![]() Grasp the woman’s hand (gingerly, of course, as she turns 95 this July) and look into those piercing blue eyes and you get the feeling you could almost be transported, Harry Potter portkey-like, back in time to an earlier era – to the beach races at Daytona, perhaps, or one of the early Motor Maids conventions in the ’40s or ’50s, or maybe to her family’s Excelsior-Henderson shop in Clifton, New Jersey during the ’20s or ’30s.Īll of which makes Gloria Tramontin Struck motorcycling’s Grand Dame. From her birth in the mid 1920s, the depression years of the 1930s and the WWII years of the 1940s, to the dynamic motorcycle culture of the ’50s, the explosion of two-wheeled popularity in the ’60s and ’70s, and smack into the bike-hyper ’90s and the early 21 st century, Gloria has seen and lived a lot of the stuff many of us only know from history books – and much of it from the seat of a motorcycle. ![]() ![]() Gloria’s book, and indeed the woman herself, are in many ways a window on the 20 th century, and motorcycling’s prominent role in it. Check out those straight pipes! Wonder what Terry and Byron would think of those? ![]() ![]() Gloria’s second bike, a beautiful blue ’41 Indian that came in on trade and replaced the olive-drab military Indian she’d bought earlier. But Gloria’s life story is much more than a longevity tale. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |