American Scooterist
Issue #48 & #49

GS Memories: Scootin’ Through the Sixties

It is 1962, and I am on the showroom floor of Cushman Motors in Minneapolis, looking at three beautiful metallic silver Vespas lined up in a row. I am in awe. Jerry Commers, the affable owner, asks me if I know what GS stands for. “Grand Sport,” I ventured. He then proceeds to extol the performance capabilities of the model. I am highly impressed. It is a first encounter that will one day lead to a passionate love affair.

Although I am a well known Vespa enthusiast, I became one only after a long, slow process. I resisted, kicking and screaming all the way. I first encountered the Vespa, in the form of the Allstate Cruisaire, as a teenager in Stillwater, Oklahoma. It would be several years before I even realized that a Cruisaire was, in fact, a Vespa.

In my high school there were about fifty students who rode scooters. Each day the high school parking lot was divided into two groups: American scooters and European scooters. Among the European scooters, the Montgomery Ward Lambretta predominated over the Cruisaire by a two-to-one margin. The Lambretta owners were considered among the coolest guys in the school. None of us even knew there was a scooter called the Vespa. To make matters worse, there was a consensus that the Cruisaire, with its side-mounted engine, was unstable.

Unfortunately, I was scooter-less. My ride was an Allstate Puch moped. In terms of vehicle prestige, the moped was at the very bottom of the high school's rigid pecking order for motorized transportation. Mopeds did, however, have higher status than no transportation or non-motorized transportation. Most of my friends had only bicycles and they envied me.

During this time, my fantasy life revolved around two things: scooters and girls. I would alternate thinking about different scooters and different girls. My grades suffered accordingly. I compensated for my scooter-less state by requesting brochures from the various distributors (which still make up the nucleus of my brochure collection). I received one for Vespas, but still felt the side-mounted engine was unstable and extremely dangerous. In the end, I decided that the best scooter made was the NSU Prima V, but owing to a lack of dealer support, a Lambretta was my choice.

But before I could get a scooter I moved with my family to western Wisconsin. One of the first things I did was to drive my moped to Minneapolis to check out the scooter shops, which brought me to Cushman Motors. Although I had never seen a scooter as beautiful as the GS, and Jerry was persuasive in his sales pitch, I still had my doubts about Vespas. In any case, I had barely saved up enough money for a used scooter, so a new scooter of any kind, let alone a GS, was out of the question.

A couple weeks later I purchased my first scooter, a beat up 1957 Lambretta 150 LD for $150 (for an account of my Lambretta years see my “Lambretta Memories” in American Scooterist, Winter 1997 or the Summer 2002 reprint). Owing to Innocenti’s poor parts service, my love affair with the Lambretta soured quickly. On a trip to Madison, Wisconsin on the LD, I stopped at Cycles Inc., another Cushman Vespa dealer. Although it is fashionable to look down on Cushmans, the Cushman dealer network, with its strong service orientation, was unsurpassed in quality. Cushman Vespa dealers were among the best in the Vespa network and many went on to become some of the largest Vespa dealers in the country after the Vespa Cushman arrangement collapsed. Cycles Inc. was two Quonset huts arranged in an L pattern (with one building for scooters and the other for motorcycles). In front was a huge lot filled with used scooters and motorcycles. While I was looking at a used GS 150 priced at $250, a GL covered with Republican bumper stickers (in one of the most liberal towns in the U.S. no less!) pulled up. The rider introduced himself as Rodney “Rod” Kreunen, the shop’s owner. When I enquired about the GS, he warned me that it had problems with the flywheel coming off and would not be a suitable machine for touring. Republican or not I decided I liked him. Rod—a Vespa enthusiast himself and a former Lambretta dealer—gave me a detailed lesson on why Vespas were superior to Lambrettas. He also gave me a hefty Piaggio fifteenth-anniversary-of-the-Vespa commemorative book and a batch of Piaggio magazines (all of which I still have). His gift, for the first time, connected me to the rich Vespa and FIV history and tradition. I stayed up until 3:00 a.m. reading everything. I was now firmly hooked on Vespas and began to save for a GS 150.

My first attempt to purchase one came in the summer of 1963, when my LD was destroyed by fire while touring Colorado. A day earlier I had spotted a GS 150 and sidecar for sale at the Harley Davidson dealer in Denver for $195. I had the money wired to me, but by the time I got to the dealership it was sold. Still needing transportation, I chose a $140 Lambretta TV 175 2 instead and drove the 1,050 miles back to Wisconsin in 26 hours non-stop.

I was never satisfied with the Lambretta and continued to have my heart set on a GS. Whenever I was in Minneapolis or Madison I stopped in at the dealers to admire them.

Finally, in May 1964, I had saved up enough money to buy one and was on the showroom floor of Jerry Commers’ dealership completing the transaction. I think I drove Jerry crazy over the previous couple years by continually coming in to admire them, but he had always been extremely patient with me. Spring 1964 also marked the start of Vescony’s mass advertising campaign, featuring highly innovative ads in most of the major mass-circulation magazines. It also represented the high-water mark of Vespa sales in the U.S. During that year, Jerry Commers sold 300 Vespas and Rod Kreunen 200.

By now, the GS 150 had been replaced by the GS 160. I bought the newer model. But the silver GS 150 was the ideal that I had initially started saving for and it was the only high-end Vespa I have never owned. Later, when I found out about the many reliability issues involving GS 150s, it became clear that I had lucked out. Nonetheless, the feeling does creep up from time to time that I was deprived of something I wanted badly.

My GS 160 was everything I had hoped for and more. Acceleration was brisk and smooth. The engine was unusually quiet with a turbine-like hum. To drive a newly minted GS is an experience unmatched by any other scooter past or present. Even today I perceive the PX 200 to be faster, but would not bet on it. I spent the summer exploring virtually every back road in the beautiful rolling countryside of western Wisconsin.

Having a dealer like Cushman Motors was an added bonus. Jerry Commers stocked enough parts to build a new scooter from scratch and no problem was too difficult for master mechanic Earl Leathers. Few dealers then and now could match it.

By the fall of 1964 I was a student at the University of Minnesota, living only a mile or two from Cushman Motors. During my student years, the GS was routinely used for the 70 mile trip back home on weekends. One summer I commuted from home to a part-time job, making the 140-mile trip four times a week. Usually the trip would take an hour and a half on the freeway. Once I made it in an hour and ten minutes. I could usually manage these trips until early December or when the first snow fell. On one occasion, I drove back in fifteen degree temperatures. I was forced to pull over to warm up at highway rest stops and cafes every ten or fifteen miles.

Although Minnesota is well-known for its ferocious winters, this did not deter many of us from riding all winter. I can remember one January morning when it was eight degrees below zero and I was pulling into the scooter and motorcycle parking lot, when suddenly a GS 150 pulled up next to me. And then, almost magically, a Vespa 125 appeared with a guy carrying his girlfriend over a street covered in glare ice. The coldest weather I rode in was minus twenty eight degrees. The GS always started and ran flawlessly in the cold. The only problem was the extremely stiff cables.

Minnesota summers, on the other hand, are as glorious as the winters are bleak. With its numerous lakes, all interconnected by a network of beautiful parkways, and late summer evenings, Minneapolis in the summertime was a paradise for scootering.

These years coincided with my first romances. I have always tied girlfriends to the particular scooter I owned at the time—the GS girls, SS girls, Rally 180 girls and so forth. The GS girls occupy a special place. Motorized two wheelers were still a novelty in the U.S., which made the Vespa something of a “chick magnet.” Just offering a scooter ride was a fairly easy way to pick up girls. The years 1964 and 1965 still had the warm and fluffy innocence of the Eisenhower era. The “real sixties” were yet to come. As a consequence, most girls (and in this halcyon pre-feminist era, they were definitely all “girls”) still wore skirts and dresses. Watching a girl in a tight skirt mount the rear of a scooter was an especially bountiful visual feast.

During these years, I and other male scooterists undoubtedly elevated the art of scooter seduction into an art form. One of my favorite tricks was to take them on late night rides along the parkway lining the Mississippi. The curvy roadway was lined with globular lights, which cast a particularly romantic glow. I would take the curves as fast as possible in order to get them to cling to me tightly. If I knew the girl well enough I could usually manage to get my hand on her thigh at stoplights. One girl, to whom I was especially attracted, always managed to outwit me by riding sidesaddle.

The sexual revolution was, of course, still several years away and the art of scooter seduction had its limitations. Breasts pressed against my back and a furtive thigh rub now and then were about as far as it went. Compared to the rest of the country, Minnesota was even further behind on the road to sexual liberation. Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion fame (whom I knew slightly at the time) is famous for his commentary on the repressed nature of Minnesota Lutherans. Clearly Minnesota girls were especially challenging in this regard (though a good late night Mississippi parkway ride could get even a hardcore Lutheran as hot as a firecracker).

In the mid-sixties there was virtually nothing in the way of a scooter culture in the U.S. Occasionally I would stop to talk with other scooterists in the parking lots, Cushman Motors, and elsewhere, but that was about it. The wonderful magazine Scootourist ceased publication a couple months after I purchased the GS. I did subscribe to the British magazine Scooter World, which, under the quirky editor Jon Stevens, provided me with a connection of sorts to organized scootering. For me, it was a window to the wonderful world of British scootering. It brought me to what was almost a fantasy world of hundreds of clubs, huge rallies, amazing dealer specials, beautiful scooter queens, and a weird scooter subculture. It was a world that could not even be envisioned for America. I longed to experience it first hand. In 1966 I joined the Vespa Club of Britain. British scootering has been, is, and always will be my polar star.

About 25 to 30 students at the university commuted on Vespas and another four or five on Lambrettas. I can still remember taking a geology lab, where every afternoon a Lambretta TV 200 parked nearby was started up precisely at 5:15 as the owner headed home. The crisp note of the TV 200 engine was music to my ears. I wondered how late into the season he would keep riding. He continued until the end of the quarter in mid-December.

Jerry Commers’ shop in 1964 featured a bulletin board with postcards from local scooterists who had traveled to distant locations on Vespas. Cards—and there were many—came from places as far away as Alaska, Guatemala, the Bahamas, and the east and west coasts. In 1962 Don and Lucille Athnos had started their trip from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego on a Vespa 150 purchased from Jerry. I had as yet to hit the road in a serious way.

But I had a master plan for systematic touring. First, the United States, and then the world. Within a few months of purchasing the GS, I was off on a 4,000-mile tour of the East Coast with my brother as a passenger. Except for a broken gear cable, the GS performed flawlessly. The cable broke about ten miles from Binghamton, New York. But while attempting to put the new inner cable in, we discovered that the end was frayed and it would not go through. I could still shift upwards, so I decided to continue in third gear until I could find a shop that could deal with it. I was not optimistic about finding a Vespa dealer and doubted that a motorcycle shop could do it. Rather surprisingly, just as we rounded the next curve a Harley Davidson-Vespa dealership in a converted barn appeared. The mechanic taught us a trick I have used ever since: solder the cable end and file it to a point.

Later that summer, I was touring in the Midwest with my brother, who was riding his Lambretta TV 175 2. My brother was riding in front of me during a heavy rainstorm in Nebraska, when he suddenly had a blowout. To avoid hitting him, I slammed on the brakes, which led to a bad skid that dumped me in the ditch. I was unhurt, but the Vespa would not restart. After working on it for a couple of hours, we gave up and improvised a towing system. We took a tubular aluminum “u” shaped portable cot leg and threaded a rope through it. The rope was attached to the Lambretta’s luggage rack, a towel was wrapped around the cot leg, which was positioned on the GS headset. As the cliché goes, necessity is the mother of invention. It worked perfectly. We first traveled to Fremont, Nebraska, about 15 miles distant. A Cushman Vespa dealer spent several hours working on it, but still no spark. We gave up at this point and decided to take it to Minneapolis, where master mechanic Earl Leathers could surely fix it. Early the next morning we started out on the long 300 mile tow to Minneapolis. We had some trepidation at first, but managed to hold a steady average of 50 mph and reached Minneapolis by nightfall. After several hours of work, Earl traced the problem to a magneto wire broken internally in the crash.

The summer of 1965 found me on the road again, this time on a 7,000-mile tour of the western U.S. (All of these trips are too lengthy to be detailed at this point.).

On the second day out, I stopped at the R.C. Cycle Center in Rapid City, South Dakota, owned by R. C. “Pappy” Hoel, founder of the Sturgis motorcycle rally in 1938. The rather grungy (but wonderful) shop was a shrine to eclecticism and was typical of many motorcycle dealerships in the rapidly-waning pre-Honda era. In the front was a veritable junkyard of used motorcycles in various states of disrepair. During its heyday, the R.C. Cycle Center had been a major Indian dealer. In the yard 40-50 Indian Chiefs stood proudly like dying dinosaurs. At the time, running Indians could be purchased for $100-$150. Hoel was also a Vespa dealer, but like many motorcycle dealerships of the era, seldom carried them on the shop floor. I had stopped there two years before on a trip to the Black Hills on my LD 150 and “Pappy” remembered me. He gladly let me set up my pup tent among the Indians, a gesture that was not uncommon in this kinder and gentler era. Waking up surrounded by ancient Indians is an experience not soon forgotten.

“Pappy” mentioned that the Sturgis meet was starting the next day and suggested that I attend. I did, and despite a few jeers, most motorcyclists were surprised and curious about my trip. Sturgis was still a small non-commercial event and drew only a couple thousand participants, not much more than an Amerivespa. (Will our Amerivespas someday number in the hundreds of thousands?)

The GS excelled on the long endless highways of the west. I easily managed 500 miles a day for days on end. I saw all the great natural sights of the west (Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and so forth), but in ways I could not comprehend at the time, it was also a journey through an America in the early stages of a powerful transformation.

On the surface, the summer of 1965 appeared as a time of innocence, though powerful storm clouds that portended a deep crisis for American society were rapidly gathering on the horizon. That magnificently mad adventure known as Vietnam was just beginning to unfold. The first of what would ultimately be a half million troops were just starting to be shipped out and the death toll that within a few years would reach nearly 60,000 was already mounting. The music scene was completely different from just a few years earlier. Music by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and others were giving identity to a new generation. Dylan perhaps captured the mood best with his famous lyric: “the times they are a-changing.”

In the Midwest, these stirrings were almost invisible. Pot still meant a cooking utensil. At the University of Minnesota there was only a tiny bohemian or alternative community centered on the student area known as Dinkytown, where Bob Dylan had got his start. But in San Francisco the process of change was far more advanced. Although the “Summer of Love” was still two years away and the words “hippie” and “counterculture” had yet to be coined, there was a kind of restlessness in the air that expressed a change in mood and lifestyle. It embodied a set of defiant non-conformist values that took root in a sizeable alternative community. In 1965 this bohemian subculture still fell under the generic name “beatnik.” I did not know it at the time, but the scooter had once been tied to the beatnik subculture of the mid-1950s (the original Scoot Magazine and the American Motor Scooter Club were both centered in Greenwich Village). For much of Middle America in the conservative Eisenhower era, the beatniks were a dreaded object of derision and loathing. But the enemy was more illusory than real. In a supreme bit of irony, most Americans—myself among them—had never seen an actual live beatnik. My first sighting came on a Berkeley street, when I suddenly saw an LD coming toward me driven by a man with a flowing beard and long hair blowing magnificently in the wind. It was a stunning sight. “So that’s a beatnik,” I thought. “A real, live beatnik.” Later I visited some of the famous beatnik haunts such as the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and the “Med” (Mediterranean coffee house) in Berkeley, both of which still exist.

San Francisco’s legendary non-conformity—woven into the very fabric of the city—was, in large part, responsible for making it, then as now, the scooter capital of the U.S. Although scooter sales were starting to wane, there was still a sizeable scooter community. The University of California Berkeley’s scooter and motorcycle parking lots were often filled with 20-40 scooters. The area still had some of the largest and best scooter shops in the country --Al Fergoda’s, Schleichler’s, and Del Deb Motors. It was a special treat to walk into a shop filled with shiny new Vespas, Lambrettas, and Rabbits. Del Deb Motors (the greatest scooter shop of all time in my books—the address, 1336 Grove St., is still etched on my mind 40 years later) was an Aladdin’s Cave of not only Vespas and Lambrettas, but also Heinkels and Zundapp Bellas and other makes. The shop was located only a few blocks from the Haight Ashbury, which in 1965 was still a normal neighborhood, but was slowly becoming a counterculture center. When I returned again in 1968, on a SS 180, flower power was in full bloom. Some of the Haight Ashbury hippies were riding around on old Vespas and Lambrettas. While I was talking to Ralph Guzman, the service manager, a young hippie couple in full hippie regalia suddenly drove up on a GS 150 and Myers Aircraft sidecar combination completely painted over in a bold psychedelic pattern. I had my camera with me and thought of taking a photo, but didn’t want to come across as a dumb Midwestern tourist. During these years, tour busses filled with camera-toting tourists regularly cruised the Haight Ashbury. The hippies hated it. My hesitation made me lose forever an image that would surely rank as one of the greatest in American scootering history.

The five week trip went flawlessly. Only a taillight bulb and a speedometer cable needed to be replaced.

Having toured most of the U.S. by scooter, I was now ready for foreign travel. The summer of 1966 found me and my GS 160 on an 11,000 mile trip to Panama and back. (This journey was a warm-up for my 1971 trip to Tierra del Fuego.) The ride to Panama was both my first real adventure trip and the first excursion to a foreign country. In many ways, the two and a half months were an almost idyllic adventure of endless days in the saddle, traveling through lush tropical greenery, and a never-ending landscape of villages, volcanoes, and mountains (at least 8,000 miles of the journey was over mountainous terrain). I fell in love with the Latin culture and found the rich Indian life fascinating, but I also got a taste of the dreaded Central American bureaucracy.

Only a few problems marred the journey. Just after crossing the border into Honduras, the GS suddenly stalled. After dismantling the engine, I found that the rings had fused to the piston and arranged to have the Vespa hauled to Tegucigalpa. In Tegucigalpa the Vespa dealer told me that since the GS had never been imported, no GS rings or pistons were available. Enrique, his cigar smoking mechanic, who drove around in an ancient, battered MG, felt this was not a problem. He fabricated a set of rings from Renault rings and welded damaged parts of the piston. This worked fine until I got to Panama and the problem re-occurred. But many GSs had been imported into Panama and the piston and rings were replaced without problem.

Prices were dirt cheap. Hotels in the villages could easily be found for $.50 a night and $1.50 in the larger cities. Meals averaged about $.30 to $.50. Crossing the Guatemalan border into Mexico on the way back, I exchanged a $20 bill. When I reached Texas a week or so later I still had $3.00 left. The whole trip cost under $300.

Finding gas stations in Mexico was often a problem. Once, crossing the continental divide between Tehuantepec and Tontolapan in southern Mexico, I was told there was a gas station in the next town, 80 miles distant. Unfortunately, when I got there I discovered that the station had run out of gas. I continued on, hoping to find gas along the way. By the time I finally ran out, I had already crossed the divide and was able to coast the entire 26 miles to Tontolapan.

In Nebraska the throttle cable broke. Unfortunately, the outer cable slipped down into the frame and I was unable to thread a new inner in. I took it to the Cushman dealer in nearby Sioux City, Iowa, but they were unable to get the outer cable out either. I then took off the engine cowl, bungeed it to the luggage, and put an inner cable in at the carburetor end and tied it around the handlebar grip. I left just enough slack to manipulate the throttle with my leg. It worked perfectly and I made the 250 miles back to Minneapolis by nightfall.

In a little over two years I had put over 52,000 miles on the GS. It had far exceeded my wildest expectations.

I used it as primary transportation until the following year, when I purchased a SS 180 at the factory in Italy. I kept the GS until 1970 when, needing money for the trip to Tierra del Fuego, I traded all my scooters in at Cycles Inc. for a new Rally 180. By now, Vespa had collapsed in the U.S. and Rod Kreunen was the only dealer left in the area. I was given $50 for the GS, $20 for the SS 180 (which had a badly seized engine), and $20 for the TV 175 2. I tried to bargain for more by arguing that someday they would be worth a fortune as collector’s items, but Rod replied that if I really and truly believed that I would hang onto them. But this was 1970 and a scooter could not be given away. I was probably lucky to get as much as I did. Within a year, Cycles Inc went bankrupt.

Jerry Commers passed away a couple years ago. His Cushman dealership is still in existence and is now ably run by his son. Cushman has always taken good care of its dealers. Rod Kreunen went on to manage his family’s real estate business. Over the years he mellowed politically, becoming a liberal “John Anderson” Republican. A lifelong train buff, the then-Republican governor appointed him Wisconsin’s Commissioner of Railroads in 1996. His passionate (and un-Republican) advocacy of rail transportation and safety (which earned him the nickname “Uncle Rodney“) were such that when the Democrats came back to power they insisted that he stay on. His integrity is considered an absolute. Something I learned four decades ago when he warned me not to buy that GS with a damaged flywheel.