I have owned this 1961 Gator Gadabout for51+years! My dad traded some concrete (our family was in the concrete business) for this minibike and a Yard Hand tractor. I was 8 and my little brother was 5, so he got the tractor (we still have that, too!).
The Gator seems to have been built by Glennco, or been its predessor, as it is almost identical, with a couple of subtle differences: The pedal has a bend in it while the Glennco is straight, and the handlebars are flatter on the Gator. Mine has the original Clinton 2 1/4 HP 4 stroke motor. The prior owner had converted the foot throttle to a butterfly type lawn mower throttle and it had been mounted flat on the top of the bar, but at some time was moved to a location on the front of the handlebar for an up-and-down motion. I had been painted red when I got it, but the original color was cream with a red motor. It suffered many paint jobs during my ownership, including maroon, blue, black, and red.
Other mods during its lifetime included wheelie bars, headlight, electrical tape racing stripes, and a "ram air" contraption that I was sure would be similar to supercharging, at speed!
When I was 9 or 10, a couple of years after I got my mini, I decided that the fork angle looked too steep (and it was!). Since this little tall-geared, ungoverned bike with a super-light rider (me.... back then) had been clocked by a friend's 1966 "Twinjet Yamaha 100" at 42 mph just after dropping off of China street hill, I thought I would break out the torch and make it handle better and look cooler by making what I called at the time, a "rake-plate". If you look closely in the pic, you can see the 1/2" thick plate (I wanted it to be strong enough!) bolted to the bottom of the headset. I even added a hole in the front of the bracket for a planned headlight that never happened. I think that the bolt-on mod made the bike look better, but probably had the reverse effect on handling.
All that said, in looking at the pics, you can see that the top tube has a decided bend upward compared to the other Glenco-type machines. It has a patch badly welded to the support brace just behind the headset. I can surmise that the reason that the fork was so steep was that a prior owner must have had a close encounter with a curb or ? that managed to put so much stress on the frame that it bent the top tube and broke the weld at the support brace. Bet that was a wild "high-side"! I assume that the forks were bent and straightened.
Those were the good ol' days!