California Motor Company

Last week's post on George Wyman inspired me to look into the California Motor Company a bit more, and I found this interesting albeit brief history.

Undoubtedly the biggest event of the year for the company was George Wyman's success in crossing the continent on his California motorcycle. The publicity generated by this event was huge: not only did it consume pages of the specialist press (for example The Motorcycle Magazine and The Bicycling World and Motocycle Review both carried extensive reports over several issues), but the event captured good coverage in newspapers of the day. California advertising made much of the epic achievement, but perhaps more importantly much of the post-ride editorial comment read like California advertising copy. In these pioneering days of motorcycling, the California was was in the spotlight.