a motorcycle by a very wealthy guy. We talked about him, his name was Chandler. Now this is the thing. The bike makes it to the finish line in New York City and is handed over to the New York City motorcycle club. And I say it hasn't been heard of before. The story on the George Wyman project website said that it went back to California and was on display at Golden Gate either for two weeks or two years. Either way, George Wyman crossed the country with the Kodak folding pocket camera in his vest that he used and took pictures along the way. And those pictures are on the internet. How can this legendary motorcycle have arrived back at Golden Gate Bridge, Golden Gate Park at that time, because there wasn't a bridge yet, on display with the story behind it and all the fame and there are no pictures. How is that possible? How is that possible? So this guy, Chandler, who is a wealthy collector, Otis Chandler is his name. He collects all kinds of vehicles, all kinds of memorabilia. And he doesn't just collect the memorabilia, he collects the memorabilia. So if he has a motorcycle, it's the motorcycle from The Great Escape. Or if he collects a car, it's James Dean's car. He doesn't buy just a version of it, he buys the best. So he hears about this motorcycle in San Francisco in a box. And they say that it had all these other parts with it, but 70 years later, parts that were falling apart and rusty, we don't know what happened to them. But somebody says there might be some pedigree to this thing. And Otis Chandler sells the bike to this guy, Dave Scafone, according to the George Wyman project. And Dave Scafone is going to the Chandler estate for any pictures to prove that this was the bike. We don't know. The parts that were added to the bike to make it across the United States were in the story discarded. But why weren't there photographs? Dave Scafone allegedly has the bike and he has restored what was left of it to as new condition. And it is somewhere. Is it the bike? My question is, if this bike went through what it went through with cracked forks, broken crank shafts, broken handlebars, I mean, everything that this thing went through, he says that he only marked down, he wrote down in his journal, the times where his falls caused physical injury to himself or to the motorcycle, the four cyclometers and whatnot, you know, broken oil viewing glass or whatever, everything. But he fell so many more times that this thing would have had every battle scar you could imagine.

Neil: Sounds like Brian Ringer.

Jordan: Right.

Neil: It sounds like Brian Ringer. Yeah.

Jordan: Anyway. Okay. So when he hands it over to the New York Motorcycle Club, it might've been as Robin Dean put it at the end of the Blues Brothers, when they go to hand over the funds to the state of Illinois building and they parked the car and the hood flies off and all the doors fall off and the wheels fall off. 516. This is the dying warrior at finish line. This might have been bad PR for the California Motorcycle Company. The truth is that the bike really didn't make it. It made it to Reno twice with minimal incident, but Reno is not the same as all the way across America. Right. I mean, the fact that the piston rings were word on paper thin tells you that they were metallurgy issues that had not yet been addressed.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: The handlebars broke in half twice. He called it crystallization. There is such a thing as chrome embrittlement. If they were chromed or nickel or whatever, it could maybe somehow etch the base metal and cause them to weaken and crack. I'm not a metallurgist, but I mean, these are things that, I mean, this is a brand new industry, things that really hadn't been addressed or invented. When you sell somebody a bicycle, how far are they really going to go? Outside of their own town where they had cobblestone and boardwalks and maybe a macadam, outside of that, you're in wagon country.

Brian: And even a modern motorcycle, if you're riding a long railroad track, you're riding railroad ties for miles at a time, it's going to have trouble, you know? Absolutely. So you can't blame, but yeah, it isn't like if somebody had the actual bike, I mean, yeah, the actual bike would look really haggard and...

Jordan: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, didn't you guys have a friend that went throughout Alaska? Tim something? Oh, Tim Clark? Tim Clark. Yeah.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: All of his amazing photographs on a modern bike that has been designed for it. Yeah. Can't have them without mishap. No, this is the other thing. And you heard this in one of the episodes, but for at least 40 years, I've been going to bluegrass festivals in Kendallville, Indiana, twice a year, Memorial and Labor Day. It's a family thing. We've been doing it forever. I had no idea that these are the same roads or tracks that George Wyman rode. And so, uh, this past Memorial Day, I took a break from listening to music and went into town. And like I said, I was standing in the same exact spot that George Wyman stood in at least two or three places. The buildings are identical as the pictures that he took 122 years ago. Nice. That was like a rite of passage for me. It was a religious experience at this point. Yeah.

Brian: Really interesting. One of the things I noticed on the Wyman Memorial Project, it looks like they're still working on research. Yeah. There's obviously a lot of things that aren't known. And you mentioned a lot of photographs can't be found. You don't know where the motorcycle is or.

Jordan: I hope they find them. I would love for them to prove that the one that this Scafone guy has is the bike. I would love for them to find, you know, the toolbox or, you know, the battery box or any, I mean, here's the other thing. Roy Marks and the California Motor Company did not have a reinforced suspension fork. The bike that George Wyman used had a reinforced suspension fork or just reinforced. The Thomas Company, who, like I said, had his guy stay up till nine o'clock at night to fix his bike. And then the crankshaft breaks the next day, which is, I don't know if they whittled it out of balsa or something, but they had a suspension fork. They were marketing it in the magazine in 1903.

Brian: Oh, okay.

Jordan: So was the fork on George Wyman's bike from the Thomas Company? This is a question, but you look at the pictures and it's, it's not a standard fork.

Brian: Yeah. They might've put that on there and they just took it out of the story because of the sponsor.

Jordan: It could be, but you look at the pictures and it shows, you know, regular bicycle forks and another articulated structure that comes out in the front, almost like a tinsel toy version of a Vincent fork or something, you know, there's something that pivots or, or has sprung there, you know, which would definitely help at least, you know, keep your wrists from turning into shattered glass, you know, crossing the country for 3,800 miles.

Brian: Yeah. And I noticed on the website too, they have, uh, GPX tracks. They follow a paved route that pretty much hits all the, hits all the points that he mentioned. That'd be, that sounds like it'd be kind of interesting to, uh, to go recap some of that.

Jordan: I guess they do it pretty regularly now. There's this gentleman, his name is Tim Masterson has done this trip and I guess they do it annually. I guess George Wyman is the honorary deceased mascot for the Iron Butt guys, right?

Brian: Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan: Uh, is that a thousand miles a day or something like that? You know, they, they've, uh, propped him up as his holiness or whatever. Yeah. I guess they do this trip every year. Now, as for the Wyman project, they say on the website that they're adding to it, but it hasn't been updated in quite a while. So I wonder if they've stepped away from it. If they're just accumulating more information. I don't know, but I checked back and the latest updates are years ago.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: I mean, maybe we got to rattle their cages or something. Maybe they're going to send me hate mail now for some of the things I've said. Um, and that's fine. It's in the magazine that is their source too.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: So I'd be happy to be wrong. Like I said, I may be right. I may be wrong. I may be full of shit, but I'll speak my mind. All right. I'm standing right here. Let's go.

Brian: Yeah. They mentioned on the Memorial Project website that they've really not found any George Wyman artifacts.

Jordan: Right.

Brian: Like you mentioned his trip diary, uh, pictures that he took there somewhere, who knows, you know, maybe there's somewhere in San Francisco at a box.

Jordan: Dave Scafoni. I don't see anything that's Dave Scafoni on the, uh, website. Oh, we got Gilroy, California, the grotto capital of the world. Previous home of, uh, was that Indian first, second iteration of Indian motorcycles in Gilroy, California. Oh, it's not. It's a, it's a Facebook profile, but, uh, and that's the right area. Could be the same guy, David Scafoni. I guess I'll have to look into that and get back to you. Cause he's the guy that allegedly has this bike. I mean, we know the California motorcycle company did not just have one model. They did not just make one bike.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: You know, they had to have a few hundred bikes. I mean, but they're based in San Francisco. So for them to find one in a box in San Francisco is more likely than unlikely. Right. I mean, it's, it's like if I went to Rockford, Illinois and found a Bridgestone, which was where they were selling them from, whatever, Massachusetts and found an original Indian. Now, by the way, Oscar Hendy, uh, one of the co-founders of Indian, they were already making motorcycles in 1902. And this dude, Oscar Hendy was not only the founder, but he was a racer and he was winning races all over the place. He was kicking everybody's ass and he gets a patent for the first adjustable airflow carburetor. Cause like we said before, the carburetor was basically a box with gauze in it and it was sucking gasoline into the engine with a atmospheric valve.

Brian: Yeah. It was just sort of vapor would, yeah. Vapor carburetor.

Jordan: Yeah. This is effectively the first almost modern carburetor that Indian invented in 1902.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: And he gets a patent for that, which is amazing to me.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: And Harley Davidson wasn't even a company yet.

Brian: Yeah. Oh yeah. This was all in the future.

Jordan: Yeah.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: I mean, it was literally that year, the same year we put an airplane in the sky, right? This is Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Kill Devil Hill and the Wright Brothers put an airplane in the air that year. All these futuristic things.

Brian: And again, the Wright Brothers, they owned a bicycle shop.

Jordan: They owned a bicycle shop.

Brian: The bicycles were like the, the peak of, they were technology, you know, at that time.

Jordan: Let's go over some of the things that happened that year.

Brian: Yeah. Crazy. I remember I, I've been to the Wheels Through Time Museum a few times. This is around 2005, 2006. We actually, I don't know how somebody arranged that. We had a private tour from Dale Waxler. He would, you know, he showed us around. He started up a bunch of them and did burnouts and stuff like that. It was just amazing. Absolutely. You see this old spindly looking stuff and you think, and it has to be so delicate, but really.

Jordan: They all work.

Brian: Yeah. They work. Those things are strong. They're built out of good metal.

Jordan: Yeah. Dale was so cool.

Brian: He'd fire it up and do a big burnout down the hallway and come back.

Jordan: He was a cool guy. Yeah. I met him a couple of times. I met him in the, when they first opened my dad and I went there. I think I was at the Honda Hoot, which was an Asheville in North Carolina before they moved to Knoxville.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: I think the last time I went was 1999 and we went to the Wheels Through Time Museum. I'm not sure what, when they opened exactly, but it was very close to when they opened and I met Dale then. I was like, you know, that's a funny last name. You know, I went to high school with some kids named Waxler. Where are you from? Oak Park, Illinois. He goes, yeah, I'm from Oak Park. He's actually related to these guys. These were tough kids too.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: They were the kind of kids that you gave them a little room to cross in the hall or cross on the street. And the dad was always working on a motorcycle, literally on the sidewalk in front of his house, which was crazy. Pretty wild. And they had a huge garage. The house was meh. The garage was as big as the house.

Brian: Interesting. Yeah. Well, that's the right way around.

Jordan: Yeah.

Brian: One question I was wondering, Jordan, you like old motorcycles.

Jordan: I sure do.

Brian: I've got an old motorcycle. What's the oldest, I've never ridden anything older than the seventies. Have you had a chance to spend time with like any of these real, real antiques like from the 1910s?

Jordan: No, not that. The earliest bike I've physically worked on and touched is 1956. And let me just preface that I have had metric motorcycles. I've ridden SAE motorcycles, but my preference is for metric. So when you say 1910, it eliminates quite a few countries.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: So I've had Italian, I've had German, I've had British. I guess if you squint really hard, I've had Austrian, Czech, but my thing is Japanese. So Japanese only goes back so far. I mean, after the world war II, there was, they had to basically regroup and start over again. But I'm a third generation rider. I rode with my grandfather. I rode with my dad, my uncles, cousins. I still ride with one of my cousins. And so that's where my roots come from. So I was not restoring per se, but there's some bikes that were restored, but mostly rejuvenating old Japanese bikes, specifically fifties through seventies, two-stroke Japanese bikes. So the earliest bike I've ever touched, wrenched and not ridden, but gotten that far was a 1956 Yamaha. Oh, wow. YA1.

Brian: That does go back a ways. Yeah.

Jordan: But Yamaha wasn't even in America yet.

Brian: Yeah.

Jordan: And then they have the YC1, which is 180 CCs. That's how the Yamaha did it. ACD is 250. YE was 260, which was something that they did to go beyond the limiter class for certain countries. And then after that, they just put displacement, but I've been able to touch and work on very rare old Japanese bikes. I own one of the earliest black bombers in the world. If you know what that is, it's a CB450 double overhead cam Honda.

Brian: Oh, okay.

Jordan: My serial number is 237 and Bill Stulver said it is built in the first week. So there's that. I do own a YDS1, 1959. I paid dearly for it and, uh, I'm thrilled to own it. And it's, it's a huge part. It's considered to be the very first Japanese sports bike with two carburetors, double cradle frame and whatnot. It was designed for sports. It was originally called the Yamaha sports.

Brian: Nice.

Jordan: Uh, there's, there's a few cool old bikes that I've, I've worked on and, uh, been able to, uh, ride, but the oldest I've probably ridden is the 59.

Brian: Yeah. There's some wild stuff coming out of Eastern Europe, uh, in the.

Jordan: Oh my God. In the fifties? Jawa. Yeah.

Brian: And yeah, CZ, MZ, they were killing it.

Jordan: We're going to talk about that. Thanks to the whole Ernst Degner story. That, that is going to be another deep dive. Maybe not as deviating as this one, but cause this is my first go, but Ernst Degner is another one that gotta be cracked open with the, uh, defection and everything.

Brian: Yeah. Basically brought us expansion chambers, I believe was.

Jordan: Yep.

Brian: Nice.

Jordan: That came from the V2 rocket, which is all World War II stuff. That's crazy. You'll hear about it. Cool.

Brian: Yeah. We'll get, we'll get to that story later on. Tune in later, I guess, huh?

Jordan: Yeah. Here's hoping.

Brian: Yeah. And one of the questions I have is George Wyman. He died at the age of 82, had a great life and so forth.

Jordan: Oh boy.

Brian: What all did he go into? Did he stay famous or was he just kind of low key or what was his life like afterwards?

Jordan: After he crossed America, he did, he endorsed a coaster break company. So he was getting residuals from that. Let me see if I can get the name of the coast. I'll look at it in a second here. But all the work that he did on the 1902 California motorcycle that he rode across, because he died in 1903, I believe it may be the same one that he rode to Reno the first try, but modified, like brought it back and say, Hey, let's do these things to it to make the trip better. You know, he became a chauffeur for a number of years and also a mechanic. Now, just because a guy is able to ride a bicycle around Australia doesn't make him a mechanic. So up until that point from I think April of 1902, he was hanging out with the California motorcycle company mechanics, learning how to tear this damn thing apart. He tore it apart multiple times down to the crank shaft. When he said overhaul, he doesn't mean spray a little brake cleaner on it and call it shiny. He tore the damn thing apart repeatedly. So he knew what he was doing. So he basically, you know, with the school of hard knocks or became a very capable mechanic. And so he became an automotive mechanic. He died in 1959 at the age of 82. There is an article in the Oakland Tribune or whatever the hell it is that goes over his story. And it is a photograph of him as an 81 year old man. Right now we only know pictures of him in his prime. We only see his rookie card pictures right now. But he became an old man with a fat face and looking, he smoked cigars all his life and died in 82 in Eureka, California, which is up north. I think that's up towards Reading. If I'm not mistaken, I'm not a hundred percent positive. Now, this is the thing here. What happened the year that he died? I mean, the guy saw everything. The guy crossed the country before there were roads. After he did it, all this shit explodes. He literally was there when they completed Route 66. Did he drive it? We don't know. I'd love to hear the rest of his story. He was there when they completed the Route 80 across North America. The Lincoln Highway was after him. It basically follows the route he took one direction or the other effectively. He had to go around mountains. They blew up mountains and went through mountains. I drove through a mountain on Sunday. We're blowing holes through mountains where trains had to go around in the old days or people had to go around with wagons. What was it like for him to see all these developments? Did he sit there silently and have no audience? What does the old man over there in the corner have to say for himself? He crossed the country before there were even roads. With a knapsack and a pistol and a lot of cash and a couple of tools, basically on a Jackie Gleason, Dom DeLuise dare, whatever we're going to call it. He did the deal. What's going through this guy's mind? I would love to know more about it.

Brian: It's a little weird how you just kind of fade it out and then the year before he died, somebody's like, oh, this old guy did this cool thing. He wrote one article and that's it.

Jordan: He had two sons. I guess they were involved partly in the George Wyman Memorial Project. So they would be a source of information. His wife passed before him. So he died in 59. She died in 58, I think it was. And his ashes are with her mausoleum, whatever they call it, crypt or whatever. So you could visit him in, I believe, Eureka, California.

Brian: Yeah. I think that's one of the stops on the tracks that they have on the website. Very cool.

Jordan: Next time I will, I'll stop by and say, hi, give him a high five. How many punctured tires?

Brian: You already mentioned one, but who are some of the other riders of the past or some of this history that you'd like to bring up in the future?

Jordan: Well, now you brought up one. Was that black woman? Bessie Stringfield. Bessie Stringfield. I want to tackle her probably after I cover roads. I think roads really have to be covered. And I'd like to knock those out in one episode, but yeah, she's pretty cool. There's so much, cause it just explodes from there. It's an exponential explosion of people that have made their mark, not because they were paid to do it necessarily because it was, it was in their spirit, you know, it was in their, in their blood. And I think I'd like to look into her. I kind of want to go sequentially in terms of years, but I think what I'd like to do is tackle roads and then take her and then take it as it comes. With you have suggestions, I'd be thrilled to hear about somebody in particular. I mean, there's so many after this.

Brian: Nice.

Jordan: I mean, we've got some that are still with us.

Brian: Well, and Malcolm Smith died pretty recently.

Jordan: Oh my God, Malcolm Smith. Yeah. He's huge.

Brian: You know, and the thing is he was part of the, on any Sunday. So he actually did get documented and he was actually pretty famous, you know?

Jordan: Yeah. Yeah. And there's so many, you know, it was their thing, you know, they were the guy, they were the go-to guy. They competed in these desert hair scrambles and whatnot and every version of the sport. And we're also the go-to guy to do the stunt in the movie. Yeah. And then you could also find them hanging out by their van, reging on something that you could have a beer with them.

Brian: Yeah. Well, Jordan, that was amazing. Thank you very much for the recap. That was a lot of fun. So next time around, we're back to abnormal with Robin Dean back in the saddle, I think. And maybe he'll share a little bit of what he's been up to and what's next. Right now we're on the backside of summer and we're planning the fall season crescendo with working on another track day. I need to talk to you about that, Neil. Working on some epic twisties, working on Missouri, working on Kentucky, travel, logistics, so much logistics, tires and gas and how we're going to get there and hotels. It's just a pain in the butt. It's all worth it though. Nice. Can't wait to get back next time. So, hey, thanks a lot, Jordan. That was a lot of fun to kind of recap and go over that.

Jordan: So interesting, if nothing else. Thank you.

Neil: Till next time, that wraps it up for this episode of The Riding Obsession.