Nothing to see here...move along.
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PR
OBLEM
CONFESSIONS OF A MOTORCYCLE ADDICT
I have a confession to make. I’m a long-time motorcycle addict and collector. Over the years I have been fortunate enough to steadily move from just storing my bikes to actually having a warehouse and garage. I started at age eleven with a cast aside Lambretta 125 from my brother, which I quickly broke. And then I talked my dad into buying a used 1958 Cushman Eagle which I didn’t break but later traded for a 1957 Zundap 250. All these bikes were stored in the barn on our property. Not much work was done on them—I just oiled the chain once in a while and rode the wheels off them. In 1966, at the age of nineteen, I joined the Air Force. I did my time—a total of three years and ten months that included nineteen months¬¬ in Vietnam before I returned to civilian life. While in Vietnam, I had a 1967 Honda CL 90 that I just parked outside my barracks. When I returned to the U.S.A. I was stationed at Wichita Falls and there I had a 1968 Hodaka Ace 100. I kept it exposed under the stairway at my apartment. When I was discharged from the Air Force in 1970, I moved to Houston, Texas, where some of my friends lived. One day visiting a friend I saw some guys standing around a car with a three-bike trailer with a 1969 Husqvarna and a 1969 Penton on it. Of course, I had to stop and talk to them. That conversation changed my life. One of them asked me if I knew what the bikes were. When I answered that they were Motocross bikes, he was impressed. He stuck out his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Don Rainey.” (He wouldn’t become Diamond Don for a couple more years.) I asked him if he raced the bikes and with a grin on his face he replied, “Yes.” He invited me to go to a race the following weekend. The day after that race I bought a used Yamaha AT1, a converted MX 46
WWW.AHRMA.ORG
Panorama of happiness
BY: SKIP KENNEDY
bike. I leased a 5 x 8 storage room at my apartment complex which I shared that with the Penton guy. It had one light bulb on the ceiling and between the two bikes and a small toolbox; it was pretty tight. I started racing immediately. In fact, racing took over my life. I raced for about six months on the AT1 before buying a 1969 Maico 250, then a new 1972 Yamaha DT2-MX, and then a CZ. Obviously, I needed more space than a shared 5 x 8 room, so Don rented the one-car garage below his apartment. There were no shelves on the wall, no place to put parts except on the floor but we were happy to have a “real” garage to work in. Life was great. I raced MX for three years while also doing some short track along with three-hour hare scrambles. Because I worked for a Honda shop, they let me work on my bikes there. I was a pro for two of the three years but found I was losing my enthusiasm. I decided to give speedway a go. I moved to Southern California in 1974 and raced for three summer speedway seasons and also two winter seasons in Florida. I was fortunate to race against all the big guns of that sport. But I got tired of the travel, sleeping in a camper and race prepping bikes out of my trailer, so I moved back to Houston. Fast forward to 1998life (i.e., wife and kids) that interrupted my racing for a bit until Don (Diamond Don now) walked into my office and said, “You won’t believe this! There is an organization called AHRMA. They race those bikes from back in the day, and they call it Vintage Racing. We’re going racing again!” He gave me the number of a guy who was selling two CZs and we started building and racing A 1974 CZ 380, which is my primary vintage race bike bikes again.
AMERICAN HISTORIC RACING MOTORCYCLE ASSOCIATION
DECEMBER 2020
