Besides which, Indian itself made some bad decisions during the 1920�s. Propped up by the home sales success of Scouts and Chiefs, company management began playing the stock market rather than updating their motorcycles. They did what Harley-Davidson had firmly decided not to do � they bought out Ace to acquire a Four and then massively re-engineered the expensive and slow-selling Four not once but three times. They started building refrigerators, car shock absorbers, and outboard motors for boats. They built an OHV v-twin racing engine the equal of the 1000cc JAP fitted to Broughs, but made less than 50 of them and only ever sent one to Europe. For the remainder of the 1920s they neglected to update the styling and engineering of their bread-and-butter Scouts and Chiefs at a time when Europe was swiftly adopting OHV, positive-stop foot-change, and saddle-tanks. To the very end, Indian never equipped the Scouts or Chiefs with either OHV or synchromesh foot-change gearboxes.
Indian in its heyday often bested its main rival Harley Davidson. History shows that, on design matters, conservative Harley Davidson were usually the followers of trends while Indian was the leader. The die-hard Indian enthusiast in me inclines to the view that H-D really only ever did one bold thing in their entire history, and that was to release the 1000cc OHV EL �Knucklehead� in 1936. It is mainly for that reason, however, that H-D is still with us today, while Indian stumbled on into a long decline that mercifully ended in 1953.
Charlie Franklin is the central figure around which all these pieces of history fit. The man was a genius. As a motorcycle designer and engineer, the range of models he created and the impact they had on the course of motorcycling all put him right up there with the likes of Val Page, Edward Turner, and Soichiro Honda. It is such a shame that his life and works have not been better documented.
Bert Le Vack is an equally enigmatic figure, and in his own way also a genius. In his recent column WB lamented the poor present-day condition of Le Vack�s grave. Also to be lamented is the relatively poor documentation of his life and works.
Can anybody out there tell us more about Bert Le Vack?
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