A Honda Story
In the early ’60’s I was a seminary student in Louisville, Kentucky and pastor of a rural church about 70 miles away. Most of the church members were farmers, although some worked at Fort Knox and a few drove in to Louisville to work. I had come from neighboring Tennessee and was well accepted in the community. Like most of the men and young men, I was a hunter and fisherman. Like my father before me, I read “Field and Stream” magazine, and that is how my Honda story begins.
I noticed a classified ad in the back of Field and Stream. It showed a small two-wheeled vehicle with a luggage rack. A hunter was riding it down a trail in the woods and carrying a deer on the back. It looked like, and was, a small motorcycle, but it was described as a “trail machine.” I was immediately curious and intrigued, for this was unlike anything I had ever seen. Motorcycles, at that time, were large and loud and ridden by disreputable characters, or so said the popular stereotype.
The trail machine was made by a company I had never heard of — Honda. It was also a company America had never heard of. Turned out it was a Japanese company. At that time Japanese companies were stereotyped as flooding American markets with “cheaply made foreign goods.” But this did not deter my interest in the Honda Trail Machine. …