User:Bikemagic2/Will Rodgers

My grandmother scolded my mother in the spring of 1963 because my mother had rode behind my dad on a stretch of road now known as The Dragon's Tail while she was 8 months pregnant with me. I had already mapped many miles as a passenger before I started riding by myself in 1968 when my dad purchased a Honda Z50 Mini Trail on my 5th birthday.

We would make the occasional trek to see family members as a family, on a motorcycle. One motorcycle. My dad, my mom, my two sisters and myself, (yes that is 5 people), would ride on Dad's Harley to my grandparents in Tellico Plains, Tennessee from Sweetwater, Tennessee. As we got older, we each had our own motorcycle and would take four or five bikes to visit friends as each of us could ride.

Dad raced a Bultaco in the late 1960's. I can remember when I was small, being in the mountains of the Cherokee National Forest behind Dad on that Bultaco with my feet sticking out and hanging on to his t-shirt. He would go over a rock or log and I would bounce off the seat high enough to see over his head before landing back on the seat.

I worked at a company named GEMTRON CORPORATION for twenty years in flat glass fabrication at Sweetwater, TN and Clarksville, TN. There they didn't know me as "Will" but as "Boy" or "Bill Rodgers' Boy; Dane" even though my business cards said William Rodgers. I still turn around when someone shouts "Boy" and my thin greying hair gives them that "what are you looking at" stare. About Gemtron Corp......The greatest people on earth work there and the greatest years of my life were spent there.

After more than 40 years of riding motorcycles, I started Will Rodgers Cycle Parts and Service. A year later I went to the web and, with lots of help from friends, built and maintain the website http://www.willrodgers.info where I list the products from my business. I have motorcycle cargo trailers, and other accessories.