barracuda
I live for the CABE
It seems the Merkle's color was yellow before they landed on orange...or maybe this reporter was color blinded from snorting too much exhaust fumes at the motorcycle race track?
Here's a 1910 ad, parenthetically referring to the Merkel nickname:
And here's Merkel's most accomplished racer, Maldwyn Jones, photographed in Mansfield, Ohio, in 1913 and still wearing on his jersey what I suspect was the unofficial "mascot" of the Merkel non-team, the bumblebee insignia:
(Notice the similarity of the rear fender to Patric's unusual bike featured on the first page of this thread.)
"Maldwyn Jones was another member of that group of turn-of-the-century boys whose lives revolved around motorcycles. Like Jim Davis who won a pair of rubber goggles and Otto Walker who brought home a turkey, Maldwyn never forgot his first prize: a .22 caliber repeating rifle which he won at an Ohio county fair in 1909. Jones continued to compete in amateur events, and in 1911 (when he was 20 years-old) he went to work for the motorcycle manufacturer Joseph Merkel, whose plant was just a few miles down the road from Maldwyn's hometown of Lebanon, Ohio.
At the time, Merkel did not have a factory team, but after Jones demonstrated an aptitude for winning races, Merkel gave his tacit approval for Maldwyn to work on racing machinery during working hours at the plant. Still, the Merkel company did not have a full-fledged race department or even a team, just Jones and a few others employed by the company, who rode either antiquated Merkel racing equipment (left over from as far back as 1905) or mostly stock examples of the road-going Flying Merkel that the company sold to the public.
Maldwyn was both resourceful and mechanically gifted. In 1913, he adapted an over-head valve head from a Jefferson motorcycle to fit the Merkel cylinder and went racing on the 1/2-mile dirt tracks on which he was most adept. Maldwyn's luck was not great in the longer races, however. In 1913, an erroneous lap count deprived him of a win at the Savanna 300-mile road race, and in 1914, he was again in the lead at Savannah when his locally-hired pit crew allowed him to run out of gas at the far side of the track."
At the time, Merkel did not have a factory team, but after Jones demonstrated an aptitude for winning races, Merkel gave his tacit approval for Maldwyn to work on racing machinery during working hours at the plant. Still, the Merkel company did not have a full-fledged race department or even a team, just Jones and a few others employed by the company, who rode either antiquated Merkel racing equipment (left over from as far back as 1905) or mostly stock examples of the road-going Flying Merkel that the company sold to the public.
Maldwyn was both resourceful and mechanically gifted. In 1913, he adapted an over-head valve head from a Jefferson motorcycle to fit the Merkel cylinder and went racing on the 1/2-mile dirt tracks on which he was most adept. Maldwyn's luck was not great in the longer races, however. In 1913, an erroneous lap count deprived him of a win at the Savanna 300-mile road race, and in 1914, he was again in the lead at Savannah when his locally-hired pit crew allowed him to run out of gas at the far side of the track."
http://www.statnekov.com/motorcycles/lives21.html