A link to the past?

I called my mother this evening just to chat and we were discussing my planned trip to Massachusetts in April. I suggested to her that riding a scooter through the Catskills and the Berkshires was something my father probably would have done in his younger years, and she informed me that when my dad was a young man, he had a scooter because his parents thought a motorcycle was too dangerous. My mother thinks she might have a picture of him with the scooter, but she's not certain.

I wanted more information, so I called my sister to see if she had my uncle's number. She tracked it down and I made a call to my 72 year old uncle in Florida. When he picked up the phone, I introduced myself and we chatted a bit, then I asked him about the scooter. It turns out that the scoot was his, not my dad's, but that he had loaned it to my father so he could use it during the summer one year. He also related an amusing (yet painful) story about my father hitting a patch of gravel with the scooter during a turn, after which he and the scooter when in opposite directions. My uncle recalled that he and my grandfather had spent two hours picking gravel out of my dad's backside (my grandfather was a country doctor).

I tried to find out what the make and model of the scooter was, but my uncle could not remember, except to say that it was British. I'm going to do some digging and see what I can find about British scooters that would have been available in the 1950's. Once I have that info, I'll give my uncle another call and see if any of the names ring a bell.

In any event, it was nice to learn that my dad and I had something in common. He's been gone now for almost five years and I miss him terribly, so this little connection means a lot.