Tuesday, Apr. 22, 2008

Lifelong love of motorcycles

Need for speed influences shop owner

JOHANNA D. WILSON

The world holds untold mysteries brilliant men have tried to solve for centuries.

Frank Deihl has figured one of them out: He knows why men love motorcycles.

They draw women, and Deihl discovered that appeal as a teenager seduced by the power of speed.

"The female attraction definitely has something to do with it," said Deihl, while sitting inside Classic Cycleworks, his business in the Choppee community of Georgetown County. "You didn't have to go very far. All you had to do is slow down so the women could jump on."

At 67, Deihl is still smitten by motorcycles.

He has a serious crush on English bikes, which he has been repairing and restoring for 50 years.

If English motorcycles, especially those made by Birmingham Small Arms Company, were clothes, Deihl would wear them everyday.

Instead, he spends countless hours seven days a week surrounded by and working on them.

People seek his expertise, send him e-mails from around the globe and drive in from Michigan, Illinois, Maryland, Virginia and other states so he can make their motorcycles marvelous.

"People will bring in boxes of parts, and he will wonder where's the rest of the motorcycle," said Bonne Deihl, his wife, who acts as his secretary. "They don't have anything but boxes full of parts, and he will make a motorcycle out of it." Most of his time is dedicated to motorcycles made by BSA, founded in 1861 in Birmingham, England.

"It was the biggest motorcycle manufacturer in the world," he said. "They also made rifles, pistols and ammunition [during] World War I and World War II."

An assortment of BSA posters featuring women with small waists hang from walls in Classic Cycleworks, where a 1939 BSA is among dozens of other motorcycles.

Tom Heyser, a former Honda dealer in Maryland, and Larry Stanley, a former cook, both help Deihl doctor sick motorcycles.

He custom-built a Triumph, an English motorcycle, for $26,000. One bike takes a good year to restore, but Deihl doesn't mind the extensive and intensive labor.

Deihl can take a 1947 engine and transmission, a 1952 frame and 1965 wheels to help create bikes so beautiful that mouths can only say, "Wow."

His adoration - second only to his skills - for motorcycles is akin to the affection folks reserve for the true loves of their lives.

"A motorcycle is like your first girlfriend," said Deihl, a staunch helmet wearer who once owned more than 30 English bikes at one time and only fell off 24 times since he began riding motorcycles in his teens."You fall in love, and you never fall out of love."

Bonne Deihl is shocked by the confession. Her mouth dropped open before she looked into his blue eyes and asked, "You mean you are still in love with your first girlfriend?"

Deihl didn't blink and replied in a calm, even tone.

"You better believe it," he said.

Still a bit stunned, Bonne quipped, "I want her name."

She got the name, and it was Beverly Cupid.

The fact is, though, her husband gets revved up by motorcycles for the same reasons women excite men, for the same reasons Cupid's arrow got stuck in Frank Deihl's heart.

Motorcycles are beautiful, have curves and can be quite expensive. (Ask Paul McCartney about that one.)

And in another similarity to women, men like taking the fast bikes for a ride. The slow ones, they keep at home.

Motorcycles have reputations they just can't live down, as do women.

Remember Marlon Brando in "The Wild One"? The 1953 movie portrayed Brando as a bad biker gang leader named Johnny Strabler.

Deihl remembers how some grown-ups labeled bikers bad boys and feared them. The girls weren't scared and just wanted to ride.

Deihl was a boy living in Johnstown, Pa., when he decided life was best lived in the fast lane.

"When I turned 16 and got my driver's license, I bought a bike, not a car," Deihl said. "All I had was a motorcycle for four or five years."

The first bike was a Harley, and it was too slow. So, less than 30 days later, he traded it in for a faster Harley.

He kept the 1947 Harley for four or five years until he bought his first BSA motorcycle around 1960 that topped out at 110 miles per hour.

"They were fast," he said. "They were light, and they handled well. The BSA motorcycles were just ideal to ride on. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there wasn't anything that could beat us on the road."

ONLINE | To read past Back Roads columns, go to Wilson's page at MyrtleBeachOnline.com.