Tim, I'm impressed!!! How on earth did you manage to hold on to that frame for so many years?
It really did have as much to do with luck as anything else. Prepare for a long story.
That little motorcycle was purchased used in May of 1978 at a place called Grandpa's Hardware in Clarksville, Tennessee. I was spending that summer with my biological father (whom I have not seen since 1984, but that's another story). He was in the 101st Airborne, stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky and was renting a foreman's house on an old farm somewhere off-post. I guess he figured I might get bored being so far away from home, so he bought me that bike for some excitement and I proceeded to ride the **** out of it the entire summer, eventually messing up the engine.
Then, somehow or another (and I'm still not sure exactly how), the bike ended up at my grandparent's house in San Angelo a few months later, where it sat until the following summer. Me and my Pap got it running again and I rode it around his land a whole bunch. But my mom didn't like motorcycles, so I didn't get to immediately bring it home to Midland.
By the summer of 1981, my biological father was out of the army and had moved back to San Angelo (his and my mom's hometown, and not coincidentally where I was born) where he landed a job with GTE at Mathis Field, working on their Lear jets. That summer, we overhauled the bike completely, installing a new B&S 1.5-horse and painting the frame blue. I rode it all of summer 1981 and 1982, then finally talked my mom and adoptive father into letting me bring it home. From there, I basically rode that minibike every day until I was 14, when I finally got too big for it and moved on to dirt bikes and three-wheelers.
It then sat in a junk heap out on the back of my parent's land from 1985 until 1996, when I rediscovered it half-buried out there in the dirt with a bush growing through it. I had been certain to that point that it had been long-since sold for scrap, but somehow it had managed to survive. Amused and elated, I dug it out of the West Texas sand and took it home.
The tires, seat, and engine were all useless, so I threw away everything but the frame and stored it. As soon as I get my Mach I restoration finished, the little mini-bike will be next. It just seems wrong not to bring it back to life after it survived so much and brought me so many great times. I suppose it'll be another thread for the Project Bikes section.