Stories from the 70's with your 70's

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power6994

Active Member
Hey all,

I would love to hear some stories from the 70's about when you got your trail 70, where you would take them with your family, would you race them, what music was around at the time, what was the overall feeling, how does it compare today?

Who was lucky enough to get a brand new one or did you have to work a paper route to save up?
 
I was 11 years old in December 1977 when I came home from the local Honda shop with this 1977 Honda CT70 Shiny Orange Bike, in the picture it has about 10 fun miles where I had rode it before putting it up and splashed I think every mud hole I came to, the bike was $540.00 brand new.
 

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power6994 said:
That's awesome! What other adventures did you get up to? Were you allowed to disappear on it all day?
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Yeah we have a lot of trails that I would disappear on, a full tank of gas and ride as long as the gas would last, and a few times I had to push the bike home to refill the tank. as a kid I bought my gas by picking up pop bottles and taking them and selling them to the little store below us, also picked up apples, pears and chestnuts and bagged them up and took them around the neighborhood and sold them.
 
I bought a brand new Honda CT70 when I was 14 years old in 1970. Saved all the money from my $35/week summer job and bought it brand new from a Honda dealer for $360 and no sales tax back then. The first day I got it, I was riding through some tall grass and ran over a running woodchuck! Never saw him until I ran him over. He got up and kept running to his hole. Me and my friends would ride on the roads to get to our off-road riding areas, and sometimes were chased by the police. We always got away by turning off the roads and riding where their police cars could not follow. Once they even unleashed a police dog after us, but we outran the dog too.

Converse sneakers never go out of style...
 

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CT70Wizard said:
Yeah we have a lot of trails that I would disappear on, a full tank of gas and ride as long as the gas would last, and a few times I had to push the bike home to refill the tank. as a kid I bought my gas by picking up pop bottles and taking them and selling them to the little store below us, also picked up apples, pears and chestnuts and bagged them up and took them around the neighborhood and sold them.
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Do you still live near that area? Or pop back past to revisit?
 
MikeCO said:
I bought a brand new Honda CT70 when I was 14 years old in 1970. Saved all the money from my $35/week summer job and bought it brand new from a Honda dealer for $360 and no sales tax back then. The first day I got it, I was riding through some tall grass and ran over a running woodchuck! Never saw him until I ran him over. He got up and kept running to his hole. Me and my friends would ride on the roads to get to our off-road riding areas, and sometimes were chased by the police. We always got away by turning off the roads and riding where their police cars could not follow. Once they even unleashed a police dog after us, but we outran the dog too.

Converse sneakers never go out of style...
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Wow! What a story! Haha!

Did your friends have bikes as well or did you share your bike? Is that your little brother? Do you still have that bike?
 
Neighbor kids had various bikes, some were mini-bikes with lawnmower engines; one had a mini-trail 50, one a Rupp mini-bike, one a Herter's mini-bike, one a Hodaka 100, a Honda 90 scooter, a Honda 100, a Kawasaki 100, up to a Yamaha AT-125 that was way too tall for the kid, but he rode it. I guess we had an early teenager suburban motorcycle gang in New Jersey. We would have drag races. I often won, getting up to 50 mph eventually, beating the lawnmower-powered mini-bikes. Yes, that's my little brother. Sold the bike a few years later to buy a deer rifle and shotgun for hunting.
 
At 11, I was a member of the local Minibike gang, small enough that I didn’t even have enough strength to pull start my engine so I replaced it with one of those crank and turn the knob starters from an old lawn mower.

But relative to this thread - at that age when I would walk home from school I would pass by Billy and Donny’s house and hope that their bikes might be out in their driveway so I could get a look at the ultimate. Billy had a new Z50 and Donny a CT70. Boy, I wish we all could be 11 again.
 
I was born in ‘78, so the only stories I have from that era involve poop👶🏻💩😂. I was 12 in 1990 when I got a red 1970 K0. My dad had bought three of them, but only two of them were running and in rough ahape - the other was just for parts. I mowed a lot of lawns and did a lot of other odd jobs to pay for mine and fix it up. I ran around in neighborhoods, empty lots and hiking trails around Boulder, CO. The brand new 91-94 CT70s at the dealership were fun to gawk at.
 
When I was young, (born 1960) I was forbidden to have a minibike or go cart. We lived in a suburban community and there was no place to ride legally. My dad was a cop so no minibike. However, my first ride was around 1975 when someone was renting CT's on the beach in St. Augustine. Here is my sister and I on our rental CT's.
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