My First Street Bike

How do you like the little motorcycle above? It isn't a picture of the one I used to have, but it is identical in every way. My very first street bike was a 1972 Yamaha LS2-100. The LS2-100 is a 100cc, twin-cylinder, two-stroke, with oil injection. This bike was bought new by my Aunt Denise, my father's youngest sister, in 1972 or 1973, and my father bought it in 1980 or 1981. I rode it all the time in our subdivision while in Indiana, but it wasn't until we moved to South Carolina that I started to "stray" with it.

We moved to Sumter, SC in the summer of 1981, and we took this little Yamaha with us (I believe we took my little 5HP Briggs & Stratton powered minibike and 1974 Honda Z-50A, too). I was.....ahem....twelve years old at the time we moved to South Carolina. I rode that bike all over our subdivsion, which had a few miles of dirt roads within it, as I didn't have a dirtbike and had outgrown my little minibikes. I eventually started to venture out on the paved roads. I rode several miles from home at this young age on this little motorcycle, but I stuck to back roads to avoid the police and fast traffic. This bike was NOT something that could outrun a cop, and I think the fastest I ever had it was 55 mph, downhill, with a tailwind. I remember riding the bike to the bridge over Boykin Pond and watching the alligators swimming under the bridge on some early mornings during the summer of 1981 and 82. I quite riding the bike when we bought my 1980 Honda XR-200 in the summer of 1983. To this day, I don't think my parents ever knew about these excursions on the little Yamaha. We evenutally sold the bike, sometime a bit later, to a guy from the Camden, SC area. I believe he was planning on turning the bike into a dirtbike for his son/grandson, which is a good thing, as the lights quit working on it a few minutes before he arrived to look at it. I don't remember the guy even test riding the bike, and he took it home by putting it in the trunk of his car and strapping the trunk deck down. Weirdly enough, I wouldn't mind having a nice, clean LS2-100, again. I doubt I'd ride it much, but you just don't see many of the old Japanese bikes still on the road, especially the old two-strokes..




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