To solve the dispute, they turned to none other than “Grizzly Adams” star Dan Haggerty. Now, the chopper is locked at the center of a quarrel between two men both claiming rightful ownership. Then along came a Texan named Gordon Granger, who claimed that he was, in fact, in possession of the original Captain America. The bike hit the auction block and sold for a princely $1,350,000. It’s owner was a collector and realtor named Michael Eisenberg.
The problems started last fall, when the Profiles in History auction house, which specializes in Hollywood artifacts, put Captain America up for sale.
#Harley easy rider movie
Now, forty years later, Captain America is a movie prop worth millions of dollars that rests at the center of a messy legal battle over the bike’s authenticity. People who watched the film-in which Wyatt and Dennis Hopper’s Billy cross the country, wheel-on-wheel, on a tragic quest-imagined discarding their own possessions and reshaping their idea of the American Dream. As time passed, Captain America became the centerpiece of this anti-establishment, middle-finger-of-a-movie. It is Captain America, the chopper driven by Peter Fonda’s Wyatt in Easy Rider and a chromed-out icon of ’60s counterculture the open road. More importantly, it has legend status, representing “a longing for a simpler life, one of adventure and the open road,” as Dan Kruse says.It has ape-hanger handle bars, upswept mufflers and an ironic stars-and-stripes-emblazoned gas tank.
#Harley easy rider manual
It has a Panhead engine (VTwin 74ci with 52 hp), paired to a manual 4-speed transmission, no odometer, and is not operational. Real or not, partly authentic or not at all, Captain America will be crossing the auction block on June 5, 2021, in Texas. Shortly after, Haggerty signed a letter that authenticated Granger’s bike, only to recant later and call it an honest mistake. Later, he admitted that Granger’s bike had only some parts from the original ( “a few bits and pieces, a chain or a fender, nothing more”), saying he’d kept the frame for himself. But, as noted above, Haggerty was never a reliable source: in 2008, he said he’d sold the original to the Guggenheim Museum. The bike comes with three letters of authenticity: from Graham, Haggerty, and Kruse. The bike has been in Texas since, and it’s now offered at auction, with an estimate between $300,000 and $500,000. He never did, so Graham sold the bike off to Gordon Granger, through the Daniel Kruse Classic Car Productions, in 1996, for $63,000. Graham funded the venture under the agreement that Haggerty would repay him the loan later on. It’s the piece Haggerty and collector Gary Graham rebuilt from salvaged parts from the original, laying around in Haggerty’s garage. One ended up at auction in 2014 and sold for a reported $1.35 million (before auction fees), even though its authenticity was challenged just days before. Years later, he would sell two different Captain Americas, both of them claiming to be original. What is known for a fact is that the Captain America used in the crash scene at the end of the film was not taken to the junkyard but handed over to the supposed original builder (and the most unreliable narrator in the entire story), Dan Haggerty. Their build history is equally muddled, with most of the people involved in the process telling different stories at different times-and no longer around to set the record straight. No one knows for a fact what happened with the original Captain America bikes built for the film (either two or four of them), but the most widespread story is that they were stolen at gunpoint right after production was completed. Adding to its value is the association with the counter-culture and anti-establishment movement, made possible through its appearance in the 1969 film Easy Rider, with Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson. Captain America, Easy Rider Captain America, or the Easy Rider chopper, is the world’s most expensive Harley-Davidson chopper and one of the most expensive bikes ever created and sold at auction.
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