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Hemmings Motor News Blog

Hemmings Motor News has been around since 1954. We're proud of our heritage, but we're also more than the Hemmings full of classifieds that your father subscribed to. Aside from new editorial content every month in Hemmings, we have three monthly magazines: Hemmings Muscle Machines, Hemmings Classic Car and Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car.

While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.

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Indian Motorcycles and More

Posted September 10, 2009 12:01 AM by dstrohl

The Museum of Springfield History in Springfield, Massachusetts, has been working on a new display of Indian motorcycles which will be unveiled at a grand opening ceremony on October 10. I saw several of the bikes that will be displayed in the exhibit when I was at the Rhinebeck Vintage Bike Show in June.

Over 35 motorcycles and classic vehicles will be displayed, this represents the entire collection of bikes that Esta Manthos has donated to the museum. Esta is the former owner of the Indian Motorcycle Museum which closed its doors several years ago.

In addition to the Springfield-built Indians, the collection also includes a replica 1893 Duryea and a 1937 GeeBee airplane. Springfield-built Rolls Royces will accompany the display as well as a Knox three-wheel car, reams of original Indian documents and advertisments and several antique bicycles.

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#1

Re: Indian Motorcycles and More

09/10/2009 12:56 AM

An interesting (to me, anyway) historical aside: I first found out that Rolls Royce had produced cars in Springfield on a trip to Tokyo in the late 1980's, where I saw one of the Springfield Rolls Royces (with appropriate documentation, etc.) for sale on an upper floor of a department store (it WAS a bit of an upscale department store, and there was also a Van Gogh- reputedly original- on sale on the same floor...)

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#2

Re: Indian Motorcycles and More

09/11/2009 8:56 AM

Hello All:

This is my first posting in this forum guys and gals, so please take it easy on me! LOL

I wish I had heard about the Rhinebeck Vintage Bike Show here. Had I had known of the show I would have loved to had gone to it, just to see the old restored Indians! Now, I only live about a mile away from the old Rhinebeck Aerodrome, but I didn't hear a peep about the bike event in the local newspaperst, nor did I see any advertisemnet for it in town, or thereabouts, etc..

Is this bike show show held annually, or was it a special one-time event? Does anyone here have any further information is this regard?

Also, interesting to note that the Museum up in Springfield will be exhibiting a 1937 GeeBee! Incidently for those of you who aren't aviation buffs, GeeBees were originally built in Springfield MA for years. Even Jimmy Doolittle flew one (I believe in the Cleveland Air Races), setting a world's airspeed record.

I don't believe any of the original GeeBees are still air worthy, as they were highly unstable and tended to crash more often then not, but boy they were the fastest thing in the air at the time !!!! Most of the surviving airframes are now static displays in air museums.

There is, however, a single replica being flown on the airshow circuit Well, at least it was around a decade ago. I don't know if there are any others that have been built since then and now are flying. About ten years ago, a beutiful GeeBee replica flew a flight several demos at the The Great New England Airshow that was held at Westover Air Force Reserve Base, a former SAC bomber base which is currently a AFRES C-5A/B Galaxy transport base and located up in Chicopee MA, just north of Springfield. Luckily, I was able to get some great videotaping done of those flights with my old trusty Sony 8mm digicam!!! Ditto, in regard to the flight demos made by a pair of retored F-104 Starfighters that had been obtained from the Greek AirForce!!!! Ohhh what a racket they made, which really really upset the audio track of my camcorder!! Me thinks the track got super-saturated by the decibels pumped out of the huge GE J-79 jet engines! LOL Anyhow, it was nice to see and hear the old Century Fighters up in the air again....ahhhh, the sound of FREEDOM!!! ***GRINZZZ***

Have a great weekend everyone!

===Mark

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Re: Indian Motorcycles and More

09/11/2009 5:54 PM
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Re: Indian Motorcycles and More

09/11/2009 8:20 PM

Many years back when I was in Japan (Yokosuka to be exact), I was passing a small establishment and saw an Indian and sidecar inside. It was painted camo and evidently was rescued from the war.

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