When Sandra McPherson of Toledo hops onto her motorcycle, a purple 600cc 1995 Honda Shadow named “Prince,” she hits the road in style: studded boots, jeans, and bright neon tops, usually pink or orange.
The bright colors are both a safety measure and a statement: She’s doing things her own way.
Ms. McPherson, a special education teacher at Scott High School, has long enjoyed motorcycles, but for years, she used to ride in back.
“I got married and had kids,” she said. “Life changes. My husband was like, ‘No, you can’t be riding a motorcycle; you gotta raise the kids. If you get killed, I’ll be left here with the kids.’ “
Things have changed.
This March, Ms. McPherson bought Prince. Now, after receiving lessons from her current partner, she sits up front, riding around the city — she likes to coast along the riverfront — and commuting to work.
“I’ll never be on the back of somebody else’s bike no more,” she said. “I’m riding my own, because I’m in control.”
Across America, riders are still shedding the hell-raising outlaw image propagated by movies and TV shows like The Wild One, Easy Rider, and Sons of Anarchy. As motorcycling undergoes a number of generational shifts, women in Toledo aren’t taking a back seat to anyone, leading the charge as part of the pursuit’s fastest-growing demographic.
A reason to ride
In 1998, women owned 8 percent of motorcycles nationwide, according to statistics provided by the Motorcycle Industry Council. By 2014, that number had climbed to 14 percent, and an estimated one out of every four riders were women.
Toledo is home to a multitude of biker associations: motorcycle clubs, owners’ groups, faith-based motorcycle clubs, and Facebook groups. Sandusky Bike Week draws upwards of 100,000 riders to the region every spring. Steve Ernst, one of Bike Week’s coordinators, estimated women made up 40 percent of the attendees this year, a number that has increased in the last five years.
Many of the women who ride in Toledo do so for the same reason: the irresistible “freedom of the road,” the “wind in your face” (or hair). Fittingly, when Becky Brown of Oregon founded the city’s first motorcycle club for women, taking out a classified ad in The Blade in 1979, she named the group Women in the Wind. (The club has since grown to the largest group of its kind, with more than 125 chapters worldwide.)
But for nurse Tracy Johnson’s coworkers at the Zepf Center, a Toledo-based behavioral health nonprofit, that carefree creed can seem downright crazy. Ms. Johnson, who rides a Harley Street Glide, eschews helmets, safety gear, and even long coats when she’s on her bike.
“There’s one person I know of that’s a nurse that rides,” she said. “Most of them will say, ‘I’ve worked in the ER; I’ve seen people come in from accidents.’ They’ve had that unfortunate experience of seeing the other side of motorcycling. I know the reality of it, but I choose to live.”
For Toledoan Virginia Wilcox, in contrast, riding has provided a safe haven. She grew up riding dirt bikes and go-karts as a child but couldn’t ride during the decade she spent addicted to heroin and cocaine.
When Ms. Wilcox got out of a jail, she bought a 1987 Honda CBR1000F Hurricane for $700 and fixed it up. She started attending Heaven’s Highway Biker Church and kicked her drug habit in October, 2013.
After Heaven’s Highway closed down, Ms. Wilcox switched to Kingdom Run Biker Church. She’s still clean and holding down a couple of jobs delivering pizza.
“They have other people there that have a similar past as me,” Ms. Wilcox said of Kingdom Run. “I could connect with them. They were good role models for me. ... If I’m having a bad day or bad thoughts, I can get on the bike and feel peaceful and stress-free.”
Like Ms. Wilcox, Toledoan Kelly Fowler grew up biking, starting out on a minibike when she was 8 years old. An employee at Equity Keystone Foods in North Baltimore, she and her husband have taken their bikes to every corner of Michigan.
“My husband rides also, but I think I love my bike more than he loves his bike. I’m not afraid of the weather. My husband will say, ‘Oh, it’s going to rain today,’ “ Ms. Fowler said. “Part of it’s having control. I hate riding on the back of my husband’s bike.”
Shop talk
Ms. McPherson, Ms. Johnson, Ms. Wilcox, and Ms. Fowler are all lifelong Toledo residents, for 58, 42, 39, and 55 years, respectively. For 44 of those years, Sheila Mitchell has watched Toledo’s motorcycle scene evolve almost beyond recognition.
Ms. Mitchell owns and operates Homer’s Cycles, the oldest family-run shop in the city, with her brother Jim Yarrito. Their father, the store’s namesake, started the business in 1957, and Ms. Mitchell began working there in 1974 as a teenager.
The shop, just off North Summit Street in North Toledo, has a yellow-painted clapboard exterior with green trim and an octagonal turret jutting out above the door. Inside, there are parts everywhere, hanging on the walls and lining shelves behind the shop counter like library books: hand grips, levers, mirrors, throttle rests and tubes, brake pads, spokes, and, in the back, tires, tires, tires. That’s Homer’s specialty.
“We’re the only shop in Toledo that specializes in wheels,” Mr. Yarrito said. “If it has spoked wheels, we probably touched it somewhere along the way.”
VIDEO: Sheila Mitchell of Homer’s Cycles
The siblings’ know-how has allowed Homer’s, unlike most family-run motorcycle shops, to stave off two crippling trends: the incursion of online parts retailers and what they and their longtime customers view as the declining industriousness of Millennials.
By embracing spoked wheels and other specialty jobs, Homer’s occupies a market niche for riders with eccentric tastes. It’s not just those who want to install lime green or copper chrome rims. Homer’s has helped customers realize their wildest ambitions: building a motorized bar stool, skateboard, wheelchair, and Radio Flyer wagon, and even supplying parts for the Toledo Police Department’s bomb robot.
By keeping every conceivable part in steady supply, Homer’s appeals to customers like Point Place resident Butch Tolles, who started coming to Homer’s in the 1970s and prefers fixing up his bike himself.
“Today, most guys don’t know where to put the oil in the motorcycle,” Mr. Tolles said. “A lot of places you take in your motorcycle, you know more than they do, and they’re working under time pressure. I don’t trust ‘em.”
He prefers places like Homer’s or the BMW shop in Point Place he used to go to, which had a potbelly stove in the corner. And like many other loyal Homer’s customers, Mr. Tolles is a motorcycle connoisseur, building bikes from parts and fine-tuning them constantly.
But bikes, like riders, are changing.
“Today, you go 100, 200 miles an hour, you barely hit the throttle and you’re going,” said Sonja Litalien, a longtime customer from Sylvania sitting in the shop on a recent weekday.
“It’s an appliance,” said Clint White of Toledo, a friend of Mr. Tolles.
“It’s effortless,” said Michel Litalien, Ms. Litalien’s husband.
These longtime riders have held out. “We like to know how things work,” Mr. White said.
In other ways, though, Toledo riders like the loyal Homer’s crowd have changed their habits, mellowing out and embracing a new image: charitable, respectable, even suburban.
“Motorcycles weren’t as popular back [in the ‘70s],” said Ms. Brown, Women in the Wind’s founder. “They had more of a bad image. Now, if you drive through suburbia when the garage doors are open, you’ll see motorcycles in there. [Back then people] looked at the riders like dirtballs. Now, it’s everybody, doctors and lawyers, so the stereotype has changed over the years.”
The geography of riders’ routes has changed to match. Bars were waypoints in days of yore; now, it’s ice cream parlors. Ms. Fowler and her husband often ride to Rita’s Dairy Bar in Grand Rapids or the Sundae Station in Bowling Green. The Litaliens are partial to Rita’s, too. Mr. Tolles and his crew frequent Toft Dairy Ice Cream Parlor in Sandusky.
“Now, it’s restaurants and ice cream,” Mr. Tolles said. “We pull up to Toft’s, nine to 10 guys with tattoos.”
Sheila’s specialty
In her time working at the shop, Ms. Mitchell has seen another stark shift: More women are coming in.
“There’s been a big change in clientele,” she said. “Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s there were female riders, but [they’d only] come in with a boyfriend or husband. ... The rules have changed over the years.”
For the most part, Ms. Mitchell and her brother run the shop entirely on their own. She does all the ordering, hunting down specialty parts. He consults with customers who have a tricky problem to solve. She puts spokes in. He tightens them and does most of the tire mounting.
Sexism persists.
“Younger guys who come in don’t want to talk to me,” Ms. Mitchell said. “Jim tells them, ‘You have to ask her.’ Women don’t really care. They want to make sure they get what they’ve asked for, for the right price, done right.”
Ms. Mitchell started riding a mini-bike when she was 3 years old, but she hasn’t been able to ride for the last decade. When she was riding with her ex in Florida, a steer knocked them over. She sustained a scar on her foot and hasn’t been able to support the weight of her bike since.
But she finds purpose in the shop her dad opened 61 years ago.
“I started because I wanted to spend time with my dad,” she said. “Then, it was more of a challenge. As a female on this side of the counter, you have to know what you’re talking about, you have to know the industry, you have to know how bikes work, or nobody takes you seriously.”
Ms. Mitchell has stood behind that counter long enough to see both retail and ridership utterly transform. People like her and Ms. Brown are the vanguards of a women’s movement decades in the making.
But even if they’re riding into the future, they’re doing so on a 1957 Harley-Davidson Sportster, not a newfangled Kawasaki crotch rocket. To that end, even with no heir apparent in the family, Ms. Mitchell doesn’t think she and her brother would sell the shop.
“It’s tough when your name’s on the door and you have a reputation of excellence,” she said. “You’re doing good work, you’re treating people fairly, you don’t want to necessarily entrust somebody else to do that.
“This was our father’s legacy to us. It’s personal.”
Contact Mark Rosenberg at mrosenberg@theblade.com, 419-724-6194 or on Twitter @markrosenberg32
First Published July 21, 2018, 10:54 p.m.
