A look of astonishment crossed Tilden Brughelli's face.

He leaned on his cane in the shop at the back of Ray Leslie's Heavy Duty Cycles and looked at the gleaming 1930 Harley-Davidson VL.

The last time Brughelli had seen the rare machine, it was crashed, fading and rusting in his barn on Jalama Road. It hadn't been ridden since 1942.

Twenty years ago, Brughelli had finally given up his own dream of restoring the bike and sold it to Greg Hamon, a younger friend who had coveted it for many years. Hamon, too, dreamed of restoring the Harley, and now, all these years later, only a special pair of twin headlights was needed to complete the restoration of the Great Depression-era motorcycle.

Tilden Brughelli

Tilden Brughelli liked fast machines. When he bought the Harley in the 1930s from a friend who was leaving Lompoc, young Brughelli was already racing his Model T in town. The sporty motorcycle had a 74-cubic-inch flathead motor that could pull like a freight train and hit 85 mph. It was a perfect match for the farmer and cattle rancher with a love for breakneck speed.

Brughelli paid $100 for the Harley, painted it black and red, added some Harley-Davidson decals, and rode it like a hurricane, twisting and turning, leaping and sliding across the hills of Jalama, where he had lived most of his life.

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“It was a lot of fun, except when I slipped it around a corner and went under a barbed wire fence with it,” said Brughelli.

At 95, Brughelli still relishes memories of his speed demon days.

“I took more spills on a motorcycle than Evel Knievel did,” he said. “My elbows caught hell.”

But it wasn't Brughelli's daredevil riding style that finally retired the Harley.

Leaving to take a load of cattle to market in Los Angeles in 1942, Brughelli told his hired hand to stay away from the motorcycle. He knew the man liked to hop in the saddle and track the trails when Brughelli was away.

“I told him not to ride it. When I got back from L.A., he was limping,” Brughelli recalled. “He told me a cow kicked him, or some damned thing. He wrecked the motorcycle.”

Brughelli found the damaged bike in a shed near the old Jalama School. He left it there for five or six years, long enough for a young boy with a sharp knife to cut a thick strip off the leather seat to make slingshots.

By the 1960s, Brughelli had moved the motorcycle back to his barn for safekeeping, but he never rode it again, never heard its engine roar.

Tony Barto

Tony Barto and his friend Greg Collier loved to surf at Jalama Beach and roam the nearby hills whenever they could. It was one of those days, in 1966, when the 16 year olds came across Tilden Brughelli's barn. To them, the barn looked dilapidated, and inside was an old motorcycle that they reasoned was abandoned.

“We knew it was an old bike. We thought it was a '37. We had an old pickup and just rolled it into the pickup,” Barto said. They took it to a barn on the Collier family's ranch on Santa Rosa Road. “We were going to make a chopper out of it.”

Barto said he and Collier knew a thing or two about motorcycles and figured they were mechanical enough to pull it off.

“It kind of backfired on us, though. We almost got in some serious trouble.”

“We started tearing it all apart. We had it pretty well stripped down,” Barto recalled. “I don't know how the guy found out about it, that we had it. He said to my friend's father, ‘Just put it back together and bring it back.'”

That's the way things were handled in Lompoc back then, Barto said.

“Believe me, we never went back to that barn after that. We felt we got off pretty lucky. We hung our heads pretty low. We had to go back and apologize.”

Greg Hamon

A few years after Brughelli recovered his Harley, Greg Hamon saw it for the first time. He was about 12 years old. The bike was a rusted heap in Brughelli's barn, where the old man repaired farm equipment, but it was love at first sight.

“It was just old; I like old stuff,” Hamon said. “It stayed in that shop. My uncle built that shop in 1965. It was there until I bought the place in 1985.”

Brughelli sold him the farm, but kept the motorcycle for three or four more years, until he gave up the dream of restoring it himself. Then he sold it to Hamon for $1,500.

“It had been sitting roughly 50 years - more than that, 60 years. It needed a lot of work,” Hamon said. “It was just fascinating. In the course of 20 years I used to see it all the time, wishing I could get it and restore it. And I did.”

He waited years to own it, years to begin its restoration, and has about $12,000 invested in it - but he has never taken it for a spin.

“I have never ridden it. I've owned it since '88, I'd say, and I've never ridden it. The bike hasn't been ridden since about 1942,” Hamon said. “This is a classic barn find. It's been put away.”

Hamon said he doesn't know the bike's destiny. Maybe one day his son Matt will own it, he said.

Ray Leslie

When Greg Hamon arrived at Heavy Duty Cycles three years ago with the 1930 Harley-Davidson VL, the old bike was a mess. The transmission was missing, some parts had been chopped off, the paint was scraped and faded. The gas tank was full of jagged holes, eaten by rust. The frame was bent. And a strip was missing from the original leather seat.

Ray Leslie had been restoring motorcycles about 50 years. He knew this was a special bike, introduced about the time of the stock market crash at the beginning of the Great Depression.

“It's the first year of a VL,” Leslie said. “Harley went way out on a limb to do this.”

Harley-Davidson built 10,000 of the bikes that year, but only 3,200 were high-compression VL models like the one Hamon owned, according to Steve Slocombe of VL Heaven, specialists in the 1930-36 Harley Big Twin, in Maidstone, Kent, England. The others were low-compression models used mostly with sidecars, Slocombe said by e-mail.

Harley-Davidson was competing with the Indian Motorcycle Manufacturing Co. for motorcycle supremacy and the Big Twin made up two-thirds of its production in 1930, said Slocombe.

“Harley was outselling Indian about 2-to-1; the VL model made up about half of all U.S. motorcycles sold during the Depression,” he said. “Production fell sharply for the next four years, with 1933 model-year production of 3,700 total machines being back down to 1910-11 levels for Harley-Davidson.”

The 1930 model was experimental in many respects, Leslie said, featuring many distinctive features, including the twin headlamps above a rounded toolbox, and ball joints in the front suspension that gave it an exceptionally shock-resistant ride. Its design was sleek, streamlined and low to the ground, a favorite in Hollywood movies, he said.

It also had a manual oil-pumping system. Riders had to pump oil into the engine while on the road. The used oil was collected, not recycled, and had to be dumped.

“People didn't go for the direct-loss oil system,” Leslie said. That may have kept it from becoming a collector's item sooner, he said. Leslie estimated the value of a fully restored 1930 Harley VL at $19,000 to $22,000.

Leslie relished his worldwide search for replacement parts.

“I've always been a motorhead,” he said. “I fixed my first motor scooter when I was 8 years old. My dad said you have to fix it before you can ride it. He came home that night and I was riding it.”

Leslie said he had eventually turned to fixing and restoring Harley-Davidsons because they are a piece of Americana.

“It's us. It's who we are,” he said.

Reunion

Tilden Brughelli walked with his cane through the back door into the workshop at Heavy Duty Cycles, 208 E. Ocean Ave., and approached the 1930 Harley-Davidson VL. It was no longer a rusted wreck. It wasn't even black and red anymore, but a brilliant black and gold, trimmed in red.

“It doesn't look like the same one. No way,” he said.

Brughelli recalled riding his Harley-Davidson on the cow trails of Jalama. About 75 years had passed since then. Brughelli ran his hand over the Harley's smooth, shiny rear fender and grew excited as he talked and reminisced, until finally he turned and tossed his cane aside.

He flashed a smile and said, “I used to kind of lose my head on a motorcycle.”

A few minutes later, Leslie kick-started the machine.

For the first time in more than six decades, Tilden Brughelli heard the old Harley howl.

January 6, 2009