ON THE TOWN:With wind on your face, be among 1st

Almost 30 years ago, I walked into an electronics store and bought a portable tape player, the type one could wear on one’s belt or stuff into a jacket pocket. The product was new and the term “Walkman” had not yet caught on with Americans.

The product I bought was not a Sony brand, the folks who manufacture the Walkman line. The model I bought was made by Panasonic, and all it did was play tapes. I couldn’t listen to the radio with it. Compact discs were still almost 15 years away from capturing our fancy.

Today, these tape players are hard to find, having been replaced by portable CD players. But if you could find one, it would probably have an AM/FM radio included, as well as a few other features, unlike my tape-only model.

That device today would cost you about $25. In 1979, I paid $100 for my no-frills version.

That purchase was one of the rare times in my life that I was an “early adopter,” a marketing term for those of us who rush out and buy the latest and greatest product, whether it is a car, a plasma TV or a tape player.

Those of us who are not early adopters hang back for a respectable period of time before jumping in. To us, buying the latest thing as soon as it is available is reckless.

Many companies count on early adopters to create for their products a buzz that they hope will convince the rest of us slow pokes to buy whatever it is they are selling, even though, historically, the early adopters are only about 10% of the population.

Twenty-seven years later, I bought the Apple iPod model called the Shuffle. The Shuffle is, in my opinion, one of the great consumer electronics products ever created.

And about a month ago, I almost became an early adopter yet again.

This time, I was inspired by a story by Susan Carpenter in the Highway 1 section of the Los Angeles Times.

Carpenter’s story previewed two new vehicles that are due to hit the market this year. And although they are versions of the same innovation, one of them hit me like a thunderbolt.

Back in February, you see, Carpenter reviewed two new motor scooters. The difference between these scooters and all the others is that they have three wheels instead of two.

And to make the product even more fascinating, at least to me, the manufacturers put two of the three wheels in the front.

One of the two scooters, the MP3, is made by Piaggio, the folks who make the famous Vespa scooters. It was the MP3 that made me pick up the phone the same day and call the Vespa dealer on West Coast Highway in Newport Beach and ask a lot of questions.

My first conversation was with Matthew Kopelow, who told me what I wanted to know. Among other things, he said that their shipment of MP3s would be arriving this month.

When I asked about what type of driver’s license was required, Kopelow told me that they had not yet heard from the Department of Motor Vehicles as to whether a motorcycle license was required or whether the ordinary class C license would suffice.

I couldn’t wait for an answer, so I pulled a string and got a definitive reply from a DMV representative: The MP3 did not require a motorcycle license.

The day after hearing this, I drove down to the Vespa dealership and gave Kelli Peters there a deposit of $1,000. It’s a good thing I did because I discovered on that trip that their initial shipment of MP3s was a grand total of six.

I wanted the MP3 badly for a number of reasons. One of them was guilt over driving my car, which gets pretty bad mileage. Another was the pure fascination with something new.

In that regard, I felt quite a bit like J. Thaddeus Toad from the story “Wind in the Willows.” In that story, Toad moves from new invention to new invention in a mania that eventually gets him into big trouble.

As it turns out, however, fate has a way of butting in. The shortcut to the end of this story is that I will not be taking delivery of my MP3 for several more months, not, however, because Peters and Kopelow don’t have any.

So if you’re interested in reducing your fossil fuel consumption while riding a scooter that goes almost 80 mph, gets 60 miles per gallon and looks hot, call Vespa in Newport Beach. Tell them you heard that there was a spare black MP3 available from a guy who wishes he were once again one of those early adopters.