Page 14 - ISSUE-5-PULSE-BIGVALLEY-HONDA

How did you first develop a passion for motorcycles?
Well, I’d had a Whizzer powered bicycle when I was about fourteen years old and then an Ariel 500 Single came up for sale in my little town in boxes. Boy, I thought I’m gonna step up -- I’m now fourteen or fifteen years old and I paid
one hundred dollars for it from my paper route money. I took it home and my family thought I was nuts; my father didn’t like anything motor- ized. I laid all the parts out and went and bought a manual, put this thing together, and by God it ran. I was riding it around my local town, high school, and all that stuff -- I pulled in a gas sta- tion one day and there was a motorcycle inside with a number plate on it. So I parked my bike, went in and started talking to the guy; he was a really nice fellow, became a lifelong friend and he raced flat track. It was a BSA 500cc Twin Flat Tracker that he raced at Gardena (the old 1⁄4 mile in Los Angeles) in California. So right
14 THE PULSE • ISSUE FIVE
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away, he was an okay guy and we became friends. He took me to some races at Gardena and I got the bug, so he says “You know, I know where there’s a brand new Gold Star Flat Track bike for sale, never been ridden, and it’s only $850. Well, I was working at a machine shop and thought I could afford that ‘cause I didn’t have any other vices that I spent my money on. I bought it and went to Gar- dena thinking that I was going to be a racer, but it didn’t take long to figure out that it wasn’t going to be a good deal. My first time on the racetrack I was competing against racers with national numbers that were all experts and I thought “This isn’t going to be good.” So I decided that maybe I ought to be a mechanic and I hired a kid to ride for me; we started to become kind of successful and that’s what got me started.
How did it go over with your dad consid-
ering that he hated anything motorized? Well, the way that evolved was I moved out at sixteen still goin’ to highschool. I left home, got my own apartment, went to school from 8am
- 2pm, went to work in the machine shop from 3:30pm - 12am.
When did you discover your aptitude for
tuning bikes and realize that’s what you
wanted to do?
I’d always liked things mechanical, like I said at fifteen I put this bike together with no help from anybody. So that kind of told me that maybe I could be a mechanic.
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