My Love Affair With The Sears/Gilera 106SS

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When I was a kid growing up in downtown Kirkwood, Missouri, I worked at the local bike shop, Kirkwood Cycle Shop. We sold new and used bicycles and also sold the Rockford Motors Chibi, Tora, and Taka- small displacement Bridgestone motorcycles.

I started going there when I was about 7, and got my first paying job there at age 12 or 13 in 1970 or ‘71, after my dad suggested I go down there and volunteer to work for a month for free. If they liked me, they could pay me $1 an hour. My dad was a real smart guy, but didn’t always give me the best advice. It’s one of the few times I listened to him that things did work out, however. The owner’s wife who ran the place told me she’d pay me $1 an hr to start, and then I got raised to $1.25 by month’s end.

I used to ride my bicycle the three blocks south from our house to the bike shop and back every day. And on the way, just a couple of doors down, there was an old Victorian multi-family house with a detached garage at the end of a long driveway that didn’t have any doors on it. I could barely see, leaning up against the wall near the entrance, the small taillight of some kind of motorcycle.

I was taught by my father at a young age not to go walking through other people’s yards but eventually, my curiosity got the best of me and I rode my bicycle down that driveway to see what was in the garage. There, leaning against the wall, was a super crusty/rusty little silver single cylinder machine with just the metal framework of a seat left on it. I had no idea of what it was. It didn’t have any badges or emblems on it that I could see. I just knew it was old and it was a motorcycle.

My latest little Sears/Gilera 106SS, pre-restoration. More on that shortly. Please read on…

I knocked on the door of one of the apartments there and asked who owned the bike. The woman who answered the door told me the building was owned by Enrique Remis, and gave me his phone number. So when I got home I called the guy and he told me he didn’t know anything about the bike. One of his tenants had left it there and it sat outside for several years but he eventually pushed it into the garage. I asked if he would sell it and he answered, “Sure.” When I asked how much he wanted for it, he told me $10. He gave me his address and said I could mail him the money and that I could go get the bike. So I did.

It was covered in rust and the tires were nearly flat. But it rolled, and the engine wasn’t seized. When I got it in my folks’ garage I took a good look at my purchase. Wow- was it rough. The wheels in particular were in terrible shape. It had a single cylinder engine but I had no idea what it was. I called Mr. Remis back. I told him that really it was so rough, would he take $5 for it instead of $10. Again he replied, “Sure.” He obviously didn’t have a title for it. I sent him $5 and he sent me back a bill of sale acknowledging I bought the bike for $5. For years, I kept that BoS and a bunch of other memorabilia under the glass on my basement bar top. I still have it somewhere in my stuff, dated 1971 or ‘72.

After the money issue was settled I took a closer look at what I bought. I found a metal tag on it. “Sears Roebuck Company” with a bunch of numbers. So I called up the local Sears store and ordered a parts book for it. Sears was amazing back then. A few days later, I had a complete manual and parts diagrams for the whole thing. I think it cost me $1.50.

The little Gilera that could.

The bike turned out to be a Sears/Gilera 106SS. They were made in Italy for Sears. Gilera was a famous Italian motorcycle maker. I didn’t know it at the time, as there was no internet or anything. So many things were a mystery back then. Song lyrics, what kind of motorcycle it was, you name it!  The bike wasn’t that old. While it looked 50 years old, it probably was no more than five or six years old at that time. The chrome plating was so bad on those bikes that if they sat outside for a month or two, it was shot. The chrome on the rims was bubbling up when they were brand new. And the seat simply rotted away. It wasn’t made of foam rubber but rather vinyl over cloth over springs. Mine was gone. I found some old clothes line in my folks’ garage and strung that across the frame to make a hammock I could sit on. I aired up the tires and they seemed to hold.

There was no ignition key for the bike nor place to insert a key. It turned out not to need one! And no battery either. The bike had a magneto, however. It was about as simple as they get. The throttle was broken, so I rigged it up temporarily until I could get a new one from Sears. It was a Magura chain-operated throttle and I had never seen anything like it before in my young life. I put some gas in it and kicked it over and to my surprise, the little 106SS fired right up. It even had working lights that brightened and dimmed along with the throttle, and a horn that sounded like a croaking frog. I rode it around the yard. It was a four speed. I couldn’t believe it!

A closer look at the Gilera single thumper.

Try as I may, I don’t remember what eventually happened to that bike other than I eventually sold it to someone. I do remember poring over the owners’ manual/parts book and seeing I could still buy a brand new fuel tank for it, available in candy red, candy blue, or silver, like mine. I fantasized about that but didn’t do it, though. And I didn’t restore the old motorbike.

Years later, I was living in Boston and probably in my late 30s, starting to relive my youth by buying old motorcycles I either owned or wanted to as a kid. I put a “bikes wanted” ad in Walneck’s Cycle Trader for a Sears/Gilera 106. Shortly after it was published I got a call from a guy who was a firefighter in Cleveland, Ohio. He was a friendly fellow by the name of Bill Murar, and he told me he knew where one was that was like new, in my favorite color (candy blue) with only 600 miles on the odometer. It still had the break-in decal on the speedometer. He said I could buy it for $800 and asked if I wanted him to get it for me. I asked him, “What’s in it for you?” He replied that he just liked these old bikes, and was the head of the Sears-Allstate Club and sold parts for them.

My latest Gilera 106SS, after some restorative measures.

I asked him where to send the money and exclaimed, “Go get it for me!” He did and I had it shipped to me for a few hundred bucks. It was just as he described. It looked practically new. It was such a great little motorbike. I loved it. Always ran even after sitting for months at a time. I probably owned it for ten years or more and then sold it in 2004 when I had to sell a bunch of my bikes because of a pending move from Massachusetts to Arkansas.

Fast forward to 2018 and I got the itch for a 106 again.

I was searching eBay and Craigslist when lo and behold, another Gilera 106SS popped up for sale. It too was candy blue and had only two thousand miles on it. It wasn’t quite as pristine as my last one, but really nice. It needed a carb rebuild, new muffler and tank badges to look nearly new. After a lengthy back and forth via email with the extremely distrustful seller in Detroit who was convinced I had to be some kind of scammer, I finally got him to sell it to me for $850.

Isn’t it a beaut?

I contacted an old guy I used to work with to haul it for me and he picked it up. Sure enough, it was exactly as it was represented to be. I cleaned it up and bought an NOS Silentium muffler for it on eBay. Then I got my old friend Bill Murar to send me a carb kit and some tank badges. Of course, as I usually do, after a couple years I decided I should sell the Gilera because I wasn’t riding it enough.

So here I am again, now in 2025, and thinking how great it would be to find another Sears/Gilera 106SS to fool around with!

Happy New Year!

Mark Zweig