Two Lane Blacktop: The Wild Ones of Fort Worth and the Triumph of the Wheel 1953-57
An Excerpt from Philip's Shadow: A Subcultural History featuring the Actor Philip Norman Fagan
My late uncle Philip Norman Fagan would have turned 86 this month. To celebrate Philip as well as the release of Jeff Nichols’ awesomely hyper-masculine Scorsesian throwback flick The BikeRiders this past weekend- probably the best new major American film I have seen thus far in 2024-, I present here a related piece of motorcycle history. The following is an excerpt from the book I wrote about Philip and the vast array of underground subcultures he explored throughout the 1950s and 60s. Before his close friendships and collaborations with Alejandro Jodorowsky, Andy Warhol, and William Burroughs and his later wanderings as a solitary monk in war-torn Southeast Asia, Philip played a vital role in the rowdy motorcycle club culture of Fort Worth, Texas and went on to set a world speed record on a customized 1956 Norton 88 at the Bonneville Salt Flats. He led an exciting dozen lives in as many years. This book can be purchased from the Evil Empire HERE. I’m very grateful for the interviews I was granted by the former members of the Iron Horse MC. Thanks as always for reading. Now, start your engines and let’s ride…
Two Lane Blacktop: The Wild Ones of Fort Worth and the Triumph of the Wheel 1953-57
A skittish motor-bike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocation, to excess conferred by its honeyed untired smoothness. [i] ~ T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”)
“Black Rebels Motorcycle Club. That’s cute. Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” Brando: “Whaddaya got?” ~The Wild One
The concept of the “motorcycle outlaw” was as uniquely American as jazz. [ii]
~Hunter S. Thompson
If you’ve ever heard a Triumph with megaphones accelerating up through the gears, then you know what Allen Ginsberg was talking about when he described a “saxophone cry that shivered the city down to the last radio.”[iii] ~Detroit Free Press, March 1994
An embrace of “Carnivalism,” of irrationality, individuality, absurdism, and play, as a reaction to and an antidote for the constraints of responsibility imposed by the established order has been at the root of countercultural activity since time immemorial. Soviet era philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin locates the phenomenon’s roots in Medieval Europe, when the peasantry embraced a sort of double life. A man was first and foremost a citizen, churchgoer, and worker within a subservient and officially condoned hierarchical existence. On festival days and in the marketplace, beyond the watchful eye of kings and clergy, he cut loose and howled at the moon, indulging in various combinations of drunkenness, lewdness, blasphemy, grotesquerie, music, dance, improvised play, costume, daredevilry, laughter, unpredictability, and general Dionysian revelry. For a day or two, the peasantry ruled the town with gleeful abandon, even crowning their own “King of Fools” on the annual Fool’s Day to assert their antiauthoritarian autonomy. As long as order was soon restored and the mass chaotic freedom of individualized behavior didn’t bleed over into the normalcy of non-feast days, Carnivalism was a socially acceptable and societally condoned behavior; albeit a restricted one. Although Carnivalism was essentially an inextricable component of primal human nature, it was also a routine put in place by the established order that allowed the peasantry to blow off steam from time to time, acting as a preemptive strategy for preventing revolts and uprisings, offering a socially sanctioned if short-lived annihilation of the responsibilities, drudgery, and mores of codified daily living. Such rituals offered a vital and necessary temporary expression of the human spirit that ultimately made the status quo repression of that spirit somehow tolerable. A man was allowed to act the fool, knowing that he must soon return to the fold of established social and moral norms or perish. A man’s official life, and therefore the greater social and cultural order, was maintained by both the memory of and anticipation of the expressive freedom offered by the escapism of festivals and marketplace “life.”
While even the most rigidly respectable society man of the Eisenhower years needed the occasional dose of socially sanctioned abandon (illicit if accepted love affairs, the three-martini lunch, holiday parties, sporting events, circus sideshow midways, poker, movies and TV, etc.), others would not- and often perhaps could not- live without a near constant embrace of the Carnivalesque. In many respects, Philip Fagan would come to epitomize a kind of Beat-style medievalist, rejecting the modern world and traveling on foot throughout adventures in strange ancient lands with nothing more than a song and a prayer. At a very young age he began seeking ways to exist within the confines of society while attempting to subvert its shackles of rationality, conformity, and routine. In Fort Worth, in the middle 1950s, he found an outlet in the world of motorcycle clubs and racing.
At an early age, I inherited one of Philip’s motorcycle helmets, a gift from my father along with my first cycle, a street legal Suzuki 185 dirt-bike. Philip’s hand-painted helmet was certainly one of a kind. It was open-faced with a chin strap and painted bone-white. But, as if the helmet was itself a human head, the top was painted to resemble a torn scalp and skull, revealing bloody brain matter within the tear. A large black spider seemed to feed upon the flesh, brain, and blood that comprised the wound. The object seems a prophetic symbol of what would become Philip’s increasingly tormented psychic state, his own mind seemingly under attack from unseen dark forces. If spiders and gore were not perverse and shocking enough, the shape of the wound was distinctly vaginal, rendering the contents of the arachnid’s meal ambiguously erotic and even necrophiliac. It seems unlikely that Philip wore such a thing in the middle 1950s; it is far too over the top. More than likely he wore it later in the less censorious California of the early 1960s, but Carl Busbee, who roomed with Jerry Fagan at the University of Texas in Arlington in 1960, remembers Philip sporting the infamous crash protector around that time, presumably home on leave from the Navy. Several years before that, Philip was making motorcycle history, including setting a Class C cycle speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats.
Sometime during the same period, he had emblazoned on his right bicep the ultimate outlaw biker icon, a skull and wings tattoo. Oddly, only one person I interviewed about my uncle ever recalled the tattoo, and when and where he received it remains a mystery. There were quite a few tattoo parlors in Fort Worth in the Fifties and it would appear that he got his in 1956 around the time he began racing Norton motorcycles for George Fasig. He didn’t show it off to his estranged girlfriend Louise the year before, but was soon proudly flashing it in photos when posing with his record-setting Norton. With the fresh ink, he in a sense joined a fraternity of those outside the mainstream; the world of carnies, sailors, thieves, and the more bad-ass biker element. It was an assertive, subversive and apocalyptic statement and as rich a symbol as can be imagined for a short, fast, intensely-lived life. Or as Ronald Tavel, his friend and collaborator from the Warhol orbit later saw it, a chilling portent of Philip’s encroaching doom.
At the turn of the Twentieth Century, American motorcycle technology closely paralleled the modern inventions taking place throughout Europe that began with the motorized two-wheeler of German inventor Gottlieb Daimler. American motorcycles were but a drop in a wider sea of motorbike engineering that included innovative technology from Belgium, Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, and Italy. In the US, Indian was established in 1901 followed closely by Harley Davidson two years later; however, the early American motorcycle industry was intensely crowded and competitive. Equally well known in the period were brands like Crosley, Henderson, Pierce, Pope, Merkel, Thomas, Orient, AMC, Cleveland, Ace, Thor, Thiem, and Excelsior. But the competition cleared out early on when four-cylinder prototypes of the modern cycle arrived and Indians and Harleys proved the only real American forces to be reckoned with in speed and endurance competitions like the New York-based National Endurance and Reliability Contest and the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy. Such high profile events launched the cycle into international consciousness and the machines quickly became a popular pastime for working class American riders and spectators alike. Cycles were a thrilling new invention and a hot fad, spawning enthusiast clubs and throngs of family-friendly “gypsy tour” groups throughout the nation, which generated their own subcultural jargon (header, mile-a-minute, ton-up, slant artist, riding pillion, road rash, lid, etc.) culminating in the establishment of the American Motorcycle Association in 1924. But not everyone was thrilled with the latest miracle of modern science. From the beginning, the loud, smelly new beasts of city riders were derided as antisocial nuisances, a source of noise and air pollution that frightened horses and prompted swift angry responses from American civic groups and religious leaders. “Get a horse!” was the battle cry of naysayers. But like the symbolic horse before them, the freedom and excitement offered by the new machines seemed to many to represent the spirit of America itself. Cyclists were the newest breed of brave, if foolhardy, rugged individualists, as The New York Times remarked in 1913. “Motor cyclists eat and sleep and talk like other folks, but at times they can’t help feeling that they haven’t as long to live as the ordinary man. And they are right. They are a fearless lot, brave enough to wear their lives on their sleeves, and have nerves as unimpressionable as flints.”[iv] While Indian dominated the race track, Harley carved out its niche as the bike of the American road, enacting a clever campaign to highlight the quiet engine of the “Silent Gray Fellow” and the company’s efforts in noise-reduction technology.
Cycle racing became a popular regional sport in the nation’s towns and cities around 1910, graduating from dirt horse racing tracks to wooden “murderdromes,” so called for the perilously steeped bank tracks and high fatality rates among competitors. In addition to the pulsing excitement of sheer speed and deafening cacophany, “motordromes offered still another thrill to the people who crowded the stands,” writes Michael Dregni. “Blood. Board-track races were like Roman chariot races of yore. A burst tire at full speed could send a motorcycle pilot careening across the track, and stories of horrific crashes at other motordromes were part of the pull to the crowd. It was the noise, spectacle of speed, and sheer bloodthirstiness of motordrome racing that had whipped the local preachers into a frenzy usually reserved for visions of the coming of the Antichrist.”[v] The combination of such clerical and civic outrage, bloodshed and death as popular entertainment, riders with nicknames like “Demon” and cycles with monikers like the Cyclone contributed to the violent, sinister and subversive image and appeal of motorcycle culture. Motorcycle daredevilry and stunt riding became standard fare for travelling circus sideshows and Wild West shows (“The Wall of Death”) as well as movie adventure serials (The Perils of Pauline, 1914-67; The Hazards of Helen, 1914-17). By the 1930s, competitive showmen of the Depression era upped the ante on outrageous derring-do, incorporating lions, rattlesnakes and other dangerous animals into their Wall of Death and murderdrome spectacles. For spectators and showmen alike, motorcycle sports thrived on the thrills of danger and death.
Meanwhile, having nearly whittled down the national competition to a two brand war, Harley and Indian were under constant assault from machines across the pond. The same crowded craze of motorcycle manufacturers that swamped the US played out in Europe as well, but the Brits had been at the top of cycle invention and innovation since the 1890s. Companies like Ariel, BSA, Norton, and Triumph continued to produce some of the world’s fastest and smoothest-running cycles, stealing both records and customers at home and abroad. Norton’s famous racing team (whose ranks Philip Fagan would symbolically join with his Class-C record of 1956) took home 14 Tourist Trophy victories in the 1930s alone and became Harley’s number one nemesis in the States. American cyclists became increasingly loyal to the superior offerings of the Brits and the competition between the English and American manufacturers eclipsed the previous one between the stateside companies. Triumph in particular proved strangely adept at negotiating that most of American of cycling events, besting Harleys and Indians at their own game, as cycle historian Lindsay Brooke notes:
…Flat tracks at county fairs. The backbone of the American motorcycle sport since the beginning. While endurance runs, TTs, and regional speedway racing were an important part of the pre-war scene, nothing matched the spectacle of riders locked in thunderous power slides, battling wheel to wheel on mile and half-mile dirt ovals. Flat track simply defined U.S. racing…Harley Davidson and Indian. Both were survivors of a once-thriving American motorcycle industry that had been all but decimated by the inexpensive automobile of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s…As the U.S. market struggled against lean times, so did racing. If motorcycle racing, indeed motorcycling itself, was to prosper again, a rebirth was needed. So in 1933 AMA czar E.C. Smith…revamped their entire program. Smith’s goal was to revitalize racing by encouraging privateers. The solution was to adopt a new racing formula. Called Class C, the new rules stipulated that racing bikes be based directly on standard production machines. To level the playing field, at least 100 examples of any new model had to be advertised and sold before any units were approved for competition. [vi]
While leveling the playing field to mass-product models, the AMA added a stipulation that disclosed their unsurprising bias toward American manufacturers: Flathead American engines were allowed to be significantly larger than the overhead-valve engines favored by British and European bike makers. In flat track events, Harley flatheads were limited to 45 cubic inches, or 750 cc, while overhead-valves were restricted to 30.5 cubic inches, or 500cc. Another AMA addendum attempted to counteract the Limeys’ superior gear-shifting engineering. However, such advantages were ultimately illusory. The stealthy British bikes were so much lighter and more maneuverable than the American V-twins that the Class C was inadvertently ready-made for the British invasion. The quality of Triumph’s assembly line models was so high that such bikes were often able to make good showings at races and speed events without the aid of regulation speed kits and custom parts. Bikes like the Speed Twin and Tiger 100 were proving a force to be reckoned with at AMA stateside races before the Second World War.
Almost from the machine’s inception at the turn of the Twentieth Century, the American motorcycle industry exploited the adventurous desires of American youngsters. Indian produced a boy’s bicycle complete with fake gas tank in 1913, while Harley Davidson followed three years later with its own brand name bicycle. Both shrewdly offered a stepping stone product for young potentially brand-loyal future motorcyclists. Such shrewd marketing was a two-way street, with the Schwinn bicycle company taking over the popular Excelsior and Henderson motorcycle brands, and bicycle dealers across the nation began pushing motorized two-wheelers to the front of their showrooms. By this time, cycles had also become a successful device in the boy’s adventure literary genre. Tom Swift and His Motorcycle was an exciting 1910 entry in the popular series featuring the young inventor-adventurer, and the Boy Scouts of America got in on the action in 1912’s Boy Scouts on Motorcycles which had its young heroes assisting the US Secret Service in China. Also emerging during the War years was a boy’s adventure series that put bikes front and center called The Motorcycle Chums. The series’ exploits were those of a group of teen bikers “who take on everything from the rugged wilderness of Yellowstone Park to the Santa Fe Trail…'thrilling adventures with moonshiners, poachers, and ‘nomadic apaches.’” Big Five Motorcycle Boys, a similar series, featured crime-fighting bikers eventually riding their machines on the front lines of World War I.[vii] By the Second World War, Marvel Comics’ Captain America was atop his steel steed keeping up the good fight against Hitler and the Red Skull on the European front, while other biker superheroes included Batman and Ghost Rider.
In World War I, cycles often replaced horses on the battlefield but were primarily used to deliver dispatches and transport the wounded along the front lines. The US Army also enlisted them in their pursuit of the revolutionary leader Pancho Villa in Mexico, while on the home front cycles slowly became a vital component of big-city police forces. By WWII, bikes were a commonplace attack vehicle on both sides of the battlefield, including models with tank tread wheels and parcel-sized folded jobs that were parachuted to troops trapped behind enemy lines. Many American troops were first exposed to Europe’s two-wheel marvels in the trenches; not only the Brit bikes of their fellow Allies, but also Germany’s BMW and Zundapp brands and Italy’s Moto Guzzi. Back at home, the major American bike brands were quick to seize the marketing potential of their contribution to the war effort, featuring endorsements from biker soldiers in their ad campaigns. Such testimonials were no doubt highly effective, simultaneously asserting the machines as a highly reliable wartime survival tool and a coveted commodity which the returning vet could not wait to buy for himself upon reentry into civilian life. Across the pond, brands like Norton also stressed their wartime service in ads, likening their Big Four machines to the Big Four victory alliance. The Second World War effectively ended the decades-long competition between Harley and Indian, with the latter never quite recovering from overextending itself on behalf of the war effort. By the end of the Forties, the Indian motorcycle was often no more than a decal on the gas tanks of British Nortons and Royal Enfields trading on the popular American brand name. But the British invasion of the late Thirties and Forties had a lot more competition to offer Harley than simply passing themselves off as the last gasps of its dying arch foe. More and more American riders were turning to British bikes like BSA, Matchless, Norton, and Triumph, particularly after the Vincent Black Shadow shattered Harley-Davidson’s coveted record at Bonneville Salt Flats in 1948, an event widely heralded in the mainstream press.
American motorcycle gang culture as we know it today began in earnest after World War II when, according to legend, members of US bomber squadrons like the Hell’s Angels and frontline cycle soldiers returned home to a vastly transformed homeland. Unable to shake the addiction to speed, danger, and general hell-raising that had defined their wartime exploits, the wily vets hit the road for adventure on motorcycles and, joined by other enthusiasts, soon gained notoriety as roving packs of dangerous gypsy outlaws who terrorized the highway stretches and small towns of the nation with all-night beer and dope-fueled carousing, brawling, and illicit sex. The subculture took on a decidedly darker tone, with the new breed of bikers incorporating much of the sinister iconography of the military, such as the leather jackets, Nazi-style field caps, and the skull and wings patches of the Air Force, while an event known as the Death’s Head Derby had as its trophy a real human skull. On the carnival circuit, Lucky Lee Lott’s Hell Drivers had dominated the cycle “suicide spectacle” scene (one of Lott’s competitors was in fact called The Suicide Club, complete with skull and crossbones logo). Beginning in 1935, these daredevils drove their machines through brick, metal, and tin walls which were often on fire as well. The riders also collided head-on with speeding cars and jumped their cycles onto flying airplanes. The Hell Drivers began as the Satan’s Pals, painting their cars and cycles the ghostly white of the graveyard save for their moniker in dripping blood-red. By the late 40s, Lott’s Hell Drivers were the largest touring stunt show in America. “Wall of Death. Thrilling. Hell on Wheels. Chills! Spills…” the posters screamed, alongside a cartoon depicting an out of control cyclist about to careen his machine over the bank track and into terrified audience members as the huge head of the Grim Reaper looked on in soul-hungry anticipation. The word “Hell” and the skulls and fiery imagery of the troupe’s carnival posters would be forevermore embedded in biker culture while Lott (whose preference was the Indian Scout) later found work as a stuntman on the prototype biker flick The Wild One and eventually inspired the antics of daredevil Evel Knievel.
By 1946, the American and European cycle industries began to rally from the long financial strain of their commitment to the war effort. After an extended period of inactivity, cycle racing came back to the fore and California became the national hub of the action, with many vets with mechanical training turning their talents and energies toward the state’s booming hot rod and motorcycle speed scenes. With Indian all but dead, the Limeys’ successes at the race track and the number of Brit bike dealerships sprouting up throughout the US continued to plague Harley-Davidson, with Norton and Triumph becoming Harley’s fiercest competitors for coveted California honors. By the early 1950s, Triumph’s string of successes included high profile events like the Daytona 100-Mile Amateur classic, the Catalina Grand Prix, the Jack Pine Enduro, the Laconia 100, and the Riverside and Peoria Tourist Trophies.
In 1947, on the Fourth of July, the two strains of American motorcycle subculture collided. In the small town of Hollister, California, an AMA-sponsored gypsy tour gathering with family-friendly racing and hill-climbs was infiltrated and outnumbered by thousands of motorcycle thugs from disreputable clubs with punk rock names like the Boozefighters, the Galloping Ghosts, the Market Street Commandos, the Pissed Off Bastards, Satan’s Sinners, the Winos, the Yellow Jackets, and the 13 Rebels. Like modern day pirates, the renegade bikers effectively seized the town and predictable chaos ensued. The state police were called in to quell the melee with tear gas, and a similar event in Riverside shortly after proved that Hollister was not an isolated instance. Oddly, the event that launched the mystique of the outlaw biker has been widely disputed. Some gang members who were there claim that nothing of the scale reported by the media ever occurred at Hollister and that even the infamous Life magazine photo of the fat, drunken, and terrifying hoodlum surrounded by beer bottles was a hoax; in fact a paid actor and not even a real biker. Whatever the case, the image stuck and the biker became a drunken antisocial menace to be feared in quiet America’s mind. When the AMA attempted to disassociate itself from the outlaw clubs by claiming the renegades represented perhaps one percent of the riding population, the unsavory bikers quickly added “One Percenter” patches to the skull-on-wings motif of their leather jackets. Motorcycle “gangs” came to symbolize all that the post-war nation sought to repress, a violent youth-gone-wild phenomenon with long greasy hair, Gestapo-like leather outfits, tattoos, and no sense of decency or morality. The Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club, formerly the Pissed Off Bastards of Hollister infamy, formed in San Bernardino, California in 1948, and a second chapter was soon formed by members of San Francisco’s Market Street Commandos. New Hell’s Angels chapters sprung up around the nation and rival clubs were formed as wild biker rallies and gatherings in places like Daytona and Sturgis became annual institutions.
By 1950, the military- and Viking-inspired leatherwear of the outlaw bands had largely replaced the natty leisure clothes of the average law-abiding citizen biker and leather clothiers were advertising widely in the mainstream biker rags. The outlaw gangs also contributed immensely to the insider’s lexicon of the subculture, adding expressions like prospect, citizen, old lady, tats, ape hangers, colors, and leathers. Just as most initially countercultural trends inevitably enter the mainstream in some palatable form, by the mid-1950s, hip Hollywood actors became the new, sanitized poster boys for the second boom in biker culture. Marlon Brando proudly rode his Triumph Thunderbird and appeared in 1953’s The Wild One as a leather-clad jive-talking delinquent whose gang of misfits shatters the idyll of a small town. The film was inspired by the events at Hollister a few years prior. Co-star Lee Marvin’s characterization of Chino was reported to be based on “Wino” Willy Forkner, the leader of the Boozefighters who had played a vital role in the calamity. The friction between Brit and American bike enthusiasts is authentically represented by that between Brando’s Triumph pack, the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club, and Marvin’s Harley-riding Beetles. (Like Dean, Newman, and McQueen, Lee Marvin was another Hollywood actor who raced competitively as a second career). At the same moment that American audiences were being shocked by The Wild One’s take on their youth culture, a young doctor named Ernesto Guevera left Argentina with a friend for a motorcycle tour of South America and recorded his adventures in what would become The Motorcycle Diaries. The people and conditions Guevera encountered on his travels would lead to the playing out of Castro’s Cuban Revolution a few years later and to “Che” Guevara’s status as America’s enemy number one.
1955 was a banner year for youthful rebellion in the United States. Rock and Roll was all the rage, with subversive new black stars like Johnny Ace, Fats Domino, Little Richard and Chuck Berry assaulting the airwaves with both seductive romantic entreats and diabolical jungle cacophonies, while music companies like Memphis’ Sun Records rushed to repackage the bluesy new sound with appealing white rockabilly hellcats like Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley proudly rode a Harley-Davidson and dressed like the rockabilly biker he was, even appearing as cover boy for Motorcycle Enthusiast magazine in leather jacket and Nazi-style cap (After his first gold record, the King would buy himself the latest Harley model every year). Allen Ginsberg read his soon to be notorious poem “Howl” for the first time in San Francisco, launching his own controversial celebrity and announcing the birth of the Beat Generation. Brando disciple James Dean’s only three films appeared in the cinema that year coinciding with his untimely death in an auto accident while on his way to the races no less. Although Dean never rode a bike on-screen, he is widely remembered as an icon of biker culture astride his beloved Triumph (so much so that Harley-Davidson has been known to use such images in their promotional materials, even though Dean is in fact riding their British competitor’s machines). In a perverse commentary on the cult of live fast, die young immortality, Dean continued to receive hundreds of fan letters a week from rabid fans that either could not accept the star’s death or felt they could still communicate with him despite it.
In the vacuum of Dean’s untimely death, exploitation distributors raided their vaults and independent film producers like American International Pictures began churning out cheap thrills especially aimed at the new youth cult and filled with monsters, juvenile delinquent gangs, hot rods, and motorcycles, the latter a particular favorite among teen boys with titles like Devil on Wheels (1947, starring Mickey Rooney, no less!), One Way Ticket to Hell (1956), Motorcycle Gang (1957), and Dragstrip Riot (1958). Drive-in movies quickly became a hot new trend among driving-age teenagers, and Fort Worth was no exception, erecting among others the Twin, the Belknap, and Cherry Lane drive-ins within a few years in the middle-fifties. Kids making out in cars while watching films about juvenile delinquents, fast cars and passionate necking were a match-made in heaven. Or elsewhere, if one were or a concerned parent or pastor. By the middle 1950s, virtually every red-blooded boy in America wanted a motorcycle.
In 1957, Jack Kerouac’s book On The Road was published to mixed reviews and instant controversy. An ode to the great American highway, the autobiographical novel detailed the cross-country exploits of its narrator Sal Paradise and his literary friends, thinly disguised versions of William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and other soon-to-be-famous Beat icons. Bursting with a passion for the unbridled freedom represented by marathon cross-country driving, the book also portrayed a new breed of American youth, a world of starry-eyed poets hedonistically indulging in drink, drugs, “negro” jazz, wild Bohemian parties, and casual sex, eschewing traditional American values in favor of a whimsical, free-wheeling blend of spirituality and self-realization. While fast cars, hoboing, and hitch-hiking were Kerouac’s preferred tools of travel, his portrait of the American road as the setting of subversive fun and adventure added to the allure of outlaw biker culture. As Norman Podhoretz opined in the Partisan Review, Kerouac’s spontaneous prose “embraced homosexuality, jazz, dope addiction, and vagrancy” and was no different than “the young savages in leather jackets who have been running amuck in the last few years with their switch-blades and zip guns.”[viii] In lineage with the rebel image of Brando, Dean, and Presley, the handsome, brooding Kerouac quickly became the new glamorous icon of the open road and representative of youth-gone-wild delinquency. Kerouac’s follow-up to On the Road would feature a character named Japhy Ryder, a motorcycle-riding Zen poet based on his influential friend Gary Snyder.
By the early 1960s the doomed romanticism of the youth cult of hoodlums, hot rods, and motorcycles produced an unlikely subgenre within pop music as well. The “teen death ballad” included radio hits such as Mark Dinning’s “Teen Angel,” the Cavaliers’ “Last Kiss,” Jan & Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve,” Brigitte Bardot’s “Harley Davidson,” and the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack,” the latter featuring the roar of a motorcycle as a musical motif within its chorus. In the early 1960s, folksinger Bob Dylan, a devotee of Kerouac, proudly rode his Triumph motorcycle on his ascension to capturing the imagination of a generation and knocking Presley from his throne as America’s most popular youth performer. Dylan’s mysterious cycle wreck in 1966 while at the peak of his career would begin an eight-year reclusive semi-retirement in which he did not perform live and added more intrigue to his legendarily inscrutable persona and mythology; he in fact holed up and recorded the mysterious and collection of arcane Americana known as The Basement Tapes. In 1963, audiences thrilled to real-life motorcycle racer Steve McQueen’s daring two-wheeled WWII exploits in The Great Escape, establishing McQueen as the new Hollywood rebel icon and the movie star equivalent to Dylan’s rock star cool.
The mainstream appeal of Hollywood actors, book-writers, and rock and rollers succeeded in taking some of the menace out of the machine, but bikes had become inextricably associated with rebellion. By the mid-1960s, the image of the biker was back in the dirt, as it became once more associated with marauding black leather bands raping and pillaging their way across the country on a two-lane blacktop high on dope and roadhouse juke music. In 1964, coincidentally the year Philip found himself in the New York underground cinema scene, Kenneth Anger shocked willing art film audiences with Scorpio Rising, a portrait of biker life that unveiled the subculture’s blatant homoerotic and fascist aspects and also linked it’s leather-clad hunks to both Christianity and Satanism, as well as to the legacies of Brando, Dean, and rock and roll. Anger’s film became one of the more widely seen films of the 1960s avant-garde cinema, largely attributable to its unrelenting gaze upon its handsome, buff antiheroes and their machines, a fascination shared by movie-audiences of the time. The same year, clashes between young BSA- and Triumph-riding “Rockers” and scooter-riding “Mods” erupted into full scale gang war and riots in Brighton, England and made news around the globe.
In addition to their general antisocial shenanigans, a 1965 government report revealed the Hell’s Angels as gang rapists of teenage girls, drug traffickers, thieves, and generally violent criminals. As always, writers loved a good outlaw. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters befriended the Hell’s Angels and Allen Ginsberg wrote an epic poem about them. Embedded “Gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s scathing and widely read 1966 expose on the gang did little to dispel the sinister myth. Such a reputation fostered a new American mythology, as well as a slew of low-budget exploitation films (many produced by maverick independent film guru Roger Corman) which reveled in the sex, drugs, and razors lifestyle of the biker menace. 1966’s The Wild Angels (featuring Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd, and real members of the Hell’s Angels) was a wildly successful hit that drew on the seedy appeal of predecessors like The Wild One and cemented the reputation of the biker for ages to come, as motorcycle cultural historian Lisa Smedman notes.
The Hell’s Angels didn’t like how The Wild Angels depicted them (After The Wild Angels was released, the Hell’s Angels sued director Roger Corman and American International Pictures for $2 million. They later settled out of court for $2,000.), but the movie-going public did. Anything with “hell” or “angels” in the title was a guaranteed money-maker. Most people wouldn’t want to meet the Hell’s Angels in person, but they were fascinated by seeing them on film.
The biker films of the 1960s also cemented the bond between the Beat Generartion and outlaw motorcycle gangs, with a great number of the films featuring a zany, often beret-sporting “token beatnik” (sometimes portrayed by the spacey, distinctly beat character actor Michael J. Pollard) who entertained the other members of the gang with mad spontaneous free-versifying diatribes. 1969 ironically yielded both a new infamy and the second wave of mainstream acceptance for biker culture in America. The Hell’s Angels made headlines with the slaying of one audience member and the assault of several others (including a member of the Grateful Dead during the band’s set) at a Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway track outside San Francisco, where the Stones had unwisely hired the outlaw gang as security for the free, overcrowded, and drugged out gig (The Angels were later thwarted in a revenge plot to assassinate Mick Jagger). Meanwhile, the crossover appeal of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (featuring Corman biker-pic veterans Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson) moved the biker film genre from the grindhouse and drive-in into the realms of the art house as well as back into mainstream cinemas. Embracing Fonda in his role of anti-heroic, hippy era Captain America, US audiences proved to have an undeniable attraction/ aversion dichotomy when it came to its homegrown Harley-straddling outlaws.
Arising in step with the biker movie genre of the last half of the Sixties (and moving beyond the scope of Philip Norman Fagan’s short life) was the career of the seemingly insane stunt rider Evel Knievel. A former Norton devotee, thief, and general nogoodnik, Knievel was an immensely popular figure by the beginning of the 70s, an American folk hero generating a slew of films, comic books, and toys, as he continually resurrected his broken body into that of a Frankensteinian cyborg held together by reconstruction, sutures, and aluminum as it rallied from comas and blood transfusions. While he was a living legend to countless middle-American families, few mothers encouraged their children to follow in his self-destructive tire marks. The same period saw the ascension of S.E. Hinton in the realm of teen literature. In books like The Outsiders (1967), Rumble Fish (1975) , and Tex (1979), Hinton enacted a bittersweet celebration of the misunderstood lives of poor greaser gangs and motorcycle boys in conflict with upper class youths. Hinton’s thugs were poor, violent, and moral; her “socials” were rich, violent, and mean. Who was to judge?
Back in the mid-1950s, the image of Brando, Dean, and Presley, a collective whom fellow road rebel Jack Kerouac would label “America’s new trinity of love,”[ix] contained the seeds of this same mixture of popular appeal and subversive hoodlum menace that would continue to define the American motorcyclist into the 1970s, when motorcycles were slightly sanitized to become featured stars in television programs like Then Came Bronson, CHiPs and Happy Days. And while the hippies had sidestepped the biker uniform for fashion that reflected more positive vibes, the outlaw biker look and attitude, along with its violence, drug use, and nihilism, was embraced by the British punk rock and heavy metal bands that emerged in the late 1970s. Taking the connections between biker and punk culture to its extreme, apocalyptic bands like the Plasmatics and punk-aesthetic films like Mad Max (1979) seemed to suggest that with the impending nuclear holocaust, the ragged, mohawked biker menace would reclaim his kingship of the lost highway, terrorizing his way back to treacherous power. But by the 1980s, Harley Davidson cycles had become the status symbols of the upper classes, with doctors and lawyers straddling hogs bedecked in faux-outlaw leather chaps and vests. At the same time, biker culture also returned to the Hollywood and rock and roll lifestyles with a vengeance. Bikes became a staple of rock music videos and album covers while cycle enthusiast Mickey Rourke (who portrayed “The Motorcycle Boy” in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1989 adaptation of Hinton’s Rumble Fish) inherited the bad boy mantle of Dean and Brando as the premiere movie star biker thug, even forming a celebrity motorcycle gang with former members of the Sex Pistols and Clash . By the Nineties, motorcycle competitions of all stripes were firmly enmeshed in the widely televised pantheon of “Extreme Sports,” a youthful phenomenon whose heart-pounding spectacles catered to a new generation of sports fans and athletes and included skateboarding, BMX racing, and mixed martial arts fighting. Motorcycles were simply a part of American culturescape and free from the historical social class, aesthetic, and age group stereotypes without ever quite losing their associations with carnival antics, outlaw gangs, and B-movies. Bikes, and the crazy youths who rode them, remain a mainstay of the nostalgic rock and roll lifestyle: Dangerous, antisocial, greasy, smelly, loud, sexy, and cool.
Way cool. In a sense, the biker image was never fully integrated into polite society after Hollister and Brando. Motorcycles were symbols of a subculture, one that would be linked simultaneously to hoodlums and artists. But the societal difference implied by a subculture is always doomed to be embraced by the status quo. It is precisely the bad-boy image of the outlaw motorcyclist that makes it a source of vicarious thrills for the establishment cyclist. Back in the middle-1950s, in Fort Worth, Texas, motorcycles and the crazy kids who rode them still meant something, Even if what they meant was just beginning to be defined and associated with a burgeoning counterculture. Occupying an ill-defined place in American culture between the beatnik/rockabilly present of Hollister/Brando/Dean/Presley and the just-around-the-corner hippy dystopian future of Hell’s Angels/biker flicks/Dylan/McQueen, the greaser and the homegrown good ole boy were largely the same, and cycle sportsmanship as ever was associated with athletic skill and prowess as much as tattoos, leather, and lawlessness.
Fort Worth’s “Motorcycle Row” emerged in the early 1950s as a center of national motorcycle racing and innovation, and Pete Dalio’s Triumph shop was the eye of the hurricane. Dalio’s was an impressive place indeed with a large half moon window exposing the mechanical glories of its showroom to the passersby on East Lancaster and mechanical guru Jack Wilson creating some of the fastest two-wheeled machines in the world in the back shop. In step with the glamour of teen-age rebellion attached to Brando and Dean, Philip Fagan and his cohorts became local legends in the motorcycle scene springing up around the motorcycle shops and drag strips in Fort Worth. And like their more famous heroes, the Fort Worth riders preferred Triumphs, BSAs, and Nortons, to Harleys. The American bikes were simply no match for the Limeys on the racetrack; as Jack Dalio liked to boast, “I’ve still got a crick in my neck from looking back for all those fast Harleys.”[x] Throughout the fifties, shops opened and closed, franchises changed hands, allegiances shifted, competition was rampant, but Dalio-Wilson was a constant. “Racing makes a motorcycle dealership,” Dalio believed. His partner Wilson concurred: “If we didn’t have the fun of racing, I don’t know if I could bear up under the plain ol’ everyday work of running a business!” According to Triumph historian Lindsay Brooke, Jack was the “Texas Triumph maestro…One of the world’s best-known Triumph tuners, Wilson built over 65 speed-record-setting Triumphs between 1955 and 1990, as well as countless winning road-race and dirt-track engines.”[xi]
Robert Baucom: Pete Dalio and Jack Wilson are so intertwined that their stories are nearly inseparable. They had a hell of a time getting those Triumphs to beat Harleys but they did it. Dalio’s Triumph shop was at 1509 East Lancaster. I think the Iron Horse Motorcycle Club started there around 1952. Everybody wanted to be a “Dalio Boy.” The Iron Horse clubroom was upstairs in the shop and there was many a poker game played up there. George Fasig sold his BSA shop to Carlton Williamson. Carlton then moved next door to Dalio’s. Fasig then got the franchises for Matchless, AJS and Norton by the Square in downtown Fort Worth. Later he moved his shop on the other side of Carlton. Then they were all right there together on East Lancaster. and it became known as “Motorcycle Row.”[i]
Curtis Terry: Well, it all started back around 19 and 49 with me walking back and forth to school carrying a clarinet that my folks had just bought. And all my friends had motorscooters, and they would pass me and wouldn’t give me a ride. And so I got mad on a Saturday and took my clarinet and got on a bus and went into town; went back to where my folks had bought it, and sold it. Hocked it for twenty bucks. And then walked all over Fort Worth looking for some kind of motorscooter for twenty dollars. I finally found an old worn-out Whizzer at Leonard Brothers Department Store; bought it. Had to get on the bus and go home and tell Mother and Dad that I sold their hundred dollar clarinet for twenty dollars and bought a motorscooter. Mother got very angry and Dad just laughed. Went back Saturday to get it and it wouldn’t run; it smoked and knocked. Dad says, “You don’t want that thing. Let’s go inside and look around.”
Wayne Ellis: Even before I met Carlton, I met Curtis. We’ve known each other since fifteen years old. We go a long way back; he’s a very dear friend. I had a Harley 125 and I’d been working for Western Union on a bicycle, and Curtis was up there on a bicycle, and a lot of my friends on bicycles that had motorcycles later. Back in those days, we didn’t say “bikes” or “cycles.” “Motor-sickles”, that what’s we always called them. Or “motors.” And Curtis, he had a Pal P-81. And then he got a Mustang.
Curtis Terry: At that time, Leonard Brothers Outdoor Store was selling several brands of small motorscooters. One of ‘em happened to be a new model called a Pal, and my dad said “Let’s take that one right there.” And of course it was brand new, chrome fenders, leather saddlebags, two-tone windshield… 55 Chevy V-8 of the day, ‘cuz there wasn’t anything like it around. So I bought that. Dad said “Well, we’ve got to get it home. Can you ride it home?” I had never ridden anything that fast before. So, had to go down the Belknap viaduct, and it was so fast that I scooted my shoes all the way down the Belknap viaduct; I was afraid it would get away from me. And that old Pal taught me a lot. It taught me how to be a mechanic ‘cuz it broke down all the time. So finally along came another brand that Leonards took over called the Mustang. American made motorscooter, made in Glendale, California around 1949. Right in the early part of 50, we took the old Pal back to Leonard Brothers and traded it in on a Mustang. And all the kids started making the switch to Mustangs. And of course, the Mustang, it was as fast as any car on the street at that time. I mean the 50 Oldsmobile and 49 Oldsmobiles were pretty fast, but anything else, the little Mustang was just as quick. It was the thing to have for a kid, you know?
Curtis Terry: So the next thing you know, we’re riding down East First Street, me and a buddy, and something passes us that we’ve never seen before. Two guys talkin’ to each other and they just drifted right on past us, went out of sight. “What was that?!” We found out it was an English bike called a Triumph. So we got to looking around and found out there was a place over on East Lancaster that had just opened up. He was selling Indian motorcycles and Triumph motorcycles. So we beat it over there. And, man, it was just like opening the gates to…to Tomorrowland! So everybody started making the switch to Triumphs and Dalio’s was the place to be. That was where the action was, man. I didn’t know who the president of the United States was, nor the governor of Texas, probably not even the mayor of Fort Worth. But boy, I knew who Pete Dalio and Jack Wilson were!
In the mid-1950s, Ft. Worth had its own version of “Rocker”-type British bike racers, made famous by the Ace Cafe legions back in Merry Olde England. Instead of a cafe hangout, the hub for gathering in Ft. Worth was mainly Dalio’s Triumph Shop, though others might have preferred George Fasig’s Indian dealership (which later became Carlton Williamson’s shop)...Philip Fagan was definitely one of the colorful stars of the Ft. Worth racing scene... ~Bev Bowen, Cowtown cycle scene historian
Wayne Ellis: Boy, I tell you, back in those days when you had Dalio’s and Carlton’s, and George Fasig at the time was down across from the courthouse, and Marvin Bell, and then later Johnny Allen, and all these guys that just sort of came up through the ranks and became dealers; they were all just part of history, y’know? Dalio was there first as far as I remember. Dalio’s was at 1509 east Lancaster which is fifteen blocks from downtown coming down Main Street. I grew up about ten blocks right straight south of Dalio’s. Real rough neighborhood; you wouldn’t even want to go there in the daytime now, much less the nighttime. Pretty rough, a lot of crime. But it was a great neighborhood back then. A lot of my friends grew up there too. I know he was there in 48-49. And he hadn’t taken on Triumphs yet; he was Indians. Then you had Walker Indians which was over in Arlington at the corner of Cooper and Division. Anyway, they were long time friends, Pop Walker and Dalio.
Curtis Terry: Pete used to be across the street in 47 and 8 at a place looks like an old filling station now, but it was a rental place. And he had that 1509 East Lancaster specially built as a motorcycle shop. But for Indians. And he moved in there in 49. And then he had a chance to take on the Triumph franchise. So they had this big competition among the franchises, having Indian on the floor and Triumph on the floor. And so one day Vic Cox came in, he was the representative for Indian, and he said “Pete, we gotta do something here; we can’t have both these franchises. Indian’s been around a long time, y’know…” And Pete says “Why don’t you just load those Indians up and take ‘em. ‘Cuz I’m goin’ with Triumph.” And that was sad, because Pete had made his reputation racing Indian motorcycles. So that was a big leap for him; kind of like these people in the foreign car business these days.
The racing and speed success story of Triumphs in the United States was an anomaly to say the least, as historian Lindsay Brooke describes in his 1996 book Triumph Racing Motorcycles in America.
Triumph never built a great racing motorcycle, at least not by the purist’s definition. There was no pedigreed equivalent of the Norton Manx, Yamaha TZ, Harley XR-750, or MV Agusta. Yet for five straight decades, Triumphs excelled in all forms of American motorcycle sport. From 1938 to 1979, Edward Turner’s original Speed Twin and its descendents won virtually every major U.S. event worth winning, while scoring countless victories in Amateur, Novice, and Sportsman competition. And along the way, they held the outright World Motorcycle Speed Record for 15 straight years. The inherent greatness of Triumphs as racing machines was in their humble production-line heritage, their broad tuning potential, and their versatility. These were motorcycles built in quantity, to a price, and designed for general use. There wasn’t an exotic among them. Even the relatively few purpose-built racing models- the Grand Prix, the close-pitch-fin 500-cc production racers of the late 1950s, and the TT Special- were not inordinately better racing bikes than what Joe Customer could buy in any Triumph showroom and, with modest effort and expense…, convert into viable competitors…Triumphs, particularly the immortal twin-cylinder models, could truly do it all…a near ideal combination of power, balance, and durability- certainly the basis for their TT and cross-country domination for so many years. Few, if any, machines of the period could handle everything from casual trail riding to punishing 500-mile desert races, from two-up touring to National TTs, and instill so much confidence in those who rode them…Hardware was only half of Triumph’s American racing saga, however. The collective heart and soul of the legend were the talented riders and skilled tuners, many of whom are forever linked with the marque…and hundreds of local heroes. [i]
Brooke gives ample credit for the brand’s stateside success from the 1950s on to Fort Worth’s master tuner Jack “Big D” Wilson, even including Wilson’s performance tips for various Triumph models in the book’s appendix. Jack played a major role in the speed-obsessed lives of all the young kids that came to form the Dalio’s-based Iron Horse Motorcycle Club, including Philip Fagan whom Wilson would hire as an apprentice mechanic. Jack Wilson was the king of Triumph tuners and the Fort Worth kids knew they were lucky to have him. He had come to work for Pete Dalio at a decisive moment in the history of Triumph in the US. In 1951, the American Triumph scene split into two distributors, with Triumph Corporation on the East Coast and Johnson Motors on the West. Although TriCor technically had a much greater service population and better markets, JoMo’s territory included all of Texas and California. The result of the split was a whole new arena of competition within the same brand: East Coast Triumph vs. West Coast Triumph. Brooke: “Jack Wilson, who built many world-record-beating Triumph twins in Pete Dalio’s Dallas (sic), Texas, shop, tried to remain neutral in the TriCor-JoMo political battle, even though he was geographically in the latter camp. ‘I respected both sides,’ Wilson noted, ‘but JoMo and TriCor never could get along. Their people were always fighting at Daytona, to the point where they never even shared a garage.’ Wilson noted that whenever TriCor would provide him with racing parts, he was told not to mention it to JoMo.” [ii]
Curtis Terry: Before the (Triumph) Thunderbirds came out, the Speed Twins were the thing to have; that was a 500 cc, like my dad bought me. Well then they came out with a racing version of it called a Tiger 100. Oh my goodness! And Pete was gonna get one. It arrived and they assembled it and they set it back there on the showroom floor waiting for everyone to come by and see it. Like when the Ford Mustang came out. Everyone was just waiting. Good lord, it looked like…First time we’d ever seen a candy orange paintjob on a gas tank. Alloy cylinders. Alloy fenders. Racing megaphones on it. Shined within an inch of its life. Come into the showroom, walk into the shop and there it stood in all its grandeur. They picked a time for people to come and see it, y’know? Well one of those old Indian riders that hung around there, I don’t know where he got it. But he got a…a “number two deposit.” About that long. I don’t know where he got it. And he laid it on the seat of that Triumph. Oh my goodness! (laughs) Pete’s up there in the showroom and he don’t know about it. And everybody walks in and they’re goin’ into hysterics, y’know? “This thing really is a,” whatever four-letter word you wanna use. And we were just in tears. And Pete comes back there and sees that and he explodes! I guarantee you that if he had a gun and he knew who did that, he would have shot ‘em on the spot. But that branded that motorcycle. I guarantee that story lasted us a long time.
Wayne Ellis: Anyway, I was fourteen when I first would go over there on my bicycle. You know, I’d walk in and mess with the motorcycles, and Pete Dalio would tell me not to touch ‘em, “Don’t sit on ‘em!” you know? “Get off that!” And when I’d leave, the guy’d always say “Come back when you got some money!” That’s Dalio, see?
Robert Baucom: I once heard Pete tell a tire kicker, “Well, it’s closing time, Stud. You want to buy this son of a bitch or do you want to talk about it?” Said tire kicker went to his car and got his check book.
Curtis Terry: Pete was kind of a curmudgeon. And Pearl was his enforcer, his wife. And if they didn’t like you, you were not welcome. And they liked me a lot because Daddy was constantly buying a motorcycle from ‘em for me, or parts. My daddy was a prince of a guy, y’know? And Pete loved to dig you. He loved satire. Big time. Oh, he loved it; if he could get something on you, man, you were done for. And one day I showed up over at Dalio’s about 54; I had just got married and bought that new AJS from Carlton, and I walked in: “Oooh…You’re one of Carlton’s boys now? Well you don’t need to be comin’ around here, you little blankety-blank,” you know what I mean? So I said, “Okay you old dago; I don’t have to deal with you.” He picked up a carbureator and acted like he was gonna throw it at me and I told him “Well, if you miss, you’re gonna break out this plate glass window!” So for a while we weren’t on the best of terms around there.
And during the time he didn’t like me, it was wintertime and cold, golly was it cold. And I was working for Western Union on my Mustang, And they would send you out ten or fifteen miles on your Mustang to TCU to deliver a telegram, ice and snow on the ground. That’s how I learned to ride, slidin’ and getting’ back up on it. Pete had in his shop, they’d taken some of that blue tubing they used to use to funnel stuff out through the roof, and they’d welded sections of it up like a figure S, put a gas hose in the end of it, and that thing would warm the shop up, man. The guys would come from outdoors into Pete’s to warm up, and Pete was proud of that stove. Well, me and a fellow named Mitchell Miner, we concocted something to interrupt that. So we went down to the corner where the old hang-out drugstore was, and all the winos hung out; it was a story in its own. And we bought about six Almond Joys, Mounds. So we slipped over to Pete’s and we’re over by the stove warming our hands and everything, and when no one was lookin,’ we tore up all those Mounds and dropped ‘em in the flu of that furnace. And here they go right on down and they start cookin’. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever smelt chocolate candy burning or not. The smell is terrible! But what’s really bad is the black smoke it gives off. In about five minutes, that place started smelling so sickening that you couldn’t stand it and in another five minutes from about the waist up, you couldn’t tell who you were talkin’ to. It was solid black in that shop from the waist up. And Pete pegged us ‘cuz we were sittin’ up there in the showroom waitin’ for it to happen, you know? He started screaming; they opened all the windows, all the doors, had to shut the whole place down. And it must have been two, three days before they got that sick sweet smell out of there. We didn’t go round there for quite a while, I must say. Because we had a new set of names.
Robert Baucom: Then you had all the young guys like Jimmy Jay and Jess Thomas needling the “old folks,” getting under Pete’s skin every chance they had and loving it. Pete was a long, lanky guy with a long dark face like a death’s head. He had this way of talking with his hand on his hip, like a gay, and he would kind of chop his other hand at you when he talked and repeatedly punctuated his discourse with “Stud.” He called everybody Stud. Tom Ryan mimicked him once until Pete looked at him and asked, “Are you trying to mock me, Stud?” Fagan tried to pull a few jokes on him also.
Jimmy Jay: He was so much fun to pick on. And Jack (Wilson) wasn’t much better: “Cracker ass kids!” I can remember they got the dyno. Now the dyno’s called a water brake and you have to have a source of water. And so they had the dyno shack; it was sitting right outside the back door; they built a roof on it in order to get back there and put those motorcycles on it and see how much horsepower they’d make. Well it was getting to be wintertime and Pete says “Jack, that 55 gallon tank, the drum, that son of a bitch is gonna freeze up some night. We need to put some antifreeze in there so it don’t.” Jack said “That’s a good idea, Pete. But first you gotta take some water out, you know, so that there’ll be room.” Anyway, Jack took the plug out in the back that ran into the alley. And Jack must have gone and bought fifty gallons of antifreeze, I don’t know how many gallons, but he poured them all in the tank. And I walked in the back door and said “Jack, what’s all that green shit runnin’ down the alley?” (laughs). And he’s all “Goddamn!” runnin’ back there to shut it off. Stuff like that was happenin’ everyday.
Jess Thomas: You didn’t get close to Dalio, he was really…I think his dad was a first generation immigrant from Italy, you know, and Dalio had this kind of stand-offish thing…It wasn’t just about money or anything like that; he was just really guarded about his feelings. It kind of came out because he made fun of all of us ‘cuz we were kids hanging on him. He was at least thirty years older than all of us. He was in his fifties when I started hanging around the shop. And Jack was in his late twenties. He moved up from Waco, I think, or one of those little towns down around Waco, and went to work for Pete. It was a really amazing relationship. Jack brought in a lot of customers because of his talent and ability. All the guys from the air base were steady customers and spent a lot of money there.
In competition, the Cub was the dominant lightweight of its era. It won every conceivable form of motorcycle sport- cross-country (Catalina GP and Big Bear Run), endures (500-mile Jack Pine), road races (Daytona, Laconia, and elsewhere), and scrambles. Enclosed in a P-38 aircraft belly-tank shell, the Cub even set speed records at Bonneville salt flats! The Cub truly did it all for a decade…Jack Wilson turned Cubs into mid-13-second, 100-mile-per-hour drag-strip demons.[xv] ~Triumph Racing Motorcycles in America
Curtis Terry: So when I hit (Dalio’s), I got there before Jack Wilson did. ‘Cuz Jack was comin’ up from Waco; he had just gotten out of the service and was workin’ for Roy Stone down there. Roy was a big Mustang dealer down in Waco. He was a big seller. And then he had AJS, and Matchless, and Indian. And Jack was working for him. He had just come out of the military, and he had just met Katie; they were going together, and they would ride up here on the weekends. Because this was where all the action was, all the racing and everything. And so when Roy said things were looking bad, Jack thought he’d come up here and interview with Pete. Roy was just a small operation and Pete’s was where the action was, so he come up here and went to work. I first met Jack Wilson in 1950 when I’d take my Mustang over there when Triumphs were first coming in and I’d say “Jack, what can you do to make this Mustang faster?” And Jack took that Mustang down, big pistons, big porch, big carburetor, exhaust system and all that, mill cylinder head. Boy, that old Mustang was dynamite! I was the fastest kid in town on a Mustang for a little while (laughs). Just before that, they’d come out with a smaller version of the Triumph called a Tiger Cub. Well, by the time Jack Wilson got through with ‘em, hottin’ ‘em up, doing everything he could to ‘em, Mustangs were dead meat. Everybody wanted a Tiger Cub. I was tall enough at that time, just barely sixteen, that Dad said “Well, that’ll be an intermediate step for you; why don’t we just go ahead and get this bigger one.” Oh my goodness! Talk about a rocket ship.
Jess Thomas: I bought my Tiger Cub and started racing scrambles about 54…No, 55, basically between junior high and high school. Bob Stoker was the main guy. He was a few years older than I was. To me, he had the most natural ability of any of the guys that raced for Pete and Jack.
Curtis Terry: Stoker, I got him goin’ on bikes when he moved across the street from me. He went on to be Jack Wilson’s number one rider. I taught the guy to ride a motorcycle and he was so much better than me that I had to go home, y’know? He followed Jack everywhere and rode all Jack’s bikes in the races.
Wayne Ellis: Going back to when I had a Harley 125, I won my first field meet in 1952 and Curtis was my main competition on his Mustang. It was a field meet put on at the old Riverside Race Track, which became the Meadowbrook Drive-in, at Riverside and Lancaster. Dalio was putting it on, Jack Wilson was running it. And so Curtis, in the first or second event, busted his foot peg and injured himself so bad he had to have a kidney removed. I won the field meet. And then Dalio didn’t wanna give me the trophy. It took him like three or four months of me going by on a regular basis; he wouldn’t give it to me. “I don’t know where it is, I don’t know where it is.” Jack Wilson heard me one time getting loud, and he comes out of the back, you know: “What’s going on?” I said, “Well, hell, I’m tryin’ to get my trophy; the one I won one here way back in January.” He looked at Pete and said, “Hell, Pete, give the boy his trophy!” And Pete had it way down under the case hidden and he gave me that trophy (laughs). And I had gotten to know Jack at that field meet. He was such a great guy. Just the way he looked, everything, you know? There was just so many great things about Jack Wilson, I can’t say enough.
Jimmy Jay: BSA came out with a little 250 cc motorcycle and Triumph only had a little 200 cc. And there was a period when Jack quit Pete and worked for Carlton next door. And that was just animosity, because Jack was Dalio’s.
Charles Campbell: I can tell you another story about Jack Wilson. He got mad at Dalio and went over to Carlton Williamson’s BSA shop, which was right next door. Triumph was his thing, but when him and Dalio had that little falling out, he built a BSA over there. We had this hot job we’d been running on nitro, you know. Jack had built up a BSA over there. Kenneth Neistal, a good friend you know, wasn’t close like Fagan and myself, but a good buddy of the Fagans (I wouldn’t know him if I seen him today; Jerry looks about the same). He was a natural on dirt, the guy could do anything on dirt on motorcycles. But he was gonna ride the BSA and I was totally confident. I went to the drag strip on that Triumph with full confidence. We wrapped those things as tight as they’d go, and I can’t even remember what drag strip it was; all I remember is I got a good start and I remember hearing this scream. Neistal was speed shifting the thing and I see this terrified look and he passed me with the thing nearly straight up! It was on nitro see, and he outrun me as far as from here to that window over there, you know, on a BSA. And that’s unheard of! When Neistal come around me, I thought Holy Moses. That’s when I really knew Jack Wilson knew what he was doing. Make a BSA run like a Triumph. But he was a genius with the motors. When I knew he was a genius is when he did what he did with that BSA. You know BSA isn’t even in the same league as a Triumph. Not even close. Jack Wilson built that thing. That shook Dalio; he had (Wilson) back within a week.
Jimmy Jay: The thing about Jack is, your motorcycle might beat his occasionally. But on the average, you’re not going to. And Jack was kind of like Winston Churchill; he wouldn’t admit defeat. There was a reason why. And he did so much, because Jack had no formal education at all. He learned everything by trial and error. When things worked, he couldn’t tell you why they worked. All the stuff we study today and know today, he was learning by hit or miss. Of course, Pete did come with the money.
Wayne Ellis: Jack Wilson is the cement for it all. I don’t care if it’s a BSA, if it’s a Triumph or a Norton. All the English bikes. That was the thing. He was a big cheerleader, supporter, the number one mechanic, the guru, the guy who…I mean, he knew what he was talkin’ about when it comes to English motorcycles. Especially Triumphs. And he put Triumph on the map of course, along with Johnny Allen and Stormy Mangham. You can go almost anywhere in the world, even if it’s a Harley event, even if it’s a Jap bike...If it’s motorcycles, and especially English motorcycles, if you mention Jack Wilson: “Oh, Jack Wilson? You knew Jack Wilson?” It’s unbelievable; it’s just like he’s God. And he didn’t do anything to promote himself. He just was him. Jack was just Jack Wilson, just a good ol’ boy, a country boy, y’know?
Jimmy Jay: And Pete was jealous if you want to know the truth. Pete was just jealous of all the notoriety. Because it was Jack that they took to England when they took the Streamliner over there. They interviewed him and so forth, put it in the museum.
Jess Thomas: Dalio kind of quit racing before he got any good at it. He was in a few nationals and things like that, but Jack, his name was the one that was connected to the fast motorcycles and performance. So he’s the one who got all the glory. And a lot of it was actually after he left Dalio.
Curtis Terry: See, Jack Wilson was our hero. He was four or five years older than us and he did all our work. We’d save and scrimp all week then go over to Dalio’s and have Jack Wilson put a set of flat tappets in our Triumph so we’d be five miles an hour faster. Or buy a big carburetor for it. Not to hurt anyone’s feelings, but Jack Wilson literally made Pete Dalio’s business. He really did. Pete was a name; he had a reputation. And Pete had the building and the business and the funding. And that was basically it. Jack was where it was at. He was an experimenter, a competitor, a perfectionist…Everything you wanted to be when you grew up. Boy, I wanted to be like Jack Wilson. He was our hero, man. And over the years, his innovations literally put Triumph in business. And he got the Bonneville named after him. Because as you know, he took it to Bonneville and set records with the Streamliner and everything. So he’s Mr. Bonneville now. He was where it was at all along the countryside. Innovations like making crank shafts out of solid billet, and stroking engines, and burning nitro, all these kind of things; my goodness! He was Einstein to us, y’know? Us kids, we barely knew where to change the oil on one.
Wayne Ellis: Wilson called me "Knothead." Until I started winning at Caddo, then he changed it to "Champ."
Curtis Terry: Jack couldn’t stand idiots. And Jack had a nickname for everybody. You know, everybody was “Lightnin’” or somethin’ worse, y’know? I don’t know what mine was; it was probably something pretty bad. He either liked you or he didn’t like you, or he’d tolerate you. But if you were one of his guys, you got the fastest stuff. And you had to earn his respect. You did.
Some bikes attained legendary status, with names like “The Black Widow” and Wayne Ellis’ unbeatable “Dirty Bird.” But Jack Wilson’s ever-evolving pet project, “The Duke” was the most coveted machine of all, with only the most respected riders allowed by Jack to grace its leather throne.
Jess Thomas: Both Philip and I rode this machine (The Duke) fairly often. Out at the road races in the morning and out at the drag strips.
Jimmy Jay: Yeah, Philip got to ride it once or twice.
Curtis Terry: Oh my gosh, it was the one to beat. This was a product of Jack’s innovation. It certainly was, and I mean nobody could beat it. Jack learned to stroke ‘em and he learned to burn fuel. And that was one of the things he pioneered was fuel burners.
Wayne Ellis: I rode The Duke. Man that thing would move…
Jimmy Jay: The trick thing about The Duke, it was the engine. The flywheels were the secret of the thing. There were three sets of flywheels built that were sponsored by Johnson Motors. They were solid billet; they weren’t cast and they made all the difference. And your motorcycle became not a 650 or a forty incher, they became a 50 incher. That was a big secret for years. Nobody ever really beat it. When the thing finally blew up years later when Jess Thomas was riding it out at Green Valley, Jessie was ridin’ that night and they were runnin’ it on fuel and I’ve never seen a motorcycle blow up like this. The entire front end of the motorcycle just hand-grenaded; half the cylinder was just blown out the front. And Pete arrived on the scene, didn’t know what was goin’ on, and he run up to Jack and said “Jack, how’s it runnin’?” Jack was so disgusted and devastated that this had happened that he just pointed at it. “Look, Pete!” and the front cylinder was just all gone. Pete said, “Who was ridin’ it?” “Jessie.” “Well, that figures; that old jinx little son of a bitch!” (laughs) It was always someone else’s fault.
Charles Campbell: This was 55, about the time Harley Sportsters came out. They pulled this motor out of The Duke, this is one of those lay-down dragsters, see? They pulled this motor out, put it in a Full Dress Triumph. Upright handlebars, you know, the ol’ big headlight and shell on it? In other words, brand new. Went out to Yellow Belly drag strip, over in Dallas, this side of Dallas, and that’s the first time I ever rode nitro. And you imagine this dragster motor in a full dress. And Dalio said, “Go back there and warp it a couple of times,” and I went back there in low gear and I remember hitting it and it just whooompp! I was just terrified. He said, “Get on the starting line, put it in second and do not dare use low gear.” And I was so scared; that Harley’s over there, you know. This feeling of relief, when you drop the hammer on it, it just went vvrrrrrrrrrrrrr! It was easier to handle than gasoline because it was just so powerful. Dalio was smart; Jack Wilson built the motors.
Curtis Terry: It was the literally the activity center of the state. The innovation, the beginning of Triumph. You go out on the weekend, watch the races; the English bikes were winning everything! Pete Dalio’s name was big in racing; Pete was a big time racer. And all the racing activities, the dirt track, the half-miles, the Peorias, Santa Fe, all the big ones. Pete had this big truck and he took his Indian racers all around, then he started takin’ Triumphs all around. And so it was the beginning of all this.
About six months later, they came out with a model called the Thunderbird and it was beautiful. Predecessor to the T-110 that came out in about 50 or 51. They were the hottest thing on the street. Well, I couldn’t afford one of them, but Dad said “Okay, I’ll tell you what….” This fella by the name of Marvin Bell that hung around Pete’s had a Speed Twin that he’d souped all up. I didn’t know anything about modifying or anything like that, but Dad went ahead and bought it for me. Dad was always good enough to me to keep me with the latest thing. Boy, it was fast as heck and of course I probably weighed about 98 pounds at the time, so it was competitive for a long time. But everybody started going to those Speed Twins, you know.
You know back then, there weren’t a lot of cars or a lot of people, there wasn’t a lot of television and all these other things. So it was the good times. You know, no crime. No drugs. We’d go downtown to the movies and park our fancy Triumphs out front, don’t lock ‘em or anything. Come back out after the movie was over and they’d still be there. With one exception. One guy’s was just too nice and it had to go! (laughs) Poor old Bob Stoker had the nicest bike in town and somebody stole it. We started lockin’ ‘em after that.
Bob Stoker: My first cycle was a Harley 125, then I had a Matchless, a Pal, then a Mustang. We had a Mustang motorcycle club over at Leonards Brothers Department Store; they let us meet in their parking lot. Then I graduated to Triumphs. Right before the British bikes came in, it was pretty much just Harleys and Indians. Then, Harleys were taboo. It was real clannish. And not just English or American. If you were British bike, you were either BSA, Triumph, Norton…There was competition galore.
Wayne Ellis: Back in the old days, when they only had Triumph, some BSAs and Nortons and Vincents and Harley Davidsons; anybody that rode a Harley was an enemy. Anybody that rode a Triumph, Norton, Vincent, BSA, they all knew each other but they did have divisions. Like the BSAs and Triumphs were always battling each other. Of course, there weren’t any Jap bikes then. In 55, 56, something like that, Pete (Dalio) took on Honda to compete, when they first hit the United States.
Jess Thomas: A lot of guys had Harleys and American bikes in different classes and stuff. But the smaller English engines were in different classes and they were faster than the Harleys. We made fun of Harleys unmercifully. Turned out one of the Harley tuner guys, one of the guys developing fast Harleys over in Dallas, got to be real good friends with us, and he went with us one year to Bonneville as a crew member. Jack (Wilson) was always impressed because he could take a cam shaft and modify it on the bench grinder, stick it back in the engine, and keep fiddling with it till it worked. But we didn’t have much to do with Harleys or the Dallas shops.
Curtis Terry: Marvin Bell at that time was working for Worth Food Market as a butcher. Later on, he did get into the bike business. He was riding Triumphs, you see, and all of a sudden BSAs started comin’ in. So Marvin had a chance to take on a BSA franchise. So he quit Worth Food Market, went out on Belknap midways out by Haltom City, opened up a shop and started selling BSA. And of course that began a friendly relationship, a competitive relationship, between Marvin and Pete. You know, always trying to outrun each other, and then of course, the competition began. And we had this place downtown on Commerce Street, a Harley shop called Helmcamp’s. And they were the scourge. About the 15, 1600 block of Commerce, and that’s where all the Harley guys hung out, and all the motor cops hung out. So if you didn’t ride a Harley, you were a sitting duck as far as the police were concerned. Total harassment, you know? And always the racing part of it, y’know, and as the years went on it just got more intense.
Jess Thomas: Marvin Bell was a long-time BSA dealer. Philip was actually with Marvin for quite a long time as I remember. Actually, after he sold out, (Bell) was involved with Fasig and Norton, at least for (Philip’s 1956 speed record at Bonneville).
Carlton Williamson: See, (Philip) was Marvin’s boy when I came to the scene. And Marvin was a nice, polite, genteel guy.
Curtis Terry: Carlton was living in Corsicana, he was probably fifteen or sixteen at the time. His father had passed away and he was living with his mother. And his mother had bought him a Mustang and he had to ride it to Waco to get it worked on. And that’s where he met Jack Wilson, as a mechanic. And so when Jack moved up here, Carlton naturally came up and discovered the motorcycle business here. Got all excited about it. And we would double date; I guess I knew Carlton before anybody did. He stayed over at one of our good friend’s house over in Haltom City, one of the group, and we all ran around together. So he went back home and told his mother “I want to get in the motorcycle business.” So he bought out Roy Stone’s inventory in Waco, which consisted of Mustang parts, AJS, and Norton parts and the whole motorcycle inventory, and he moved it up here and moved out on Belknap next door to Marvin Bell. And then shortly after, he bought out George Fasig’s inventory, Norton, Vincent, and a bunch of used stuff, and moved it out there. In ’54, when Helen and I were married I had a $600 AJS that I bought from Carlton.
Carlton Williamson: Well, back in those days, it was early in the motorcycle business. I moved up here March 8, 1954. I was working for Fasig as a mechanic after school and on Saturdays for twenty dollars a week, loving what I was doing. Absolutely loved it. I found out he wanted to sell out, and I called my mother and said “How much money you got?” and she said about $3000, and I said, “Well I wanna borrow it to buy this motorcycle business.” She thought I was crazy, but we went down to the bank and pulled out all the money. But I still needed five hundred more, so I sold my little Chevrolet for five hundred. I was seventeen years old when I went into the business. And man, I took off runnin’. It was unbelievable. And I think Fagan came along the first year, something like that. I remember he rode a little one lung next door, a little single cylinder BSA, and was hangin’ around. And Fagan came into my life and out, into my life and out.
Wayne Ellis: As far as the other dealerships, Carlton moved in next door (to Dalio’s); he had BSA. When he first came from Corsicana, he was 17 years old. And he bought George Fasig’s shop, not the dealership. You can buy a shop, a repair shop, you know, parts, where you can work on ‘em. Until you’re authorized, and of course, he was too young to get a dealership. A few years later, he was still a kid, but he had his “disabilities” removed, as they call it, by a friend who was a lawyer so he was able to get a dealership. And that helped him to get started with the BSAs and everything. Anyway, Carlton, he was on Belknap when he first bought George Fasig. And that was his first dealership but I don’t remember how long he stayed out there. I don’t remember how I met him; might have just ridden by and seen his shop. But we started double-dating. I don’t remember if he actually had a Vincent dealership or if he just had Vincents. Because he had a Vincent drag bike, which was real good. You know, Black Shadow, Black Lightning…
Charles Campbell: That Vincent Black Shadow we’d ride, that thing was bored and stroked. It was sixty-one cubic inches, that was gigantic back then. They bored and stroked it and it was eighty and some odd cubic inches. You’re talking about three times the size… Imagine how fast that thing would go, and me and Fagan both rode that thing.
Robert Baucom: Carlton at 18 was awed by Dalio with his self assured, arrogant ways. Pete was always insulting and putting down “the Kid”. One time Pete decided they were going to put one over on Carlton. Pete secretly had Jack Wilson unpack a new Triumph T110. Jack pulled the head and jug, put in higher compression pistons and cleaned up the ports on the head. They then packed it back up and it looked untouched. Pete then went to Carlton and said, “You been blowing about how fast a BSA is. Let’s just take a couple of new ones out of the crate and run them top end.” Of course it sucked Carlton’s scooter up the tail pipe.
Curtis Terry: I remember one we pulled on old Carlton one day. We were in the shop on East Lancaster, and they had these three stalls out the side door toward Carlton’s building where we did our make-readies and our paintjobs and everything. Hot summer day and we had this kid Pete Gibbs who hung around the shop; he was a doctor’s son. He said, “Can I use y’all’s welder?” He had a race bike he was workin’ on, y’know. “Okay.” He didn’t know a lot about it, but Baucom was with us and he said “Ah, he’ll be alright.” So he’s out there welding away and the hose breaks. And he turns around to see what it is and it ignites a cloud of gas. Booooom! And it blows a bunch of crap out of that end stall and Baucom runs out there to me and says “Oh my God, Gibbs is dead!” Gibbs comes staggerin’ outta there, y’know; we run over there and he falls down on the ground. “Oh my God, we killed Dr. Gibbs’ son, my God…” But he gets up and we shut everything down and we’re thinking Thank God, we escaped it. We look up the street at the corner of Carlton’s building and there’s four guys peering around the corner seeing what’s goin’ on, Carlton’s workers, y’know, and they’re over there laughin’. So what? We made a big fool out of ourselves to everybody. Well that wasn’t the end of it. Damn Carlton had called the fire department! They knew there weren’t no fire; they just wanted to humiliate us. So here comes the fire department down East Lancaster just a-roarin’ and we’re thinking this is gonna be on the news, we’re gonna be humiliated. What to do? So we all run out to the curb, and when the fire truck pulls up, we motion ‘em next door to Carlton’s! (laughs) So they all go runnin’ inside Carlton’s with their hoses and hatchets hollerin’ “Where’s the fire?!” Now we’re peerin’ around the building at Carlton and laughin’! We just lived to one-up the last joke. It was just mayhem around that place all the time.
Jimmy Jay: Of course by this time, Carlton’s shop was next door. Carlton was an Indian dealer, and Indian actually ceased to exist as a manufacturer. But a guy named Floyd Clymer started importing motorcycles under the Indian name. They really weren’t Indians. But one of ‘em was a Norton, which was a very famous marquee. Then George Fasig got the Nortons. Fasig at one time was out on East Lancaster. Then he was downtown right across the street from the courthouse, on the bluff there.
Jess Thomas: And George Fasig was kind of desperate to break into the business. And George really wasn’t in business all that long; he didn’t make a go of it like Dalio and Marvin Bell did. But he had Norton and Mako and Zundapp. He was basically of German extraction, so he liked the German motorcycles. I don’t know how he got connected with Norton, but that was his money-maker.
Curtis Terry: Right over the North Main bridge was a place called George Fasig’s Motorcycle Sales. I don’t know where George came from. But he was kind of an unusual fellow to say the least. You had to watch him. Old Smilin’ George, But he took on Vincent and Norton and I’m not sure if he had AJS or anything else. And that’s where I met Philip.
Wayne Ellis: I always liked George Fasig. He tried to recruit me to ride Norton. He said, “Boy, you and Philip would just be real good,” y’know? And I’d go by and see him up by the courthouse, 214 North Commerce. And Marvin Bell moved into his spot later and became a BSA dealer and repair, or he built them. And he was a great guy.
Jimmy Jay: So Fasig was the Norton dealer and Frank Askew was his tuner. And Frank was a real nice guy; he was one of the few grown-ups that would tolerate us kids. The others would just tolerate us so long.
Jess Thomas: Frank Askew, he was the mechanic for George Fasig. He went to all the dealer schools and stuff like that. He was a regular at our weekly poker games at Dalio’s. And George…I don’t know what his deal was. He’d lose a bunch of money, throw it in the pot and just laugh uproariously. Carrying on like he didn’t care if he lost a hundred bucks. Which was a lot of money in those days.
Robert Baucom: There was always lots of betting going on between Pete, George, and Carlton. Late night races at Saginaw, a small town north of Fort Worth. Lots of funny games, cheating and stuff. Pete was a gambling fanatic. He had a sign in the shop that said “I’ll run a mile or more for a dollar or more. Call collect. WB Dalio. ” Pete helped to put Fasig out of business in their poker games.
Jimmy Jay: Oh God, everyday it was…It was like Cannery Row or something. There was something everyday that somebody was trying to con somebody out of or whatever.
Curtis Terry: It got to the point in school…My wife says “Those motorcycles ruined your education, didn’t they?” Because I’d look out the window and look at my motorcycle. And I wouldn’t hear the teacher. I couldn’t wait to get out and beat it to Dalio’s.
Wayne Ellis: All the guys to me were just like brothers. Even though we all at one time were fierce competitors. Some of us didn’t even want to associate with each other. We were all trying to get at each other. But I said, “Get over it. Get over it. We’re all in this business to enjoy motorcycles and enjoy each other.” And to conserve the motorcycle history. And me and Curtis, that’s our goal.
Jimmy Jay: Man, it would take John Steinbeck to tell the story of that era! I wouldn’t trade anything for it. In fact, I feel sorry for kids today that don’t have the passion for stuff that we had. That box is a wonderful thing that we have. But you know, they don’t use their imaginations.
Bob Stoker: We were a bunch of crazy kids. We were so young we didn’t even realize how much fun we were having! And there was no drugs in our crowd; maybe it was before all that was really around. It was like a three-ring circus all the time. Something always going on. It had to be the best time and place to be young in history. Grand times…
Curtis Terry: They had a club called the Iron Horse Motorcycle Club. The Iron Horse Club was formed, actually, before the Triumph situation even. Then ultimately it grew and they built that clubhouse upstairs and periodically they would have meetings up there and go for rides on the weekends. Pete had it built for the club that they formed, It was a lot of camaraderie.
Jess Thomas: I wasn’t involved in the “leadership” or anything, but basically it was just Dalio’s customers. They constructed a clubhouse upstairs at Dalio’s. He used to have a sort of parts junkyard upstairs, you know, he’d put old disassembled motorcycles up there and slowly sell off parts or use ‘em or whatever. And he ended up concentrating all that and putting them in a storage room or something. And they actually built the clubroom upstairs, all the volunteers. They had a pinball machine. And mainly a card table! (laughs).
Jimmy Jay: It was a storeroom for years. Then the Iron Horse wanted to have a clubhouse so the guys themselves built a clubhouse upstairs. And they’d have big poker games there every Saturday night up there. And when I say poker games, they would end about 8:00 on Sunday morning; they went wide open all night. All night. So many of those people are gone now; a few of ‘em are around.
Wayne Ellis: I didn’t get in on those card games and all that other stuff going on up there. You know, Bill Coleson built that clubhouse. Him and Jack Beabout, he was an Air Force guy, a tailgunner on a B-36. But I didn’t spend a lot of time hanging out there. Whenever I wasn’t competing on the weekends, I was home ‘cuz I got married in ‘55.
Jimmy Jay: Everyday it was like “Where ya goin’?” “To the motorcycle shop.” “What do you down there?” “We just…go the motorcycle shop!” I mean you had to be there or you’d miss something. We’d have dirt drags down the back alley. From the east end of the alley to the back door was only probably sixty, seventy yards. And they’d bet as high as fifty dollars who could get to the back door the fastest. But this would upset the negroes that lived right behind it. So after a hard day of drag racing back there and just raising hell, sometimes our back windows would be gone.
Curtis Terry: So may funny stories and so many monkey shines. Thing about Dalio’s, there was always some kind of mischief going on, some kind of race goin’ on. “Sunday morning we’re gonna go to Saginaw and we’re gonna race the Harley shop for a hundred dollars.” Or “We’re gonna go to Caddo Mills and we’re gonna race these other guys with our Triumphs against ‘em.” Always some kinda competitive spirit. And there was always a card game goin’ on upstairs, or a dice game goin’ on in the back of the shop. They loved to play jokes on each other. Firecrackers were everywhere. You just never knew…That’s why we all went over there, because of the monkey business! And we would play stuff on the other dealers. The motorcycle business and the money it provided was secondary. It was a tool to provide us with the greatest times of your life!
Jimmy Jay: For one thing there were the guys who had the big bikes and the guys who had the little Tiger Cubs, 200 cc. And Philip had a big motorcycle so he kind of ran with the older guys. But I’d see him down at the shop. His first big motorcycle, he had a big 40 incher, 150 cc’s, a BSA that he’d bought from Carlton. Philip was a very likable, good-lookin’ kid. Good lookin’. There were the guys like Philip, Jesse, myself and a few others and then there were the older guys, they had wives and so forth, and we were all pre-that. We always called all them the old guys.
Bob Stoker: Guys like Philip, Jimmy, and Charlie were kind of the younger guys. Philip was a real clean-looking, nice-looking boy. He and Charlie Campbell raced all the time. They would race anybody! And they were always together; kind of joined at the hip.
Charles Campbell: I think I met him over at Dalio’s (motorcycle shop). I don’t know; I was fifteen, something like that. May have been fourteen. Fact I think I was fourteen because wasn’t Philip a year or two older than me? We were already riding those old drag motors at a fourteen, fifteen years old. Sixteen, we were in high gear.
Curtis Terry: I met Philip’s mother long before I met Philip. I was going to a doctor; I had hurt my knee pretty bad, and come to find out this doctor’s nurse’s name was Una Fagan. I didn’t have any tie-in at the time ‘cuz I hadn’t met Philip. So anyway, he started riding Fasig’s race bikes for him. We got to hangin’ around and I’d go by old George’s place every once in a while, and Philip would show up at the Triumph shop on something ever once in a while, just one of the young fellers comin’ around there. We’d see him at Pete’s coming and going. And he hung around Carlton’s shop and rode some of his bikes. He was always reaching, always trying to find where he wanted to be. And I was married, had responsibilities, bills to pay and everything. And you just had to love the guy. If you wanted to design somebody that was good-lookin,’ absolutely not a care in the world, full of monkey business all the time, pullin’ pranks on everybody all the time, gregarious as heck…Everybody loved the guy, y’know? He was just…When you seen him coming you knew there was gonna be something funny goin’ on. He ran in a different circle of guys that were younger than we were. I got five years on him, so he was fifteen and I was twenty, I believe. So he was out there livin’ it up, him and Sonny Hill and Jess Thomas maybe, Baucom, Charlie Campbell. Wayne Ellis was his friendly rival.
Wayne Ellis: I remember him being a fierce competitor. Philip was around 15, 16, I guess it was when I first met him. He was four years younger than me, so in 53’ or 54’ when I knew he was going to the drag strip, that would have made him 16 or 17, something like that. Of course, Philip had a BSA; I guess it was a Golden Flash. Back in those days there was the 650 Golden Flash. Pretty motorcycles. During those years in the middle fifties, Philip was BSA and Norton and Triumph. Anybody that went up against Philip knew that he had competition, because he was a fierce competitor. But he seemed like a real nice guy, everybody liked him. I just remember him being a very likable guy. And a good lookin’ guy, y’know? The girls went crazy over him. He could have been a movie star. He really could. But he was kind of like me. He wasn’t really that into girls. He was busy with motorcycles. I had girls getting mad at me; one came over to my house one time and slapped me because I stood her up. “Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot I had to go to a motorcycle get-together” or something (laughs).
Charles Campbell: Oh he had several (girlfriends). And let me tell you something, you go to these meets or anything, those gals were all over Fagan. They thought he was the prettiest thing that ever walked. We couldn’t understand it, but they did. (Q: Did he ever have a serious girlfriend?) Not that I know of. How can you get serious when another one was trying to crawl all over you?
Carlton Williamson: He had a perfect smile. Such a good-lookin’ guy. But it seemed like he never liked girls. And so I wondered, what in the world is wrong with that guy? But I didn’t think anything about it then. He didn’t look sissy. Back in those days, a guy was just a guy; you didn’t think anything about it. Now, looking back, you can think all sorts of things about it.
Judith Williamson, who later married Carlton, never knew Philip personally but remembers him as “a cutie pie. Or ‘hot’ as you young people would say nowadays. And all the girls thought so.”[i] Pat Stansell, who would marry Jerry Fagan in 1962, remembers her brother-in-law’s days with the Fort Worth bike clique well. Despite their status around town as young living legends, she recalls no arrogance or posturing on the boys’ parts. “I don’t think they thought they were like ‘the coolest.’ They were just doing what they thought was the funnest. Of course, everyone else thought they were the coolest.”
Louise Albers: My mother forbade me to ever ride on his motorcycles and I honored her wishes. We went and watched motorcycle racing at a track and also some drag racing. It was just a big crowd of people and it was just… a track? I can’t recall there being a bandstand where you would sit, just people watching. But I did drag race in a car with him one time at some sort of track. He asked me to go with him in this car, he was driving it, and I did. It wasn’t just road racing like the regular kids did; it was on some sort of actual track, but I can’t recall the details. It was very exciting, but pretty frightening. I was scared to death, it was this little bitty car we raced around the track. I don’t really recall that much really about it. But I remember thinking, oh my mother would kill me if she knew I had gotten in a car like this. I was scared and excited, the emotions all ran together. I felt that I was still obeying my mom, to the letter at least. She would have thrown a fit if she knew.
Jess Thomas: While I wasn't a close friend of your Uncle Philip, I certainly remember his unique personality very clearly during our mutual motorcycle racing days. Philip Fagan was one of the more memorable characters from my youth in Fort Worth’s motorcycle milieu. I don’t really know where we met, but of course the main focus was at Dalio’s, the motorcycle shop. We were actually rivals at Bonneville. He was riding a Norton for Dalio's competitor George Fasig when he set his record. A short time after, "Fagan" (as we called him) set the record, I rode one of Dalio's Triumphs to break his mark. Your uncle was definitely a piece of work: full of himself and incredibly funny. He believed in absolutes and was forever running off in tangents. He would get completely absorbed in some ideal, and then drop it cold before it could be developed into something rewarding or tangible. [ii]
Carlton Williamson: He was always interested in racing bikes, the Vincent and all those things. And he just made himself well known. The first time I remember seein’ him, he was riding a Vincent on a drag strip. He rode that Vincent up at Gainesville. And he went to drag race with us out at Caddo Mills, out east of Dallas about thirty miles, an old abandoned airstrip. And he rode his 125 over there, but I don’t think he ever ran it but a time or two. I remember he was always antsy. He always seemed to me like he was strange. Not like the other guys, just strange. Not anything particular…He was never the same! He was always different. But I always thought the world of him. He hung around my shop for quite a while, and rode some of my bikes. Then he went over to George Fasig’s; they had a Norton over there they wanted him to ride. Then he rode it for a while against some of the Triumphs in town. And then right before he left, he got into Triumphs. So he made all three stations, BSA, Triumph, and Norton. And he made friends with everybody.
Jimmy Jay: I’ll tell you what Philip was good at. Everybody had nicknames and Philip could come up with some great ones. There were these two guys, they went to Birdville, and one was a little bitty beaver-looking kinda guy, and the other one was fat. And Philip called them the Gimp and the Gump. And it hung, it stuck to ‘em.
Jess Thomas: One of his kind of social tricks was he always had a nickname for everybody our age that we interacted with. He called Bill Burgess “Turd-gess” just to get him mad. And these two kind of short burly guys; I think they were from Convair, from the Air Force hangar, and they were kind of hanging around Dalio’s. They were kind of rough and tumble guys, and he called them the Piggy Brothers. And he’d do things like that just to kind of stir things up. He really liked to keep some social friction going in anything he was connected with. You know, he’d kind of piss people off. That thing about keeping emotions stirred up with anyone he was around, insulting them, you know? In good nature, but…stirring the pot, keeping things stirred up was what he was really good at. What he took joy in. (Philip’s brother) Jerry was kind of the same way.
I was actually a lot closer to Jerry than Philip, for we went to college together for a couple of years. For the longest time I thought that Jerry had died in a car accident, but obviously whoever told me that years ago was mistaken. Want to see your dad's face turn white? Show him this message and tell him that I'm going to tell you about all the wild shit he did when we were young. [i]
While little brother Jerry Fagan, my father, wisely lacked the sheer recklessness of his older brother and friends like Campbell and Thomas, he was himself no stranger to the art of the “run and gun.”
Jerry Fagan: I remember tearing past a cop in Riverside, Fort Worth. No telling how fast I was going, really flying. Sure enough I immediately heard the sirens. He was following me down Riverside Drive when I turned on a side street and the first house had their garage door open so I pulled inside and shut the door. . Suddenly the garage door was raised and there stood the woman who lived there. She asked if he was after me and when I said yes she told me to stay in the garage and she shut the door again. The cop was also on a motorcycle. While in the garage, I heard him come back up the street a couple of times. I stayed in the garage about 30 minutes and then thanked the lady and left.[ii]
It was not to be Jerry’s last run from the law, and later rumored escapades involved outrunning them in cars with trunkloads of beer on ice. Jess Thomas remembers cruising through a black neighborhood with Jerry in an Oldsmobile 88 and pelting hapless citizens with a barrage of water balloons. “It’s a wonder both of us are still alive.”
As with Jerry, some members of the Dalio’s crowd remember both Philip Fagan and his buddy Charlie Campbell as being a big part of the Iron Horse group, but also outside of it as well, individualists so to speak. Campbell the musical prodigy had the piano as his first love, and Philip was destined for…Well, something else, although neither he nor anyone else was sure what. Although among the most competitive riders in the group, Campbell and Fagan were often dismissed as dabblers whose minds were elsewhere. Cycling was a passion and talent for them, but also a mere stopover. Some of this sentiment might have been the result of the two youngsters’ coveted closeness to Jack Wilson and Pete Dalio, a status which all the gang sought but few managed to obtain.
Jimmy Jay: The thing about Charlie Campbell; Charlie only learned to do one thing in life but he does it well: He can play the piano. And he’s made a pretty good livin’ at it. To tell you the kinda guy Charlie is, my wife graduated from Carter Riverside close to downtown Fort Worth, East Side. And she got involved with a class reunion and everybody was under the impression that Charlie went to Carter Riverside. And he came and played for ‘em and everything; got a big ovation. Then Charlie got up and he says “I want to thank y’all but I graduated from Birdville High School!”
Curtis Terry: Charlie Campbell grew up down the street from me as a little fella, and his mother made him play piano and he couldn’t play with us in the lot behind our house. That was our baseball field, and our football field and our boxing field where all the kids hung out. But poor old Charlie had to stay home and play piano! Boy, he got good at it, but…Him and Stoker had Jack build ‘em special motorcycles. Oh my goodness! Best looking motorcycles, Triumph street bob drag jobs with everything…
Charles Campbell: Fagan told lots of jokes and stuff. And Dalio over there, watching and chewing on his cigar, and Fagan talking about, “Look at the silly ol’ son of a…” He made fun of Dalio a lot. But Dalio didn’t care; he knew he was making fun of him.
Jimmy Jay: You know what I really envied Philip is that Pete just tolerated most of us; you know, like “What do you kids want? Get outta here!” You know, we were buggin’ him. But he actually liked your uncle! He liked him; he genuinely liked Philip. And that was somethin.’ To get on Pete’s good side; that wasn’t easy.
Bob Stoker: Even Pete liked him! That was the funny thing; Pete really liked Philip and Charlie for some reason. I mean, he would ridicule everybody else, but he really accepted Philip. Charlie and Philip were both right under Pete’s wing.
Charles Campbell: Philip was really a Triumph person, but he could easily get mad at people. If he got mad at Dalio, then Dalio would get mad at him, and he’d end up over at George Fasig’s place or something for a ride, you know? He’d end up riding a Norton of all things. Fasig had Norton over there, middle of Fort Worth right off of Belknap. But Fagan always came back to the Triumph shop.
Jimmy Jay: I’ll never forget the day he rode up there…He went down to Chromer’s Ace, downtown Fort Worth, and bought a James motorcycle, which Pete didn’t sell, and he bought a tire from Pete. And Pete had announced that he was gonna come out of retirement and get in on our little short track out at Stormy Mangham’s place the following weekend. And so, he said “Pete, you know that tire you sold me?” He said “Yeah what about it Philip?” “Come out and look at it.” So Pete went out there and got down on his knees and looked at it, said “Philip, there’s nothing the matter with that tire.” And Philip says “I know there’s not Pete. I just wanted you to get used to lookin’ at it ‘cuz that’s all you’re gonna see of me on Sunday is my rear tire.” (laughs) None of us other kids would’ve had the guts to do that, but Philip did! And Pete thought it was funny. It was great. Everybody liked him.
Charles Campbell: We had all the motorcycles we needed ‘cuz we were riding a different one all the time! As soon as Jack Wilson would get through souping one up, I would be on it or Fagan would be on it.
Our 55 Triumphs arrived in the same crate, and we were the happiest… I think I was sixteen. We went over to Dalio’s, and they uncrated it, Jack Wilson put a zoomed up back fender on my Triumph you know, they customized both of them. Then Jack pulled the heads on ‘em; did a head job on it you know, valve springs and everything. Not a full house thing, but we had two fast street motors. And we were both going down Lancaster, and Fagan looked at me and said, “This oughtta be against the law for anybody to be this happy.” Boy, we were the two happiest people on the face of the earth at that time.
Bob Stoker: When they got those bikes, I remember Jack worked on both of ‘em; to make ‘em run faster. Nobody ever really said anything about it, but we all knew.
Jerry Fagan: The guy that owned the Triumph dealership sold Nortons also. (Philip) rode Triumphs a lot but he didn’t race them competitively, as far as I remember. When he’d come over I’d ride the bikes with him. We saw him quite a bit during that time, I think, when I rode motors with him. Of course he was involved with the Triumph dealership and a Norton dealership here so, he worked there part time. And that’s how he got into the racing part of it. He got in with some people and was working at the Triumph dealership part time, helping them overhaul motors and everything around the shop. And got into racing that way. I met a lot of his friends that he made while he was racing.
Jess Thomas: After Philip started hanging out at Dalio’s, Jack Wilson hired him as an apprentice. So the first thing Philip did actually was go down and buy a brand new white uniform with his name on it and all that kind of thing. Got his hair all slicked back, you know, the typical way Philip went about anything; he just overdid every aspect of it. Of course, the first thing that happened, an oil line broke and it shot grease all over him (laughs). All over his brand new white uniform. It just destroyed him; he was just sick about it for a week.
He wasn’t a natural mechanic. He was really articulate, and he was artistic. And I think the main thing that he wanted to learn from Jack was how to do the paint jobs and stuff on those custom motorcycles that Jack got so good at. I don’t know what his background was technically, but he was always trying to do things that just didn’t make sense mechanically. But he always had the nicest looking machinery and the most artistically modified stuff of any of the younger guys that did all their own work.
He worshipped Jack Wilson though; he really did. He called him the best motorcycle mechanic in the world, and all that. And I think he was serious about working for Jack for longer than any other thing I remember him getting involved with. (Q: Were they pretty close?) Yeah, they were. Jack was kind of disappointed that he didn’t have more of a mechanical knack than he did. He made Philip do all the sanding and preparation stuff for all those really fancy chrome and paint jobs that he did.
Wayne Ellis: There were BSAs, Triumphs, little Harley 125s, and Mustangs and everything. Then the competition went from field meets to drag races and to scrambles, then scrambles became enduros and you know, whatever else they call ‘em now. I remember that anytime we had any competition, drag race or field meet; or when Triumphs would meet groups of BSAs or Nortons at a restaurant or a drive-in (there were lots of drive-ins back in those days), you could bet on a fight breaking out.
My longtime friend, he grew up in my neighborhood and he rode a Triumph too, his name was Paul Wayne Howell. He was like Paul Bunyan. Even though he’s 71, 72, he’s still…His hands are like, he’s got the biggest hands I’ve ever seen and he’s still much of a man even though he’s up in years, you know? And anytime we had any sort of disagreement (and there was always a mouther goin’ on; if it wasn’t me or Philip or somebody else eggin’it on), of course our gang would egg it on and of course Paul Wayne, he never said nothing. Then if some big old guys riding BSAs, whoever their tough guy was…Back in those days the BSA guys, their toughest man that always stepped out was Don Welborn, who became an evangelist, died in a plane crash. Anyway, whenever there’d be a confrontation, all us little guys would be shoving back and forth. Then here’d come Paul Wayne, steppin’ up from the back of the crowd of the Triumph riders, and Don Welborn would square off. And we’d let them; they would settle the fight! (laughs) I never saw anyone get the better of Paul Wayne, but Don Welborn could stay with him as good as anybody. He was a tough dude, but Paul Wayne, when he hit it was like George Foreman. I’ve seen him hit people and just splatter their face, it’s just unbelievable. God…(laughs) And he was just so quiet; he wouldn’t even speak.
But Philip, he and I were talkers (laughs). We were lovers, not fighters, you know? I was a mouther and he was too. There were always lots of mouthers. And I got the reputation of, I don’t know if Dalio gave it to me or Carlton, but I was the instigator, the antagonizer. The guy who was always starting something, but I’ll start it, you finish it, you know? (laughs) ‘Cuz I had Paul Wayne over my shoulder. When we were kids, he was a giant but I could slap him around. But as I got older, there was no way I’d try to do that to him.
We had a rocket run out at Benbrook Lake, and back in those days they had just built Benbrook and the dam and everything. See, what the rocket run is; every fifteen minutes you shoot a rocket. You start off like two to five miles away and you have to find where they’re shooting the rockets from. We had a mixture of BSA and Triumph guys out there. And it was the only rocket run I was ever in and I won it! I was on a little Triumph 350 Twin; it was called a 3T. And my motor was mostly for street and I was jumping logs and everything else; there’s no telling what you’re liable to drop into or whatever. I just happened to jump over a log; it was on the edge of a little creek bed and all this brush. And the headlight went down; I almost went down in that creek bed. And I looked down into that brush and I could see someone in there. It was Curtis Terry and William Weiss shooting off rockets.
I remember after that was over with, it was so dark; it was like ten o’clock at night, probably September or later in the fall; so it was pitch dark. When you get to Bose Park out there in West Side, when everybody turns their lights out, their motors off, you cannot even see the hand in front of your face; there’s no moonlight or nothing. So there we are in a big old group shooting the breeze and laughing, nobody’s drinking, just laughing and having a good old time. I think the oldest people there were me and my brother Benny; he rode a Triumph too. And Paul Wayne, he was a couple years younger; everybody else was fifteen, sixteen. And all of a sudden here come two, maybe three carloads of young men. Not kids, we’re talking eighteen and up, know what I’m saying? There were two, three, four in each car. And when they pull up, we can’t see except what you can see by their headlights. And they get out and start milling around. They got beer bottles. And they’re mouthing, like “What’s going on here? What’s going on?” And somebody said, “Well, this is the Iron Horse Motorcycle Club.” Well, the leader of the gang is this one-armed guy with a leather jacket: “Who’s got a club? Who’s got a club around here? Somebody got a club?” And him and the other leaders are kind of leaning against the front of one of the cars. The one-arm guy is leaning against the left headlight and they’re all really smarting off. Anyway, one thing led to another and it looked like a rumble. Me and Benny recognized it. Paul Wayne; he’s standing over in the back. He always stood in the back, coming out of the woodwork, y’know? Well, my brother always carried a .25 automatic. And Benny was always 235 pound, five foot seven. You know, he carried his weight good even though he was short. So Benny pulls his .25 automatic and sticks it in this guy’s face. And that guy says, “Shoot me!” And I’m standing next to my brother saying, “Shoot that son of…,” y’know? And I’m reaching down on the ground trying to find a club, a piece of wood or a rock or something. So Benny, he raised the gun up just a little and shot, just right over his head. Pooow! Like that. And they all froze, y’know? And then Paul Wayne steps up from the back and says, “I’ll tell you what.: I’ll take this one! This one! And this one!” He knocked three of ‘em up on hood of the car, literally up onto the hood. And when they rolled off, the guy with the leather jacket, he gets up and Benny’s like “Don’t you move,” ‘cuz he’s the leader. The other guys got up and ran back, jumped in the cars, and they’re yelling “C’mon Johnny!” or whatever. “Let’s get outta here; these people are crazy!” So they load up, even one-arm guy; he’s drivin’, then one of ‘em yells, “Where’s so-and-so?” And when they put their headlights on, over on the side Stoker spotted Paul Wayne. One of the guys had hit him right on top of the head with a beer bottle. I mean really gashed his head open. Well, Paul Wayne turned around and he had him like a bear, like this, and hitting him. And he was almost dead from him choking him, but his face and head were like a…He just beat him; he was doing this to him, like that, y’know? And Stoker said “Paul Wayne’s got him and he won’t let go!” So Benny and I walk over and say “Let him go, P.W., let him go.” So when he let him go, he hit him one more time. And they had to come and get him. He couldn’t walk. Jessie Thomas was there; Stoker was there, Curtis, Jimmy Jay, the whole main base of the club back then. And I’m almost certain Philip was there that night. So, they left and we took Paul down to Harris Hospital in the old downtown Fort Worth to get sewed up in the emergency room. It was either Philip Fagan or Jessie Thomas that rode Paul Wayne’s motor, the Thunderbird, down there for him.
‘Cycle Endurance Race Captured by Brammer James Brammer of Fort Worth won the endurance race staged by the Cowtown Cycle Club Sunday morning near Benbrook. George Stewart of Dallas finished second and Leonard Dorsey of Dallas third. In afternoon drag races, Jess Thomas of Fort Worth won the small class; Carlton Williamson of Fort Worth won the 30-50 class; Philip Fagan of Fort Worth won the 40 class; and Buford Milster of St. Louis won the 74 class. [iii]
Curtis Terry: Out in Saginaw, the cops would come down and watch us run top end, maximum road racing. They’d watch and monitor the radios so they could let us know if the Highway Patrol was coming.
Robert Baucom: A select group would all go out to drag race or run top end north of Fort Worth. Just past Saginaw there was this three-mile stretch with no side roads. They’d get out there after midnight on a Saturday night, unload the bikes and run drags or a couple of miles top-end, i.e., as fast as the bikes would run. There was a lot of serious betting; $150 dollar bets which was big money back in the 50’s. Dalio would bet on anything. Fagan rode Dalio’s bike out there sometimes.
Jimmy Jay: See, there was no Interstate 45 then; there was just roads. There was no interstate highways to go that fast. And we just drove out, left about six o’clock the morning. What we termed road racing back then was for money: Who could run the fastest. There was a guard base north of Fort Worth, a National Guard base, and there was a drag strip out there. But we didn’t go to the drag strip. There’s a little town, Newark, not far from there, and they’d get out there, I mean at dawn! On Sunday morning, there wouldn’t be any traffic. And they’d just run top end. It wasn’t a drag race. They’d just say “Okay we’re gonna start here,” then decide on a point maybe like a mile away. And you were already hauling mail by then! And there was money bet for this, especially between Pete and Carlton. Who had the fastest motorcycle. I remember those. Pete was a serious gambler. Very serious.
Charles Campbell: Oh yeah, they were always wanting to out run each other. Nortons can’t outrun Triumphs you know. I remember one time, George Fasig bet me five dollars, which that was a lot of money for me, that the Norton would win the drag races out at Green Valley. Anyway, I went and collected my five dollars after that. We didn’t have any money. Actually them guys, I don’t remember any of ‘em ever tipping us or anything! We were there just to have a ride.
Curtis Terry: The thing of the day was who had the fastest motorcycle. And there was a place out past the Saginaw city limits, there was a divided highway that ran for a good mile either way. And we’d go out there at dawn and they’d bet money and see who had the fastest, Triumph or George Fasig’s Vincent. Philip was George’s rider. And he was good. So that’s how I came to know Philip.
Charles Campbell: We wasn’t considered professional motorcycle racers. Everything was illegal. We’d go out to the highway, see, this would be five thirty in the morning, just as the sun’s coming up good; this was way out on the north side of Fort Worth, way on out there. Farm market road, nice and smooth. You would come around this sweeping curve, you could go around it at a hundred miles an hour, and then there’s a good way down through there. And we’d look at each other and that’s it. We’d usually be in third gear when we’d come around that curve and then by the time you got around it you’d shift to fourth and then you relaxed and it just floated out of you into that prone position. And then all the people from the shops would gather around this gate right there, all we needed was some farmer coming out, you know?
Wayne Ellis: We always placed someone there to make sure some farmer didn’t pull a tractor across there at six o’clock in the morning.
Charles Campbell: That was the finish line; you had plenty of room to slow down. There might have been a hundred people there, you know. And easily fifty sitting down there at the finish line waiting for those things. I can imagine seeing two of them coming down through there. There’s nothing prettier… I’ve watched ol’ Fagan try one out and hear that screaming thing coming and be turning about seventy two, seventy three hundred RPM’s, him coming by like a rocket with those legs straight out on that thing. There’s nothing prettier than that.
Carlton Williamson: He was good. He was good. He was all business, no pussyfooting around. The other guys would come out and they’d joke and drink a beer or something like that, but he was always tending to business. Out near Tulsa, he was out there drag racing, and we lit him off, and goddamn, he was in a big speed wobble- “Oh shit, man! There he goes…” And sure enough, he brought it up, came back. Laughin,’ you know? I don’t know what he was tryin’ to do, lay prone on it or somethin’ like that. But he never did anything the same way, always trying something different.
Jimmy Jay: He was a very good drag racer. Very good drag racer. Good reaction time.
Jess Thomas: Well, we all went out to one of those Sunday morning road races out on, I think they called it Saginaw Highway. It was a stretch way out in the boondocks then. There was a lot of money betting on the outcome. And that morning, Philip had taken off his license plate and made up this little home-made replacement for it that said “Catch me if you can.” To me, that pretty much captures his whole outlook and way of…Of going about the interactions you get involved in with motorcycle racing. Just the whole kind of subculture of the whole thing, you know? And I thought it was great and I’ll never forget that as long as I live. “Catch me if you can.”
Charles Campbell: But me and Fagan weren’t actually running each other. We did a couple of times and that one time, I had him and he drafted around me. Just like those cars do. Old Fagan was riding something for somebody’s shop over there; it might have been Marvin Bell. I’m running against Fagan see, he’s riding one of their motors; I’m riding a Triumph., but Dalio, he says, “If you’re in front, don’t let him draft you. He can draft you!” I said, “I can handle this.” And sure enough, I’m feeling good because we’re getting right close to the finish line and raaaaaaaa! He drafted right around me. You can imagine, he’s right up behind me laid prone and he waited till we got there and it just sucked him right around. I remember that. Boy, I was p.o.’d.
Wayne Ellis: All the motorcycle dealers, everybody would bring something out. Carlton and George Fasig and Marvin Bell, Pete Dalio and you know, that’s where we’d go to road race. And I went for fun. And Philip went for fun, you know? Because we talked about it. We rode together and did a lot of stuff in a group. We competed against each other. I remember it was fun with him cause he never, and I guess I didn’t either, take anything seriously.
Jess Thomas: To me, he wasn’t a serious racer either. As far as competitive racing. I mean going out on the highway and seeing who could run a hundred and fifty and stuff like that was one thing. But he was a lot more interested in the showmanship and the social interaction of the whole thing than he was actually learning how to do the things you had to do be a real tuner or racer. As a matter of fact, Philip bounced around a lot between his life’s interests, you know? It seemed like he’d just kind of get to be serious about it and he’d lose interest and go off into something else. Yeah.
Charles Campbell: And I fell there one time, I took one of those racing motors out on the highway and got in a speed wobble. I fell at over a hundred miles an hour, just right down the middle of that thing. It mostly skinned me up, I’ve got an old helmet out there in the store room, it just shaved all the side of it off. That would have been my head and stuff! I would have been dead without that; I didn’t even have a leather jacket on or anything. it actually landed… I remember seeing the motor. It would go ppiiiiinnnnnngggggg! You couldn’t even tell what it was when they picked it up! Because it just kept on…. It hit the ground and spun like a quarter, you know? I’m sitting there… I remember after I quit sliding that thing was, I don’t know, it had to be an eighth of a mile ahead of me. It just kept on, it was like flipping a quarter.
Joe Manano, he was an old dragster guy; had quite a bit of money. He worked at Bell Helicopter, he was a big shot out there. Well, he could afford a few of his own dragsters. He had Jack Wilson build him up lay-down dragsters and stuff, you know. That’s where the handle bars are down on the forks and you’re laid out. They’re not as long as these things are today but they’re all out dragsters. Joe Manano one time, he was gonna show me and Fagan, this was out at the Forest Hill Drag strip, “Let me show y’all how this is supposed to be done.” Telling me and Fagan that, you know. Joe Manano gets on that Triumph and he rips it on. He’s not running anybody, he’s just gonna show us what drag racing is all about. Well, he went across the finish line and we didn’t see him anymore, you know. Me and Fagan finally jumped on my street motor and run down there. Here’s Joe Manano hung up in a barbed wire fence, motor over in the field. And Fagan says, “Joe your supposed to shut off as soon as you cross the finish line. Are you still gonna show us how this is done?” Fagan got over in his face: “You did a good job, Joe.” Blood running all over his face and everything. That’s one of the funniest things that ever was. At least the guy was alive. He didn’t show us anything else.
Jimmy Jay: In those days there was a dirt track out on Jacksboro Highway called the Panther City Speedway. There’s a big shopping center on it now. But Philip and Benny Smith went out there and were gonna cut some hot laps on the dirt. Benny and (Philip) traded motorcycles. Triumphs had a swinging arm just like…conventional. Whereas BSAs had the old plunger type suspension that sank a lot lower. Anyway, Benny ran hard into this corner and was leaning it over. And the plunger dug into the ground and just flipped him and flipped him and flipped him. And Benny says he can still remember Philip standing over him and sayin’ “You’re gonna have to pay for my motorcycle!” as they’re haulin’ him off in the ambulance (laughs).
I forget what they called that particular track; it’s gone now, everything’s gone…But this was gonna be your uncle’s debut into flat track racing. And when you were flat track racing in those days it was only 500 cc’s, not 650. And it was a motorcycle that was prepared for a national number, for a guy named Gene Smith, he was an older guy. But Pete was so hot on Philip that Pete said “I’m gonna give him a chance to run down there.” So he was comin’ out of a corner, and this was just during practice, and he really gave it a lot of gas. And he just rolled off the motorcycle (laughs), just rolled off of it!
Robert Baucom: Fagan was racing Dalio’s half mile racer for the first time one weekend in Houston. Somehow he managed to fall off the bike in the turn before the back straight. The bike straightened up and with the throttle stuck open ran the length of the straightaway … riderless.
Jimmy Jay: He fell off it and the amazing thing was, this was a half-mile track, which was pretty good size. And the motorcycle continued by itself down the track, into the infield, miraculously not hitting anybody.
Robert Baucom: It went up the bank at the end, hit a beam folding back the forks and throwing it upside down in the air, shedding parts all the while.
Jimmy Jay: The motorcycle ended in the pond (laughs). I can still see Jack Wilson out there; it had these exotic forks on it made out of aluminum magnesium and stuff and it just tore ‘em off the motorcycle!
Robert Baucom: Dalio told a young teenage Jess Thomas to get in the pond to retrieve the pieces. Fagan was just mussed up from falling off but wasn’t hurt. However Fagan couldn’t correct his mussed up hair to his liking, so he got on the back of a bike and rode into town to get some pomade for his hair. That really pissed Dalio off. Disgusted, he groused, “Hell he could have stayed around and learned a few things about riding a half mile. My bikes torn up and he’s going into town for pomade.”
Jimmy Jay: Well, the only thing Pete got mad about is that Philip was worried about his hair. He just went back to town to get some pomade for his hair! (laughs). That did Dalio in. Oh, it pissed him off. It was funny.
Charles Campbell: I don’t know if Fagan ever fell as fast as I did on the drag strip. I think he fell several times. Neither one of us understood traction, especially in cold weather. It’s gonna grab and those dang things gonna come right up in your face. And then we got to ride them on Nitro, and nobody ever forgets that stuff. I was scared to death the first time I ever rode on a Nitro, I don’t know how Fagan felt. When you shift, instead of it winding up it just goes whoomp, whoomp, whoomp, you know? Your mouth goes back like that. But it was fun. We thought we were in heaven all those years.
Jerry Fagan: I remember one time he fell, he was racing on the road against somebody and fell going about ninety miles an hour. It skinned him up real good but he had a leather jacket and everything so it really didn’t hurt him that bad but took a lot of skin off him.
Curtis Terry: I think his valve stem got sucked down when he was riding a Vincent. He went down at about a hundred miles an hour. Chewed him up pretty good.
The damage of one of Philip’s wipeouts is evident in a photo taken in what appears to be a hospital room. His nose and mouth are grotesquely swollen and misshapen to the point he is all but unrecognizable. Another intriguing aspect of the photo is the young man who reclines in bed with him. None of the biker pals I interviewed recognized this individual, but he clearly appears to be a close friend of Philip’s judging by the intimacy conveyed in their posing. This further conveys the notion that his life was a secret, compartmentalized and complex one, with him playing a certain role within each friendship and situation; a young man with a deep need for privacy.
Jess Thomas: I think it was after Marvin finally gave up the dealership and sold it to Carlton that George Fasig became the Norton dealer and Philip kind of took up with him. Because basically there wasn’t a spot for him at Dalio’s. It was more of an opportunity, you know? A shop can only financially afford to have one or two active supporting racers…It was an opportunity to give him an image and a sense of accomplishment.
Bob Stoker: Out at Newark, there was a mile and a half straightaway on a road going out toward Boyd. That’s where Philip drafted Ellis so bad. That was on that same Norton he took out to Bonneville.
Wayne Ellis: Pete Dalio, he told me that morning, when he starts drafting you- because Philip was good at drafting- he says when he starts drafting you … because you didn’t have any shoulder on these little two-lane roads. As a matter of fact, it just dropped off and you had this gravel here. So he says, “You just pull over to the side and let the draft just pull the dirt back in his face.” And I’m saying, “I’m not gonna do that!” So when you first turn on, it was like a half-mile stretch and you’re geared real high; you almost have to take off in second gear and by the time you get to that turn, you’re almost at the top of second gear. You know, you’re on top of your cams, you’re really revving, 85, 90 miles per hour. And then there’s a stretch for like a full mile or more, then you turn on. And that Triumph, it just accelerated on down the road, you know. We got on down there and I shifted into third and I was gone. I looked back and Philip was way back there. So I thought, I’ll just shift into fourth. I had told Jack the night before, “I need my shifter on the back axle.” Where it’s supposed to be! Jack says, “Ah, you don’t need it.” And I said, “Yeah, I think I do.” He didn’t move it. So when I raised up to shift, I had to bring my feet up, see? I had back pegs but I had to bring my feet up to the front to shift. And when I did, all that wind hit me and when it did, Philip closed the gap. And when I got into fourth, before I could get the RPM back up again, he was drafting me. I never will forget that sound: RAHR RAHR RAHR! And he went right by me there at the finish. And that was one of the very few I ever lost. My old Dirty Bird drag bike never lost a race at Caddo, you know? Anyway, Pete Dalio got mad at me; thought I threw the race. I mean he really got mad at me; wouldn’t talk to me for several days. (Q: Pete lost some money on you?) Oh yeah, a minimum of 300, 500 that particular race. That’s like 5,000 today. I told Jack, “I did everything I could do; if I hadn’t had to raise up…,” and he was like, “Oh well…” (laughs). Jack Wilson, he was the greatest guy, you know? But Pete Dalio, he didn’t have no slack for you. Especially when he had money on something.
If there was a motorized version of the great American cowboy, Johnny Allen would be it. Riding Stormy Mangham's Triumph-powered Texas "Cee-gar," these backyard speed surgeons cut down every record the well-financed NSU company team had set only a few days earlier. [i] ~Bonneville Salt Flats
The granddaddy of all Triumph streamliners is the Devil's Arrow (later nicknamed the Texas Cee-gar), built in 1954 by Fort Worth airline captain J.H. "Stormy" Mangham and Triumph tuner extraordinaire Jack Wilson…With rider Johnny Allen (a well-known Texas dirt-tracker) at the controls, the Cee-Gar went 193.3 miles per hour at the Bonneville Salt Flats in 1955…then beat the Germans with a 214.7 mile-per-hour two-way average in 1956. Because of an official snafu, the speed was not accepted by the Federation International Motorcyclists (FIM). But the AMA accepted it, giving birth to Triumph's famous Bonneville 650-cc roadburners. Triumph-powered streamliners continued to hold the ultimate motorcycle record for another 14 years. First to break the Texans' record was drag racer Bill Johnson in 1962. [ii]
~Triumph Racing Motorcycles in America
Jess Thomas: Everybody took their own trailers and pick-ups and everyone pretty much paid their own way. Except for the official guy that the shop was sponsoring at the time. There wasn’t really enough paying racing to develop a large number of professional riders; you had to drive all over the country to race. I always ask Stoker why he didn’t get more involved with professional racing than he did, and he says it was all dollars and sense. He said you could make a good living as a bricklayer and retire with a union fund, you know? He said half the guys he knew in motorcycle racing got beat up and hurt and they ended up with nothing and no way to make a living.
Even Triumph bread-and-butter riders like the legendary TriCor/East Coast champion “Little” Ed Fisher echo the Fort Worth boys’ accounts of the sponsors’ tight-fistedness when it came to national and international racing events: “[TriCor] paid my motel at Daytona- that was a big deal for us then…But I got no expense money driving down and back. The year I won Laconia I hauled TriCor’s three race bikes to New Hampshire in my pickup truck…didn’t even pay me a cent for gas.”[iii]
1956 saw the passing of Ab Jenkins, the man who had put salt flat racing and Bonneville on the international radar. With mile after mile of smooth, white unencumbered surface, the surreal dreamscape of the Bonneville Salt Flats near the Utah/Nevada border became the ultimate arena for testing and proving automotive speed around 1914, quickly displacing Daytona (still known then as Ormond Beach) as the international capital of automotive speed record-setting. Beginning in the late Forties, cycles became a presence at the Flats and by 1951 were allowed to compete against hot rods. Established in 1949 and entering its eighth year in ’56, Speed Week was held annually at the Bonneville Speedway in August and September, and the Fort Worth riders, shop owners, and mechanics became renowned for their performances there. As a collective, the Texans did extraordinarily well at Bonneville in 1956, although ironically the efforts of Jack Wilson, Johnny Allen, Jess Thomas, and the Dalio’s gang eclipsed, and in Thomas’ case erased, Philip’s new record on the Fasig/Askew Norton. From the beginning, Philip seemed fated to become a footnote at best in whatever field he devoted himself to. The big news out at Bonneville the year Philip set the new (and swiftly broken) Class C speed record was the Texas Triumph Streamliner, a collaboration between Jack Wilson and Stormy Mangham, an airline pilot for American and erstwhile aeronautical engineer who owned his own airport. Stormy also had a scramble track on his property for the Fort Worth cycle crowd and Philip often raced his various bikes there.
Robert Baucom: Stormy Mangham, Senior Pilot for American Airlines, had built a Triumph Streamliner in his hangar at his airport. Jack Wilson built an engine for it. In 1955 with Johnny Allen riding it they set the World’s Fastest Motorcycle record at the Bonneville salt flat at 190 something . The famous Bonneville was launched from the development of the Tiger 110. The Bonneville nickname came from the Bonneville Salt Flats where the modified model was timed at an amazing 214 mph in 1956.
Curtis Terry: Stormy literally built the rolling chassis and the fiberglass shelling at his hangar out at Mangham Airport. And Jack built the engines. And as Jack always said, “Stormy deserves as much credit as I ever I did.”
Bob Stoker: Jesse, Johnny, and I went with Jack out to Bonneville one year and all three of us set records. So Triumph had us all out to California. After that, I ended up pulling the Harley and Chevy Streamliners just about every time we went out to Bonneville.
Jess Thomas: Two main reasons this project succeeded. One was because of Stormy Mangham’s knowledge of aerodynamics and a couple of chemical engineers from Convair that helped us figure out how to mix and control the nitro fuel we used in the thing. There was no air intake on this thing. You’d think the engine would bake itself making all that power. The secret was you put in enough methynol. Methynol has an incredible level of evaporation and it sucks the heat out of the engine…so you don’t need a lot of cooling area around the thing. And then you put in enough nitro to get the power you need. And these guys pretty much helped us figure out how to do all that. Johnny Allen was actually the first guy who rode this thing. He set the record in 56. And we were gonna go back and see if we could do better in 58 when I rode it. I went along as a pit crew member, but I was the only one along who could a) fit in it, and b) had any experience in the thing. I tell you, that opened up a lot of opportunities for me. Holding a world speed record automatically makes people take note of your ability.
Bonneville historian “Landspeed” Louise Ann Noeth:
Another “first” came from Stormy Mangham of Smithfield, Texas, who ran his fully streamlined Triumph Texas “Cee-gar.” Unless other documentation can be found, he should be credited with being the first to use a braking parachute on a motorcycle…Also on the salt prior to the eighth running of the Speed Week shindig was the German NSU motorcycle factory team going after the mark of 190 miles per hour…Before the group got back home to Germany, their record got clobbered by the amateur group of Texans…Unlike the well-financed factory squad, the Lone Star State residents were shade tree mechanics. Powered by a naturally aspirated, 650-cc Triumph Thunderbird engine, rider Johnny Allen recorded a 214.40 miles per hour average- good for entry to the 200MPH club- the first American motorcyclist to do so. It was also the first time America had held the record since 1921. Both the AMA and the Federation Internationale Motorcycliste (FIM) officiated at the events, but a raucous scandal erupted when the FIM refused to make the runs official, even though the FIA was perfectly satisfied that the Texans had whomped the Germans. Not wanting his team to be smeared by the arrogant stink, The NSU company director penned a capitulating letter, stating his team had been beaten fairly.[xx]
Philip certainly had more than a passing interest in the Streamliner. Despite Jess Thomas’ perceptions of Philip as lacking both the talent and a sincere devotion to learning motorcycle technology, some evidence suggests otherwise; including his recruitment into various prestigious engineering programs while in the Navy. While working for Jack Wilson as a mechanic-apprentice, Philip either tried his own hand at designing a closed Streamliner-like machine or assisted Wilson in these pursuits, as evidenced by several pencil-drawn blueprints in his archives. It is even possible that he played a significant role in the modifications of the record-breaking 1956 model eventually piloted by Johnny Allen, working with Wilson and Mangham on key ideas. Furthermore, it is likely that he was actually intended to pilot the awe-inspiring machine at Bonneville before some fresh falling out with Dalio and Wilson precluded this.
Charles Campbell: Stormy Mangham built it like an airplane wing, out there at that ol’ farm. Johnny Allen drove that old Streamliner; Fagan almost got to do that. But I don’t think he ever…He didn’t ride the Streamliner did he? He was gonna go to Salt Flats. That may have been around the time they had their arguments or something, and he’d get mad at Dalio, you know? Then he rode that Norton, you know, for ol’ Fasig; he ended up on that Norton at the Salt Flats. George Fasig…George was a funny ol’ guy, kind of a heavy set and always laughing, but he was tickled to death when Fagan broke that record on a little thirty and a half cubic inch motorcycle.
Established in 1898, Norton advertised itself as “The Unapproachable” and throughout the years had carved out a daunting track record at international Tourist Trophy and Grand Prix racing events. The marquee had also established itself as a vital competitor in US speed events at least since 1941, when a Norton rider won at Daytona, followed five years later by the introduction of the brand’s speedy 1946 Manx model, named for the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy. As one historian puts it, Norton was “the first ‘foreign’ motorcycle many North American riders had to contend with- and, often, lose to.”[xxi] Throughout the latter 1940s, Norton had proven itself the British bike to beat in stateside competition; so much so that after a series of wins at Daytona, the AMA had banned the Norton Manx from further competition. Norton’s “success story” was always a double-edged sword at best. In addition to its superior product, the marquee had long developed a highly competitive race team that swept up titles throughout Europe, particularly dominating TT events, before eventually expanding into the US racing circuit. However, adding to the expenditure of the company’s WWII effort which it was still reeling from, its narrow focus on racing was a great financial strain on the company; and in addition to this obsessive and unprofitable focus on competitive innovation, Norton no doubt lost many loyal customers by exporting their new brands abroad before making them available in England, an act many proper Britons considered a personal affront. While the “Reliability” stressed in Norton’s ads since the beginning might have been beyond debate, availability was an issue that hurt the brand plenty. In 1949, Indian, itself a struggling marquee, became Norton’s stateside distributor, with the predictable loss of brand quality and identity. By 1953, an English umbrella company called Associated Motor Cycles took over Norton, AJS, Matchless and several smaller British marquees, resulting in a further loss of quality and lack of distinction among the classic brands. One result of all this was that while Triumph bided its time and built a reputation for highly reliable, high performance street bikes before launching itself in earnest in the US races after WWII, Norton’s ability to get in on the new American market was extremely limited by its focused commitment to high profile racing events in Europe. Its biggest competitor, Triumph, simply seized the opportunity.
Triumph was also wily in quickly developing its Grand Prix model as a swift response to the racing success of the Norton Manx. Touché; in 1950, the Norton Dominator, with its popular new Manx-style “featherbed” frame and twin cylinder engineering, was designed specifically to counter the faults of, and to compete with, the new speedy Triumph twins. “Built in the light of Experience,” the Dominator’s advertising campaign somewhat woefully proclaimed. The Dominator presented Norton with a new set of problems: The struggling company was losing much needed money simply because it could not keep up with the production demand for their popular new line, and BSA and Triumph both predictably stepped up to fill the void with their own featherbed designs. And while Norton had given Harley-Davidson the best runs for its money in the US scene of the Forties, Triumph had begun to overshadow both brands by the early Fifties. In popular stateside desert enduro events like Big Bear and Greenhorn, Triumph simply dominated, while Norton had managed to take Daytona in 1941, 1949, 1950, and 1951. Five years after the brand’s last big American showing, Fort Worth shopowner George Fasig and tuner Frank Askew were determined to steal back some thunder for the Norton marquee at Bonneville with the help of Philip Fagan. On August 28, Fagan rode Fasig’s Norton Model 88 (formerly known as the Featherbed Dominator) to set the official 30-50 Class C speed record at the Salt Flats, beating the record then held by fellow Fort Worth riding legend Johnny Allen.
Philip was excited to hit the big time at Bonneville and make good show in the central arena of competitive cycling. He sent a novelty postcard- a color photo of a salt flats rider making time laid out in the prone position on a Vincent with a tiny packet of salt stapled to it- home to Una and Louis; writing in small, neat script:
Dear Mom, We arrived here at Wendover on Saturday morning. There were no rooms in town, for all the hot rod boys from California had called in for reservations. We’re sleeping on some gravel pits. Jessie came up with Jack Wilson. The speed trials are starting tomorrow, so I’ll see you toward the end of the week. Love, Philip
PS: Frank and I have lost $100.00 apiece off one-armed bandits.
Philip’s Norton tuner Frank Askew adds a parenthetical addendum assuring the Shiffletts that the postscript concerning bandits is a “big joke.”
Louise Albers: He sent me some of the championship photos in Houston, really nice glossies. But I returned them after I got married.
Local Motorcyclist Makes Fastest Run BONNEVILLE SALT FLATS, Aug.29 (U.P.) A special racer powered by three engines sped across the salt flats at 234.83 miles per hour yesterday to gain top speed of the day in the national speed trials here…Class times for the day included: gas 500 cubic centimeter: 126.629 miles per hour driven by Phil Fagan of Fort Worth.[xxii]
Charles Campbell: He got that Norton; it’s a 30 ½ cubic inches, and he rode that thing at Salt Flats. Little later, Dalio pulled out a thirty cubic inch Triumph, and I think they pumped it up a little bit and messed his hundred and thirty mile. That was the fastest that they’d ever run one of those things. My lawnmower’s almost that big, you know my riding lawn mower. Then, your Triumph was just forty cubic inches. They’d bore them and then they’d be forty five cubic inches. That Norton was a thirty and a half cubic inches. What am I trying to say? In other words, a record. It was a record.
(Q: Was he pretty proud?) He seemed to be, but it wasn’t that big a deal to him. I remember taking that magazine with his picture, I showed it to one of his teachers. He says, “I didn’t know he was completely crazy!” I said, “This is nothing, he’s just running a 130mph. You ought to see him on the fast motorcycles!”
AT SHOW- Here’s the rider and cycle which set a new AMA record Wednesday at Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah for 500cc machines, class C. The rider is Philip Fagan, 17, of Fort Worth. The motorcycle is a Norton. In runs of a mile each way, average speed was 127.32 miles per hour. Top one-way speed was 129.961 miles per hour. The machine is owned by George Fasig of Fort Worth, Texas Norton distributor. It was tuned by Frank Askew and Marvin Bell. The motorcycle is on display at the show at Hoover Pavillion in connection with the National Motorcycle Rally.[xxiii]
Charles Campbell: He was the only one that could make one run that fast. The reason Fagan got that Norton to run as fast as it did is because he laid prone on it. He’d get all strung out there. See, those things run ten miles per hour faster with your legs straight out. Made a little rocket out of it, it catches a lot of wind when your legs are down on the foot peg. Fagan invented that. He’d just relax and vruuuump…right out in the prone position. Both of us, we spent more time laying prone on the stupid motorcycle than we did riding the thing. We rode them a hundred and fifty miles an hour that way.
(Q: They broke Philips record like a day or two later?). Dalio went beserk, put Jessie out there on this thing while they had the Streamliner out there anyway. Dalio just couldn’t stand (Fagan’s setting the record on Fasig’s Norton), and they took that Triumph out to the Salt Flats, and he eased (Fagan’s) record out. Jessie Thomas, he broke Fagan’s new record by a few hundredths of a mile an hour. It was same thing really. His average was 128.91 and I think Fagan’s was 127. Like a fraction; being a 128 average both ways.
FORT WORTH DRIVERS SET ‘CYCLE RECORDS BONNEVILLE SALT FLATS, Utah, Sept.6 (AP)- A Texan rode his streamlined motorcycle to a new world’s speed record of 214.40 miles per hour on Western Utah’s salt flats Thursday. Johnny Allen, 26-year-old Fort Worth man, erased the old mark of 211 m.p.h set earlier this summer by Wilhelm Herz of Neckersulm, Germany, on the same course. Allen’s run was timed by the United States Auto Club. Another Texas driver, 17-year-old Jess Thomas, also of Fort Worth, set a new American Motorcycle Association record for a 30.50 Class C motorcycle. His speed was 128. 91 to beat the old record of 127.42. [xxiv]
H-D REACHES 207 AT BONNEVILLE…Among the several other machines running, Phillip Fagan’s Norton 88 was outstanding. Strictly Class C, the 88 traversed the two-way Bonneville mile at 127.328 to capture, for a brief period, the American Class C record. However, Jess Thomas of Fort Worth, Tex. regained the title for Triumph and Dalio’s shop in Fort Worth, a burst that averaged out to over 128 mph. This run took place shortly after Speed Week.
HELD CLASS C SPEED RECORD NICE TRY: Phillip Fagan, 18, of Fort Worth, Tex., poses with his hot Norton 88, which held the AMA class C straightaway speed record for several days. The 88 traversed the Bonneville mile at a two way average of 127.32 mph, but a few days later Jess Thomas of Fort Worth regained the C mark with a Triumph Tiger 100- as reported elsewhere in this issue. The Norton is owned by George Fasig and was tuned by Frank Askew and Martin Bell. It hit a top speed of 129.961 mph during the two runs.
Johnny Allen had held the Class C speed record when Philip bested him in August and Allen was one of the most successful and revered riders on the circuit. But Philip’s briefly held Bonneville record must have been a bittersweet experience at best. The November 1956 Cycle magazine, “World’s largest Monthly Motorcycle Circulation,” featured both of the latter two reviews above, alternately praising and jibing him, along with a half-page photo of a beaming Philip atop his British steel steed. On the facing page was a full-page ad for the new Norton 99, seeming to announce that it was prepared to pick up where the defeated 88 left off. But it was the Triumph Streamliner record of the Allen/ Mangham/Wilson Dalio’s team that made the cover story (“Those Torrid Texans Turn the Trick! Johnny Allen Scorches Bonneville at 214 for Record”) followed directly by a photo of Thomas busting’s Fagan’s record on his Tiger 100 and a listing of combined Triumph records then held by Allen and Thomas while both were also namechecked in an ad for Renold chains. Triumph itself took out a full page ad celebrating the accomplishment of the Allen and Thomas Texas contingent.[xxv] Still, Philip had made it into the record books and into the industry’s premier periodicals. Motorcyclist magazine also featured the Texas Triumph Streamliner as its cover story the same month (“Allen’s Triumph Boosts Record to 214 mph: Torrid Texan Adds Pepper To Bonneville’s Salt By Setting 8 Speed Records With Streamliner”) and again worked Thomas’ new record into the mix (“Thomas Sets Class C Record of 128 mph With Tiger 100”) and the same ads featuring the Cee-gar, Allen and Thomas ran there as well. The back covers of both mags consisted of the same full-page ads for Lodge spark plugs, featuring Allen and the awesome Streamliner. Motorcyclist reported on Philip in two blurbs with a promotional photo of him sitting on the 88 and an action pic in the prone position:
16-year-old Jess Thomas at speed on the Triumph Tiger 100. Bike was tuned by Cal Makela and Hazen Bair. Record speed of 128.91 mph erased a few-day old mark of 127.32 mph set by another Ft. Worth youth, 18-year-old Phil Fagan on his Norton 88.
NEAR HITS AT BONNEVILLE Preceding Johnny Allen’s successful record runs at Bonneville were other motorcyclists who competed during the National Speed Week in latter August. Pictured here are two of the contestants. At right is Phil Fagan, an 18-year-old Ft. Worth rider (why do all these fast fellas come from Ft.Worth?) who racked up a Class C AMA record for 500 CC bikes…A few days later, he lost his fresh record to Ft.Worth’s 16-year-old Jess Thomas…[xxvi]
Philip must have felt he had ended up on the wrong side of the fence when he left Triumph and Dalio’s behind for Norton and Fasig’s. Like so many cycle feats, the glory was so short-lived it was as though it hadn’t happened at all. Adding insult to injury, the prestigious industry mags that covered the story of his quickly-beaten record also featured the Streamliner as their cover stories. Not only was Philip immediately a footnote in yesterday’s recordbooks, but his tale of woe was within the pages of publications that featured the state-of-the-art racing machine he had helped develop with Wilson and Mangham and one which he was likely intended to pilot. Furthermore, it was in fact the now-famous Streamliner pilot Johnny Allen whose record Philip had beaten with Fasig’s Norton, while Jess Thomas, the boy who had now quashed his own record, would also soon be making cycle history as part of the elite Streamliner club. A pattern was established. Philip would continue to immerse himself in the various subcultures of his time, a part of living history; yet that same history seemed to conspire to keep him off the official record.
Jimmy Jay: He did set some records at Bonneville. Frank Askew actually tuned that bike that Philip set records on out at Bonneville. They were quickly broken, but the records that Philip set were actually more important because they were on naked motorcycles. See, the Streamliner and those people, they were a whole different thing. And Jess Thomas broke his Class C record. But Philip set a record for 650 cc. And that one was broken not by anyone out here, but by some guys from the west coast at Bonneville Salt Flats
Robert Baucom later became a district manager for Triumph. Excerpts from his eulogy for Jack Wilson were included in editor David Edward’s September 2000 column in Cycle World magazine and he is currently writing a collection of short stories about the Fort Worth East Lancaster motorcycle scene of the 1950s and 60’s. Charles Campbell, Philip’s closest childhood friend, soon gave up cycles and became a renowned Fort Worth musician, but still remembers their friendship, shared passion for speed, and sheer daredevilry as the defining elements of what he and the other motorcycle enthusiasts unanimously recall as the greatest moments of their lives. Wayne Ellis is a retired businessman who, along with Curtis Terry, continues to keep the legacy of the Iron Horse Motorcycle club alive and organizes regular gang reunions for “bench racing.” Bob Stoker, acknowledged by his peers as the greatest of the Fort Worth racers, got out of the motorcycle business young enough to pursue other interests, as did Jimmy Jay, one of the speakers at Jack Wilson’s funeral. Curtis Terry went on to head a number of automobile and motorcycle franchises, including Triumph, remaining a close associate of Dalio until Pete’s death in 1988. Terry is also a foremost expert on the nearly forgotten Mustang motorscooters. Jess Thomas remained a vital and legendary force in international motorcycle competition, making his home and mark throughout the cycle world of the United States and Europe and also serving as an editor for Cycle magazine. He still holds the record as the youngest rider to break 200 miles-per-hour at Bonneville and enter the fraternity known as the 200MPH Club, and was the guest of honor at the recent unveiling of the reconstructed original Triumph Streamliner at the National Motorcycle Museum in England. After heading up a number of franchises, Carlton Williamson retired from the motorcycle business and is currently writing a book of self-help philosophy.
Charles Campbell: Had that 55 for years, I kept it a long time. I had a full house Triumph, back then I bought from Jack Wilson. It was a 66 model, and it was so radical you couldn’t hardly ride it on the street, radical cam. I should have kept that thing…55 Triumph…. And I finally sold that and that was the last motorcycle that I ever actually owned
Jess Thomas: I don’t think Philip could find what he was looking for in the motorcycle “fraternity” and racing kind of thing. I don’t think he even had any idea what he was looking for at that point in life, you know. I don’t know what he encountered and learned in the Navy that would have helped him develop that…He didn’t have the…I guess I’ll backtrack and say a little about what racing does to your nervous system and your physiology. Have you ever known any soccer players or guys like that who get their nervous system so keyed up that they can do things they couldn’t normally do? It’s an enormous adrenaline rush. And it changes your personality. We call it “the race face.” You know, when you get on the starting line and it’s time and you’re revving up and it’s in gear. Your whole nervous system completely changes. You gotta be kind of the old western gunslinger mentality to be good at it, you know? It’s gotta be something that you have to do and you feel compelled to do. And I think that’s where Philip’s threshold was, that he didn’t ever get through. He didn’t have the killer instinct to go out and be a professional racer. He loved what was the theater of it at that time, all the things that were involved, the human emotional interactions, the art form of racing
Wayne Ellis: I wish I knew more about Philip. I wish I’d have known him better. I know I enjoyed meeting him. And he was a good-looking kid. And personality! I wish we’d have had closer ties as we got older. But we just lost touch. But he went on to the Navy. And he had other fish to fry.
Carlton Williamson: For the first couple of years, I think we were tight. And then he got sidetracked. But he’d always come in. He’d come in and we’d chat, you know, keep up pleasantries.
Curtis Terry: I would go see my doctor from time to time and I learned he had joined the military. I had lost track of him. And Dr. Wiggins would express concerns about him from time to time. Uh…worried about his mental state…I don’t know what to say…Afraid he was losing himself a little bit…
Jerry Fagan: In like 1956 or 57, maybe even 55, he came back and started living with us. And he lived there probably a year and went to the high school that I went to, Birdville. He ended up leaving and didn’t graduate there; he got his GED later in the Navy.
Philip’s days with the Fort Worth biker gang can be viewed as marking not only his entry into one of the great American subcultures, but also his first known attempts at replacing his increasingly withdrawn biological father with more approving, established older male role models. Bell, Dalio, Fasig, Williamson, and Wilson came to stand in for his own preoccupied dad, their active sponsorship and interest in him a replacement for Philip Senior’s waning involvement with him. This search for the love of a male parental figure would continue throughout his life. His surrogate spiritual fathers would come to include several Fort Worth artists, George Ohsawa in Japan, Alejandro Jodorowsky in Mexico, Paul Swan, Gregory Markopoulos, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Andy Warhol in New York, and the various gurus and yogis at whose feet he would kneel in Southeast Asia near the end of his life. The motorcycle racer, artist’s apprentice and novice monk were but various dimensions of the same intense yearning, an excruciating desire for the love, acceptance, understanding and the paternal pride that his emotionally distant father was unwilling or unable to express. And his shifting alliances among the various motorcycles, shopowners, and mechanics, while perhaps unremarkable, seem reflected in his long estranged relationship with Louise Albers and his continuing pattern of keeping intimacy at bay and bailing on relationships once they grew too close for comfort. While his relationship with Louise remained troubled and he was unwilling to marry her, he was increasingly, if perhaps by choice, also somewhat estranged from Una and Jerry as well. He began to bond intensely with special friends like Charles Campbell and later Johnny Simons to fill that void. His natural shyness led him to keep others somewhat at bay, rendering him elusive and imbuing him with a strange aura, a mysterious charisma. But the mischievous smiling joker that the Iron Horse gang remembered would virtually disappear with his entry into the Navy, replaced by a solemn seriousness, a brooding intensity that many observers and old friends would label troubled. He seemed to think himself destined for great things and could not be fulfilled by the ordinary and mundane. By this point, the motorcycle scene of Fort Worth was boring him, and the travelling he had done with the cycle scene had shown him a wider world filled with interesting places and fascinating people. He’d always hated school and continued to perform poorly. Life was short and it was time to move on. He’d played it out. It was time to embark on the mythical adventure that is the sea.
Sources:
[i] In Dregni, M. & Dean, J. (2000). The Spirit of the Motorcycle: The Legends, the Riders, and the Beauty of the Beast. Stillwater, MN: Voyageur Press, Inc. p.33.
[ii] Thompson, H.S. (1966). Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. New York: Ballantine Books. p.91.
[iii] Brooke, L. (1996). Triumph Racing Motorcycles in America. Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International. p.2.
[iv] In Dregni, M. & Dean, J. (2000). The Spirit of the Motorcycle: The Legends, the Riders, and the Beauty of the Beast. Stillwater, MN: Voyageur Press, Inc. p.29.
[v] Dregni, M. & Dean, J. (2000). The Spirit of the Motorcycle: The Legends, the Riders, and the Beauty of the Beast. Stillwater, MN: Voyageur Press, Inc. p.53.
[vi] Brooke, L. (1996). Triumph Racing Motorcycles in America. Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International. p.8.
[vii] Smedman, L. (2007). From Boneshakers to Choppers: The Rip-Roaring History of Motorcycles. New York: Annick Press. pp.16-18.
[viii] Podhoretz, N.(1958). Quoted in Gornick, V. (2006). “Wild at Heart.” In Shinder, J. (Ed.) (2006). The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later. p.8.
[ix] Kerouac, J. (1957).”America’s New Trinity of Love: Dean, Brando, Presley.” Unpublished poem featured on the Kerouac: Joy, Kicks, Darkness (1997).
[x] Baucom, R.H. (September 29, 2008). E-mail to the author.
[xi] Brooke, L. (1996). Triumph Racing Motorcycles in America. Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International. p. 116, 33-34, 103.
[xii] Baucom, R. (June 2008). Various email correspondence and phone converations.
[xiii] Brooke, L. (1996). Triumph Racing Motorcycles in America. Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International. p.6.
[xiv] Brooke, L. (1996). Triumph Racing Motorcycles in America. Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International. p.16-17.
[xv] Brooke, L. (1996). Triumph Racing Motorcycles in America. Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International. p. 110-11.
[xvi] Fagan, J.P. (June 30, 2007). E-mail to the author.
[xvii] Undated newspaper clipping, most likely from The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 1955. PNF Archives.
[xviii] Brooke, L. (1996). Triumph Racing Motorcycles in America. Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International. p. 102-03.
[xix] Brooke, L. (1996). Triumph Racing Motorcycles in America. Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International. p.32-33.
[xx] Noeth, L.A. (1999). Bonneville Salt Flats. Osceola, WI: MBI Publishing Company. pp. 72, 74.
[xxi] Dregni, M. & Dean, J. (2000). The Spirit of the Motorcycle: The Legends, the Riders, and the Beauty of the Beast. Stillwater, MN: Voyageur Press, Inc. p.57.
[xxii] Newspaper clipping, United Press (August 29, 1956). Most likely from The Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
[xxiii] Undated newspaper clipping, August or September, 1956. PNF Archives.
[xxiv] Newspaper clipping Associated Press. (September 6, 1956). PNF Archives.
[xxv] In Cycle: “World’s Largest Monthly Motorcycle Circulation.” (November 1956). Volume VII, Number 11. pp.12,10, 11, 1, 29-32, 7, 2. PNF Archives.
[xxvi] In Motorcyclist magazine (November 1956). Number 710. pp.1, 12-15, 25, 2, 3, 24.
Other Dear and Departed Rebels Forever With Us…
“Spider” John Koerner 1938-2024
James Chance/James White 1953-2024
Donald Sutherland 1935-2024
Amazing chronicle--Thank you. Your uncle was an endlessly fascinating character. I enjoyed particularly the cultural history of the infatuation with motorcycle culture. I met Allen Ginsberg one day on the UT campus around 1977 right after I had read Hunter Thompson's "Hell's Angels," where Ginsberg is mentioned several times. I asked him how he happened to come to hang out with such a brazenly vicious bunch of crazies as the Angels. He basically said that early on, the counterculture bought into their mystique of rebel coolness--until they knew better. I guess that was pre-Altamont. And by the way, you're absolutely right about "The Bikeriders"--an instant classic.
This is the coolest and most fascinating cat. He did it all. You'll love reading all the different adventures he lived in the book, Philip's Shadow. I highly recommend it.