With great planning, the museum dedicated to Harley-Davidson coincided with the brand's 105th anniversary. The motor company rode a wave of anniversary events and ride-ins all last year. But a party every five years doesn't keep a museum running, so H-D has events planned to continue drawing riders and their families.
The first event took place March 27th showing the films of ex-racer Bob Stuth. Bob was a Harley-Davidson factory racer in the forties who began filming motorcycle events after retiring from competition. Bob filmed exclusively in color, making his footage unique for its time. The tapes were donated by Stuth's family; a few of them recalled him projecting films onto a white bed sheet at home. Eight hours of silent film was distilled by H-D curators into about two hours of programming.
Bob's footage contains mostly parades, flat track races, club events. Much of the footage looked like an Archie comic with motorcycles added. Club members wore matching pants, hats, embroidered shirts and, believe it or not, ties. At events there were awards for Best Dressed Couple, Best Dressed Family. Nowhere were the Boozefighters rioting in Hollister, CA; these were Wisconsin's accessorized nuclear families that happened to ride motorcycles. I always pictured Brando in The Wild One (which used all British bikes, not one Harley) and James Dean—all that fifties rockabilly counterculture dazzle. But Bob's footage gave a peek into the more family-oriented side of motorcycling: something more innocent and basic.
As a rider from Milwaukee it's natural I would've been to the museum but until this past March 27th I hadn't. Had it been somewhere else I would've made a pilgrimage, but at three miles from my house I could do it anytime. Plumber with a leaky faucet, so it goes.
In contemporary culture Harley-Davidson and racing aren't a word association match. Fatboy. Lowrider. Road Glide. Soft Tail. But in actual fact Harley-Davidson is the winningest manufacturer in motorcycling history due to the XR750's success in flat track racing. Flat tracks are oval-shaped and made of dirt. While approaching corners racers break traction, spinning out the bike's rear end, then slide their inside foot over the track for stability until the straightaway. Preceding flat tracks, H-D participated in board track racing (wooden tracks built in an oval shape with banked turns) and off-road events, some with sidecars.
The museum does a great job to showcase bikes and artifacts from the golden age of Harley Davidson’s racing history. There is an enormous collection of stained and moth-eaten wool racing jerseys, helmets, leathers, off-road pictures, riding club outfits from seventy years ago, battered sidecar hacks, stretched hill climbers equipped with tire chains. Seeing all this made me feel like I was staring into my grandfather's closet, the things I never knew about his gray-haired grin. Except my grandfather was a company created in my birth city and I'm just now discovering old H-D's virile youth.
I found the Bob Stuth films to be a good analogy for the Harley-Davidson museum as a whole. The museum is about riding, not its place in pop culture.
The H-D museum has events planned throughout the summer. The next is a celebration of the bikes used in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on Saturday April 11th.
http://www.harley-davidson.com/
Click here for a link to the video
Photography by Darci Buttera