Walneck's Classic Cycle Trader - January 2009 - (Page 136)

ABOUT OUR WRITERS THE MIDNIGHT WHIZZER..MARK ZIMMERMAN sports fan who never missed the Wild World of Sports. The Ascot TT was being broadcast, the first televised motorcycle race in the US, and one won by Skip Van Leeuwen on a Triumph. “I instantly decided I was a Triumph guy,” Mark said. Mark learned to ride in junior high, first on a Mobylette moped and later on a step-through Honda 50 Mark and his friend “borrowed” when no one else was around to complain. Not long after Mark got his first ride, a Taco 22, a mini-bike that came in kit form that really began Mark’s wrench turning exploits. “It was horrible,” Mark said of the mini-bike. “The fork was held to the frame by an extra long bolt and had something like a valve spring under the bolt. Just terrible.” Mark’s two-wheeled life soon got better thanks to a new law. Now living with his mother in Philadelphia, Mark said a family friend had previously rented scooters to servicemen, but the new law required a motorcycle license for customers and killed the business. The man told Mark, who thought the guy was just blowing smoke, that if he could make a broken scooter run, he’d give it to Mark. Mark came back from school one day to find the man dropped off three dead scooters. “Somehow I managed to get one of them running,” Mark said. “I rode the wheels off the thing,” Mark continued. “It drove my parents nuts so one day I came home and they were all gone.” Bigger Bikes Mark graduated to a Honda Super 90 and again rode incognito, waiting for his parents to leave so he could take it out on the road. “I never went too far with it because I wanted to be able to push it home if I got caught,” he said. Pumping gas for 50 cents an hour soon financed a $300 CL72 and more wrenching activity. “I’d take all the pieces off I could get to and paint them,” Mark said. But the bike met an unfortunate end, a casualty of his stepfather’s interest in trying to share a common activity. Try as he could, Mark couldn’t talk his stepfather out of attempting to ride it, so Mark gave in. “He thanked me by totaling the bike,” Mark said laughing now at the memory. “He just pinned the throttle and dumped the clutch.” The bike shot out underneath his stepfather, blew through a split rail fence and crashed into a tree. After his stepfather recovered from his own injury, a cracked vertebrae, he wanted to make amends. They brought the wrecked bike down to a local shop The Midnight Wizzer By Mike Brown M ark Zimmerman is a man of many talents, a wrench turning motorcycle racer who can throw out a word like Kafkaesque with the ease of a college professor one moment and then hop on a flat track dirt racer he built himself the next. Many would also brag about multiple books in print and nearly 300 racing trophies or crow about many other accomplishments, but a conversation with the mechanic/writer/racer feels more like a visit with an old friend who holds a common interest, a love of motorcycles. The total lack of pretentiousness is mirrored in Bench Racing, a column Mark writes for this magazine. Simply put, the guy behind the writing is very much what you see every month in twelve point type, except one learns a lot more through direct questions about how all the technical and verbal knowledge evolved. “I was a very troubled kid. I put my parents through hell,” Mark said in reflecting back on when he first became interested in motorcycles. “Anything with an engine got me going; a bulldozer was terrific, a locomotive over the top.” Mark said his early years in Wildwood, NJ were full of mechanized equipment and he was drawn to machines like a strong magnet to ferrous metal. He recalled one bulldozer in particular he somehow managed to climb up on and start by himself when he was only five, a sight fortunately also caught by Marks’s mother. “I was sitting in the thing and it was running,” Mark said. “I was laughing like a madman. She said I was pulling on all the levers trying to get it into gear. Fortunately, I couldn’t reach the clutch.” A few years later at eight Mark developed into an avid fisherman, a hobby he still enjoys. He got up early one morning to fish and was “transfixed” by a sight he vividly recalled: a bright red BSA Road Rocket resting majestically on the street near his house. “I think I sat and stared at the thing for two hours,” Mark said, adding that he hoped to meet the owner but that it never happened. The bike was gone when he came back from fishing, the owner still a mystery, but the memory of the Road Rocket still burns brightly. “A pure escape vehicle,” Mark said. “I could get on it and just disappear.” Motorcycles moved out of static display one Sunday afternoon while visiting his grandfather, a 136 January 2009 | WALNECK’S CLASSIC CYCLE TRADER® I WALNECKS.COM http://www.WALNECKS.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Walneck's Classic Cycle Trader - January 2009

Classic Cycle - January 2009 Contents American The Buzz with Buzz Walneck 1970 Harley Davidson FXS - Low Rider Motorcycle Tips with Mike Brown 1970 Harley Davidson Super Glide Cal Rayborn’s 1973 HD SRTT 1978 Harley Davidson XR 750 Bench Racing with Mark Zimmerman Events Listings & Advertisements British Chain Anyone? Barber Vintage Review Biker of the Month Parts, Accessories, Want Ads The Art of Dismantling Why Do We Do It, and When? Buffing Metal Old Blue, Deja Blue and the California Hot Rod A Fat Daddy I Call Friend 7th Annual Concours European Teacher Knows Best … Mike Brown The Midnight Whizzer … Mark Zimmerman Madman … Somer Hooker Buzz Japanese Motorbikes & Scooters Memorbilia Antique Cycle Clubs Competition How to Place a Word Ad How to Place a Photo Ad Area Code Directory How to Subscribe Let Us Help with Your Event

Walneck's Classic Cycle Trader - January 2009

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.