A fragile build sheet from the age for Fred C. Atwood’s homemade motorcycle, listing various parts used to create it, has survived through the decades. A new 1945 Harley-Davidson engine is included, the heart of the vehicle, suggesting that the Modesto mechanic built it that year or shortly thereafter.
My guess is that the hand-made frame came later, perhaps made in the auto body shop that Atwood established in 1946 with his brother, Chalmer, at 717 Eighth St. in downtown Modesto. Or maybe they started with the motorcycle frame in the mechanic’s garage they formerly operated with the Keene brothers at 608 10th St.
The Atwood brothers also made the motorcycle’s oil tank and wheel hubs. They welded two Cushman scooter fenders for the front fender and two more for the rear. The handlebars came from a bicycle; the switch, of a tractor; and the ammeter, from a Ford Model A.
To change gears, the driver would grab a chrome “outside the door” doorknob mounted on a shifter with his left hand, the build sheet says. He doesn’t mention what Fred’s wife Mildred might have said about it.
They lived on Johnson Street, a little north and east of downtown, according to the building sheet and The Modesto Bee archives. Her society pages contained mentions of the Atwoods over the years, from their engagement in 1930 to their death in 1967.
But his beloved motorcycle today lives, so to speak, perched on a ledge nine feet above the ground inside a room in a three-bed, three-bathroom Airbnb guest house. rent in Shingle Springs.
It’s a 370-pound piece of cheery interior decor, a conversation starter that evokes days when people at the end of World War II were scavenging for whatever they could find for whatever they might need.
The people staying at the rental “are always interested in talking about this bike. It just has a life of its own,” John Juntunen, the owner, told me in a phone conversation.
How did a motorcycle stoned in the 1940s by a mechanic in Modesto end up at an Airbnb near Coyote Pass on Highway 50 between Sacramento and Placerville?
Fred Atwood had built and sold another motorcycle to a Sacramento man, according to tradition passed down from owner to owner. When that buyer wanted a second one, Atwood offered him the motorcycle he had built for himself, perhaps because cancer was pushing him to give up riding two wheels, Juntunen said.
That same year, according to a notice in The Bee, the Atwood brothers sold their garage equipment to the same Alfred Mathews, whose name 72 years later remains on Modesto’s oldest new car dealership north of McHenry Avenue.
Atwood’s obituary said he was only 59 when he died in 1967. He had come to western Kansas with his family at age 11 and was the son of Stanislaus County Engineer James Atwood. The family attended First Christian Church and Fred enjoyed flying homemade radio controlled model airplanes. He must have been a useful fellow.
Juntunen’s paperwork suggests the motorcycle was passed down to the buyer’s family until Juntunen’s son Jared, an Osprey pilot with the Marines and a motorcycle enthusiast, bought it in 2013.
An interior decorator who owns an antique shop in nearby Diamond Springs helped John Juntunen and his wife, Felicia, decide where in the guest house to display the many Americana pieces they had collected : farm scythes and shovels on the wall, an old cherry apple. -pedal wagon for toddlers seven feet up another ledge, repurposed interior wood paneling from the roof of a 1920s railroad car house in Placerville.
Why not ride this vintage motorcycle where it really gets everyone’s attentionsuggested the decorator, nine feet up?
In 2019, the Juntunens set up a winch in the attic to hoist the 370-pound vehicle onto the ledge, and an engineer friend helped secure the bike to a wall. When people staying in the unit want to know how they got it up there—it’s always the first thing they ask, John said—he explains how a rope was threaded through a hole in the ceiling, then patched by a light fixture.
Among the onlookers was my Modesto-raised brother-in-law, Jeff Hamilton, and his wife, Karen. They were delighted to learn about the motorbike’s history when they stayed at The Bunkhouse, as it’s called on Airbnb, a few days ago.
“People look at it and say, ‘Wow, that’s special,'” Juntunen said. “I show them the light above and tell them a little bit about Atwood and how it was built in Modesto — a guy who built bikes for other people, and this was his personal bike.”
