(2017) When I was a kid, in the 1970s, I’d walk a mile from the farm to Highway 61 to buy a can of soda (pop) from the Skelly gas station vending machine. A mile. On foot. Uphill both ways.

The guy who ran that Skelly station rode a green Suzuki GT550 with a Vetter fairing on it. It wasn’t a “classic,” it wasn’t a “collectible”—it was just his ride. He commuted on it, toured on it, and once rode it all the way to Florida and back. And like every motorcycle in the Carter administration, it had a milk crate lashed to the back. Forget your $900 anodized EuTouratech luggage systems; in the ’70s, we had Marigold Farms milk crates and a couple of bungee cords.

That old Suzuki was basically my first streetbike—even though I never owned it, never sat on it, never even touched it.

I’d just stare at it like it was the Ark of the Covenant while I drank my soda. The cylinder head had “RAM AIR” stamped on it, which to my kid brain meant supercharger. Obviously.

In reality, it was Suzuki’s engineering equivalent of a comb-over: a weird tin plate duct glued on top of the motor to “channel air.”

Yeah, sure.

The other part of this story is even dumber: as a farm kid, we only drank milk and water. I’d never actually had a soda at home. But I saw all those Coke commercials on TV with the fizz erupting out of the bottle, so I assumed that’s how you drank it. Foam. So I’d sit next to the GT550, shaking cans of Coke like a monkey with a hand grenade, and drink the froth while staring at the bike. Imagine being that station owner: “Well, there’s the weird kid again, guzzling foam next to my motorcycle. Hope he doesn’t die.”

He never chased me off, though.



The owner of the GT550 died suddenly the summer I was 14 or 15. A few weeks later, I walked five miles into town to ask his widow if she’d sell me the GT550. I had a janitor job lined up at the church and had even worked out a payment plan in my head. But I sat on the curb across the street from her house, staring at the door, and chickened out. Walked home. Never saw the bike again.

Years later, when I knew what the GT series really was, I dismissed them as vintage landfill. The GT550—nicknamed “The Indy”—was a three-cylinder two-stroke “touring” bike with four pipes and the performance credibility of a John Deere riding mower. Naming it after the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was borderline blasphemy.

When my buddy Dick once called it the "Indy" on my porch, I told him flat out: “Don’t. Not in my house.”



By 2015 I had finished a Kawasaki triple project—a bike so legend that men would follow you to gas stations just to blurt unsolicited facts about it. And yet, during that “restoration,” I came dangerously close to rolling it into the street and giving it to the first person who expressed interest.

The Triple came out nice, and riding it was like being an attractive blonde with an ample chest: men followed you everywhere and blurted compliments at gas stops.

But Kenny Roberts once told me, “Nostalgia can be a disease if you’re not careful.” Kenny was right.

Then winter came, and I needed something to wrench on. My friend Paul Groth mentioned a GT550 rotting away in a Quonset hut. We dragged it out, hosed it off, and—boom—green paint, travel stickers, milk crate, the whole déjà vu package. Suddenly I was back at that Skelly station, chugging Coke foam like an idiot and staring at “RAM AIR.”

Seven months later, the thing was done. My rolling tribute to 1970s motorcycle logic, where milk crates were luggage racks, decals were character, and bad ideas got green paint and three cylinders.

The Milk Crate Bike.