The story of American Honda’s rise to prominence starts in Boise, Idaho, of all places, at a small Honda dealership that belonged to a fellow named Herb Uhl. It also involves Jack McCormack and the company’s most popular product at that time, the Honda 50. One night in 1960, while looking over the most recent sales records, McCormack spotted what he thought was an anomaly. At that time, Honda had six dealerships set up in Los Angeles, all of which were fairly successful operations. But according to the records on his desk, this one dealer in Podunk Boise was selling more 50s than all six of the L.A. dealers combined. The next morning McCormack called Uhl to investigate.
“I called Herb and said, ‘Herb, what are you doing with the Honda 50 up there that you’re selling so damn many?’ He told me how he was selling them as a trail bike, putting a cheater sprocket on the back and some knobby tires.”
McCormack asked Uhl to send one of his trail conversions down to California. Uhl did, and McCormack was impressed. “It was a brilliant little machine,” McCormack says about Uhl’s creation, “It worked so well because it was light, and with the automatic clutch you could climb logs. To do that on a big bike, you had to have a certain amount of skill.
On a 50, you didn’t get there real fast, but you had fun and you didn’t need to know much. I saw lots of possibility for something like Herb was doing, selling it as a bike that you could go in the woods and hunt or fish with. Sort of the earliest ATV.”
McCormack crated the bike back up and sent it to Japan, with a request that the company create a production version of Uhl’s creation. Honda responded to McCormack’s idea immediately. “It took no effort at all to get the trail bike,” he remembers. By March 1961 the CA100T Trail 50 was available to dealers. The new machine was an instant success. Cycle World’s praise was universal: “To you staunch, hairy-chested, full-size bike riders (and this includes us), to you trailing addicts (this also includes us), and to you new riders who have yet to experience the joys of trailing (and this includes our wives who rode the Trail 50 until they had to be pried off of it), we heartily recommend you go Trail Fiftying!” American buyers responded enthusiastically, and the trail 50, an idea hatched by a small dealer in relatively remote Idaho, was an unqualified success.
Source: Honda Motorcycles
See also: The First ATVs Had Two Wheels