The Sunday Motorcycle
I want to start with what the motorcycle actually was, because nothing that happened afterward makes sense without it.
My father, Edwin Carl Merritt, bought the 1952 Vincent Black Shadow in the fall of that year, new, from a dealer in Charlotte who had ordered it special from the English factory. He was twenty-four years old and had just returned from Korea and he spent three months of saved wages on it because he believed, as young men returning from wars often believe, that the future was going to be worth celebrating, and this was the form his celebration took.
He rode it for nineteen years.
He gave it to me on my twenty-first birthday with a set of tools, a box of documents including the original bill of sale and the factory build sheet, and the instruction to take care of her because she would outlive both of us if I did. He was not wrong about the outliving. He died in 1987 at sixty-three, and the motorcycle was in my workshop in Hendersonville, North Carolina, still running, still polished, still carrying the specific weight of his hands on the grips.
A Vincent Black Shadow in documented, running, original condition is not a motorcycle. It is an artifact. There are perhaps fifty in that condition remaining in the world. The factory records I kept in a fireproof box in my workshop, alongside the original dealer receipt, the export documentation, the correspondence my father had maintained with the factory, and forty years of my own maintenance records in my handwriting.
The last serious appraisal I had done, eighteen months before the Sunday in question, had valued it at four hundred and thirty thousand dollars.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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