Chattanooga Tennessee, story by Elizabeth Ryan
Chattanooga: 'Meep-meep': Scooter lovers embrace the goofiness
In 1971, 26-year-old John Gerber rode a Vespa Rally 180 scooter 25,000 miles from Minneapolis, Minn., to Tierra del Fuego on the southern tip of South America.
In Argentina, he spent an afternoon digging out a road just minutes after an avalanche hit. In La Paz, Bolivia, he said he spent three days holed up in his hotel room while a gun battle raged as a military coup tried to take over the government.
His 10-month-journey was chronicled in the now-defunct “Scooter World” magazine and made him a legend in the scooter scene. One of his biggest admirers was Scotland’s Norrie Kerr.
“I thought, ‘Geez, this guy has a backside like an ironing board to do this,’” Mr. Kerr said.
The two struck up a correspondence and stayed in touch for more than 30 years. And at the opening party for the 2008 Amerivespa rally Thursday night in Chattanooga, they met for the first time on the Walnut Street Bridge.
“Our relationship is built on the spasmodic, the off-the-cuff, the little bit,” said Mr. Kerr, who owns a scooter parts distributorship in Derby, England. “That’s the beauty of it and makes interest and generates friendship.”
The lifelong connection that started with a scooter is something enthusiasts say is common in a scene where scootering is less of a hobby than a lifestyle.
Noelle Omer, who helped organize the rally that is expected to draw about 450 scooterists to town this weekend, said her love of scooters sparked a deeper attraction to her now husband.
“I knew he was the one for me when I found out he was into scooters as well,” she said of the man she met at a 2002 scooter rally in New Orleans.
Ms. Omer said scooterists often have similar interests in literature, music, art and films.
“I kind of joke that all us punk-rock kids who went to see bands in high school finally got some money and bought scooters, and we still seem to gravitate to each other,” she said.
Vespas have inspired people to form clubs from their first days on the market in the late 1940s, according to Atlanta’s Christina Sacco, who collects scooter trivia.
Groups such as the Hill City United Scooter Club in Chattanooga and Scootlanta in Atlanta have revived the Vespa tradition and extended it to a new generation. The kind of people scootering attracts, Ms. Omer said, don’t mind how goofy they look when they catch a glimpse of themselves cruising by a plate-glass window.
The built-in silliness of it all, she said, means that scooterists tend to have a good sense of humor and know how to enjoy life.
“It’s almost impossible to ride a scooter and not smile,” she said.
Ms. Sacco said her first scooter ride was “like immediate freedom.”
“You’re outside in the open … you see more, you hear more, you smell more,” she said. “And sometimes it’s a bad smell, but for the most part, it’s exhilarating.”
Most scooterists have a story about how their love affair with scooters started, and it usually involves a first glance, an old barn or a classified ad in a local paper. The craving seems to be deeper than they can even articulate; there was just something about that vintage-looking, zippy, two-wheeled accessory with the ‘meep-meep’ honk that called them.
But nobody seems to have just one. Ms. Sacco has three. Jen Obal, who runs Scenic City Scooters in Red Bank with her husband, Stan, has five. Ms. Omer has six: four vintage Vespas, one modern Stella and a vintage Lambretta.
“It is habit forming. You just can’t leave well enough alone,” she said.
Ranging in price from $1,600 to up to $4,000, scooters can get almost 168 miles on only two gallons of fuel, a feat that, in the era of $4-a-gallon gasoline, has helped them attract a new kind of rider.
“We see very, very few people coming in and getting them for pleasure and more and more people coming in and getting them for necessity, for commuting to work and riding on a daily basis,” Ms. Obal said.
The recent resurgence of scootering and scooter rallies worldwide is something that Mr. Gerber, who lives outside Boston, is neither surprised nor pleased by.
“I’d always kind of kept the faith,” he said.
So one of the positive side effects of gas scooter riding, whether you care or not, is they burn far less gas and therefor pollute far less then gas engine cars. Already you can pat yourself on the back for making your carbon footprint that much smaller.
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