Motorcycles and Dogs in the Bloodline
- Hal Grant
- Jun 23
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 23
11,000 miles on a 1915 Indian Motorcycle - Dogs and Riders
The moving company packed our house Thursday, we spent Friday running errands and cleaning the empty house (on Lorraine’s birthday of all times). It’s Saturday morning and the movers are unloading our household items and furniture into our upstate storage unit. Incidentally, my sister and I have been using this storage unit since 2019 when we sold our family summer estate in Bar Harbor, Maine. It still had boxes of photos from WW1 and a few heirloom antiques.
A large plastic tub of old photo albums caught my eye. Thinking it would become buried under the incoming household stuff - I grabbed the tub and took it to our car. I started looking through the photos and realized these were pictures of my Grandfather Wallace (“Bud”) Baker, my mothers father. He was famous for his 1915 11,000 mile, round trip 5 month Indian motorcycle tandem tour across the US from Washington to California and return. I decided to photograph each page in the album with my iPhone.
After his 1915 trip, Bud joined the US Army Ambulance Corp in 1918 as a motorcycle courier in France. A couple of pictures of Bud caught my eye on what appears to be a 1918 Harley Davidson. So I took snapshots of those pictures with my iPhone. Later that day as Lorraine drove us home, I flipped through the pics of the album on my phone. I zoomed in on one of the pictures and was shocked. On his bike sat a small black dog - with head and face EXACTLY like our present day dog Lola!! Could this be an incarnation?
Lorraine and I ride the Goldwing motorcycle with Lola in a backpack. She is a great passenger, always eager to sniff the air and see the sights as we wizz along the back roads of America. What are the chances that my Grandfather rode with a dog on his motorcycle just like our Lola? Over one hundred years (107 to be exact) have elapsed between the two pictures below:
Commenti