CRAZY WEIRDO
BIKERS VANISHED FROM THE
POPULAR MIND, REPLACED
BY IMAGES OF WHOLESOME MIDDLE CLASS AMERICANS RIDING
HONDAS
But the 50 had other things going for it, not least of which were looks and luck. The Honda’s tidy styling, with modernistic swoop fairings, pretty color combinations and girl’s bicycle seat step-through design, gave it a non-threatening — that is, non-motorcycle — look.
All those kids born after the war were now begging for the car keys.
Parents could accept Billy and Jane hopping on a neat, cute and cheerfully buzzing device barely more rapid than a Schwinn. At $250, it was Christmas or graduation giftable. And it came with maybe the most brilliant promotion cam- paign in history, Grey Advertising’s “You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda,” which was actually written as a Marketing class project by a UCLA student.
Crazy weirdo bikers vanished from the popular mind, replaced by images of wholesome middle class Americans riding Hondas. If 4,000 of them descended on Hollister, the town would be wracked with Kiwanis Club meetings, church picnics, sock hops, charity bake sales and scout jamborees.
When Honda entered the U.S. market in 1959 (with the slogan “Nifty, Thrifty Honda 50”) it sold 170. After 1963’s “Nicest People” print and TV ad blitz, annual sales exceeded 200,000.
The 50 was, as the Beach Boys sang in “Little Honda,” Not a big motorcycle/Just a groovy little motorbike. But it was a real motor- cycle nonetheless and turned
everyone who rode it into a mo- torcycle rider. The 50 resembled a scooter. But it was no Vespa with eight-inch wheels, AWOL rear springs and engine tacked on one side of the rear axle. Scooters had the handling characteristics of a grocery store shopping cart on a wheelchair ramp. The Honda didn’t.
You could get a lot of fun, if not a lot of hurry, out of a Honda 50. And you could get a little more hurry out of the near-doppelganger 89-cc Honda 90 that added half a horse to the power. (It also started the trail bike craze, with the lower- gear-ratio, knobby-tired Trail 90.)
These made you want bigger motorcycles. Honda had some. The 305-cc C77 Honda Dream stayed with the non-threatening, mom-reassuring, un-Harley look, though in a different way.
The Dream seems to have been styled during a sake chug-a-lug. The front fender comes off the head of a Trojan warrior. The rear fender is modeled on an early Elvis haircut. There’s enough molded sheet metal in the front fork assem- bly to make a Buick. The headlight is rectangular and futuristic, if your
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