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>> Ryan Swadley: Welcome to the Wisconsin Historical Museum. I'd like to welcome our author,
Pete Barnes, today. He's written two books for our
Wisconsin Historical Society's Badger Biography series.
One here on "Harley and the Davidsons," and the other on "Richard Bong."
today. He's joining us here from Ohio
So thank you very much. Welcome. [APPLAUSE]
Pete Barns: Thanks a lot. Thanks so much for coming.
I'm excited to talk to you a I really appreciate everybody coming out today.
little bit about both of these books.
would jump out that the name I think probably most people
"Harley and the Davidsons" would be much better known
So I'll probably spend a little more time on that, but if we than "Richard Bong."
The two are not really related. Richard Bong was an Air Force have sopilot that flewe to at lduring World War II..
But the stories are a little bit
related, and that's why I try to tie them together with the theme
Anyway, I'm a teacher near day dreams that change history.
So I've always felt like it's a second home, I guess. That's kind of how I got Wisconsin near Dodgeville.
I teach fifth graders so I'm interested in Wisconsin history.
quiet, attentive audience. used to a kind of squirrely audience. So it's interesting to have a
I'll do my best to adjust to that. Anyways, I'll get right in the
stories.
We'll start by talking about Harley and the Davidsons. I think everybody, especially in
Wisconsin but around the world, is familiar with Harley-Davidson
of books written about motorcycle company. And of course there are dozens
Harley-Davidson. I would like to recommend one while I'm at it.
If you get interested, my books are primarily meant for kids but
it does give you a good overview of the creation of the company
and that sort of thing in this
one about World War II and Bong, in particular.
in the history of Harley-Davidson, especially the early history, this book is also But if you really get interested
Society. from Wisconsin Historical
It's called "At the Creation." And this author is one of the only people that I know of who
has really dug very deeply into the very earliest history of the
company. Like a lot of companies,
Harley-Davidson has an image and
has a very strong culture that they want to protect and that they want to encourage, and so
he really went back and took a
look at where did that really begin, what's the truth behind it.
Like a lot of companies, there
are some things that they may have used as more of a marketing scheme, especially in the early
days, that might not have been
completely historically correct. I didn't really focus on that in
important and it's really kind my book, but I think it is
of an interesting puzzle the way he put those pieces together. At any rate, the day dream here
begins with two boys, Bill
Harley and Arthur Davidson. They grew up in Milwaukee. Born just a year apart.
And they were buddies, they were
to their local lakes, and they neighbors in their early years, and they loved fishing. They loved to ride their bikes
came up with this dream going up the hills and getting tired out,
particularly, what would it be probably at the end of the day
like if we could have a motor on the bike we could get up and
This was an idea that was not original. They didn't invent the down the hills.
And they weren't actually even motorcycle.
the first motorcycle company. But as we'll find out, their real skill was in finding the
best ideas in finding ways to make it work and then in
creating a company that became a worldwide success.
At any rate, they were familiar with motorcycles and, the questioned what we'll get to in a second here is how they would
have been familiar. They were also both very
mechanically inclined. Particularly the Davidson
family had a very strong
background in that area. Arthur's father, William C.,
get to, worked as a carpenter for the Milwaukee railroad. And his brother, William A., who there's several Williams we'll
also worked for the railroads. was the oldest of the founders,
His other brother, Walter, worked in railroads in Milwaukee
They were machinists, they were carpenters, so they had a lot of and also in Kansas.
learning but a lot of hands-on inclination in that regard. Not necessarily a lot of book
At any rate, bicycles were very lcommon in the 1890s when theyd astarted working on this idea.s There were actually 250 bicycle
companies already in the United States in the late 1890s. But motorcycles was a brand new phenomenon.
So the question is, how would they have come up with idea for a motorcycle or come up with the
work? Gottlieb Daimler, Daimler is concrete knowledge to make it
1885, but in the United States actually given the credit for the very first motorcycle in
at just the turn of the century, Indian motorcycles, their first production was around 1901.
The question is, where would
sure, one thing that makes Harley and Davidson have seen their first motorcycle? One theory and we don't know for
researching the earliest years about these guys is they were not big on writing things down.
They didn't even really like to discuss their earliest years. And so even if you look at
and other things from later years, they were a little bit vague and they were not, they didn't have diaries, they didn't
write letters to one another, that sort of thing. So collecting the evidence is a little bit tricky.
So this is more of a
postulation, what could have happened. In 1885 a man named Edward
Pennington came to Milwaukee. He had a motorcycle which really
is a bicycle with a very small engine attached to it.
He was an inventor but also sort
of an entrepreneur looking for investors, that sort of thing.
about how well this motorcycle So there is a lot of speculation
actually worked. But there was a huge
Milwaukee. demonstration in downtown
Hundreds of people came and it's very possible that maybe Bill and Arthur Davidson came to the
presentation and maybe that's one of their first influences for coming up with the idea for the motorcycle.
At any rate, they had to wait a few years before they could really pursue that idea.
Cambridge. In 1896 Arthur Davidson moved to
His family had a farm there. He lived there for several
He worked as a pattern maker years.
making tools and things for local companies. At that time he made kind of a
interesting relationship that helped Harley and the Davidsons and another well-known person at the time and that's
Ole Evinrude. Arthur and Ole Evinrude became
friends and fishing buddies. Fishing is another theme that
kind of carries through this
story. And the story that goes there is
Evinrude and Arthur Davidson, were out fishing and thinking about it would be great if we didn't have to row all over the
lake. So that's kind of the beginning that of story.
Milwaukee as did Arthur, and the Evinrude later moved back to
two of them stayed in very close contact and there's a lot of
Evinrude's earliest work on engines very much influenced speculation that actually
some of the earliest Harley-Davidsons.
Even though they were working on
of course finished by working on slightly different ideas, Evinrude did work on motorcycle and automobile engines and then
the outboard motor engine and that's what he's best known for. At any rate, Arthur lived in
Cambridge for a few years, and
There were jobs to be had. Bill finally convinced him just four years later, 1900, to come back to Milwaukee.
And so both of them got to working on an electric company
Soon after, about 1819, they there.
really get serious about this idea of building a motorcycle. And here's where it's kind of a
fascinating part of the story.
Neither of them had been to college. They didn't really have any
books, engineering books or anything like that. They had very few tools that
very much. would really have helped them
But yet just a couple years later they've got their first knoworking motorcycle engine.nd that sort of thing.
that have possibly have happened? It's kind of an interesting story, and of course like most
great innovators they got a lot of help and they got a lot of ideas for outside places that they combined together to make
theirs work.
One place they got some help was from a German draftsman who worked at their company, and he
had seen some different motorcycle engines. In particular, actually here's
This is just one of his early patented designs just to kind of Ole Evinrude's outboard.
In France there were two give you an idea of what he was working on at the time.
inventors, De Dion-Bouton, who had come up with a small
one of first ones that was motorcycle engine, and this was
company had seen these engines, and he had a pretty familiar, was pretty familiar with them. This draftsman at Bill Harley's
the two of them worked out the So he did quite a bit of help,
drawing from 1901. sketches and the designs. The first evidence we have of a real concrete idea is the
Unfortunately, I didn't have permission to get that image, and that's the first evidence of
a Harley-Davidson engine. It's not too different than this
one. A very small engine, as we'll
talk about, which turned out to not quite do the trick for them.
At that time we enter what you might call the tinkering phase
or my basement's a mess phase or
They started doing their work moafter work, after theirur tinkfull-time jobs, in theyou want to call it.
Bill was mostly the designer, Arthur was building the parts. Davidson's basement.
They were tinkering, they were putting things together.
They didn't have a great number of tools, and so here's where a lot of their help comes in. They had a neighbor and friend
named Henry Melk who just lived a few blocks away.
He had a drill press, some of the others things that they He had a needed.of tools. These were run on an old
gasoline engine, and Arthur is
So in other words, reliability quoted as saying the engine was persistent in quitting whenever you needed it most.
this thing to work. This went on for a couple years. They're working nights, they're working weekends trying to get
advice from this German, who we think was named Emil Kruger, They're receiving advice from Evinrude, they're receiving
this whole time. And after about two years, in
1903, they're getting close.
They've got a number of parts. They think they have a good design for an engine, but it's
not working the way they want it
you an idea of some of the tools to. I do have a picture of an early lathe about 1900 just to give
that they were working on at the time. So they decide we need some more
help, who are we going to ask.
Well luckily, like I said, the Davidson family had a great number of skilled people who
they could rely on. They called on, didn't call on, but they wrote to Arthur's older
considered the most expert in this area. brother Walter who they
He was living in Kansas at the time, so Arthur kind of played a
trick on him writing in the letter, their other brother William was getting married in
and so they decided well we could kind of fudge a little bit Milwaukee in April of that year,
And so in the letter it was indicating come on back, we'll about how far we've come on the motorcycle.
give you a ride on our new motorcycle and you can help us
with this new idea. So Walter actually quit his job,
pretty much a big mess of parts and that sort of thing. cBut fortunately for everybodyg ainvolved, Walter was probablyw
the most driven, most energetic of all the founders.
Here he is in 1908 with one of their first models.
He had been a bicycle rider and racer in earlier years, and the family story is that he would actually take it apart in the
family kitchen, strip it down,
put it back together again before going on rides.
Milwaukee to Madison and back. He would train by riding from
So tons of energy, very knowledgeable, and he was kind of the one who put them over the
top as far as actually getting
this thing to work. They continued after the wedding to work with Henry Melk and his
tools.
At the same time, the oldest brother, William, was working at
He had access to a number of the nearby railroad.
parts. He had extra materials that he
It's speculated that maybe he was actually machining some of could start bringing to them.
So that's another one of those the parts at the railroad maybe after his regular hours.
things that Harley-Davidson probably wouldn't want advertised.
But they did what they had to do
completed. to get it finished. At any rate, finally they had their first motorcycle
You can imagine what that must have felt like. This was in 1904 after about
three years from the very first design that we know of. Before they could actually get
Mrs. Davidson, the mother, it all put together,
decided having not just two boys but now three tromping in and out of the house, you can
imagine the grease and the dust,
family story, and a lot of these the noise in the basement all night long, the thing that kind of put her over the top is a
family stories actually come from a granddaughter of Walter
Davidson, who did some Davidson, her name is Jean
most forthcoming about the early interviewing and talking to these founders. Like I said, they were not the
days. But the story goes that they were working on the carburetor
experiment in the basement with gasoline. The fumes floated up the stairs.
had open flame for cooking, and there was a pretty big explosion At that time in the kitchen they
knocking the pots and pans all over the floor, knocking food
off the shelves.
And as you can imagine Mrs. Davidson wasn't too pleased
So at that time she said this is by that.
She got Mr. Davidson, the father, to build them a shed in We've gotthe backyard.ing about And that happened late 1903.
And that's what we, most people who are Harley-Davidson fans may
backyard woodshed. have seen this image. It's known as the original
And they painted their company logo on the door there and got
The original one was only 10 to work.
feet by 15 feet. So you can imagine it was pretty
and then later William, the fourth founder, got to work in cramped in there when all three
there. Pretty soon they were expanding
it and making it bigger.
But at any rate, in the summer of 1904 they had a working
They were excited, sort of like the Wright brothers getting their plane off the ground. At that time, it was not an easy
thing to get a motorcycle going.
You had pedals like a bike and you had to pedal to get it up to
with your engine and get it going, get the carburetor settings right. sYou had a leather belt you hade
to tighten to connect the wheels
to the engine and then off she would go. Walter, being the energetic one,
sort of the leader of the group,
demanded the first ride. And it did work.
motorcycle. We don't know too much about it except for what we have the Heearly design sketches.s
We know it was really small.
Less than two horsepower. If you have tools at home, you for the engine. That's about 116 CCs.
Even some leaf blowers run on more than that. So it did work but it didn't do what they wanted it to do.
It couldn't get up the big hills
in Milwaukee. It didn't achieve nearly the speed that they wanted.
It was somewhat of a
disappointment. At this time they could have given up.
They could have gone and done the things that their friends were doing, maybe gone out with their friends or come up with a
new hobby.
But like all great innovators, this is a time when they said this is no time to give up.
We've got something here. We've got to just crank up our
So at any rate, they started on a new design. inA few complications here.k, At this time Bill Harley decided
it was time to go to college. He was only founder to make that
Madison, Wisconsin at Madison, decision. He went to the University of
He was still the designer, the starting in 1903. He studied engineering. But he was still very involved.
engineer who was coming up with the basic ideas that they were putting into effect.
And so they've stayed in very close contact.
Arthur was actually going back and forth to Madison to visit
them. They were sharing designs back
same time. and forth, and they were also working with Evinrude at the
Another problem they had was parts.
parts from the Milwaukee So again William is bringing
special donation. They were unable to buy their lathe, their own drill press. SoThey had an uncle, the a
Davidson's did. He was called the honey uncle because he kind of came up with this special donation at $170,
which of course at that time was
quite a bit of money, which they used to buy a lathe and some of the other tools they needed.
They also decided they wanted their, not just their engine to be bigger and better, they did
new design that had more come up pretty quickly with a
horsepower that had a bigger engine, but they wanted some of the other parts of their
motorcycle to work better.
One of their big innovations, although again they're not really the first to come up with
this idea, was to change the
The first motorcycles, as was bastheir very first one, weree. Hopefully we can use this mouse here.
It's what's called a diamond basically bicycles with a motor attached.
frame. So it has a diamond shape here. The problem with that is the
engine is up pretty high, and it's harder for the rider to
balance. It doesn't really fit in there
very well, and it's just not a
real optimum design. One of their early decisions on their first model that was
actually sold and became one of their more successful innovations was to create what
So the frame loops around. they called the loop frame.
You have the engine here nice and low to keep a nice center of balance.
Everything fits in there much more nicely.
The most probably explanation for where they come up with that Again, this is not really their original idea.
design is a company called Merkel.
There were several Wisconsin
companies that were running at that time, and Merkel was based in Milwaukee as well.
And they probably saw that
design in a catalog and used that as their own.
make it more cushioning and better support. They made some other They strengthened the fork to
At any rate, by late 1904 or innovations.
early 1905 they had a working model. And this one really did the
trick.
It was more than three horsepower. It could get up to about 15
miles per hour. And it really did what they wanted it to do.
of Milwaukee. And they said we're actually on to something here. It could get up over the hills
this is something we could This is something we could sell,
produce. So at this time they decided
Walter quit his job. it's time to get things going.
He started working full-time and pretty soon Arthur Davidson quit
Bill Harley, of course, was still in college through 1907. as well.
And William Davidson was the last to leave his job.
He had a child at home. He was married so he was kind of
But he eventually quit his job the most adult and had the most responsibilities at the time.
as well. One tricky thing was to find
At that time, the motorcycle customers for the motorcycle.
wasn't really a popular idea for a number of the reasons.
complaint about motorcycles. It was noisy, as is still a
It was considered very dangerous.
earliest models, including One problem was that the
Harley-Davidson, they didn't have a clutch.
stoplight, for instance, and let You couldn't stop at a
your engine continue running. If you wanted to come to a complete stop, you had to turn
the motorcycle off, start pedaling, get it going again, and then go on your way which is
a hurry to get somewhere. So one of the problems with that not real convenient if you're in
is a lot of riders started going around that problem by just
zipping through stoplights, zipping around cars and pedestrians.
running for the curb as soon as they heard a motorcycle coming, diving out of the way, that sort There's stories about people
So it took some time before Harley could really convince of thing.
making deliveries, it works well people this is a safe, reliable machine, it works well for
advertisements, many of them for a number of different uses, and that was a long battle. But if you look at their earlier
People riding very slowly on show delivery people, they show postal workers which was one of the earliest uses for it.
their Sunday ride with their fanciest outfits on, that sort
Another way that they really of thing.
worked on advertising and getting themselves out there, of course there was no TV, there
are not the mass forms of advertisement that we have
motorcycle racing. today, one way that they gained a reputation was through
They were in their first race in 1905. And they could really get
bragging rights, not just in
Milwaukee but around the Midwest and across the country, by
proving that their product was winning these races and by
superior to others. So here they had kind of a secret weapon.
Walter, again, was the fierce competitor of the group.
He was a great mechanic so if he had a breakdown or something, he
was great for getting off the bike and fixing it and getting
Harley-Davidson and a great racer. it going again. A tireless advocate for
the racing idea and won a number So he was really the one in the early years who was supporting
of races that really raised their reputation as a company. One of his specialties was what
they called the endurance races which were really kind of a brutal pastime. Some of these were two- or even
three-day runs, 200 to 300
miles, sometimes even 400 miles across all sorts of terrain, mountains, hills.
And of course the roads at that time were pretty primitive, very
bumpy, lots of animals and other things to run into.
And to make it even harder they had all sorts of rules of how to
run these races. A race would start with a
thousand points.
They raced usually in teams of two or three. You had to reach a check point
not just at any time, not as you
follow. So you would have to be at check as fast as you can get there, but you had a schedule to
two at another time, etc. If you got there early you would point number one at a certain exact minute, check point number
be deducted two points for every minute you were early.
Every minute you were late you
would be deducted one point. So you really had to be exact and precise.
You obviously had to be very
So make it even more fun, they good at keeping your motorcycle maintained at overcoming flat tires, that sort of thing.
had these secret checks. Judges would hide behind trees
approached and you had to be and jump out with a flag as you
able to stop within a certain number of feet or else you would lose points.
They would stand at the top of
the hill and make sure the riders weren't pedaling to get
proving that your motorcycle is actually working under its own up to the to of the hill,
power. At any rate, Walter and his team
were excellent at these.
And he really proved without a shadow of a doubt that
reliable and the most solid quality product at the time. Harley-Davidson was the most
Henry Meyer from Milwaukee. That was in late 1904. The first motorcycle they actually sold was to a man named
three owners. It later was bought by someone And the interesting thing about that motorcycle it had at least
many as 100,000, miles in its lifetime. iSo if you think about the very ran at least 80,000, possibly as
actually producing and selling first motorcycle that they're
to have that sort of reliability that's pretty impressive. So things start to ramp up a
little bit. In 1906 they were able to sell
factory. 50 motorcycles. 1907, they actually built a new
They had expanded their backyard shed, here's just an early
1915, of some of the picture a little bit later,
destroyed all competition and really did dominate, especially Tin the teens and early '20s. the wrecking crew because they
construction on a factory that In 1906 they started
was, at that time, Chestnut Street, it's now Juneau Avenue which is still where the
original factory is today.
If you ever have a chance to get to Milwaukee there really is a
They have an archive there and a great tour.
number of their first models and that sort of thing. Not real impressive looking at
that time.
They were really all about the nuts and the bolts, getting things produced, getting things
out there.
And as it progressed, of course, they moved to a brick factory,
and that sort of thing. At that time they also greatly expanded the size of it
meeting on the factory floor. And here's where it's kind of interesting to think about the They had their first company
individual skills, what they members, the founders and their
brought to the company. They voted Walter president, which wasn't a big surprise
being sort of the natural leader. Bill Harley had just graduated
became vice president. from University of Wisconsin,
Arthur, secretary and treasurer. And William agreed to be the
He, like I said, quit his earlier job. floor manager.
To have three brothers and a family friend to create a
company is one thing but each one to have their own individual
skills that really helped make things work is kind of
interesting.
Walter was the president. He was excellent with numbers, great attention to detail, a
strong leader.
And some interesting stories about him, in the earliest years
every motorcycle that was produced by the factory. he actually personal test drove
So he would be out, they had a railroad track just behind the
factory, and the story is that
he would race along with the trains as they went up and down the street.
And he was very exacting about
the quality. His motto was that no parts of
replaced with another company's parts. any motorcycle should ever be
He fully believed in Harley-Davidson's product.
And he thought if you were
including some other company's parts, you were probably making your motorcycle worse.
At any rate, here we have Arthur, Walter, Bill Harley, and
I kind of like this picture because a lot of them are very then William A. Davidson on the far right there.
what they actually look like. They were pretty natty guys, but formal, professional looking, but this one you can kind of see
why I like that particular you can see they got a little glint in their eyes so that's
was really the genius behind the photograph. Bill Harley was a much more reserved quiet person, but he
design and continually looking for improvements. Like Walter Davidson, he really
was driven by making
Harley-Davidson the very best and was never satisfied with what they had and was always
looking for the next big thing. An interesting way to measure that is his first application for a patent was in 1909.
By the time he died, he had 90
well, but his real strength was patin his personality. so He was a storyteller, he was a Arthur was a great worker as
director of sales. jokester, and so he became
He went out and pushed Harley-Davidson across the
First Detroit, Minneapolis, Chicago, were some of their first places outside of Milwaukee.
And then as we'll talk about, pushed to the east coast. By the 1920s, they had
in 60 countries, which is kind of the height actually. motorcycle dealerships
Since then that number has never been matched again.
At any rate, he used those
One story, again this is from Jean Davidson, Walter's Igranddaughter, talks about one practical jokester.
Scottish singer and actually put time he dressed up as a famous
on a performance, advertised himself and sang these songs to a fairly large audience and they
never realized that it wasn't actually the person he was
was kind of the steady worker. supposed to be. The last founder, William A.,
He was in charge of the factory floor. He was very close with the
employees, known for always having an open door at his
a book full of notes about office. The story there is that he kept
different loans that he had given out to different employees but that he rarely actually
called in the loans and was a generous, good boss and good
own individual skills and combined together made for a with the workers. So they all kind of had their
things really started to take off. really powerful team. So anyway, like we said, 1907
They had sold 150 motorcycles. They're working on now a
two-story factory pretty soon and it's starting in 1908.
They're starting to pull ahead of the other companies, Mitchell
and Merkel, which are both
Wisconsin companies, are both out of business by 1910. That really leaves only one
competitor in the United States and that's Indian motorcycles,
nemesis for Harley-Davidson all the way to 1953 when Indian finally went out of business. In 1908 they had a chance to
really show the east coast what Harley-Davidson could do and to really compete with them, and so
the Catskill Mountains they had an endurance race in
of New York. It's a really challenging territory, very steep mountains.
It compared to what Walter and
his team were used to racing in. The first day Walter and his
rain. They had to stop to help a team were caught in the pouring
Walter is racing down the hill, again this comes from a promotional piece so there may They had to fix a flat and
but it definitely makes a good be a little bit of elaboration
story, he's racing to reach the check point, launched into the air by a rock, and as he's
flying through the air thinking to himself is my motorcycle frame going to hold or not. Is Harley-Davidson really as
reliable as I'd like it to be.
The bike comes down to a very hard collision, the frame holds, he makes the check point just
barely in time and continues on the race. Just to give you an idea of what
through, during the same race one rider was hit by a cow. [LAUGHTER] some of these riders were going
they had to walk it. One bent his wheel so badly that
And then they had a racer they referred to as "Never Quit --," he was hit
by a milk wagon and he continued
in the race. He road for about 60 miles
So this was not for the weak of heart. with his nose broken.
Only about half the riders finished the race.
At any rate, Walter and his team
finished first. They got a perfect score for hitting these check points
we talked about just on time and
really set the bar, on the east coast especially, where
really did not have any kind of relationship with New York City and Boston, these big cities. They showed riders in the east
that Indian was second to Harley-Davidson, and at that
time they started to really pull ahead.
Some other additions at that
belt to make things more time, they started to improve their design adding a chain drive instead of the leather
was actually a hand pump so the driver had to decide when he A mechanical oil pump replacing what they had in the early days
thought the engine needed more oil and then pump it in by
himself.
You can imagine how accurate that was. But the biggest and probably the
best known addition at that time
was what is referred to as the V-twin engine, a two-cylinder engine.
Now again, it was not the first company, Harley-Davidson were not the first to try this model but they definitely made it
their signature, and it's still the engine design that's best known today in Harley-Davidson
They started this actually in 1907. They weren't really producing hthem until 1911.
Much more powerful and more expensive but considered really one of the top of the line
So they're expanding designs at that time.
at a great rate. By 1914 they have two million square feet of work space.
They've got 1500 employees. They're producing nearly 20,000 motorcycles a year. So if you think about 1904 to
1914, that's a pretty big jump. In 1904 it was taking them about
By 1914 they're producing one about every six minutes. four months to finish a motorcycle.
They were involved with both So that's a pretty good turnaround.
18,000 motorcycles for the wars, World War I and World War II. In World War I, produced about
military. This really expanded their presence in Europe, and a lot of
the bikes actually stayed there after the war.
They got a number of dealerships going after the war as well,
after World War I.
But like a lot of companies at And again, World War II about 90,000 motorcycles produced for the military.
that time, they went through some hard times.
depression in 1920 that really There was a brief world
hurt their sales badly. So they had a huge drop from the early 1920s, and then, of
course, the Great Depression, as
By 1933 producing only about happened for most companies across the country, there was a huge drop.
shut down the plant and that 3500 motorcycles. They're laying off employees. They're thinking about having to
sort of thing. But they kept things going. They really emphasized selling
to police departments.
where you could carry, make deliveries of meat or dairy or vehicles. They made customized side cars
I never saw an image of that but they had even a motorcycle that delivered caskets, supposedly.
that's an interesting idea. And they came up with some pretty innovative ideas.
They actually created a model starting in 1927 called the Model B.
design. They actually were able to use It's a very simple stripped down
some of their parts from other models which saved them a lot of
money, and they sold it for $190, one of the least expensive
motorcycles ever for them. A little bit more controversial
decision was to sell some of
their designs to the Japanese. They did that the early '30s
They hated to have to sell some of their ideas and to give away some of the things they worked when they were still struggling.
needed the money. And one of the good things that came out of this was one of their most famous designs ever.
In 1936 they started producing
this picture, but on the covers whahere these round sort ofad engine. It's a little hard to see in
depressions, they're supposed to look at the knuckles on the
fist, and that led to later designs, the panhead and the
It was one of the most advanced designs that they had come up shovelhead, with. are kind of It used overhead valves instead
of side valves which was more expensive to produce but
produced a much higher performance vehicle.
And this racer in 1937 actually broke the speed record on a Harley-Davidson, 136 miles per
course, was really fast. hour, which at that time, of
And that really kind of launched them, put them back on top, at
Another challenge that they went least for a short time.
over. thrAnd luckily all of theirey really had to think about how are we changing our leadership
founders' sons got involved with a company at some level.
And so the story goes that in 1942 when Walter was on his death bed he actually called the
right there they decided the family into the hospital and
future of the company, basically.
was the most similar to Walter William A.'s son, William H.,
and he took on the role of president.
of sales. Bill Harley, his son actually became the new vice president of And Walter's son became director
on that process of coming up engineering and kind of carried
with new designs and that sort of thing. So they were able to transfer
all that knowledge and all of that that they had worked on to their family. After that they went through
some rough times. There was, after World War II,
of course the idea of people wanting to change their bikes
and the motorcycle image
changed. You have what people called choppers when you customize your
bike. We are having what became known as the outlaw biker idea. And this kind of tarnished, at
least in the opinion of the founders, tarnished the image of
Harley-Davidson. And they worked really hard to
kind of come back to the image
One thing that hurt them in 1947, sorry here's William H. Davidson, he was the second certainpresident.erson.
And he was president for 30 years.
rally in California that was You see 1942 to 1973. In 1947 there was a motorcycle
covered by "Life" magazine and this is a particular image, I don't know if you can tell
there.
This motorcyclist is riding over about 25 beer bottles, and he looks like he's about to fall
off his motorcycle. There's a lot of controversy
over how bad this particular event was and how bad things
actually were.
considered a major setback in terms of the reputation and the thisimage of the company.ding There were some movies that were
made, The Wild One with Marlon Brando, Easy Rider is probably the best known, which came later, and again it's
taking them away from the image they were trying to portray.
from the European bikes and later from the Japanese Anotmotorcycle companies.ad a The Japanese, in particular,
were producing smaller, more
gap and started to really redominate Harley-Davidson.es By 1969 they decided that they 1960s, took advantage of that
competition and they actually sold the company to a larger couldn't keep up with the
of them as they produce bowling balls and that sort of thing. compaAMF really slashed thehine Foundry, AMF, you may have heard
They streamlined things, there workforce.
was a labor strike, and most people agree that quality really
Sales went way down and the company, Harley-Davidson almost went bankrupt. plummeted during that period.
story kind of gets encouraging, and I think it's kind of a neat ending to it, in 1981 AMF decided to sell Harley-Davidson.
Some employees, including one of
the founder's grandsons, Willie G., I think I have a picture of him, we'll get to
that in second. But he was a grandson of William A.,
He was one of the people who one of the original founders.
helped buy back the company, and they come up with the slogan
coming back to we're our own "The Eagle Sores Alone," kind of
company again, we've reclaimed ownership of it.
there was kind of a rebirth in Coincidentally, in the '80s
interest in American heritage. There was, during the Reagan
that helped imports-- it helped American companies. And Harley-Davidson kind of went era, there was some tariffs
with some models that were sort of a retro design. back to their roots by coming up
better known models. This one is called the softail, which is another one of their
it looks like one of the bikes The idea here is in the rear of the motorcycle they're hiding the suspension back here so that
that someone might have rode back in the '50s or '60s, but it
you would want for a more modern still has the smooth ride that
past. Harley-Davidson regained their So they really went with that return to the heritage of the
popularity and really pushed forward.
Like a lot of companies, they're
really struggling again today, but they're still one of the
greatest traditions of all time. greatest companies, one of the
I think I'm going to stop there. I went a little bit over with Harley-Davidson so I apologize
about that. I think I'll stop here and thank
you want to stick around, I'd be everybody for coming. If you do have questions or if
happy to answer them. But thanks so much for coming [APPLAUSE]