Riding the Dirt Bike Evolution

By Lewis Hale

It’s that thing when you see yourself riding through town on your street bike with the wind blowing in your hair and your beautiful girlfriend riding behind, wearing only shorts, sandals, and a halter top. Sounds like fun? Sure does! But someday you may want something different. It’s that thing as you are taken back into the 1950s—just as Japan began sending low-cost fun-loving motorcycles to the US. With the 1960s came a new motorcycling challenge—the introduction of Europe’s exhausting sport of motocross. This collection of short stories will take you through years of “The Dirt Bike Evolution” when motorcyclists across America were being introduced to various forms of racing on dirt courses, sandy trails, and mountain paths. You will experience the challenges of traveling to these events. Each decade has brought advances in technology and development of the dirt bike. Today X Games performers are doing double flips in the air on these high-tech machines to the excitement of their stadium-filled audiences. Travel along to the southeast as these fictional sportsmen racers pursue their passion of riding and racing into seven decades.



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• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781646540754

Book preview

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Riding the

Dirt Bike Evolution

Lewis Hale

Copyright © 2020 Lewis Hale

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books, Inc.

Meadville, PA

First originally published by Fulton Books 2020

ISBN 978-1-64654-074-7 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64654-075-4 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgment

1950s

Motorbikes

1966

Trail Riding on a Mountaintop

1967

The Bristol Twins Motorcycle Club

Racing for the First Time

1968

A Trip to Haysi, Virginia

1969

Brownsbad Motocross

Bristol Twins Motorcycle Club Constructs a Race Facility

1970s

Racing at Hickory Hill

1980s

Riding the Alligator Enduro

Enduro Racing in Alabama

Winning a Championship

1990s

On Our Way to Motorcycle Week in Daytona

Racing a Virginia Championship Hare Scramble

2000s

Racing into the Twenty-First Century

Foreword

Over the years that I have known my husband, Lewis Hale, there has been one absolute constant, and that is his strong love and enjoyment of motorcycles, bicycles, cars, and all things motorized.

We have spent many happy years attending enduros, hill climbs, motocross races, flat track events, and vintage motorcycle festivals. When we attend these things now, it is apparent that the sport has changed, and yet it has stayed the same in many ways. During the practice drills and intermissions, I enjoy watching the variety of attendees. You see grandparents proudly helping their grandchildren get ready for the event or even just babysitting while the parents race, and you see parents yelling from the sidelines and proudly waiting for the awards ceremony at the end. You see young people hanging out with their friends and swapping needed items for their bikes. You see small children all dressed out in protective gear, getting ready for their turn to race. It seems that the sport has grown so much that it would not be recognizable if a time machine would take us back to the 1950s and 1960s.

While reminiscing about the old days, an idea formed in Lewis’s brain. He wanted to tell some fictional stories about his experiences in the old days. Some of these stories are founded in events that truly happened, but the names, circumstances, and sometimes the outcome have been changed. If you think you see yourself in some story, you may find that the story is not as you remember it. That is deliberate.

In the story entitled Motorbikes, Lewis writes in the mid-1950s. Youthful teenagers, unaware of the destruction dynamite can cause, are somehow allowed to purchase dangerous and powerful explosives from a local retail outlet. Thankfully, today tighter regulations are required for the sale of these explosives and their components.

As you read through these stories, imagine that you are helping to develop the sport from the spyglass of those early days when things were not so polished, and the riders, participants, etc. were not so highly trained. The GOATs had not yet been identified, and there were few training camps available to develop skills at such an early age.

We hope you will enjoy reading and sharing these stories with your children and grandchildren, and that they will use their own imaginations to see the early days of this sport in a new way.

Kerry Hale

01-03-2019

Acknowledgment

To my wife Kerry C. Hale, who has encouraged and supported me in my obsession with the motorcycle. For the more than fifty years we have been married, she has helped me ride, race, photograph, report, and attend as spectators many off-road motorcycle events along the eastern US. Without her support and dedication, I would not have had the opportunity to pursue this wonderful passion.

To my late brother Ronnie W. Hale, who shared a love of riding motorcycles in the woods from the time we were very young men, the many trips we experienced throughout the southeastern United States chasing enduro races, and many other off-road competitions, both as competitors and spectators.

1950s

Motorbikes

A man on the loading dock of our local hardware store gives Bob two sticks of dynamite and several long strands of fuse in exchange for the money he has in his left hand.

My friend Mike and I have followed his brother, Chad, and Chad’s friend Bob to downtown from our neighborhood west of town. It is fun riding our Whizzers with Mike on the bike behind me, and Chad is doubling Bob.

Chad’s Whizzer is a recent model, which is styled as a motorcycle. My Whizzer is also factory-built but a motorbike, which is a Columbia bicycle with a four-cycle engine and a belt drive. My parents allowed me to purchase it about nine months ago, not long after my thirteenth birthday, to help with the delivering of my afternoon paper route.

After stuffing the dynamite sticks in the front of his jeans, Bob is forcing the fuses into his shirt pocket as he walks back to where Mike, Chad, and I are waiting.

We go through the process of starting our Whizzers again, and Mike and I follow Chad and Bob back toward the neighborhood.

We’re riding on smooth pavement and nearing an end to the city limits. The pavement stops where the county line begins. Our plan is to ride from the beginning of the county’s gravel road several miles to Steele Creek, which ponds downstream to a popular swimming hole. There is a narrow concrete bridge in the gravel road that provides a dry crossing across the shallow creek, but many vehicle owners drive into the creek beside the bridge, stop, and wash their prized machines in the creek water.

It’s early in July of 1955, and we are out of school for vacation, a perfect time to enjoy the freedom of riding our motorbikes in the summer sun.

As we start down the long hill, which begins with the gravel section, I steer the Whizzer into the right side track. I am following the same course Chad takes. Car and truck traffic has crushed the gravels to powder in this narrow course, making the surface kind of smooth. It is difficult to balance the bike on this part of the road with Mike sitting on the luggage rack behind me.

Chad and Bob are ahead of us when all of a sudden Chad’s little Whizzer begins to swerve from side to side and eventually drives into the deep gravels piled in the center of the road.

Bob, then Chad, are thrown from the bike and slide face down in the gravels.

By the time Mike and I get to them, Chad is picking himself up and rubbing his bleeding wounds. Bob gets to his feet, checks the sticks of dynamite stuffed in his belt, looks at the raw spots on his bare arms, and displays a look of disgust when he pushes at the long tear in the pocket of his shirt.

After talking about trying to double on a gravel road, we begin the ride again toward the creek and that cool swimming hole.

When we arrive at the creek, Bob pulls a knife from his pocket, flips the blade open, and cuts a few inches from one of the sticks of dynamite. Chad helps Bob attach a long strand of fuse, rubs the red and yellow tip of a wooden match on the leg of his jeans, and when it flames, lights the fuse.

Bob holds the piece of dynamite in his hand for a few seconds as the sparks fly from the melting fuse, then he throws it into the creek…and we run.

Only seconds pass before we hear a loud boom.

Spinning around toward the noise, there is a beautiful plume of water spraying high into the air. The soothing sound of the droplets falling back to the surface is mystifying.

But I’m reluctant to think about the downside to this excitement. There are casualties of creatures living in the creek that float to the surface when the water returns to a calm flow.

We continue to watch in disbelief as each piece of dynamite explodes when Bob throws it into the water.

When all the dynamite has sounded a boom and sprayed water high into the air, we hike alongside the creek downstream to the swimming hole, which is located in the middle of a dairy farm.

Today all the livestock has been moved to another pasture.

After removing our clothes, we take turns jumping from the grassy knoll into the creek just a few feet below. Much of the murky, reddish color in the water comes from splashes pounding against the red clay bank, where the creek makes a turn to the southwest.

Mike’s face shows a disappointed look when I tell him we need to leave for home. I have to start delivering the afternoon newspaper soon.

While sitting on the front porch of our house folding newspapers, I start to think about the many days hanging out with Mike and Chad. I met the brothers when I began riding the Whizzer.

Mike loves music. And he loves Elvis’s music.

Mike is already a talented musician at the young age of fourteen. His talent obviously comes from his mother, who is a popular music teacher.

Slowly I am gaining an appreciation of Mike’s favorite recordings.

Personally, I think Chad is a genius. He and Bob are only a few years older than Mike and me, and he has so many, many great inventions!

But one of Chad’s ideas backfired.

After building a small pipe bomb in the basement, he decided it would be safe to explode it in the furnace since he had used very little gun powder in a short piece of galvanized pipe. When he lit the fuse and closed the door to the furnace, the force of the explosion broke one of the grates in half and blew several pipes from the exterior of the furnace.

Chad was lucky enough to fix their home’s heat source before his parents found the damage.

Last week Chad asked if I would like to see one of the bombs he had built. I agreed, so he pulled a contraption from under a workbench in the back of the garage. We carried it across the street, behind his house, and up the hill into the woods.

When that thing exploded, the tree limbs he had placed in between separated into thousands of pieces.

Oh no!

Trouble in the driver’s seat of a white pickup truck has just stopped in front of my house. It is my boss at the newspaper, Mr. Franks, and I know he is coming to scold me again. My paper bill was due earlier in the week, but I still don’t have enough money to pay.

For more than a year, I have delivered newspapers to neighborhood customers seven days a week, which includes a combined edition on Sunday mornings. A couple of months ago, when an important baseball game was being played, I made a decision to hide all of the papers and planned to deliver them when the ball game was over.

Unfortunately, I didn’t deliver them on that Friday night. Instead, I went home and climbed into bed.

Collecting from many of the customers is a difficult part of my duties. Often they say they don’t have the money or their husband or wife has the money, and I should come back later.

Asking for payment door to door is a discouraging task sometimes, but when I failed to deliver on that day weeks ago, that gave many of my customers an excuse not to pay for the week, and some were mad