Last summer, my great uncle Charlie passed away. Charlie Hasty was great person and I could sing his praises for a long time. However, since I usually concentrate on motorcycle stuff on this blog, I’ll focus just on the treasures of his garage rather than those of his personality.

Charlie was a big time tinkerer. He built a miniature scale train, from scratch, with each car being around five feet in length. The engine was perfect. He even spent a year to find the right size acorn nuts to use on the boiler to mimmick the rivets on a real steam engine. He also built a few half scale early 1900s antique cars, one powered by a Cushman Eagle engine and another by a B&S motor. He built a miniature carnival, complete with moving rides like a four foot high ferris wheel. Basically, a trip into Charlies garage was a trip into an Alice’s Wonderland of mechanical oddities.

But my favorites were his 1950s era Cushman Eagle motorcycle and, the queen of the garage, a bright yellow 1933 Morgan Supersport. The Morgan was an english built three-wheeler with a water-cooled Matchless v-twin mounted between the two front wheels. The body was a smooth torpedo shape and the driver was protected by a small glass windshield inside the wooden cockpit. There were levers to adjust the timing, levers to adjust the idle, levers to adjust the flow of fuel, levers to apply the brakes and levers that I still don’t know exactly what they do. This thing was a motorcycle geek’s delight. When Charlie cranked the thing, it would sputter and shake with the front end doing a dance from side to side like a stack of gears and A-arms doing a belly dance and the long steel exhaust rumbling out the rhythm.

Well, with Uncle Charlie’s passing, its now time for the contents of his garage to be distributed to family or sold and the Morgan, because of its value, is on the auction block. The first potential buyers came by last week to take a look at it. I’d buy it, if I could, but I don’t have the garage space or the time to do the thing just. I’d prefer to see if go to some place like the Barber Museum but selling to a specialized buyer like that requires more time, knowledge and effort than my Great Aunt can put into it.

Soon the old Morgan will grace someone else’s garage…

[image from Antique Motorcycle Club of America web site]