Photo: Hemmings Auctions
Let us paint the scene for you; you're cruising down the street in the especially hipster section of Brooklyn, although any trendy place for upwardly mobile tech dufuses and starving artists works just as well. You're pretty content riding on your 1950-something Vespa scooter, assuming there can't be another person for miles with one as nice as you. You've gotta be king hipster by this point, right? Well, you would be, up until the real king hipster pulls up alongside you on this, a 1945 Salsbury Model 85 factory prototype.
So then, a genuine prototype scooter from a company most modern folks have never even heard of, and in what can only be described as numbers matching factory fresh? Now that's some weapons-grade San Francisco hipster bait if there ever was one. Jokes aside, it's a real treat to see a pre-war scooter form factor so commonly associated with Italian and Japanese manufacturers made right here in the USA. It is a treat most bike enthusiasts don't know is available to them. Founded by the eccentric California-based engineer E. Foster Salsbury in 1935, the all-American scooter company beat its much more famous Italian counterparts to market by over a decade.
Famous names like Amelia Earhart were often seen zipping around the State of c riding Salsbury's designs. Earhart herself was notable for using a Salsbury scooter to get back and forth around Lockheed's company airstrip in Burbank and places elsewhere nearby. Notice the red and green contrasting handlebars on this prototype? Well, that's a nod to the kind of flyboys and flygals that used to love these scooters, with the bars looking almost like an aircraft's beacon lights.
So this scooter's Hemmings listing says it was Earhart's influence using a Salsbury scooter as her runabout that led to the styling choices of this prototype. Other little trinkets included a then-futuristic variable speed transmission we'd now identify as something of a precursor to modern CVT units. Its minuscule little engine was also a four-stroke motor as opposed to the more popular two-stroke bikes and scooters prevalent in the day. So the story goes, this prototype was instrumental in the development cycle of the Model 85, which turned out to be the most commercially successful motor vehicle built by the brand before it went under in the early 1950s,
In short, it's pretty hard to put a definitive price tag on a piece of American history so irrevocably tied to perhaps its most famous aviator ever. But that won't stop the seller from trying. The asking price in question, you may ask? That'd be a cool $26,000 before the added taxes and shipping fees. Are you hipster enough to drop almost $30 grand on a scooter? At least someone out there is.
Famous names like Amelia Earhart were often seen zipping around the State of c riding Salsbury's designs. Earhart herself was notable for using a Salsbury scooter to get back and forth around Lockheed's company airstrip in Burbank and places elsewhere nearby. Notice the red and green contrasting handlebars on this prototype? Well, that's a nod to the kind of flyboys and flygals that used to love these scooters, with the bars looking almost like an aircraft's beacon lights.
So this scooter's Hemmings listing says it was Earhart's influence using a Salsbury scooter as her runabout that led to the styling choices of this prototype. Other little trinkets included a then-futuristic variable speed transmission we'd now identify as something of a precursor to modern CVT units. Its minuscule little engine was also a four-stroke motor as opposed to the more popular two-stroke bikes and scooters prevalent in the day. So the story goes, this prototype was instrumental in the development cycle of the Model 85, which turned out to be the most commercially successful motor vehicle built by the brand before it went under in the early 1950s,
In short, it's pretty hard to put a definitive price tag on a piece of American history so irrevocably tied to perhaps its most famous aviator ever. But that won't stop the seller from trying. The asking price in question, you may ask? That'd be a cool $26,000 before the added taxes and shipping fees. Are you hipster enough to drop almost $30 grand on a scooter? At least someone out there is.
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