Our story here is about a special 1966 Honda 305 Scrambler, a motorcycle owned for a cool half century by my friend Jerry Dowgin, but the story needs background to provide context.
To riders of a certain age, the words “Honda” and “305” hold special meaning. Anyone with even a passing interest in vintage motorcycles knows the Honda story and how it changed the world. Triumph’s Edward Turner saw it coming when he visited the Honda factory in Japan in the 1960s and urged Triumph to prepare. Turner’s words fell on deaf ears while Triumph, the rest of the British motorcycle industry, and Harley-Davidson soldiered on, oblivious to the emerging giant that was the Japanese motorcycle industry. Small bikes, a well-marketed succession of moves up to larger bikes, the Honda CB750, Japanese motorcycle dominance: It was a brilliant marketing strategy complemented by design and manufacturing excellence, and it resulted in one of the most successful companies the world has ever known.
The strategic triad of Honda 305s
Much of Honda’s success was due to the technical excellence and success of the Honda 305s. There were three: The Honda Dream, the Honda Super Hawk, and the Honda Scrambler. At the time, they were the biggest motorcycles Honda made.
The CA77 Honda Dream was not an offroad-styled motorcycle (that was the CL77 Scrambler’s domain) or a performance motorcycle (that call was answered by the CB77 Super Hawk). The Scrambler and the Super Hawk appealed to more serious motorcycle enthusiasts; the Dream was a much less intimidating ticket into the motorcycle world. The typical Dream buyer was either someone stepping up from a smaller Honda or someone who had not previously owned a motorcycle. Honda first used the name “Dream” on its 1949 Model D (a single-cylinder, 98cc 2-stroke) and no one knows where the Dream moniker came from (legend has it that someone at Honda upon first seeing the Model D, proclaimed it to “look like a dream”). Some say Honda based its forward leaning parallel 250/305cc engine design on an earlier NSU engine, but Honda unquestionably carried the engineering across the finish line (when was the last time you saw an NSU?). The Dream’s 305cc 360-degree engine had a single 23mm Keihin carb and it produced 23 horsepower at 7,500rpm. According to magazines of the era, the Dream was good for between 80 and 100mph (the disparity in reported top end was presumably due to motojournalist weight and perhaps prevailing headwinds). The Dream averaged 50 miles per gallon, although in those blissful days of $0.28/gallon gasoline nobody really cared. Honda built the Dream until 1969. The Dream retailed for $595 back in those days, but a shrewd negotiator could do a little better.
The second motorcycle in Honda’s 305cc strategic triad was the Super Hawk. Honda initially offered the 250cc Hawk in 1961, but it quickly evolved into the 305cc Super Hawk. The Super Hawk used a 180-degree firing order parallel twin (Honda’s Type I engine) and it was good for 28 horsepower at 9,200rpm (an unheard of engine speed back in the early 1960s). Like the Dream, the Super Hawk had an electric starter and a kickstarter that oddly rotated forward. The instrumentation was cool, too: Instead of the more conventional (i.e., British) separate cans for tach and speedo, both were contained in a single panel atop the headlight. The Super Hawk had a tubular steel frame and front forks, but no front frame downtube (the engine was a stressed frame member; the starter occupied the space where a front downtube would be). A Cycle World road test pegged the top speed at 104.6mph and the Super Hawk ran a respectable 16.8-second quarter mile with an 83mph trap speed. Super Hawks had twin-leading-shoe front brakes (something special in those pre-disk-brake days). The motorcycle weighed 335 pounds. The Super Hawk was available in the same blue, black, white, or red color choices as the Honda Dream, but unlike the Dream, all the Super Hawks had silver frames, silver side covers, and silver fenders. I remember that most Super Hawks were black.
The Super Hawk had good media presence, long before product placement became the mega-industry it is today. There were pop songs about little Hondas, Elvis rode a red Super Hawk in the 1964 movie Roustabout, and a fellow named Robert Pirsig rode across America on a Super Hawk and wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig’s Zen was a best seller, it became something of a bible in the motorcycle travelogue genre, and it was considered high literature even outside motorcycle circles. Pirsig’s Super Hawk currently resides in the Smithsonian Institution.
The Honda 305 Scrambler
The Honda CL 77 Scrambler rounded out Honda’s 305cc motorcycle lineup. Honda’s Scrambler model started life as the 250cc CL 72, and then in 1965, Honda upped the displacement to 305cc. The Scrambler was a kickstart-only proposition (the frame downtube needed the real estate in front of the crankcase occupied by the Super Hawk and Dream electric starters). The Scrambler had twin carbs and redlined at 9,000rpm, where it produced 27.4 horsepower. It had slightly less compression than the Super Hawk but made more torque with its different cam profiles. Like the Dream and the Super Hawk, the Scrambler had a single overhead cam, two valves per cylinder, a 4-speed transmission and a wet clutch. The Scrambler had the Super Hawk’s Type I 180-degree firing order.
With a curb weight of 337 pounds and a 52.4-inch wheelbase, the Scrambler was only slightly smaller and approximately 25 pounds lighter than a 650 Triumph. In a nod to its off road character, the Scrambler was geared a bit lower than either the Dream or the Super Hawk. The Scrambler’s suspension only had 4 inches of travel (laughable for an offroad motorcycle today), but it was more than either the Super Hawk or the Dream and motorcycle design was evolving rapidly in those days.
Honda, with its marketing genius, capitalized on a 1962 Dave Ekins and Bill Robertson 250cc Honda Scrambler run from Tijuana to La Paz (well before paved roads ran that far south in Baja), a ride that ultimately morphed into the Baja 1000. The Ekins/Robertson Scrambler Baja ride cemented Honda’s reputation as a manufacturer of high performance, reliable, and serious motorcycles. In 1966, a new Scrambler retailed for just north of $700, slightly below the price of a new Super Hawk, slightly more than the more sedate Dream, and about half what a new Triumph 650 cost. Honda sold approximately 90,000 Scramblers in America.
Many felt and still feel the Scrambler was the coolest of the Honda 305s, probably because the Scrambler looked more like a Triumph than a Honda. The Scrambler had a teardrop-shaped fuel tank (with rubber knee pads!), 19-inch wheels, universal tread tires, rubber fork gaiters, a single downtube frame, and high, wide handlebars. The Scrambler’s appearance was further defined by a jaunty upswept twin exhaust pipe arrangement that ran along the bike’s left side. Both exhaust pipes merged into a single asymmetric delta-shaped muffler, which most Scrambler owners promptly ditched. Most owners replaced their Scramblers’ mufflers with aftermarket “Snuff-R-Nots” that went into the ends of both exhaust pipes (you could flip them 90 degrees to run either open pipes or a slightly less open exhaust flow). When the Scrambler’s exhaust pipes were “snuffed,” the Scrambler had a raspier, sharper, and even more offensive exhaust note. Ah, the 1960s!
All three Honda 305s used a wet sump oil system, and on all three bikes, the engine and transmission shared oil. The Honda engines used horizontally split cases, a design approach that (along with vastly superior manufacturing processes and component dimensional controls) essentially eliminated oil leaks. All three Honda 250/305cc motorcycles represented radical change. Overhead cams, high rpm, electric starters (for two of the three models), 12-volt electrical systems, relatively low cost, and other features put the Japanese machines well ahead of their British and American competition. Honda’s marketing was legendary and appealed to a much wider market than any competitors. Honda’s “You meet the nicest people on a motorcycle” marketing slogan, vastly superior quality, good performance, and affordable pricing clicked with the public. Honda introduced a lot of people to motorcycling.
Meet the Dowgins
During the 1960s (in the middle of the above Honda engineering and marketing revolution), Jerry Dowgin was a football star at South Brunswick High School in New Jersey. Jerry was four years ahead of me (he was Class of ’64) and I didn’t know him at the time, but like many people in central Jersey, I knew the Dowgin name. Jerry’s father, Captain Ralph Dowgin, was a New Jersey State Trooper who rose to command Troop D, the unit that patrolled the New Jersey Turnpike (one of the most heavily traveled roads in America). My father knew Captain Dowgin and spoke of him in near-reverential terms. Captain Dowgin was a “local boy makes good” story and our paths were destined to indirectly intersect. A couple of decades after leaving New Jersey, I wrote The Complete Book of Police and Military Motorcycles. Thanks to lifelong friend and former classmate Mike Beltranena (retired Director of the New Brunswick Police Department and South Brunswick High alum), a vintage photograph of Trooper Dowgin on his 1934 Harley-Davidson police motorcycle graces the cover of that book. I knew the Dowgin name, but I only learned of Jerry and his Scrambler from a recent Facebook post. I contacted Jerry, he invited me to New Jersey for a ride in the Pine Barrens on the Scrambler, and once the pandemic wound down and people started traveling again, it was game on.
A 1966 Honda 305 Scrambler found in a barn
Back in 1972 Jerry and his older brother Ed were helping brother-in-law Bob install a new heating system in Bob’s farm house. During a mid-morning coffee break on a freezing New Jersey morning (the boys put a little whiskey in their coffee to ward off the cold), Jerry noticed an abandoned 1966 Honda Scrambler parked below a window just outside Bob’s farm house. (Had the Scrambler actually been in the barn it would have been a true barn find, but Jerry found the bike on Bob’s farm and that was close enough to allow some literary license.)
Jerry bought it on the spot from Bob for the princely sum of $10. The Scrambler had been neglected for several years; Jerry’s brother-in-law had removed the spark plugs years earlier and it rains a lot in the Garden State, so the engine was frozen. The deal Jerry made with brother Ed was that Jerry would do the work if Ed would pay for the parts, and the parts bill came to $125 from Cooper’s Cycle Ranch (one of the early and best-known East Coast Honda and Triumph dealers). Thus began a journey that has spanned a half century.
Armed only with the tools in the Scrambler’s tool kit, a Glenn’s Repair Manual, and a fierce determination to get the bike running again, Jerry tore into the task. Getting the Scrambler sorted took some doing, as the engine would not turn over, the top end needed an overhaul, there were compression issues, and getting the timing, valves, carbs and other adjustable things right was a challenge. There was no Internet back in the early 1970s and in this initial resurrection period, information was difficult to come by. One of the first things Jerry did was pull the cylinder head and bring it to Cooper’s Cycle Ranch for a rebuild (that cost another $125). Studs broke; Jerry replaced them. Timing drifted; Jerry became an expert on setting the points and adjusting the timing, all through trial and error and advice from other Honda enthusiasts. Jerry succeeded. The Honda was back on the road.
Jerry retired from a finance position in the New Jersey state government in 2001, and he and his wife Karin started putting more time and miles on the Scrambler. The Dowgin family had moved to the New Jersey Pine Barrens, prime motorcycle country. When I recently visited Jerry, we rode the Pine Barrens and it was great. We stopped at a couple of roadside motorcycle spots (including one with a statue of the legendary Jersey Devil, New Jersey’s own Chupacabra), chatted with other motorcyclists, and had a great time. I rode Jerry’s Scrambler and everywhere we stopped, the vintage Honda was a conversation starter.
I greatly enjoyed my visit and conversations with Jerry. I asked Jerry if he inherited his interest in motorcycles from his motor officer father and the answer was a firm no. “Pop wasn’t interested in motorcycles,” Jerry told me. “He saw too many young Troopers get killed on motorcycles when he was a State Trooper.” The New Jersey State Police website shows New Jersey State Police motor officer fatalities in those early days was indeed high. Things were different then; there was little protective gear and New Jersey State Troopers rode all year. I remember when I was a kid that snow meant little to our State Troopers; they simply put chains on their tires and continued to patrol.
Jerry’s Scrambler needed another rebuild in 2018 when the compression and top speed dropped significantly. Jerry had the cylinders rebored and he installed oversize pistons. Over the years, other repair requirements emerged, as might be expected on a motorcycle with five decades under its wheels. Jerry keeps the Scrambler running, relying on internet forum advice, his old Glenn Repair Manual, a Harbor freight compression tester, a more extensive collection of specialized tools, and his decades-long relationship with the Honda.
Jerry’s never intended a concours restoration; his objective was a resurrection. Other than a repainted fuel tank, the Honda’s finish and most of its parts are original. Fifty years ago Jerry simply wanted to get the old Scrambler road and trail worthy so he could explore the Pine Barrens, neighboring Pennsylvania, and other parts of the mid-Atlantic states. As the photos here show, Jerry hit a home run, and his Scrambler has been a New Jersey Pine Barrens staple for 50 years. Jerry rides every chance he gets and he told me he plans to leave his Honda Scrambler to his son and grandson. That is a magnificent plan. MC
Originally published as “Jerry and the Jersey Devil” in the September/October 2023 issue of Motorcycle Classics magazine.
