Some favorite quotes from my trip to SoCal.....

Photo courtesy of Wes/Four Aces

I had the extreme pleasure of spending several hours with Mike Parti on this trip. I was fascinated with all his stories, scrapbooks, machinery, and not in the least, his motorcycles. Here's some of what the conversation went like:

Mike Parti: They (the AMA) didn't like us (The Galloping Gooses) too much. We got thrown out of a race one time, so we just went down the road about a 1/4 mi. and set up our own admission gate to the races. We did that for a while, but we had to get out of there pretty quick, there were 200 people coming down the road after us when they figured it out.

We used to have this Goose, that was named Jumpin' Joe. He was a jump instructor during the war (WW II). He was a real brawler, he liked to fight. He tried to parachute into the 1955 Rose Bowl, but he missed, and wound up in the parking lot. Broke his leg. When they were carring him out on a stretcher, he kept yelling "TAKE ME INSIDE, I HAVE A MESSAGE FOR THE WORLD!"

Jumpin' Joe was hanging out in a bar we all used to go to, and this guy comes in looking for Joe, so he says "I'm Joe, what do you want?" The guy says he heard that Joe was pretty good with his fists, and Joe told him he did all right for himself. The guy told Joe that he'd like to try him out. So Joe says that's OK, but he tells the guy that he has an "hour rule" in cases like that. The guy replied "An hour rule, what's that mean?" Joe tells him "Well, if I knock you out in 15 minutes, I still get to beat on you for another 45....."