I refurbished a couple of wheels for a 74 a while back. like the bike, they were in terrible condition, badly oxidised, pitted and appeared the PO had used hammer and chisel to remove the tyres. there were some pretty deep gauges on the edges and the flats were badly scratched and had quite a few gouges out of them.
I have quite a long history with polishing aluminium and I've posted on here before re polishing aluminium if you care to read.
To refurbish these wheels I hit the edges with an angle grinder to remove the gouges. I used a nylon fibre wheel to smooth and remove the gouging and scratching from the flats, then polished them. they came up pretty good I think.
Both hubs were skimmed on the lathe to true up the flanges and remove the casting bridges between the fins. the bridges between the flanges on the front wheel was turned down a little so I could get in there with a mop to polish.
I then laced both wheels with stainless spokes. Heidens can supply good spokes of the. right length for stock wheels.
Do yourself a favour and get an 8" grinder so you can use decent size mops. I have a 45 year Old GMF grinder I've converted specifically for polishing. You can pick them up reasonably cheaply - new or second hand.
To polish the rim, grind off the gouges on the edge with a fine grit angle grinder, use a nylon fibre wheel on the grinder to remove gauges and scratches on the side walls. Nylon fibre whee.ls are a dense fibre wheel impregnated with aluminium oxide, they are not Scotch Brite wheels. They are available in a range of grits. Just be, careful when using them because they can remove a surprising amount of material in a very short time.
The mud collecting valleys on the rim can be polished used a 1/2" wide sewn mop, as can the centre. The flats are easy to polish using a wider wheel. If you are using a bench grinder as I suggested, cut some bicycle inner tubes to length and cover the bench grinder shafts, because the rim 'will' slip off the polishing mop from time to time and hit the shaft.
With polished aluminium comes maintenance, because the aluminium will not hold the shine very long without being treated. Treatment options include Bright Dipping, if you can find anyone that does it. Clear powder coat. Or one of the commercially available clear coats for polished aluminium such as Glisten.
Another option is bead blasting. Bead blasted aluminium looks quite alright, albeit rather flat. bead blasted aluminium lends itself rather well to clear coat, so no maintenance.
The first pic is the nylon fibre wheels I spoke of, second pic is an 8" bench grinder converted for polishing they aren't much good for anything else anyway, except sharpening lathe bits). Third pic is of some bits showing a reasonably decent polish job, last pic is of a bit I machined up, then bead blasted, as you can see, blead blasting gives quite a nice even finish. Second last pic shows that all bikes should have spoked wheels. The remainder are pics of my wheels.