By Sean Mestan

Although the motorcycle ads in Popular Mechanics spoke to our hearts, and local dealership brochures could send us off into dreamland, it was usually a short ride on a relative’s or a friend’s bike that set the wheels in motion for many of us who became motorcyclists.

I was about 10 when my father bought a step-through 55cc Suzuki M31. I still have the bike, stored in numerous boxes, just waiting for restoration. It wasn’t the coolest ride on the block, but dad needed it to commute to work, and, for that purpose, it served him well.

I have pretty vivid memories of him bundling up so much in the winter that not a square inch of skin was exposed to the cold, Kentucky winds. As time went by, the ownership of the Suzi was transferred to me, or at least that’s the way I saw it.

In my first voyage into motorcycle mechanics, I removed the muffler baffle—held in place with one screw—and, in so doing, turned that bike into a step-through beast.

The back roads near my home were never the same.

I was fogging mosquitoes with two-stroke smoke long before the state of Kentucky ever started their pest management program. I never forgot to mix the gas and oil, because Suzuki, in a fit of genius, strapped a little plastic oil bottle just below the gas tank to serve as a constant reminder.

The low-profile muffler kept me from being the coolest kid on the block, plus there were places it just couldn’t go, which I learned the hard way.

It wasn’t a Honda SL70, but I loved that bike. Mark my words, it will be out of the boxes and in one piece again someday.

I have an uncle, Ken, who always seemed to have some kind of cool bike. I still have a memory of him pulling into our driveway one hot summer day on some type of Honda scrambler, with his prim and proper mother, my grandmother, perched on the back.

She was wearing “grandmother shorts” that were cut just above her knees, exposing the rest of her legs that, to the son of an art teacher, appeared the same color white as the glossy helmet she was wearing. She looked happy and relaxed, meaning my uncle was not riding that bike like he did when I was on the back of it.

Over the years Ken and I have attended numerous vintage bike festivals and races together, texted Craigslist ads to each other, and even raised our right hands and swore to each other that we would not discuss a recent purchase around our wives. No matter what we talk about on the phone these days, the conversation will always eventually steer toward bikes.

And, finally, I want to mention the Lewis brothers, Bobby and Johnny.

Their love of motorcycles was in the stratosphere. The basement of their home on Madisonville Street in Princeton, Ky., reeked of wonderful motorcycle smells.

There were racing trophies everywhere, and they were tall. I’d been around trophies enough in my life to know that if you had a really tall one, then you probably did something better and faster than the rest of us.

One week, you might be in the Lewis’s garage and there would be a Yamaha motor in a thousand pieces. Then, the next week, it would be in a shiny frame, blowing out smoke at a rate four times that of my step-thru Suzi. I’m telling you, it was inspiring.

While we weren’t best buddies during our high school years, but our friendship grew over the years, and I have always enjoyed following their successful racing careers in flat track and motocross.

Sadly, Bobby died in a car crash in April at the age of 59. He worked in a motorcycle dealership at the time of his death. There weren’t too many parts that Bobby couldn’t track down. He was a customer’s best friend.

For me, Bobby was always a text, a Facebook message, a phone call, or a 7-mile drive away. I appreciated his dry sense of humor, his willingness to share advice and his honesty.

One time, I sent him a picture of a rough-looking bike in a Craigslist ad, asking if he knew what it was.

“Hard to say. Looking like a Bap,” he replied.

I like to think that I’m familiar with most brands of bikes, but I’ve never heard of a Bap.

“What’s a Bap?” I asked.

“Big ass project,” he fired back.

He said my wife gave him $100 to say that. “She figured it would save $1,500 in restoration that would never get finished,” he joked.

Bobby left a great mark on the world of motorcycling in so many ways. He was an AMA Life Member and I owe a large part of my love for all things motorcycle to him. He passed his love of racing on to his son, Jake Lewis, who has a successful professional road racing career in the MotoAmerica Motul Superbike class.

My friendship with brother Johnny continues to this day. And, unbeknownst to my wife, he has hidden a few of my “purchases” in his garage.