The whole thing was born, they say, in the late 1940s, when most ex-GIs wanted to get back to an orderly pattern: college, marriage, a job, children –all the peaceful extras that come with a sense of security. But not everybody felt that way. Like the drifters who rode west after Appomatox, there were thousands of veterans in 1945 who flatly rejected the idea of going back to their pre-war pattern. They didn’t want order, but privacy- and time to figure things out. It was a nervous, downhill feeling, a mean kind of Angst that always comes out of wars… a compressed sense of time on the outer limits of fatalism. They wanted more action, and one of the ways to look for it was on a big motorcycle. By 1947 the state was alive with bikes, nearly all of them powerful American made irons from Harley-Davidson and Indian (now defunct).
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