Stories - Chapter 16
Chip and David's Excellent Adventure
I shipped my 350 Honda Scrambler to LA from Dad's warehouse in Atlanta in August of 1969. I loved riding it in California, as there was no helmet law there, and Florida passed one in 1967.
My good friend, Jim "Chip" or Chips" McClurg, was stationed in the Navy in Long Beach, not too far from me in Huntington Beach. We weren't that tight back in Jax, but we knew each other. We hung out in 1970. I picked up a couple of girl hitchhikers going to Long Beach once to check on his apartment for him while he was out to sea. He lived with two or three other sailors. I knew his place would be a wreck, and I was going to clean it up a little for him as a welcome home surprise. The girls were nice and appreciated the ride to Long Beach. They asked me if there was anything they could do for me, so I asked them if they would help me clean up the apartment. They said sure and good naturedly pitched in. I don't remember if we drank any beer or anything, but we had a good time and it only took an hour or so. They took off and I went back to Huntington Beach. I never saw them again. That was fairly typical of meeting cool people in Southern California back then. There were so many cool people, that you were always running into them. You couldn't be friends with them all. Chip and his roommates were grateful to come home to a clean pad.
So Chip is discharged from the Navy in May of 1971. He rents a room from Mom Ingersoll at the Alma Hotel at 215 1//2 Main Street in Huntington Beach. I was living there again, too. Chip works at the snack bar/restaurant at the end of the Huntington Beach pier for a few months. He has a Honda 305 Scrambler that he bought while he was still in the Navy. We were both pretty hard up so we applied for food stamps, I'm thinking in June. I met my future girlfriend, Sallie Rosenbaum, who was running the food stamp presentation. Chip and I were talking to her after the meeting, and she said "Do you have any questions?" I said, "Yeah, do you want to go out dancing Friday night?" She said yes, and we began a two year relationship. Sallie is a really nice person and I think the world of her.
Anyway, I digress. Chip keeps after me to ride our motorcycles to Florida. Neither one of us has too much going on in SoCal. Chip had never ridden more than a hundred miles or so at a stretch. I had been back and forth from Jacksonville to Atlanta a few times on my Honda 305 Dream and my 350 Scrambler. I knew it would be a looonng ride. I tried to explain to Chip that it wouldn't be all fun, but he was enamored of the idea. Easy Rider, the movie, had been released in 1969. Chip finally wore me down and we left around the end of June. Chip remembers us being in Houston on the 4th of July. It took us 10 days to make the trip. We stopped in Houston for 3 days to rest up. Bryson Williamson, owner of BJ's Surf Shop, who I knew from working for Greek surfboards, put us up. Texas hospitality.
The first night out we stopped in a rest area in California in the desert. Chip started freaking out, thinking about Carlos Castaneda and Don Juan, the Mexican-Indian brujo. He finally went to sleep and we set out the next day. I think we spent the next night at Carlsbad Caverns, we got there late at night, and spread our sleeping bags out on large pieces of gravel. We were so tired, we slept good anyway. We explored the caverns the next day. I thought they would be a great place to have a rock concert.
We started riding at night so our engines would run cooler. Our bikes were too small to run continuously at high speed on the road. We could only go about 50 mph or so even at night or the bikes would overheat. The speed limit was 70 then, before the gas crunch of a few years later, when the speed limit was lowered to 55. We had some scary moments when cars and big trucks would come up behind us, and zoom by. We had some guys follow us from a restaurant once at night out west, for 20 or 30 miles before they turned off. We were scared.
Anyway, about two days out, we woke up in a concrete drainage ditch in a rest area one morning about 10 o'clock. I looked over at Chip. It was hot, his face was red, he was sweating, and he had ants crawling over him. He looked at me, not happy, and I knew he understood what I had been trying to tell him before we left. We stopped at Big Surf water park, in Tempe, outside of Phoenix. We didn't surf the man made wave, but watched for a while. The sand was so hot there on the beach by the wave pool, that it burned your feet. We stopped at 6 Flags over Texas, between Dallas and Fort Worth, briefly. We were worried about leaving our gear on our motorcycles, but went in anyway. When we came out, there were some Harley riders nearby. My bike had TT pipes with removable baffles (no mufflers) and I revved it up a few times as we were leaving, just to show off. Chip got a kick out of this. My bike was as loud or louder than the Harleys. I ran most of the time without the baffles, only installing them in towns we drove around in. We stopped in an auto parts store somewhere in this area and asked for Castrol brand motor oil, so we could change the oil in our bikes. The counter man looked at me and no kidding, said "Caster oil? You get that at the drug store." We kept looking. I don't think we ever found Castrol, but not too long after changed our oil with some other high quality brand, probably in Houston.
We were almost out of gas one night in the Southwest, and found a closed gas station, whose pumps still would trickle gas. We filled up and left some money by the pumps. Chip remembers hallucinating and seeing elephants driving from Dallas to Houston. I'm guessing we had been on the road for five days by then. I remember almost falling asleep while riding down a highway about that same time.
After leaving Houston, we rode to Mobile and stayed with my Uncle Lester and Aunt Frances Stearns overnight. Lester worked for Esso, and bought us each a tank of gas in the morning.
We finally made it to Florida and pulled in to George and Betsy's place on Florida Boulevard and 3rd Street in Neptune Beach. It was late at night and George came out and told us to turn our bikes off so we didn't wake up baby Brooke. I think I went to Mother and Dad's house on Oleander Street and spent the night. Chip probably went to his folks' house in Royal Palms.
We got jobs working for George, who was the landscape foreman at Thousand Oaks, a modular home development in Ponte Vedra, now called Summerhouse and Ocean Grove (The modular homes are long gone, but the entrance road is still called Thousand Oaks Boulevard). George Sares also worked there as a carpenter. Brother George's 2 requirements for hiring were that you were either black, or had hair as long as his. Ah, those were the days. George had a Toyota sedan with a loud muffler, so we knew when to get back to work when we heard him coming. He sold it and bought a pickup truck that was quieter. We were sad.
I stayed in Florida for a few months and flew back to California. George and Herman Brame sold my bike for me for $350 as I recall, and sent me the money.
Frisco Trip
It’s early Spring 1972, in Southern California. My friend, Glenn and I are both temporarily unemployed. And as young men are wont to do when bored, we decided to take a trip. Not having any money never entered our minds as a deterrent. For $9 (and I’m not making this up) you could fly from LAX to San Francisco on the redeye flight. We assembled some camping gear into a couple of backpacks, old school with metal exo frames, and prepared to depart. My girlfriend, Sallie drove us and Glenn’s girlfriend, Jackie, to L A International. Sallie’s 4 year old son, Brian may have come too, I don’t remember. Sallie had a beat up old 4 door Falcon sedan, which was usually loaded with books, fast food wrappers, laundry, and assorted crap. I used to get on her about cleaning up her car, but that’s another story.
We arrived at the airport about 11:30 PM. We got our tickets and were seated on the airplane by 11:55. Hard to believe, but this was before the TSA.
After a short flight, I don’t think we ever got to altitude, just up and down in less than 30 minutes. After disembarking we unsuccessfully hitch hiked to downtown, The City, as Northern Californians liked to say. In other words, we walked from the airport, which as I remember, was not too far. We wandered around downtown for an hour or so, at 1AM. We felt like we were in a surreal Fellini movie. There were drunks, street people, cops, and various other characters wandering around doing various things, strange things, to our minds.
We wandered off in the general direction of South San Francisco, to start hitch hiking back to Costa Mesa, SoCal. We considered finding a roof top to sleep on. This was Glenn’s idea, since he was more street wise than me. He said we would get up before dawn and hit the road again.
About this time, a young man about our age, pulled over in a fiberglass dune buggy. He took us to a house nee mansion, that he was care taking for absent owners. He cooked us a great breakfast and we went swimming in their heated pool. The next morning, after a good night’s sleep, the young man drove us to Highway 1, where in the course of a few days, we made it through Big Sur, Santa Cruz, and other points south to arrive safely in Orange County. On the way we camped out in a cemetery in Santa Cruz, which according to Glenn, was another safe place to sleep over night.
Side note: I got a ticket for hitch hiking in Golden Gate Park. I don't remember if I paid it or not.
