I was little more than a punkass kid when I got the opportunity to join the staff of STREET CHOPPER magazine. Well, I was at least nave. I wasn't being paid much, but the opportunity to be on the staff of a motorcycle magazine was a dream come true. Tex Smith of HOT ROD Magazine fame was the staff mentor at then-TRM Publications, but that did not mean he wasn't at the top of his game when it came to gags and pranks.
I was in my very first week of working for TRM when Tex approached me about writing a feature. He then explained that the photo captions should be written flush left, flush right. I asked what that meant, and he explained that most captions are written flush left, ragged right. In laymen's terms, that is because the words are of different length so the sentence length staggers on the right, unless the layout artist alters the spacing between the letters to make them even. Tex told me to make the captions flush left and flush right, but did not tell me that the art department could make adjustments. It took me two days to come up with the nouns, verbs, and adjectives to make my sentences the correct length, but I did it. That was only the beginning of jokes and gags this newbie would have to endure, but as you can tell they left enough of a mark that I never forgot them.
I thought this was the supreme joke on the staff newcomer until Tom McMullen came up with the idea for the ultimate road trip: riding choppers across the United States. At least, that was what I was led to believe. Man, I was excited!
Everybody who was anybody into motorcycling during the early '70s had watched Easy Rider so many times that they could describe the next movie scene in detail before it happened, even lead you through the simple dialect. So it would be a given that an issue of STREET CHOPPER immortalizing Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper's cross-country ride would sell like popcorn at the movies! I sat in on the editorial meeting where McMullen announced that he intended to recreate Captain America's famous cross-country trek, including a stopover at Mardi Gras in New Orleans along the way to Daytona Beach, Florida's Motorcycle Speed Week. Tom described how the radical bikes were being built by AEE Choppers, his motorcycle parts business, and how we would photograph and document this once-in-a-lifetime ride.
As a side note, AEE had built a number of Captain America and Billy bikes for a variety of show promoters across the country. Seems like everyone thought each bike was the real thing; however, there were a number of copies made and some facts that you may not have heard about until now. Number one, I was told that in the closing days of filming Easy Rider, the entire semitruck containing the famous motorcycles and filming gear was stolen. Chopper Specialties and AEE got a frantic phone call, then put their efforts together and built replacement bikes in a matter of weeks! Doubt me? If you get a chance to look at posters or Columbia Pictures' promo photos, the earliest images of Peter Fonda's bike features a Wishbone (bent downtubes) rigid frame. The later photos depict a straight leg rigid frame, so I suspect the rumor of the bikes being stolen is true!
But, back to the trip. Jim Clark was TRM Publishing's office manager, publisher, etc., and he was definitely in on this gag on young Steve. I had stuffed jeans, underwear, and T-shirts into a bag, installed new batteries into my camera gear, and was ready for our cross-country jaunt. This was going to be fun and I still couldn't believe I was being paid to haul, ride choppers, and transverse the U.S. to the bike mecca of Daytona Beach. I helped load the choppers, gas cans, oil, tools, then jumped into the shotgun seat. Away Jim and I went, with Tom following close behind. Trouble was, we were heading North on Interstate 5, which the last time I checked was towards San Francisco, not Florida. I asked only to be told we were taking the northern route (to Florida?).