The seventh graders wobbled by on tricked-up chrome scooters, their anemic two-stroke motors winding to peak revs as they narrowly missed being creamed by a U.S. Postal Service truck turning south onto Pleasant Avenue.
Go-Peds or Go-Scoots, whatever you call them, manage 15 miles per hour or so and must surely invoke images of mini-bike days to any 44-year-old suburban father.
Maybe it’s these kids’ over-the-shoulder glance? They’re scanning for police cars. They know it’s illegal to ride these contraptions on the street.
Just as Dad knew it was illegal to roll his Honda Z50 or CT70 Mini Trail up and down Old Mill Road in 1969, but he did it anyway. What fun is owning a mini-bike if you can’t tweak the local constabulary?
For six years or so–1968 to 1974–the suburbs were infested with speed-crazed junior high schoolers darting and swerving on their minis.
You turned 13 in 1969? Then you lobbied your folks for a new Honda Mini Trail. You wanted the more powerful CT70, but you’d settle for a Z50. And if they didn’t have $279, you grabbed for a Sears or a Ward’s or any tube frame onto which you could tack a Briggs & Stratton lawnmower engine with four bolts. (Listen closely, and you’ll hear the ring of your finicky old centrifugal clutch.)
Honda sold an estimated 90,000 units of the 1969 Z50 Mini Trail, which was imported to the U.S. between 1968 and 1978 and is still sold elsewhere under different names. (The Monkey Bike marketed by Honda in Europe is essentially a Mini Trail, as is the Panda Fun Rider, a Chinese example assembled from Honda-approved parts.)
Honda’s figures, combined with those of smaller producers such as Arctic Cat, Taco, Rupp and Li’l Indian, indicate a peak production of 300,000 bikes in 1973. And today, those old minis are worth a few skins to guys age 40 to 45 as they yearn for they days when they’d tear about at a heady 29 m.p.h. flat-out with one hand on the kill-switch in case Officer Tavernier should cruise around the next corner.
Tom Tavernier served with the Lincolnshire Police Department from 1970 to 1985 and had a talent for snagging kids making illicit mini-bike runs over the Laura B. Sprague School playground and through Spring Lake Park after midnight. Reached in Springfield, Mo., where he heads the Court Alternative Sentencing Program, Tavernier hardly contains his glee.
“You guys were not bad kids,” he recalled. “You’d jump off the road and ride between houses to get away, and you’d laugh at us. You had your fun … until we figured out where to hide to catch you coming through on the next block.
“Even when you did get away, we knew who you were. We knew your shapes and sizes; we knew who owned which mini-bike. It was no big deal to drive by the next morning for a little heart-to-heart talk with your parents. And most parents were cooperative. It wasn’t like today, where a parent’ll say, `Prove it!’ and then get a lawyer to sue the police department.
“What worried us was the possibility that one of you guys would plow into a tree in the dark or take a clothesline across the neck. We were concerned about crashes and fatalities … because none of you ever wore a helmet.”
And the mini-bike crazes extended well into Chicago.
Chris Koules, a professor with the Art and Design Department of Columbia College, grew up near Western and Bryn Mawr Avenues in the late 1960s. His first mini-bike, an off-brand Gemini SST, “cost $200 out the door. My brothers convinced my parents to buy it for me at the True Value hardware store near Touhy and California [Avenues]. The bike was beautiful. It had a little two-stroke, rotary-valve 50-c.c. engine and went very fast. We mostly rode in the alley, but sometimes we’d try to sneak over to Thillens Stadium. The canal area on the other side was wooded and undeveloped, and you could ride there unnoticed. Our goal was to reach the canal. And when the cops caught us they’d say, `Hey! Take that thing home … now!’ And we would … or sometimes we wouldn’t. We might wait around until we thought they’d gone.”
You have to be 16 years old to have an operators license for any motorized vehicle less than 150-c.c. (18 for any bike more than 150-c.c.) Besides, mini-bikes are not street legal; they can’t get them registered and insured for the street. Adults could ride only street-legal mini-bikes, say the CT70 if it were equipped with headlights and brake lights and properly licensed, a very rare occurrence.
Koules began snapping up vintage Honda mini-bikes in 1992, long before the collectible market heated up. Along with “about 10 old high-school and grammar-school buddies who went to Mather and Lane Tech,” he formed the Chicago Mini Trail Club (www.minitrailclub.com). Members hit swap meets looking for obscure parts and take their Hondas up to their vacation in Eagle River, Wis., each summer to “ride the heck out of them.”
Early on, Koules was able to buy whole bikes for next to nothing. He paid a Wisconsin farmer $70 for a running Z50, but those days are long gone. Koules owns “four or five” restored Honda Mini Trails and puts the total number for the group at “about 25.”
The most valuable Mini Trail in his opinion?
“It’s definitely the 1968 KO Z50 model, which came without a headlight. The K1 in 1969 introduced a headlight and was the only year to have a battery. The succeeding K2’s and K3’s and so forth operated lights off a magneto.
“My advice is to buy the most complete Mini Trail you can find, because parts like headlight buckets and tail-light assemblies are next to impossible to find. They’re the first things that were trashed by kids and parents didn’t bother replacing them.
“I think it’s also important to note that Honda no longer produces many of these parts. After they stopped importing the Mini Trail Z50 and CT70 in the late 1970s, they offered dealers a buy-back program. Any parts still in their original packaging, they would buy back. Dealers who had placed their parts in bins … were out of luck.
“Then a few years later, at least to my understanding, a couple of British speculators traveled around the U.S., stopping at Honda dealerships, offering to buy all of the binned parts. This drove up the price of NOS [new original stock] parts, if you can find them at all.”
Guy Foster, president of the Colombia, Mo.-based International Mini-bike Association, pegs the price range for vintage Honda Z50 Mini Trails from $650 for basket case junk up to $3,500 for a full restoration.
Foster’s group has 158 members and is a clearinghouse for mini-bike information; he also operates a parts-supply business for all brands and sells new and used mini-bikes. New models available through the International Mini-bike Association include the 50-c.c. Panda Fun Rider and the Li’l Indian, which is still built in Michigan by the family that founded the company in 1959.
“You need to find a complete bike,” says Foster. “Look to see the headlights and taillights and gas tank and emblems are all there, if possible. You don’t want to break the household budget over a Honda Mini Trail. This is a hobby you can work on gradually.
“With me, half of the fun is in the chase. I work with a good friend down in Louisiana who loves to get out there and beat the bushes for old Mini Trails. We try to stick with those early years, 1968 to 1973 or so, when they had the mono-shock suspension.
“I also have people who contact me wanting to know the value of their Mini Trails or if they’re looking to sell. One old man said, `If you don’t want it, I’ll take it to the junkyard’ and I said, `Whoa there … wait a minute!'”
Foster makes an interesting point about mini-bikes. He points out regional brand loyalties for the Honda. If you grew up on the West Coast, chances are good you owned a Taco, Bonanza or Powell. Kids on the East chose between Rupp and Arctic Cat, and everybody had the Sears, Wards and Penneys models.
Foster still handles Li’l Indian, a build-it-yourself mini-bike fabricated to 1959 specifications (with only slight modifications) by the Michrina family’s Recreational Leisure Corp. of Farmington Hills, Mich.
The Michrina brothers–Ray, Larry and Regis–generally are regarded as the fathers of the classic mini-bike, i.e. a tubular frame with 4-inch wheels and 3- to 5-horsepower lawnmower or Go-Kart engine.
Inspired by a motorscooter frame given to them by 1952 Indianapolis 500 winner Troy Ruttman, the brothers designed a scaled-down version using Go-Kart wheels and a Clinton A-400 Go-Kart motor. Ruttman bought the first three L’il Indians produced to get around the pits at race courses.
“Troy wanted to know what to call these little scooters,” says Ray Michrina, “and up to that point we just called it `little scooter,’ but that didn’t fit the product very well. We thought of miniature … but miniature what? Motorcyclists called their motorcycles `bikes,’ so we put the two together and came up with miniature bike, but that didn’t flow too well. One of us, I forget which one, shortened miniature to mini and coined the word `mini-bike.’ The name Li’l Indian came from our mother, who told us `not to act like L’il Indians’ when we went out in public.”
(Michrina also notes that they were smart enough to register the name “Li’l Indian,” but nobody thought to bother with “mini-bike.”)
Regis Michrina, working with his wife, Jan, and Jimmy “the Welder” Williams continues building L’il Indians by hand–they’ll sell about 600 bikes this year. There is no push to expand production and lose sight of quality.
The new L’il Indians boast a Tecumseh engine, the last true mini-bike engine in production. The suspension has been beefed up, but the ride remains firm. (For information, call 248-477-0212 or visit www.recleisure.com.)
So imagine your seventh grader exchanging his motorized scooter for a snappy red Li’l Indian.
That’s fine, but don’t imagine him on public streets in 2000.
Lincolnshire Police Chief Randy Melvin had his own mini-bike in the late 1960s and understands the temptations of speed and freedom to the 13-year-old mind.
He listens to what former colleague Tavernier said about taking mini-bike riders home and speaking to their parents, and he disagrees.
“Not today, not anymore,” he says. “Now it’s by the book. If I catch a child on a mini-bike, I’m required to issue two tickets–one for driving an unlicensed vehicle in the roadway and one for operating a motor vehicle without a license. That goes for motorized scooters, too.”
Really?
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
That’s your final word on the subject?
“Yes. No mini-bikes, no motorized scooters.”
Ahhh, rats.
