Sally Halterman was 26 years old, 4 feet 11 inches tall, and weighed 88 pounds. On May 12, 1937, she stamped her foot at a skeptical D.C. police examiner until he relented and handed her the first motorcycle license ever granted to a woman in the District of Columbia.
Four months later, on August 31, she eloped on that motorcycle.
The Evening Star caught up with her on September 11, 1937, at the apartment she had just moved into at 2120 H Street NW. By then she had been “Mrs. Bert E. Halterman” for ten days. Most of her friends still called her Sally Robinson. She had been too busy on her bike to tell them.
A motorcycle elopement to Vienna
Sally told the Star reporter how it had happened. “I met Bert when he tried to buy my motor about a year ago. Then we started going together, and all our dates were motor cycle rides. We’ve never gone to a show together, or gone places together in an automobile. I haven’t been in an automobile in months.”
“We slipped off with another couple on August 31 and rode our motor cycles down to Vienna, Va., to get married. And we’ve spent all our spare time going places on our motor cycles.”
Bert Halterman was a messenger for R.C.A. and rode his motor every day for work. For Sally it was pure hobby. She had been riding since 1928, when she was twelve years old, in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Nine years on two wheels before she walked into the D.C. examiner’s office and dared him to fail her.
The bike, “worked over” to fit her
Her motorcycle was the smallest regular production model on the market and still weighed 380 pounds. That’s more than four times her body weight. The bike had to be modified so she could reach the clutch, the brake, and the handlebars at once.
She had bigger plans. “I’m going to get a special-built job this Winter,” she told the Star. “It will be all chromium plated and will go 130 miles an hour. I can get only 80 out of the old job.” She was already aiming at the title of first woman motorcycle racer.
Her path to the license had taken some persistence. The policeman administering the road test, the Star wrote, “seemed to think a girl had no business riding a motor cycle, and that she was too small anyway.” She stamped her foot. He signed the permit.
A club that had to rewrite its constitution
Sally and Bert planned to join the Capitolians, a newly formed D.C. motorcycle club. There was one problem. The Capitolians’ constitution explicitly forbade female members.
The club agreed to rewrite it. Sally was to be initiated “a week from next Friday,” which puts her admission ceremony on September 24, 1937.
The Library of Congress photo at the top of this post, taken September 15 in front of the Lincoln Memorial by Harris & Ewing, marks the publicity moment in between. The wire-service caption called the group simply the “D.C. Motorcycle Club” and noted she was “the only girl ever to be accorded this honor.”
Where Sally Halterman fits in the national arc
Women had been riding motorcycles in America since the machines first showed up in earnest in the early 1900s. Avis and Effie Hotchkiss rode a Harley sidecar rig from Brooklyn to San Francisco in 1915, and the Van Buren sisters made the first transcontinental crossing by two solo women in 1916.
Bessie Stringfield, the Black motorcycle pioneer who later settled in Miami, was logging long-distance solo rides through the South in the early 1930s. By the time Sally Halterman applied for her D.C. permit in 1937, the bikes and the riders were a generation deep.
What was new about Sally Halterman in 1937 was not that she rode. It was that the District of Columbia, slow and bureaucratic as ever, finally signed a piece of paper saying she was allowed to. The first such piece of paper it had ever issued to a woman.
Halterman wasn’t the only D.C. woman to claim a national first in this era. Sixteen years earlier, a Georgetown teenager named Margaret Gorman became the first Miss America, winning the inaugural pageant in Atlantic City in 1921 at age 16.
Is sally still alive? if not what are her birth and death dates?