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In the closing years of the 1960s, I rode a motorcycle, Wisconsin weather permitting. In my circle of associates from the neighborhood and at McDonalds, where I worked throughout high school, it was the preferred mode of transportation.
I rode a Yamaha 250. John Kurzynski had a Honda 160, Davey Kuhn had a Bugatti, Sputzie Steinke had a Suzuki 250. Crazy Roger had a Triumph. There wasn't a Harley to be seen among us for several more years.
In fact, it wasn't the Harley that was our dream bike of choice; we all aspired to a Vincent Black Shadow. We only knew of that English classic by reputation, none of us had ever seen one on the streets of Fond du Lac, Wis. I don't believe I've ever seen one on the ground, even now.
Technologically advanced, hand-assembled, expensive and with fewer than 1,700 bikes produced between 1948-53, the Vincent Black Shadow was everything a bad-ass motorcycle should be. The bike got its name from its striking appearance; everything that wasn't chrome was painted in stove-enamel black. Its reputation came from it status as the fastest production motorcycle of its day . . . and for years beyond.
The Black Shadow had a 55 hp, 998 cc V-twin engine and a 4-speed transmission. It sported an oversize speedometer that registered to 150 mph. It could make a pretty good run at pinning that needle, but actually topped out at about 125 mph.
With a sticker price of about $1,700 (in Great Britain), the Vincent Black Shadow was about 25% more expensive than an Indian or Harley Davidson. I could no more afford a Black Shadow today (even if I could still ride a motorcycle) than I could in 1969. In England, a nice original Vincent sells for around $25,000, while a restored bike can bring $50,000 or more. That's Jay Leno territory.
My latest World on Wheels custom card pays tribute to the legendary Vincent Black Shadow and the dreams of a Wisconsin kid 45 years ago.
In my "what if . . . " musings after I buy a Powerball or Mega Millions lottery ticket I sometmes get to daydreaming about the first vehicle I would buy.
Lately, the answer is a 1960s Volkswagen Samba, more often known as the Microbus.
I was recently surprised to see on an episode of Pawn Stars that a really nice restored example can be a $100,000 car in today's market. Oh well, when you win $100MM, what's $100K?
Sometimes I think I'd hunt down the white-over-green microbus that was featured on several episodes of That '70s Show near the end of its run.
But if I had cash in hand, my real first choice would be a white-over-light blue example like the one that sticks in my memory from my early college days.
As a freshman at the University of Wisconsin Fond du Lac, a branch commuter campus, my English professor was Dr. Michael Pikulef -- "pronounce it 'pickle-ef'" he'd said on the first day of class.
Mike, as he insisted we call him, was almost the stereotypical liberal college instructor of the early 1970s, but that meshed well with my own philosophy at the time.
I realized that I was really in college at my first party not long after school started. Besides the usual hippie chicks, pot- and pillheads and artistic poseurs, Mike was at the party.
Partying with the prof! I wasn't a high school kid any longer.
When booze ran low, a collection was taken up and Mike said he'd drive. Heck, he may have been the only one over 21 in attendance. I volunteered to go along. We got into his blue VW microbus and headed to a nearby bowling alley where we bought a case of beer, and to some other place I no longer remember for a gallon jug of cheap sangria.
I was really taken with that VW. You sat way up near the windshield and it had a tall stick shift lever. The bus had a particular engine sound that I can still hear today.
Some day I'd like to have me one of those.
That's why my latest World on Wheels custom card honors the venerable hippie wagon.
It's interesting that Mike Pikulef has almost no internet presence. I've found a couple of 10-year-old mentions of a Michael Pikulef in connection with the Village Playhouse in Wauwatosa, Wis., but that's it. I wonder what became of him?
In my Oct. 29 presentation, I explained that in nearly 60 years of collecting bubblegum cards as a kid and as an adult I had never owned a single card from the popular 1955 Topps Rails and Sails issue.
The Chicago and North Western diesel locomotive card I created in that format was a first for my custom card efforts.
Here's my second "addition" to that series.
As wide-ranging as the ships were in the "Sails" allocation of that 200-card set, Topps couldn't cover everything, and thus left me some room to work nearly 60 years later. Surprisingly, for a card set that was designed to appeal to re-teen boys, there was no pirate ship in the original Rails and Sails series.
In my studies of the original R+S I learned a great deal about the set that helped me in my custom card making.
I learned how truly scarce the high numbers -- 151-200 -- among the ship cards really are.
At any given time there are some 800-900 singles and lots of R+S cards up for sale on eBay. My best guess after scouring those listings for a couple of weeks is that fewer than 10% of them comprise high-numbers.
I was delighted to discover that about half of the 70 original Sails cards featured on back a line art drawing of an American lighthouse.
This allowed me to bring a hometown element to my first ship card.
The Fond du Lac lighthouse was built in 1933 on the south end of Lake Winnebago, at a promontory at the city's Lakeside Park. The octagonal Cape Cod style structure is 40 feet tall.
Probably since its early days, the lighthouse has been a beacon not only to craft on the lake, but also to local kids seeking a nearby safe place to park at night and "watch the submarine races." The popularity of the place as a lover's lane is attested to by the quantity of New Jersey white fish to be found there on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
The lighthouse is the most iconic symbol of the city. It's found on the city seal, police patches, informational signs, etc.
There was no dearth of good photos of the lighthouse available and I really enjoyed the time spent converting one of them to line art for the back of my card.
As you can see, the subject I chose for my first custom Sails card is the most famous pirate ship of the Golden Age (late-17th and early-18th centuries) of piracy in North America: Blackbeard's flagship, Queen Anne's Revenge.
The capsule history on my card back provides the bare bones, and you can easily find much more about her with a google-search.
Queen Anne's Revenge has reemerged in popular culture as a component in one of the Disney Pirates of the Caribbean action-fantasy movies, On Stranger Tides, released in 2011.
Blackbeard and his ship also co-star in the video game Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, a 2013 release.
There is even a Lego kit of the Queen Anne's Revenge based on the Disney movie and also released in 2011. The Lego set is about 1,100 pieces and had a retail list price of $379.95.
Too, the discovery of the wreck of the Queen Anne's Revenge in the coastal waters off North Carolina in 1996, and subsequent salvage operations have brought new attention to the actual ship Queen Anne's Revenge.
Finding artwork for my card was easy, there are a number of modern paintings of the QAR to be found. Curiously, many of them share the dramatic theme of the ship cutting through the dark on a moonlit night.
While finding such art was easy, making it work in the context of a Rails and Sails formatted card took a good deal of effort. I stubbornly clung to the idea that I wanted the ship's pirate flag to be readily visible. This caused me to go through a number of permutations to fit the typographic elements to that end.
I actually completed seven different variations with ships sailing this way and that, and with black and white type arranged in all conformations. I studied them for a couple of days, gradually eliminating them until I came to the conclusion that the pictured card most exactly fits my vision.
There will be at least two-three more Sails cards forthcoming on different topics, though I don't have a timetable. I want to get out some more World on Wheels and TV Western customs in the near future, as well.
For whatever reason, as big a collector of bubblegum cards -- sports and non-sports alike -- as I was in my childhood in the 1950s and early 1960s, I never owned a card from the 1955 Topps Rails and Sails set.
As a pre-teen, certainly the subject matter would have appealed to me. The lack of any of the cards in my childhood collection indicates to me that none of the several neighborhood grocery stores where I bought my cards as a kid carried the cards.
Come to think of it, I now wonder whether the issue penetrated much into Wisconsin at all. Among all the dozens of original card accumulations I bought around the state throughout the late-1970s and early-1980s, I don't recall ever finding an R&S card.
So my first Rails and Sails card is MY first Rails and Sails card. My custom card depicts a streamliner of the Chicago and North Western railroad circa the 1950s-1960s.
These big yellow and green diesel locomotives were a familiar sight in my childhood. The train station in Fond du Lac was on the west side of town. We lived about 10 blocks west of the station. (So, yes, I did come from the wrong side of the tracks.)
I have two specific memories of the C&NW streamliners that inspired me to make this Rails and Sails tribute.
The first memory is from my very early childhood; early enough that the details must have been among the brain cells I killed off wholesale in later years.
My best guess is that I was somewhere between 4-6 years old. I remember boarding the train in the evening and being seated on a bench seat between my mother and grandfather. My recollection is that we were traveling to Chicago, but for what reason I cannot remember. Mom and Grandpa are gone now, so I guess I won't know the details of the trip until, on my deathbed as promised by the Dalai Lama, I receive total consciousness.
My other specific memory of the C&NW passenger train at the Fond du Lac station dated from my misspent -- some would say delinquent, or even outright outlaw -- late teen years.
One night I was out with my brother and some buddies, drinkin' and cruisin' the town. We had to stop on a side street near the train station because the evening train between Milwaukee and Green Bay was stopped at the station, blocking the street.
Also waiting at the tracks was a young man whom we'll call Billy. Billy was developmentally disabled. In that less politically correct time, we referred to him as a Ree-tard. But never to his face. Billy had the mind of a child, but the body of a man . . . a large man.
If you think Lenny from Of Mice and Men, you have Billy. He was probably a gentle giant, but none of us was willing to find out for sure.
In my mind's eye I picture him as being six-foot two or three and more than 200 pounds. As I recall it, you never saw Billy without two things: a five o'clock shadow that could be used to strip paint, and a fancy wagon. Billy's wagon was one of those red Radio Flyers with the wood-stake box.
Billy pulled that wagon all over town, to what purpose I never knew.
On this night, while we waited for the train to move, somebody in our car called out to Billy, "Hey, Billy, if you want the train to get out of the way, piss on it. It'll move."
With a bit more prompting Billy did whip out his johnson, which perhaps again more in my recollection than reality, was prodigious. As Billy began to hose down the side of the train, we honked the car horn until some of the passengers looked out the window and began gasping and pointing.
Within a couple of minutes a two uniformed trainmen were hustling Billy away. I don't recall hearing that he ever got into serious trouble for his efforts to move the train, and my buddies and I all had a good laugh at the time. Today, of course, I feel badly about the affair. I believe God or karma or the universe or whomever has repaid my loutish behavior several times over.
In any event, the Chicago and North Western streamliners are a childhood memory that I deemed deserving of preserving in this latter-day addition to the Topps Rails and Sails issue of nearly 60 years ago.
I may have one more "Rails" card in me, and I have definite plans for two or three "Sails" cards, so watch this space periodically.
