First of all, I bought a mini-bike after trashing my dad's best friends Vespa's clutch out in the desert. I figured that I should buy my own rather than wreck my Dad's Friend's stuff. At that time my father hadn't bought his own 2 1/2 acre parcel of land and we didn't start building my Dad's retirement home on weekends until 1968 and we finished it completely by 1980 when my Dad retired. He lived there with my Mom until he passed away in 1985. My Mom sold it in 1986 I believe for a variety of reasons. The biggest reason was she didn't want to be alone way out there in the desert away from relatives and friends.
But, the point I'm trying to make is that at that time the law was at least 20 miles away back in Yucca Valley and so basically you could do anything you wanted with an off road motorcycle or even licensed motorcycle or dualsport or whatever because no one likely was going to bother you even if you were 12 years old because we were so remote away from all cities or even gas stations there. Even our land when Dad bought it in 1968 we were the only people in our 20 acre section of land who lived there because no one else had water rights to having water piped in there but Dad and he had to go to a board meeting to petition for piped in water around 1970 I believe around there. Until then we bought water from a water truck and set up a 1200 gallon water tank above one of my Dad's big tool sheds so we had gravity feed water at first from about 10 feet high down to us and then Dad bought a pressure tank. In 1980 when I bought my own 2 1/2 acres in Mt. Shasta about 600 miles north of where Dad bought his property he welded me a wood stove out of that water pressure tank to heat my A-Frame that he and I built starting in 1980. This wood stove was a great one and kept me and my wife and kids warm to hot during winters in 7 feet of snow outside at one time where my 2 1/2 acres of land was then. When he had piped in water he didn't need his water pressure tank any more so he welded the pressure tank into a great wood burning stove for me and my family.
But, riding a 2 wheeled gasoline powered something was for me the main draw to going out to the desert on weekends with my parents from the time I was 12 until my 30s with my family. From 1960 to 1980 I lived a lot of different places but mainly in Glendale and the Greater San Diego area closer to Escondido. I bought at around age 12 a Wren by Bird. It had a 2 1/2 horsepower Tecumseh gasoline engine on it with a centrifugal clutch that could do 30 mph. It had only one gear so you might have to push with your legs and feet until you got to 10 miles per hour. But, mostly the centrifugal clutch worked great. It had a regular motorcycle hand throttle and the brake was just a piece of metal that went up against the rear tire.
One time at Glendale High School in Glendale, California the throttle stuck wide open and I hit a chain link fence to a tennis court going about 30 mph. At the last moment I pushed up with my feet so I hit the fence with my chest on my seat so I didn't ruin my face or die. A friend was watching me and was really scared I would be seriously injured but mostly it just knocked the wind out of me and crinked my neck a little bit.
The point I'm making here is that if you going to be riding a motorized 2 wheel vehicle at 12 or 13 you need to be somewhere the police aren't going to stop you or else you could die like this kid did when he freaked out and hit a curb and split his head on a stop sign and died.
Mine was metallic blue in color.
a Wren Mini-bike by Bird looks like these ones:
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