1940s nostalgia from Modesto surprises Airbnb visitors in El Dorado County

A fragile-from-age build sheet for Fred C. Atwood’s homemade motorcycle, listing various parts used to create it, has survived through the decades. Included is a then-new 1945 Harley-Davidson engine — the heart of the vehicle — suggesting the Modesto mechanic built it that year, or shortly after.

I’m guessing the handcrafted frame came next, perhaps made in the auto body shop Atwood established in 1946 with his brother, Chalmer, at 717 Eighth St. in downtown Modesto. Or maybe they started on the motorcycle frame in the mechanic’s garage they operated earlier with the Keene brothers at 608 10th St.

The Atwood brothers also made the motorcycle’s oil tank and wheel hubs. They welded together two Cushman scooter fenders for the front fender, and two more for the back. The handlebar came from a bicycle; the switch, from a tractor; and the amp meter, from a Model A Ford.

To shift gears, the driver would grasp with his left hand a chrome door knob “off of house door” affixed to a shift lever, says the build sheet. It doesn’t mention whatever Fred’s wife, Mildred, might have said about that.

They lived on Johnson Street, a bit north and east of downtown, according to the build sheet and the archives of The Modesto Bee. Its society pages contained mentions of the Atwoods over the years, from their 1930 engagement to his death in 1967.

But his beloved motorcycle today lives on, so to speak — perched on a ledge nine feet above the floor inside a room at a three-bed, one-bath Airbnb guesthouse rental in Shingle Springs.

It’s a 370-pound piece of jaunty interior decor, a conversation starter evoking days when people at the tail end of World War II would scrounge up whatever they could find for whatever they might need.

People staying at the rental “are always interested in talking about that motorcycle. It just has a life of its own,” John Juntunen, the owner, told me in a phone conversation.

How did a motorcycle cobbled together in the 1940s by a mechanic in Modesto end up in an Airbnb near Coyote Pass, off Highway 50 between Sacramento and Placerville?

Fred Atwood had made and sold another motorcycle to a Sacramento man, according to lore passed down from owner to owner. When that buyer wanted a second one, Atwood offered the motorcycle he had made for himself, perhaps because cancer was pushing him to give up riding two-wheelers, Juntunen was told.

In that same year, according to a notice in The Bee, the Atwood brothers sold their garage equipment to Alfred Mathews himself, whose name 72 years later remains on Modesto’s oldest new-car dealership on north McHenry Avenue.

Atwood’s obituary said he was only 59 when he died in 1967. He had come west from Kansas with his family at age 11, and was the son of Stanislaus County Engineer James Atwood. The family attended First Christian Church, and Fred enjoyed flying homemade radio-controlled model airplanes. Must have been a handy guy.

Juntunen’s paperwork suggests that the motorcycle was handed down within the buyer’s family until Juntunen’s son, Jared — an Osprey pilot with the Marines, and a motorcycle enthusiast — bought it in 2013.

An interior decorator who owns an antique shop in nearby Diamond Springs helped John Juntunen and his wife, Felicia, decide where in the guesthouse to display the many pieces of Americana they had collected — scythe and farm shovels on a wall, an antique, cherry apple-red toddler’s pedal car seven feet up another ledge, interior wood panels repurposed from the ceiling of a 1920s-era railroad carriage house in Placerville.

Why not mount this antique motorcycle where it will really catch everyone’s eye, the decorator suggested, nine feet up?

In 2019, the Juntunens put a winch in the attic to hoist the 370-pound vehicle to the ledge, and an engineer friend helped fasten the motorbike securely to a wall. When people staying in the unit want to know how they got it up there — it’s always the first thing they ask, John said — he explains how a rope ran through a hole in the ceiling later patched by a light fixture.

Among the curious were my Modesto-raised brother-in-law, Jeff Hamilton, and his wife, Karen. They were delighted to learn the motorcycle’s history when they stayed in The Bunkhouse, as it’s called on Airbnb, a few days ago.

“People look at it and go, `Wow, this is special,’” Juntunen said. “I show them the light above, and tell them a little about Atwood and how it was built in Modesto — a guy who built bikes for other people, and this was his personal bike.”