"Scootin' through the Sixties"

American Scooterist, Issue #48 & #49

Fun little bit of American Scooterist "Oral" history.

These years coincided with my first romances. I have always tied girlfriends to the particular scooter I owned at the time—the GS girls, SS girls, Rally 180 girls and so forth. The GS girls occupy a special place. Motorized two wheelers were still a novelty in the U.S., which made the Vespa something of a “chick magnet.” Just offering a scooter ride was a fairly easy way to pick up girls. The years 1964 and 1965 still had the warm and fluffy innocence of the Eisenhower era. The “real sixties” were yet to come. As a consequence, most girls (and in this halcyon pre-feminist era, they were definitely all “girls”) still wore skirts and dresses. Watching a girl in a tight skirt mount the rear of a scooter was an especially bountiful visual feast.

A more innocent time, indeed.