Thursday, October 27, 2011

Zdeno Cycle and the first ATV in Canada

The first ATV was actually called an ATC. I should know. I owned it.

Zdeno was a guy who was once motocross champ of whatever eastern European country he came from. One of those countries that's been wiped from the map.  Moved to the new land. Got a Honda dealership. It was on Elizabeth Street in Guelph.

I wandered in there one day in '69 or '70. They had this weird hallucination on the showroom floor. A tricycle. Balloon tires. Honda 90 engine. Hi-lo four speed. Looked like something out of a cartoon. I just had to have one.

Kind of odd when you think about it. My very first childhood memory involved a tricycle. I was pedalling my trike up Lorraine Avenue in Guelph, past Billy Kipling's house. Billy was standing on the front lawn. As I passed he hurled his sister's toy iron at me. Those were the days. Little sisters had toy steam irons. Big brothers had toy guns.

So he flings the iron at me, for no reason I could figure out, and bops me square in the head. All I remember is it really hurt, I fell off my trike, causing even more trauma, and I ran home crying.

So now I'm in my mid-teens and I want to buy this trike. Maybe I just wanted to run over Billy's face with it, I don't know. But I had to have it. It was my first bank loan. Dad co-signed.

That Honda three-wheeler was one incredible joy-ride. First thing I figured out is that I could pretty much go indefinitely on either the two back wheels- a wheelie- or two side wheels - a side-wheelie as it were. Sure, a few times I went over backwards and scraped a bit of skin off my ass, but you kind of expected that with anything you bought at a motorcycle shop back in the day.

I soon got the stunt riding thing figured out. Built a little ramp up beside the road. Got all my siblings to lie on the ground behind the ramp. Then I'd jump over them. Sort of like Evil Kneivel except instead of jumping buses you were jumping over your siblings. Nobody ever got hurt.

Must say the design of the Honda ATC was a litigation lawyer's dream. Even after I'd racked up hundreds of hours on this baby, totally unpredictable things could happen. You'd be snaking up a 60 degree incline back in the woods. Low range. Territory that none of your dirt-bikin' buddies could dream of, and suddenly the Honda would do a sharp left and take off down the hill.

I remember the first time I let "the kid" take her for a spin. He's got her at about 50 clicks alongside the irrigation ditch up beside the highway. He's about nine years old at the time. He's whipping along, drifting closer and closer to the ditch. I'm watching, thinking oh shit, he can't be going in the...

And the ATC disappears from view, tumbling into the ditch. Holy shit! I just killed my little brother... I run for the ditch, look over the edge. Eight feet below me I see three balloon tires, and up beside the front tire, there's the kid's face. He's looking at me. Then he starts to laugh. The ATC has flipped, he's trapped underneath, but he landed in mud and two feet of water. It broke his fall. He's OK!

Unfortunately, not everybody who had one of those three-wheelers go its own way had such a happy ending. Honda had a flood of law-suits over the controlability of their three-wheelers. So they stopped making them and along came the four-wheeler. Less fun. Less law-suits. But today in rural America, the four-wheelers are everywhere.

Before they pulled the plug on production, Honda had seriously upgraded their three-wheeler. The balloon tires went the second year of production, in favor of off-road knobbies. They upped the power. You could get 185's, 250's, and more. Yamaha and Suzuki even got into the act before the legal tsunami hit the fan.

Then the three-wheelers morphed into four-wheerlers. They're everywhere. But I'm looking for a good clean three wheeler. At least a 250. Give me a shout if you have one for sale.

 I'm still looking to run over Billy Kipling's face.

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