Bruce’s ‘42 WLA
Bruce Linnell and Julie (cant remember her surname then, later I think they got married?) and Bruce’s WLA, sometime around ‘78.
He had just ridden the bike up from somewhere in New Plymouth, where he had bought it for NZ$500 as I recall.
It was at a bike shop and they were apparently hugely disinterested in it, it had been sitting out the back for years, not going. As I recall Bruce spent a day or two fettling it and got it running.
He rode it up to our place and Julie rode the Ducati GTS860 in the background.
Bruce let me ride the Ducati, and I was blown away. A fantastic bike in its day, so much more sophisticated than the Nortons and Triumphs we were used to. I later bought one in ‘79 when we went to Adelaide in Australia to live for a while.
The WLA was an ex US Army bike left over from the war effort. There were never as many of these in NZ, as there were 741B Indians, which were incredibly popular after the war, when the Americans decided they couldn’t be bothered to take them all back to the States. There was many a back country farm broken in, from off the back of an Army Indian.
