All Over the Map

The story of Sarah Lyon, the force behind the Female Mechanics Calendar,
begins (and ends) in Louisville

The Louisville Courier-Journal

Monday, February 4, 2008

by Katya Cengel

Sarah Lyon curls her hands around the handlebars of an imaginary motorcycle.

She is sitting in her unheated and frigid Louisville studio/office -- what can you expect for $150-a-month rent? -- but in her mind, she is on the road, listening to the Swedish electronic duo The Knife, astride her motorcycle near Los Angeles.

"Riding in the dark and the fog, curvy roads, cliff on one side, ocean on the other," she said, leaning to the right and then the left.

The Knife's haunting vocals are pumped through an iPod, which she purchased after she lost her cell phone in San Francisco.

A new cell phone would have been "like $200 or $300, and the iPod was $80."

No further explanation is offered.

She admits she didn't need the iPod, and that the iPod has little to do with her tale.

But then that's the story of Lyon, a 29-year-old adventurer whose escapades lead in many directions, the latest a 12,000-mile motorcycle trip across the country last summer that resulted in the 2008 Female Mechanics Calendar.

But that was the end -- or the middle, depending on how you look at it.

The beginning is in Louisville.

Lyon "has always, always, been very independent," said her mother, Nancy Lyon, a 62-year-old retired librarian.

As a 6-year-old, Sarah was the only Brownie Girl Scout who didn't cry during a four-day trip away from home, said Nancy. When she was 24, Sarah took her first solo cross-country motorcycle trip. Her mother remembers the 80 days she waited for her only child to return as "very nerve-wracking" for her and her husband, Jim, Sarah's father.

On future trips Nancy persuaded her daughter to carry a cell phone and to ring them whenever she reached a new destination, which is why Sarah had a cell phone in San Francisco, which she lost.

It doesn't explain the iPod.

Nothing does.

But that's getting ahead of things.

It was on that first trip, on the back of a 1978 Yamaha XS750, that Sarah Lyon first became captivated by female mechanics. Because her bike was old, she spent quite a bit of time that trip in bike shops, but saw only one female mechanic from Chicago to Minneapolis to Seattle.

Actually, the inspiration for the calendar had come even earlier, when she was working as a part-time motorcycle mechanic in Cincinnati and Louisville and found herself face to face with pinup calendars on a daily basis.

Her 2007 Female Mechanics Calendar, made following her second motorcycle trip in the summer of 2006, is a 14-month alternative to those busty blondes holding a wrench.

The women she photographed for her calendar can actually use the tools they hold. She "got rid of" about 800 of the 2007 calendars, 650 or so of them in exchange for money. Despite positive feedback -- the calendar even has a fan in Kenya -- she wasn't planning to repeat the effort the following summer.

Then she moved out of her apartment and put her things in storage. She also bought another bike, a 1977 BMW R100S named Lucy, short for Lucinda Williams, whose songs Sarah sang on country roads. The Yamaha that made the first two journeys had an unfortunate incident with fire and has since been christened "Smokey."

On Lucy, she made her way to Nevada and spent a week camping with one of the previous year's calendar girls, Jennifer Bromme of San Francisco. A 6-foot-1-inch blonde from Germany, Bromme said her mother always wanted her to be a model.

"To me, it's kind of funny, because now I can say I'm a calendar girl," she joked during a phone interview.

But not the kind that hung on walls when she was doing her motorcycle mechanic apprenticeship in Munich in the early 1990s.

As Ms. July 2007, she has her blue coveralls zipped to the top, and the dark roots of her hair are showing. Rags and clutter are in no short supply.

It was almost July when Lyon decided to move on in search of a Ms. July, Ms. August, Ms. September.

But first there was May.

At one point Lyon, who now works mostly as an artist specializing in photography, was a roadie for a band that included a mechanically gifted female guitarist who lives in Portland, Ore. On her most recent trip, Lyon made her way to Oregon and met with the guitarist, who told her about two local bicycle mechanics.

In her Louisville studio, Lyon flips to May in the 2008 calendar and tries to explain the bafflement of Bob.

You see, there are two Ms. Mays -- Bob Kendrick and Jackie Davis. In addition to repairing bikes, Kendrick and Davis teach classes on the subject, one exclusively for women and transgendered adults.

"But Bob lives as a woman," said Lyon. "And I'm not sure why Bob's name is 'Bob.' And I think this might confuse some people."

It doesn't bother her much.

While the $15 Lyon gets for each calendar did not cover her traveling expenses, it did pay for the calendars' production.

Motorcycle enthusiasts accounted for a large segment of her fan base the first time round; schools and educational programs are showing interest in the 2008 calendar. Kathy Bate, a career-development specialist with an educational service agency in Midland, Mich., bought 10 calendars to be hung in Midland County's 10 public high schools.

"I've never seen one like it before," Bate said of the calendar during a recent phone interview.

And it fits right in with the state's goal of encouraging students toward "nontraditional careers," which female mechanics fall under, she said. A poster of male nurses has already resulted in boys shadowing nurses. She hopes the female mechanics calendar will have a similar result. All she needs now, she said, is to find the female mechanics for the girls to shadow.

There seem to be plenty in the San Francisco Bay area.

Adina, Ms. July 2008, is from Oakland, Calif. Sporting a crew cut and multiple tattoos and piercings, Adina is "just the scariest picture ever," said Lyon as she flips to July. "But that's what she's like; she's really intense."

Gina Follansbee, another blond Northern California grease monkey, said she has had male customers walk out on her because she is not a man. She kept her cool and played tough, but she isn't tough enough to ride a motorcycle cross-country by herself as Lyon did.

"She's a very gutsy girl," said Follansbee, of Santa Rosa, Calif., Ms. February 2009. "I give her a lot of credit for that."

At 37, Follansbee is starting her own adventure. A few weeks ago, she received a call from a casting agent looking for a female mechanic to co-host a TV show. She sent him a video and is waiting to hear back.

Meanwhile, she works in the family mechanic shop, where the Female Mechanic calendar hangs at the counter as a reminder that women can do the job just as well as men.

Now if she could just get her tool suppliers to listen.

"They always come around Christmas and stuff, and they give you these coffee mugs, and they have Playboy-looking girls on it, and I'm like, 'Hey, you know what? I really don't want to look at them.' "

Reporter Katya Cengel can be reached at (502) 582-4224.