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What takes up most of your time these days? During the day
I’m an independent sales
rep and I work for different companies selling motorcycle accessories
in the motorcycle industry, and at night I have a company called Nightmare Racing that makes reproduction plastic for all the vintage Kawasakis. So if you have a 1978 KX125 like when you were a kid, want to restore it and make it look brand new, I’m the guy you get ahold of to get the plastic.
Talk about a little bit about your
day job as an independent sales
rep. I’m an independent contractor, so whether it’s raining or snowing, I’ve still gotta go out and make all my sales calls or whatever. I work for companies that can’t afford a full-time employee, so they just
pay me straight commission. I wear a lot of different hats and some shops I go in and sell ‘em a little bit of everything and then some places I just sell one speci c item. But, I’ll travel all of Kansas, all of Missouri, and a little bit of southern Illinois -- so I drive about forty ve thousand miles per year around to all the shops in the midwest.
When did you recognize your
passion for motorcycles?I started ridin’ motorcycles when I was ve years old and I did my rst race was when I was nine years old. I kind of got out of it for a little while in
the eighties and then in the nineties I started collecting old vintage bikes and restoring ‘em, and started collecting bikes along the way. I was growing up in the seventies along with the growth of the motocross era when it was just becoming a sport in America. I raced all the way through the seventies and I was kind of with it from three inches of travel all the way
to twelve inches of travel, water cooled, disc brakes and everything.
That had to be a cool time to be just getting involved from the technical advancement, the broadening of the sport on
American soil, etc... It was a good time, because the seventies were when it all changed. Basically, if you look at the bikes from 1976 to 1982, the changes are just so dramatic; that’s when I was a teenager and that’s when I was into it the most. It was a real exciting time.
What’re some of your memories as
a teenager in the seventies? Well, I grew up in St. Louis and there was a track out it in St. Peters, Missouri called Cycle World USA and it was a national caliber track. >>
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