UNDER CONSTRUCTION!!! - Steve Hacker's Online Motorcycle Museum

1974-1983: Firstly: My Personal Childhood Motorcycle History...

The 1974 Honda XR75... The bike that immediately hooked me and made me OBSESSED over motorcycles! I never got this bike, and still want one to this day (2019), but I've managed to have 30 or so OTHER bikes over the decades. Just not this one. My best friend called me on Christmas morning 1974 and told me to come over and see what "Santa" had left him under the tree. I was already riding the local motorcycle single track trails throughout the woods around my neighborhood on my BICYCLE, PRETENDING (and painfully wishing) I was on my very own motorcycle, and generally aggravating all the other neighborhood kids that had "real motorcycles", and I was at an almost stalker level over all my other friends that had motorcycles when I didn't. I even rode "air" motorcycles sometimes, running along the trails ON FOOT and jumping off the jumps my friends had made, ON FOOT, because I knew my HEAVY bicycle couldn't jump as high as I could on foot, and I just wanted to FEEL THAT FEELING. I even aggravated a fair number of friends, regularly BEGGING them to just let me SIT on their motorcycles in their garages, in some cases, even craving sitting on rusty old dirt bike FRAMES with no engines that friends' fathers had sitting up in sheds and such, awaiting restoration...

Me, Steve Hacker, on my very first "motorcycle", a Gilson 4hp Tecumseh minibike, circa 1975 (9 yrs old)... It was somewhat of a letdown, and not the 1974 Honda XR75 I obsessed over, wanted, begged, pleaded, worked, saved, and bled for, but I took what I could get. I was not even allowed to leave our 1 acre yard with it, and the couple times I dared to, I got in BBBIG trouble for it...

FINALLY! In the Summer of 1979, at 13 years old, I got my brand new 1979 Yamaha YZ80F... It took my parents divorcing and my mother and me moving from Laurel, Maryland (a suburb centered exactly between Baltimore and Washington DC), to tiny little, culture-shock-laden Blakely, Georgia, to not only realize the fulfillment of my mother's promise to get me my own "REAL MOTORCYCLE", but to also go from being the most aggravating and uncool, non-motorcycle-owning kid in town, to being, hands-down, the VERY COOLEST kid in town. My motorcycle evolution happened quickly after this...

In the Summer of 1980, at 14 years old, I traded up to my 1980 Yamaha YZ125G...

...And quickly learned how to "motocross" in the treacherously deep sands of Southwest Georgia...

My mother, Carolyn Hacker, even got into the act, at 39 years old, buying her own 1980 Yamaha DT100G to ride with me. This photo was a rare appearance; her actually on a sandy motocross track. The intent was for her to ride with me just on street and dirt roads with me on my 50cc Puch moped that I got as my first "street bike" (you could ride them on the street at 15 years old back then with only a learner's permit and no full driver's license). So, since she was a novice rider, and I was already right on the edge of being a "pro" motocross racer by this point, we would occasionally ride together on weekends so she could, as she put it, "commune with nature", and since she would ride very slowly, my moped that could only top out at 30mph was the perfect fit for us riding together. How cool was that? How often do kids get to say they ride motorcycles WITH THEIR MOTHERS? Not very often, but we sure did. It wasn't terribly frequent, but it was an occasional weekend thing, but I actually got far more use out of her DT100G dual-sport than she did, truth be told. By 1981, it and my moped were my primary bikes, even more so than my YZs were. I wasn't technically legal on the DT, so I "snuck" it down the road and went for the nearest trails and dirt roads, but my 50cc Puch moped WAS legal when I turned 15, and so it became my "daily driver", for everything; school, social, etc., until we sold EVERYTHING (incredibly sadly) for me to get my first car, a 1976 Toyota Corolla, to drive to college starting in the Fall of 1983... It would be 5 years before I ever threw a leg over a motorcycle again, but this was indeed the END of my motorcycle CHILDHOOD...

Motorcycle Chronology, History, and Information...