Toys for Tots Toy Run

About this event

Harley-Davidson's own writers have admitted the name sounds more like a southern rock band than a dealership. The more unusual thing about White Lightning is where it sends its customers: this is a Milwaukee store that runs off-pavement training days out of Tellico Plains, which is not the direction most of them point their riders.

Shawn Wells has been general manager for more than five years and it is not his first Harley store; the group above him, under chief operating officer Keith Morrison, runs two others that lean the same way, towards adventure riding. Where the White Lightning name actually came from, nobody has written down.

The Toys for Tots collection it hosts feeds the Chattanooga campaign, run by coordinator Aaron Butler with Sergeant Daniel Mallett of the Marine Corps. That campaign hands the toys back out over five days in the week before Christmas, as a drive-through on Discovery Drive with families called forward alphabetically by surname — the unglamorous end of a toy run, and the one that decides whether it was worth doing.

The store sits on Lee Highway. Monteagle Mountain is up the interstate to the north-west and the dirt roads the dealership likes are east of there.