The Gearhead General

Bob Burns flew eighty-one kinds of aircraft, but on the ground he had the same affliction his whole life: every few years he would, in his own word, “lust” for some fast little machine and buy it. A Vespa in Greece, a Harley in Guatemala, two temperamental British sports cars, and — at retirement — a motorcycle he rode around the entire country. The general off duty was a gearhead.

The TR2 That Glued Itself Shut

The Triumph TR2 he had bought in England and shipped home from Greece nearly didn’t survive its first American winter. Driving it west to a new assignment at Tacoma, he stopped for gas in Prescott, Arizona, on a night forecast for the twenties, and prudently asked the attendant to check the anti-freeze — which, it turned out, the car didn’t have. The attendant topped it up. It wasn’t enough.

The next morning the engine wouldn’t turn over; they coasted it down a hill to start it. Days later, stopped at a traffic light at the gate of Fort Lewis, it died for good. A wrecker hauled it to the Tacoma Ford dealer, who tore the engine down and found the culprit.

“The cylinder head gasket had been crimped and allowed all the coolant in the system to leak into the combustion chambers and the missing anti-freeze had burned and effectively glued the pistons to the cylinder walls. He had to do a total reboring and polishing of all cylinders.”

A factory assembly error had quietly drained the coolant from day one; the engine had been cooking itself across three states. Rebored and reborn, the little Triumph gave him no more trouble.

Lost on the Way to Tyndall

At Colorado Springs he found an Austin Healey he couldn’t resist. When the family set out for Tyndall, they split up: Andy rode with Bob in the Healey, Ruth and the two girls followed in the Olds. They made no plan for where to stop — surely they’d never lose sight of one another.

“This was before cell phone days so inter-car communication was impossible… I had a problem with the Healey not being able to shift into top gear and we totally lost sight of the Olds… I do recall the angst I had during the hours we were separated.”

A commander who could marshal air-defense divisions across continents spent an afternoon helplessly cut off from his own wife and daughters by a stuck gearbox and a country with no cell phones — one of those small, universal terrors that the rank does nothing to spare you.

Around the Country on Two Wheels

The machines didn’t stop when the career did. Prompted, in 2003, by a Ken Burns documentary, Bob remembered the first great motorcycle ride he and his friend Hugh Williams took in retirement — a loop around the whole United States.

“We rode west to san Diego, then north to Canada, getting a load of volcanic ash on our bikes from the Mt. St. Helens eruption shortly before we arrived there. Then east across the Canadian rockies and onto the rolling landscape of the plains… On our ride around the upper side of lake Superior, I encountered the problem with my pup tent and near madness from mosquitos… Then south through the appalachian trail to Florida.”

The Mt. St. Helens ash dates it to about 1980 — which means Bob was roughly sixty-four years old, camping in a pup tent on the shore of Lake Superior, fighting off mosquitoes, partway through circumnavigating the country on a motorcycle. “Oh well,” he wrote, “that was then.”

It runs the length of his life, this thread — the Vespa he bought in Rome and rode through Athens, the Harley that put him down hard in Guatemala, the sports cars, the cross-country rides into his sixties and beyond. A man who spent his working life strapped into the fastest machines the country could build never lost the itch for one more.