Of Knuckleheads and Panheads

 

Harley-Davidson riders are deeply attached to their motorbikes, an affection based to some extent at least on some aspect or other of the design and engineering. For example, there are Knuckleheads and Panheads. The names derive from two designs of piston-heads of Harley motorbikes. A panhead Harley is so named because the rocker box cover on the cylinder head resembles a camper’s cooking pan, whereas, the cover bolts and the curved shape of the cover gave the knucklehead its nickname.* This miscellaneous piece of information, of no great importance (unless you happen to meet a Harley rider), is the kind of knowledge that accumulated in my memory over 40 years of conversations with hundreds of people as part of my work as a publisher. I’ve been reminded of this by a letter from Ken Magri, who I met when he was teaching art history at American River College in Sacramento, California.

 

Armando Magri's 1936 knucklehead: the two knuckles are immediately below the tank

I was working for Thames & Hudson as the publisher of college textbooks. My early commissions included books for courses such as Greek Art and Archaeology, Roman History, Introduction to Archaeology. The owner of the company said to me one day that he wanted “something much bigger”. I suggested that he give me six months to research a course called Art Appreciation, which is a humanities requirement for a degree in any subject in many colleges in the USA, especially in the South and the West. I realized that I had found something bigger during my first visit to talk to an art appreciation instructor at Perimeter College in Georgia. The college taught art appreciation to 2,000 or so students every year, so, since art textbooks sold for $100 or more, if I could publish a book that was adopted by her college, just that one sale would be worth $200,000.

 

An ad for a panhead engine

I travelled on and one day drove from Berkeley to Sacramento. I met Ken at his office in American River College. I soon learned that Ken had once taught art history at Folsom State prison (famous for being mentioned in a Johnny Cash song). I figured that, if he had taught art to prisoners in jail for some very serious crimes, he must have a talent for teaching his subject. On my second visit, Ken collected me from my hotel to take me to the Harley-Davidson dealership, which had once belonged to his father Armando. The owners still had on display Armando’s collection of antique Harleys. It was there I learned to tell a panhead from a knucklehead. Armando owned a first-year model 1936 Harley knucklehead, which Ken sold recently for $133,000. I also discovered that Armando, as well as being a motorbike dealer, was a competitor on a motorbike racing circuit in northern California. Ken took me home to see some of Armando’s memorabilia. These include wonderful black and white photos of racing meetings and biker’s rallies: I recall a very period group photo taken, at Pismo Beach in 1926. Another memorable item is Armando’s metal “skid shoe” worn over the rider’s ordinary shoe, used for broadsliding, or putting your foot down in a turn. Ken also showed me a splendid orange 1950 panhead FL Harley with a sidecar that he was restoring for his son Theo (who at that time was in high school, so too young to ride it). Theo has ridden in the sidecar but has yet to ride the bike. Ken tells me that he has been scanning the family collection of almost 1,000 photos collected by his parents Armando and Lu, and their predecessors in the Harley dealership Frank and Gladys Murray, for the Harley-Davidson Museum collection.

 

A 1926 biker's rally at Pismo Beach

Ken retired in 2016, as I did, and began a new career as a journalist. His wife Teresa drew his attention to an ad from the Sacramento News and Reviews for a cannabis writer. Ken’s task is to write pieces to add some real news to 28 (sic) pages of cannabis ads. In 2018 Ken won 4^th place for Investigative Reporting from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for two articles about counterfeit vape cartridges. The paper recently received a grant to publish articles about affordable housing, so Ken has diversified from cannabis to social issues.

 

Photo of a 1919 Harley-Davidson's dealer meeting. I assume that the dealers are wearing face masks as a precaution against the Spanish flu

My boss at Thames & Hudson once complained that I had by far the largest travel budget of any editor. I wonder if he would have appreciated my travelling to be educated about the finer points of Harleys. My response would have been that the man who taught me about panheads and knuckleheads had helped me to publish the biggest selling book in the company’s history. A book that continues to sell in its 4^th edition.

 

Ken, by the way, is a Knucklehead.

 

* In our recent correspondence, Ken has been attempting, with limited success, to educate me in the finer points of Harley nomenclature and engine design. I have managed to understand that there are many more distinctions than simply panhead vs. knucklehead. Here is now Ken explained the question to me:

“For those who like to get technical, and there are many, the "evolution engine," which replaced the shovelhead, had its name shortened to "evo," but that referred to the whole engine configuration, not the cylinder heads. Some people have called evos "blockheads" but that nickname is not commonly used. As for the current overhead chain-driven twin cam engines, 1999-2016, I have heard them called "twinkies," but that's not a cylinder head" nickname. And folks who don't like the revolution engine, 2001-2017 called them the "showerheads" or "sprinklerheads." Funny nicknames, but again, not well known. Oh, let's see, I better mention that old Sportster engines from 1957 to 1984 were called "ironheads." But I own a 1977 Sportster and I didn't even know about that nickname until double-checking my information for you.

 

So, based on all of that, I wouldn't say it's just about knuckles and pans, except in the sense that many Harley owners are binary about Harley-Davidson. For example, some won't like any Harley made after...1948, or 1965, or 1984, 2001, or the Italian ones, or the non-V-twins, you get the point. 

 

So, other than all of those details above, when the nickname for the engine is based on cylinder head configurations, yes, "flatheads, knuckleheads, panheads and shovelheads" are the best-known nicknames.” 

Armando Magri on the flathead he rode at Daytona International Speedway in 1940

 

Wanted one hermit, previous experience desirable

 

Early Saturday mornings, as I prepare our breakfast, I listen to BBC Radio 4’s Open Country, which focuses on an aspect of rural Britain. On 22 January, the subject was Stoke Park Estate, 108 hectares on Purdown with views over Bristol. About 1338 the powerful Berkeley family of Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire acquired the estate, but it was not until 1563 that Sir Richard Berkeley, MP for Gloucestershire, built the original house. By the 18^th century the family had become still richer from a coal mining concession near Bristol. No doubt it was money from coal that funded the replacement of Richard’s house by Norborne Berkeley, 4^th Baron Botetourt (1717-1770), about 1760, with an imposing residence in ‘Jacobethan Revival’ style, with splendid views across the landscape.

 

Stoke Park Estate and the c18th century house

Like many an owner of a grand country house, Norborne wanted an imposing landscape to provide an impressive setting for it. He commissioned a noted landscape architect of the time, Thomas Wright of Durham (1711-1786). Stoke Park is the best surviving example of Wright’s work. Open Country caught my ear with a curious fact. It seems that when one designed a magnificent park landscape, one needed an attraction to entice visitors. So, Norborne employed a hermit. I thought of Jayne Eyre responding to a gentleman’s advertisement for a governess. Perhaps Norborne advertised for his hermit in some publication where gentlemen’s hermits sought employment.            

                                      

Norborne’s employment of a hermit was by no means eccentric or novel. In the early 15^th century Francis Paola, an Italian mendicant friar, is reported to have lived as a hermit in a cave on his father’s estate. In 16^th century France estates included a chapel or another small building to house a hermit. The first was perhaps at Château de Gaillon whose hermitage consisted of a chapel, house and garden. Hermits caught on with British aristocrats in the 18^th and 19^th century. Charles Hamilton, owner of Painshill, prudently issued his hermit with a seven-year contract of employment, which must have included a termination clause, since the hermit was sacked after three weeks when he was discovered in a pub.      

 

Unfortunately, Norbert made some bad investments and was forced to accept an appointment as Governor of Virginia in 1786.  He died there two years later. The estate and the house were inherited by Norborne’s sister, Elizabeth, widow of the 4^th Duke of Beaufort, and remained in the Beaufort family until 1915, by which time the house had become Stoke Park Colony for the mentally handicapped. The NHS took it over in 1948 until it closed in 1988.

 

Stoke Park hospital

During World War II, the park was a site for anti-aircraft guns to protect the city and port of Bristol. The concrete structures remain. Many years’ growth of brambles and ivy covered the artillery emplacements. Goats employed to clear the growth are a popular attraction for Bristol’s children, and so, in a sense, have replaced the 18^th century hermit.

 

The story of Stoke Park’s hermit recalled my meetings with Buddhist monks in Japan. When we visited our son John in Kanazawa the mother of his host family took us to a monastery in the hills above her home. She called into the office where she was told that there was an Australian monk (“Australia-jin”) working in the garden who could tell us something about the monastic life. The monk was called away from his work. He wore a long robe of rough material and round his waist a censer which issued smoke to drive away insects (he could not harm or kill them). The Australian explained that he lied a simple life of meditation and work in the garden as preparation for his return to Australia.

 

Another encounter with a monk was quite a contrast. My colleague Ms Matsumoto had taken me to an exhibition opening in a small gallery on the fashionable Omotesando street in Tokyo. There I met a young monk, a relative of the artist, dressed in a splendid saffron robe and drinking a beer. I asked him about his life. He explained that he walked in the mountains and bathed in waterfalls. I asked him how he fed himself: simple, people gave him his meals. I commented that this seemed like a nice lifestyle if one could also join fashionable gatherings in Tokyo and drink beer.

 

On another occasion, I had taken my colleague Jane Turner, editor of The Dictionary of Art, to Asakusa, a large complex of Buddhist temples. We had paid a fee to choose a small stick on which was written something in Japanese characters, which you match to the drawers of a large wooden cabinet to select a sheet of paper (an omikuji) on which your fortune is written. I had suggested that we keep them until we might meet somebody who could read them for us. That evening we attended a reception. There I met another monk, also wearing a saffron robe, and sipping a drink. I asked him if he could read my omikuji. He agreed and told me that mine predicted good fortune. I found Jane and introduced her to the monk. She produced her paper. The monk shook his head and told her that he had rarely seen such a bad prediction. I am glad to reassure my readers that at the last report both Jane and I are alive and well, so perhaps misfortune was not her lot after all.

 

Choosing an omikuji at Asakusa

I had thought at the time of meeting the party monks that a drinking monk in fashionable gatherings in Tokyo was slightly incongruous. Perhaps they had a function rather like Norborne’s monk, to add something extra to the venue. This set me thinking about parallels in my own profession. I recalled that when renting office space in New York the usually hard-nosed agent would make a few (invariably small) concessions to attract a publishing client. Apparently, we attracted other tenants.

 

I recall being invited to a fundraising dinner for Friends of the Sir John Soane Museum in Soane’s house in Lincoln Inn Fields in the 1990s. At the time I was Publisher of The Dictionary of Art, which was how I met Peter Thornton the director of the museum. I found myself seated at a table with assorted wealthy Americans, Bridget Cherry, editor of Pevsner’s guides to the architecture of England and a very distinguished elderly member of the aristocracy. We three were meant to charm the moneyed guests out of their money. Unfortunately, the aristocratic lady became quite drunk so Bridget and I had to keep talking to distract the Americans from her inebriated state. Around the same time, I was invited occasionally to lunches at Sotheby’s. I would find myself at a table with the auction house’s finance director, owners of works he hoped would sell them at Sotheby’s and one or two characters like me who I suppose were meant to impart an air of scholarship far removed from the grubby subject of money.

 

As I commented in a previous post, the BBC, which enriches the culture of our country with a range of programming which will never be matched by for-profit broadcasters, and which provides this service for £0.44 per day, is a remarkable institution. For entirely ideological and self-serving reasons, it has long been threatened by elements of the Conservative Party, which are now in charge of the party and the government. The same faction has already undermined the British Council, another fine institution. It must not be allowed to destroy the BBC.