Our new place sits across from an elementary school on a slightly busy road off the main drag in Mountain View. There’s orchestrated chaos twice a day when kids are dropped off and picked up in front of our house. One daily highlight is seeing middle school-aged storks and geese roll by: young teen girls storking on their bicycles, pulling on the bars and standing while pedaling instead of shifting out of the big ring (storking), with a gaggle of young teen boys rolling by a few minutes later, their prepubescent voices breaking in unison (like geese) excitedly about stuff in general.

Then there’s the cool kid.

Autumn is quickly shifting into winter in several states this week, as a foot of snow is falling in South Lake Tahoe and the white stuff is blanketing parts of New Hampshire. Although I’m 11-plus years removed from living in the Midwest, I carry fond memories of zooming around Pelican Lake in north central Wisconsin on my parents’ snowmobiles, striking fear into my wife as my brother Joel and I raced across the snowy ice at a squillion miles an hour.

Recently, I wrote about British industrialist Dennis Poore saving Norton, Triumph, BSA and other motorcycle manufacturers from ruin between 1966 and 1973. Nearly 40 years prior in the United States, Excelsior-Henderson was third place in the US motorcycle market behind Indian and Harley-Davidson.

When the Great Depression wreaked havoc in late October 1929, worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) fell an estimated 15 percent by 1932 (by comparison, worldwide GDP fell by less than 1 percent from 2008 to 2009 during the Great Recession). In many countries, the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until the beginning of World War II in 1939. Bicycle czar Ignaz Schwinn—who purchased Excelsior in 1912 and Henderson in 1917—ceased motorcycle operations in September 1931.

How did Indian survive? We have the great-grandson of industrialist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours, patriarch of the mighty du Pont family, to thank.