Couple Of Pics From Germany 1991

I'm sure you've heard of W&W Cycles in Germany. They've been a world leader in taking care of Harley riders all over Europe. They are located in Wurzburg, Germany which was just a few miles up the road from the airfield I was stationed at. Once a year they had a big Drag Race on our runway at Giebelstadt Army Airfield. It was a fun day and I've posted some pics before from the festivities. I've been trying to find these pics for a while and finally figured out which nook or cranny they were hiding in,. Enjoy the pics, I'm out of town all weekend, but I'll be back to my regular ways next week and maybe I can get some cool current stuff to post.

My friend Leo was an American G.I. who got out of the Army and stayed in Germany. He married a local girl and ended up working for W&W. A great guy who took care of us and he owned a really cool FXR back before it was cool to have one. He was the first person I ever saw powder coat section of an Evo rocker box. He and a friend had a full set coated gloss black then Leo gave his friend the uncoated center piece from his rocker box so they ended up with opposite looks on the rocker boxes. Leo with polished upper and lower with a black center piece and his friend with the opposite. It was a cool and unique look back in 1991. The other bike in the pic was one of the many shop bikes they brought along.

Another view of the bikes. Look at the edge of this pic and check out the intake on Leo's FXR. Don't see these very often.

The infamous W&W Cycles dragbike in one of its earliest incarnations. I believe they still race this bike, but you'll have to check with them to know for sure.

Wurzburg, Germany 1989, We had some Serious Fun!

It was 1989, the year I bought my first Harley. I was stationed in Geibelstadt, Germany on an old WWII airfield that was used by the Germans to test the Me262 jet fighter. They flooded the runway to help hide the place, but the British noticed the fake cows hadn't moved in a day or so in their spy pics and found the place. The village and surrounding area was liberated from the SS and the US took over the place for the Army Air Corp and then eventually as a helicopter airfield. We were even still using a lot of the old buildings built by the nazis. It's closed down now, but Geibelstadt and Wurzburg was a GREAT placed to be stationed. Hell, I got my first couple of tattoos and my Sporty while I was there so it couldn't be all bad. These pics are from before I got hooked up with the Stray Dogs MC, when I was just another independent Biker looking for a good time.

The first time I ever sat on my very own Harley Davidson. It was a 1989 883 Hugger XL. I loved this bike and put MANY miles on it. It was even stolen and returned to me. slid into a tree and repaired, basically we went through a lot.  I wish I still had it.

So new it still had the stock mufflers on it! This picture was taken at a rest area on my way to Holland for a party I was invited to. A few weeks before this I was riding around Wurzburg and saw a couple on a BMW bobber stopped looking at a map. I stopped to see if they needed help and it turns out they were from Holland and were looking for a campground on their way to Paris. I helped them out, we partied that night and a little while later I get an invitation in the mail to come to their farmhouse for their big Biker party. THAT was a great weekend. I rode up by myself since no one else could get a 4 day pass to go with me and I was the only American there. Talk about getting treated like a celebrity. . Buy me a couple of beers sometime and I'll tell you the stories.

The night before the party we put our bikes in the rear/party area of their farm house. That's Peter's BMW in the foreground. As you can see I over packed even back then. I hate needing something and not having it.

Another picture following Tattoo, Earl is in the lead and I'm sure we were heading to a bar somewhere.

We used to party and hang out at the Fortress Marienberg in Wurzburg a lot. Especially at night after the bars closed. We would park here in the courtyard and then go sit on the castle walls and drink beer or try to get cozy with whatever honey decided to ride up and party with us. The Polizei were pretty cool about it, they always told us to just make sure we cleaned up our mess. I'm sure it's not like that anymore.

The same shot as the last pic from farther away. Check out that Citroen 2CV. Those cars were so ugly they were cool.

This is a view of the castle from across the river. I would hate to have had to assault it back in the medieval days. We would sit up on those walls and talk, drink beer, snuggle on our sweeties, whatever was right at the time. Damn, I miss that place, it had a really cool vibe about it.  I didn't take this one I got it from Sundar Palaniappanand his webpage through google.

This is Tattoo and Karin having a beer at the Rock Palast (Rock Palace) bar. Karin owned a small bar in Wurzburg, but she had a thing for Tat so every once in a while we could get her out to the bigger bars with us. The Rock Palast was a great Heavy Metal bar, the walls were painted like stone castle walls, there was a 3 foot wall around the dance floor to sit on and hang out. they even had the back half of an old Cadillac to sit on a drink your beer. The bouncers and bartenders really appreciated it when us real Bikers actually showed up. They got tired of the posers in t-shirts talking about the bikes they used to have or were going to get. The stories from this place will cost you some more beer and it might take a while.

The wall of a church in downtown Wurzburg. I always thought it was cool to see the old stonework on these buildings and how they used the death iconography. The winged skull has been around for many centuries, it's not just a biker thang.

The front of the same church. Can you imagine a Southern Baptist church with a robed skeleton guarding over the door like this?

That's enough for now. I hope you like traveling down memory lane with me like this. I really enjoyed my three years in Germany. I put over 25K miles on the bike and got to see a lot of cool places. I wish I had taken all the pics I should have, but back then you had to use film and it cost money to buy it and develop the pictures. I needed the money more for beer and gas, I did manage to get some good shots though.
Later....

Scanned in some old pics....

I was scanning some pics to share with my old Army buddies and decided to scan in some of these to share here. They're a mix from different places and times, but they are all at least 10 years old. I hope you dig em!

One of my first real riding partners Tattoo on his old ironhead Sporty riding through the German countryside. We had a blast back then, no real cares, just looking for a good time and a few wild women. Luckily we usually found both ;-)

My old '75 XLCH after I put the motor in a older XL frame with a welded on hardtail and a ton of bondo to hide the welds. I was trying to put an old VW taillight on it as you can see on the back. Never did get it to fit like I wanted but the idea was a good one I just needed better tools.

Me sitting on the bike outside the barracks at Ft. Bragg, NC around 1992. I was building this bike on the concrete slab just in front of where the bike is in this pic. Not a great place to do any cool work, but better than nothing.

The parking lot outside the Night Owl Lounge in Fayetteville, NC (FayetteNam for those who know). This place was a really cool Biker Bar with a pool table and bar downstairs and another bar and small stage with strippers upstairs. One of the best things was when the woman who owned the place got drunk she would walk out and tell Ted to "start that damned bike I wanna ride" that meant we were all gonna line up and ride our bikes through the bar. One night Steve decided to stop in the middle of the bar and do a burnout on the knuckle. It was beautiful to see all that tire smoke fill up the bar. The pool table had a huge scar from his passenger peg for the whole rest of the time I was stationed there. Starting from the left in this pic there is a stock Sporty, then the white Softail with one of the first set of Indian style fenders you could get for Harleys, pretty much a prototype for the later so called Indians they sold. Next was my friends old Knucklehead then another old friend's ironhead Sporty in an Amen Savior frame and finally a 1200 Sporty. You never knew what bikes you would see here or what club might show up. It was always a blast and I really miss the old place.

 A few of my fellow Stray Dogs from Germany. This day we decided to go to Darmstadt because one of us really wanted a DarmstarterBrau beer. What the hell, 75 miles for a special beer is no big deal so we took off. This picture was taken in the parking lot of the real Frankenstein's castle the actual place where Mary Shelly wrote the book. I'll post pictures of it sometime later. In this pic we have Horse and his now Ex-wife on his Shovel then John and Jacque on his Low rider that John still owns today with a few hundred thousand miles on it. John also owns and runs Millar Machine in Orchard, TX.

This is Shannon Graham and his son standing by his drag bike. It was an early 80's ironhead that was a mean damn machine. Unfortunately a busted axle adjuster let the chain get loose and bind up on the front sprocket blowing the cases vertically, ending our racing days.

I hope y'all like this old stuff, be sure to leave comments and let me know if you like it. I still have plenty more pictures I can scan and add off and on.

More Pics from Germany...Some Bikes and The Morning after!

Here are some more pics from back in the day. I think I may make Fridays the day for my vintage posts. If I don't find anything else cool to post at least I can have something up at least once a week.

Anyway these pics were taken at a rally somewhere in Germany that I was too hung over to remember. We would go for a nice long ride on Saturday and then ride in and set up at the fest grounds to party all night and then somehow find the strength to strap our crap to our bikes and then take a nice long ride home. It was a great time. I saw all kinds of cool bikes from vintage chops to VW trikes and even modern crotch rockets. You didn't see the attitudes there that you see here in the states. I sure do miss those times.


Nice VW trike, also it was OK for 2 guys to ride together over there. No one thought you were any less of a man, just because your bike was down or something. Dig the cool springer and the cheap hubcaps, build what ya can and ride the hell out of it.



Another trike, looks like he used a girder on this one and actually had some nice rims on the back.



A couple of beautiful Panheads. I'd love to have either one of these today.



One of the large tents I was talking about before. I felt sorry for the folks who had to walk around and clean up after these events. Drunks tend to be messy .



Another shot of the carnage, we were lucky we had pitched our tents in the woods off to the side of the tent so we were not rudely awakened by that bright ass sunlight.

Hope you enjoy these pics, I know I sure as hell enjoyed the events and happenings when I took them.

Party Pictures from Germany 1989-1991

Back in the day when I was stationed in Germany I rode with the Stray Dogs MC. It was a great group of folks who were mostly military like me, but we had enough locals to keep the club grounded with all the craziness of us G.I's getting transferred all the time. I'll post some club pics later but for now I want to put up some shots from the parties we went to. One thing I loved about Germany was that there were clubs in damn near every town and that meant that every weekend there was a big party somewhere fairly close. The club hosting the party would put up a huge Fest tent and have a band, a bar and food to buy right there in the tent. Some parties/tents were small like a couple of these shots show and some were huge like you'll see in another post. No matter what though the beer flowed, it was cheap and the we had a blast.

This was one of the bigger tents, you can see the edge of the stage has a wooden wall, that wall ran around two sides of the tent and enclosed the stage on the short end and the bar/food on the long side of the tent. Sometimes the band was Rockabilly like this one and sometimes it was pure Metal. Ya never knew til ya got there what you were going to hear.



Another picture from the same party, you can see that it got kinda muddy with the bikes running around. We would pull in, put up our personal tents then hit the bar for Beer. Some parties we would get crazy and we would ride our bikes through the tent with someone on the back to hold the beers till we got back to our club enclave.



A local club's colors. Some clubs were big and active and you would see them everywhere (we tried to be like that). Others were kinda small and you would run into them once in a while. It was always a good time though.



This pic is from the IceRun. It was a party held over News Years and you HAD to ride in to be able to party there. It was fun dodging the snow/ice to get to the place. The tent was small because not that many folks had the intestinal fortitude to ride in. We all got a certificate for making it though. This one was fun because the band asked me to ride my bike in the tent when they played "Born to Be Wild". I was trashed, but I somehow made it without falling over. By the way, back in those days the old songs were not as played out as they are today. It was still cool back then.


Another pic from the IceRun. Looking at the back of the tent.



When the whole club went on a run a hang around usually brought a van with all the food and other crap we might want, but wouldn't put on our bikes. It seems we had quite the spread at this party.