A motorcycle helped bring Jimmy and Grace Pulis together in the fall of 1958. More than 53 years later, a motorcycle still serves as a source of togetherness for the Haines City, Florida couple.
In the beginning, it was Jimmy who drove the motorcycle and Grace who rode on back. These days, Grace is the one gripping the handlebars and Jimmy, who has health problems and walks with a cane, is the passenger. In biker lingo, Grace is “packing her old man” when Jimmy shares the saddle of her 2007 Kawasaki Vulcan 900.
“That’s what happens when you teach us to drive,” said Grace Pulis, 68. “We take over.”
It was a novelty for a woman to drive a motorcycle in the 1970s, when Grace started riding. These days female riders are much more common, but she said others often seem startled by the sight of a gray-haired woman, who happens to be a great-grandmother, driving with a man behind her.
“I’ve gotten everything from, ‘Don’t you know where you belong?’ — meaning I should be on the back, not on the front — to ‘Wow, that’s marvelous that he lets you do that,’ to ‘I don’t know if I’d want a man who’d let me drive,'” Grace said.
It began this way: Grace was a 15-year-old high student waiting for the school bus near her home in northern New Jersey when she noticed a man passing the spot each morning on his way to work.
One day he sped past on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Another day he was at the wheel of a Jaguar, and then she saw him driving a new Chevrolet Bel Air.
“My girlfriend dared me to wave at him,” Grace recalled.
“And four months later we were married,” said Jimmy, 75.
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