The first real roadracer I personally knew lived in a bus.
I burned through small town WI the other month on the way to a basketball tournament and never even let off for Beldenville, Wisconsin. Very small town, less than 100 inhabitants.
Seeing it drift away in the rear view mirror I remembered that a guy I knew once lived there in the '70s and 80s.
I don't recall his name.
Before we were roadrace enthusiasts my friends and I--and this was in the early 1980s--were drag racers. The lack of canyons in rural Minnesota sort of forced you to adopt a racing style that you could do on straight roads, so drag racing it was.
We dragraced bikes for years, on the street of course, but also on dragstrips all over MN and WI. The closest legal place to race was Rock Falls Raceway just outside of Eau Claire, WI. We spent many night piled into cars and vans and trucks, sleeping outside the gates on Saturday night, waiting for the place to open on Sunday. Blankets, beer, girls ... cassette music.
 | |
| (2017) I actually found the old bus that Norton racer lived in. It had been dragged to a nearby farm. |
So we'd go through the line of bikes and borrow what we could from people that five seconds before we didn't know. "Borrow your jacket? Any gloves? What size boots do you wear?" It always worked out. When you're 21 every day is like jumping out of a plane without a chute and the sense that it would all work out was as sure as the sun.
One guy we ambled up to was there in a minimal sense. He rode there, like we did sometimes, but had all the gear. In fact he had full leathers, boots, gloves and he came there to race for money; we just temped fate by racing for trophies.
I don't remember his name.
I can see him in my head through. 40s guy, black, thin, not an easy life vibe from him. Quiet, Bates leathers.
When I was in second grade, the library of the primary school I attended had in its library some sort of Giant Encyclopedia of Motorcycles-type volume and I checked it out and rushed home to page through it.
Now, this was the 1970s--early 1970s-- so the whole Easy Rider thing was still in full swing. Peter Fonda, or the other guy, on his bike, were on a poster above the bed of one of my friends--Fonda on one of those horrific choppers. Everyone thought that choppers were badass, and being the quiet kid I never stood up to "call BS" as they say now, but something in me, from day one, found an unspecified aspect of choppers distasteful. I felt the same way about Evel Knievel. Sure, he seemed cool, to a degree, but watching him jump things just left me with a sense that there were technological answers to Knievel's bikes that he failed to explore.
Back to the book. I brought it home, put it on my bed and started paging through it. At some point the pages opened to a full page illustration of a Norton Manx racebike.
I can't say enough about how much this simple illustration influenced me at that age. I stared at it, tried to copy it with thin paper and kept the book so long that the librarian was on the verge of calling my mom and telling her to bring it in.
That simple picture spoke to me in a way that few things in my life ever did. It was, I suppose, like seeing the naked form of the opposite sex and realizing that you're hetero. I just knew that racing motorcycles like that were something I was going to get as close to as humanly possible.
Faced with being without that picture was not something I wanted to live without, and after some deliberation, I carefully tore the page out of the book and returned the book to the library. No one ever said anything about it. I think, now, that Giant Encyclopedia of Motorcycles wasn't a real hit in grade school.
I had that picture for years. After the coast had cleared I tacked it to my bedroom wall and I'd look at it, stare at it, into my late teens. It would not surprise me to find it my mom's attic tomorrow.
The nameless guy had a Norton Manx and we got to know him a little, after he learned we were from the big city of Red Wing--not far from where he lived. I recognized the bike from the drawing in my room and showed some interest in it. He said that the Manx was his, that he'd bought it in Minneapolis, and it was his sole means of transportation. I don't remember him push-starting it but I assume he did. We asked how he got around in the Winter and he said he didn't.
He had roadraced, he said. Where I can't recall, but he said something about Daytona and other places I'd only read about in magazines. He spoke plainly, and remembered results and details of his racing exploits. He tolerated our assuredly idiotic just off the farm questions. The thing I remember is that he never got off his bike. He sat on it between runs, with his helmet in his lap, talking shit with/to all the other money racer guys. We drifted back to our truck and sneaked beers or went to find girls. Now, decades later, it strikes me that the Manx didn't really have a kickstand and I suppose he could not just prop it up and get a Coke like we did. He was always alone.
He didn't confess that he lived in an old school bus in Beldenville, WI, but on some night of drunken stupidity we ended up there and somehow learned that he lived in an old yellow school bus behind a bar. It was not a nice school bus. He had the Manx in the bus with him. He was the first fellow I knew who had a motorcycle in his house.
I'd like to think that we sort of celebrated this fellow more, but back then it was all about ETs and reaction times. Whose bike was fast? Whose bike was going to get faster? "What did you run?" I can't imagine the British men who designed and built the Manx thinking that one would be drag raced but there it was and unfortunately even my crispy GPz550 could easily humiliate the Manx in a drag race. So it was over.
Of course bracket racing is about being consistent. And he was robotic in the way he pulled 14.10s or whatever any time he dropped the clutch. He won money every Sunday with that bike.
After I started writing I heard that he was still in Beldeville, living in the bus. Bingo. Easy story. And just like that my friend who delivered pop in Beldenvile reported that he'd died one winter and the bike was gone.
I borrowed gloves from him once. We were truly just off the milking machines so we raced in the only gloves we had--thick leather winter gloves. His, though, they were true racing gloves. I felt different when I pulled to the line in those gloves. Sort of like looking at that illustration as a kid.