My Scooter

 I was once the proud owner of a 1958 Cushman Road King scooter.  It was two tone aqua and white and is a collectible item now.  But in its day when I had it, it was way out of style.  I had it in the late sixties and the cool bikes were the little Honda's, Suzuki's, and Yamaha's zipping around.  Years before this when I was a little kid my older brothers had motor scooters and go carts but I was too young to drive them. Then by the time I was old enough, my brothers had moved on to cars and I was left with an old frame of a scooter in our decrepit barn just sitting there with no wheels, no seat, and no engine.  It was just a metal frame with a wooden floor and rusty handlebars that I would stand on (no seat) and pretend to drive.  I started asking my dad if we could put wheels and an engine on it and he made the mistake of saying that he sometimes saw engines in the window at the Goodwill Store downtown in Muskegon when he would walk by it on the way from his shop he worked at to the bank to cash his check on payday.  So every payday I anxiously waited for him to come home from work hoping he had an engine for the scooter.  But it was always either he forgot to look, or he didn't go by the store that day, or he checked and they didn't have one, Things were not looking good for me and my scooter.  

One day my luck changed dramatically, my brother Bob was going to work at the Grand Haven State park for the summer and he was also going to rent an apartment in Spring Lake so he needed something to get him just the few miles from Spring Lake to Grand Haven.  He and dad had found the Cushman somewhere for $50 it was decided this would do the job and they loaded it in the trunk of the car and brought it home.  It was big and heavy so that says a lot about the size of the car trunks in the sixties.  I was mesmerized by it, it had a full body that was painted as I already said in two tone paint, a floorboard with a clutch and brake pedals and a shifter on the side of the body to go from first gear to second- that was it, two gears.  Top speed was about 45 mph going downhill on a paved road.  The plan was for Bob to drive it for the summer then I was to buy it from him in the fall for $50 from the money I earned working for Tony Grumet.  I was really excited about this and couldn't wait to get it.  It seemed like an eternity before the scooter came back to our house and when I gave Bob the $50 he said I owed him another $25 for parts he had to put into the scooter to get it running.  I knew nothing about the extra $25 and only had $50 so I insisted that was all I would pay.  Bob got really mad about it and he and dad talked about it for what seemed like a long time, finally it was decided I only had to pay $50 but Bob was still sore about it.  

I was instantly the hit of the neighborhood; I had friends like never before.  Four or five guys would just drop by regularly to ride the scooter.  I was pretty proud of it, especially at first.  Yes, it was old fashioned, but it ran well when I first got it and was a lot of fun to ride on the little road in the woods behind the house.  We soon found out it was no nimble machine though; it was made for blacktop and the dirt road through the woods was a challenge for it.  It was easy to spill over in soft sand and really heavy to pick up right again.  But there were almost always two guys on it so between the two of them it was not too hard.

In time though things started breaking on it and I was not any good at fixing them.  One of the problems was the twist throttle on the handlebar broke and dad said there were no parts to be had for it.  I eventually rigged up a string to pull to make the engine run fast or slow but it didn't work very well and eventually I would just ride it with one hand on the handlebar and lean over with the other hand on the carburetor trying to control the throttle which made it even trickier to drive in the sand.  It got harder and harder to start but the final straw was when the old barn collapsed on it from too much snow on the barn roof.  At first I thought my Cushman survived the collapse with flying colors and I was pretty proud of it.  (Unlike the fiberglass boat that someone had unfortunately stored in the old barn that winter).  But a new problem began to plague the scooter, whenever I would go over a bump, I would get a sharp poke in the butt.  I thought maybe a coil spring in the seat had broken in the barn disaster. and when I went over a bump it poked up from the padding and got me.  I looked and looked for something that was poking me and just couldn't find it.  Finally I noticed that the engine also sputtered whenever I got the poke in the butt.  This lead to see that the wooden bottom of the seat had been cracked from the barn collapse and that the seat would flex down over the engine when I hit a bump and on the top of the engine was the spark plug with an uninsulated spark plug wire which would contact the coil spring in the seat when it flexed down.  So I was getting a shock from the spark plug in the butt whenever I went over a bump.  That and the other problems pretty much killed the love of the scooter at that point.  Besides, I was getting interested in cars by then.  So dad made a swap with my mom's cousin Monte Beegle who wanted the scooter for parts to make a motorized trike, I think he needed the gearbox.  We got in the trade a 1958 baby blue Mercury Park Lane convertible with a huge continental kit on the back.  The thing was bigger than the Titanic and it was now my car.  The only problem was I wanted a little sports car, but that's another story.