Bye, bye, motorcycle license

The cycle of life

I no longer have a motorcycle license for the first time in 50 years.

When I got my Ohio driver’s license renewed a week before my 88^th birthday November 5, 2020, the clerk said:

“No more motorcycle on your driver’s license?”

I guess she figured an 88-year-old and a motorcycle were a bad combination.

So my new Ohio driver’s license no longer will have a “motorcycle” designation.

I was 38 when I rode a motorcycle for the first time, thanks to the late Gene Gray, a good-hearted electrician in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio who loved to share his toys with his friends.

He gave me some instructions and put me on his 250 cc Benelli, built by an Italian motorcycle company that began in 1911, sold shotguns first, then was taken over by Argentine owners and currently Chinese owners.

What a thrill it was when I rode that Benelli up the Gray farmland hill in Willard, Ohio and then soared into the air when I reached the top of the steep mini-cliff! I was hooked.

Gene sold me the Benelli. Hell, practically gave it away.

Eventually the Olesky home in Cuyahoga Falls had the Benelli, a 175 cc Yamaha, a 125 cc Honda, a Penton dirtbike and a 75 cc step-through Yamaha that I drove to work daily.

The baby Yamaha put me into a hospital ER when I crashed into a curb in the sudden rain on my way to work at the Akron Beacon Journal. Afterward, I showed up a work, then passed out. The late printer Terry Dray reached across the turtle where we were putting together a page of hot type to keep me from slamming into the floor.

The Olesky family rode those motorcycles with our “gang,” other parents with their children, in Ohio, in West Virginia, in Pennsylvania and in New York. On non-interstate roads, on logging trails.

Gene would be in the lead motorcycle and I would be riding shotgun (last bike in a line of up to 15 motorcycles) to protect the riders between Gene and me from auto traffic.

I once got the Benelli up to 85 mph on a straight road with no traffic in either direction. Wind whipping at the face protector on my helmet. If you haven’t done it, you just can’t understand it.

My personal Mona Lisa, my late wife, sold the motorcycles when the children were reaching the age where they could legally buy their own bikes. “If they kill themselves on a motorcycle,” Monnie said, “then at least it won’t be my fault.”

I’ve driven about everything that moves in my lifetime, including an elephant in Thailand that splashed gleefully into a water ride with Paula and me seated atop it. And horses at Blackwater Falls in West Virginia, till one tried to rub me off with a tree. Maybe he was prejudiced against a Polish-American in his saddle. And a camel with the Great Pyramids of Egypt in the background.

Motorboats. “Crew” member of a sailboat on Lake Erie. Trains between Virginia and Florida and Cass Railroad for tourists to the highest point in West Virginia.

Hot air balloon drifting above the land in Ohio.

Wrecked a few, too, in my youth.

Scooter, wagon, a child’s contraption that you sat on a seat and pulled the handle and shaft back and forth to get it moving, bicycle. Well, it was a reddog road, which meant there were a lot of rocks and few smooth paths. So over the holler I went on Thomas Street in Monongah, West Virginia, time after time. Once, Tom Retton who lived across the holler on Jackson Street saw my unconscious body 100 feet down the ravine from the road. He carried my lifeless form to our house, knocked on our door and told my Mom, “Here’s your son.” She fainted.

Mom fainted several times over my misadventures which required medical treatment.

I’ve also been on cruise ships more than a dozen times, in commercial jet passenger planes including one that was close enough to the North Pole to see the aurora borealis on our way to China.

I’d skied snowy slopes in Ohio, once almost sending one ski to one side of a tree and the other to the other side, stopping barely in time and preventing a split “personality.” And water-skied in the Ohio River and on Lake Erie.

I crashed a friend’s borrowed bicycle into a parked truck in Monongah. Learned some new curse words from the truck’s owner.

I rode wooden toboggans done commercial chutes in Ohio, wind blowing through my hair (I had hair then). I went sledriding on the hills around Monongah where we had to drag our feet at the bottom to keep from being scalped by barbed wire. One girl didn’t do it fast enough and lost a lot of hair and scalp.

When the 1950 snowstorm of 45.5 inches hit northern West Virginia I rode my sled down steep Swisher Hill because automobiles weren’t able to navigate U.S. 19. We were going so fast at the bottom that we had to drag out feet going UP the next hill to keep from flying off the curve and into injuries.

I’ve ridden miniature hot-rods on commercial tracks.

I hitch-hiked, between my freshman and sophomore years in college, from Monongah to Chicago to Philadelphia to Monongah. My mother gave me two $20 bills and had me put one in each sock. When I returned home after my 1,300-mile journey, I still have one $20 bill in one of the socks.

One of the drivers who gave me a ride told me how he was heading back to Montana to shoot the guy who stole his wife from him. I made sure not to irritate the driver the rest of my ride from Massillon, Ohio to near Chicago.

I took lessons to be an airplane pilot but never actually flew a plane. My mother-in-law said, with my penchant for running out of gas in automobiles, that I probably would run out of gas with the plane.

I never tried skydiving because I knew I wouldn’t be able to find the ripcord in time to keep my body from slamming into the ground.

I’ve used transportation to visit 56 countries and 44 states. Thailand was my favorite foreign country. Beautiful scenery, beautiful people (inside and out). We took a large rowboat to the water markets in Bangkok. We did our shopping without leaving the boat. The merchants just handed our purchases from their boat to our boat.

Lot of memories. They help sustain me during the stay-home pandemic year.

I’ve had plenty of varooms in my life. And not just on the motorcycles.