My Last Bike

I had a number of different motorcycles during my life. This story is about my last. It was 1972 and I was attending the University of Houston on the GI Bill and working for my brother on his used car lot. One day, a finance company that carried a lot of the notes on autos we sold, called and asked if we could store a motorcycle they had repossessed. The bike had been purchased in Michigan a few months before. The owner had loaned the bike to his sister and her boyfriend so they could take it for a test ride. They test rode it all the way to Houston where they got busted for drug use. The police had turned the motorcycle over to the lien holder. I fell in love with it the moment I first saw it. It was a 1972 Kawasaki 750 and it only had a few thousand miles on it. I told the finance company manager I was interested in buying it and he said he would give me a shot when it was sure that the owner would not reclaim it. That didn't happen for two years. I would crank it up from time to time and ride it around the car lot. It had power like nothing else I had ever owned. One day we got the call that all legalities had been satisfied and they could sell the bike. They made me an offer i could not refuse, assuming we would wave two years of storage fees. During the time I was waiting , my son had been added to my family. He was about four months old the day I drove the bike home. I had a friend that had a bike that had been hounding me for months to go riding around with him. I gave him a call and we set up a riding date for the next weekend. It was a beautiful spring morning . We decided on the possible route and he took off ahead of me. About a mile from my home, the road ended in a T where you had to turn right or left. My friend was ahead and had already made the turn and I was stopped at line waiting for some traffic to go by . There was one more car coming by and I could see it was traveling way over the speed limit. In the last moment, the drive decided to turn onto the road where I was stopped. Only problem was that he did not see me. He turned into my lane and didn't see me until he was right along the side of me. When he did see me, he over reacted and almost turned the car oven in the ditch. It was a car load of drunk teenagers. As you always hear, my life passed before me in those seconds. I could imagine my windowed wife and infant son without a father. My friend was out of sight and I turned the bike around and drove back home. A while later, he returned looking for me. I told him what had happened and also told him I was not riding it anymore and was going to sell it. I put an ad in the paper the next week and sold it to the first person that came by. Years later when I started using the Internet, I did a search on that 72 Kawasaki. It was then that I found out that that year/model of Kawasaki had been dubbed, "The Wiidowmaker"