Who is Effie you ask?

Effie Hotchkiss was one of the first Ladies of Harley. Her personal journal, Wheels in My Head, includes this comment (grammar errors left intact):

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There used to be a quote, here, that I linked to online from a biker gal website. I erased that quote (and put this in its place), and here is the reason why.

I posted this blog in 2005, as the date shows. An old post. I am writing this portion of the post (in italics) in March 2010. In late 2009 or early 2010, some deranged, spastic, hysterical, ranting, psychotic (am I repeating myself?) pussified bully named Craig Dove, with the writing skills of a severely retarded child, wrote me a series of berserk emails. His first email to me said, “How dare you publish copyrighted material with getting permission from the publisher.” The email was followed with “?!?!?!?!” And that’s all. Real intelligent.

I received a second email a couple of weeks later, just a bit more decipherable, with a threat to remove the quote/link. No mention of who he was. Apparently, Mr. Dove is such a technical asswipe, he doesn’t understand the Internet, links, quotes, etc. Who was this psychotic Dove character constantly lighting up my email box (he was being filtered into the spam folder, but he apparently didn’t get that)? Didn’t know.

On about the 3rd obsessive email from this manic crackpot, he said to me, after a whole email of unbelievably insane behavior, “I am the great grandson of Effie Hotchkiss and the trustee of her estate……….whatever, whatever. “I am suing you….How dare you….” He is a Copyright Nazi. Ignore him. That simple.

He wrote again.

And again.

I googled him.

You would have thought I committed the crime of the century by quoting from an article about Effie Hotchkiss – a person that NO ONE has ever heard of.

Of course, I got all of the emails days and weeks after he sent them, only when I went through my “crackpot folder.” The guy is so absolutely crazy, it’s funny. I looked at all the emails that had piled up from him, and I had threat after threat after threat of lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit. Screaming, hysterical, angry, whackjob emails.

Craig Dove – you are a dickless little namby-pamby. You act like a woman in estrogen therapy – and that’s how you come off in email. I can’t imagine what kind of a gutless, creepy asshole you are in flesh. Fuck off you whining, feeble, bored, little pantywaist.

And that’s it folks. What a sick, sick experience. Of all the crazed-mental emails I’ve gotten in eleven years, including threats and stalking, this guy is at the top of the “surreal” list. I’ll probably blog his emails just for fun. What he sent to me is public material.

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At 20-something years old, Effie bought a Harley, and rode from New York to San Francisco, accompanied by her mother (Avis) in a sidecar, because, yes, Mom wouldn’t let her go alone. The year was 1915. Roads were barely in existence, and the assorted problems encountered during Effie’s trip included a lack of road signage; mud up to her gas tank; barely passable roads; cowboys; Indians; and rattlesnakes. And of course, she was a woman, in 1915, on a motorcycle, with her slightly portly mother weighing down the sidecar just a bit.

Effie and her mother slept wherever they could along the way, and occasionally Effie’s mother would earn room and board by teaching her craft of “tatting” (crocheting) to housewives in exchange for a room for the night. Effie proved her worth as a mechanic many times along the way. After all, how efficient and reliable could a Harley have been in 1915? We Harley owners joke that, even now, we pay 2005 prices for 1955 technology.

Effie and Avis were the first women to cross the continent on a motorcycle. By modern standards, they would be two very independent and adventurous women. By 1915 standards, they were remarkable heroines.

Interesting factoid: Effie, being the independent woman she was, also packed her six-shooter. Smart woman. Effie was a libertarian.