Round Up
ROUND UP
JOE PARKHURST
DECEMBER was a bit of a celebration month around CYCLE WORLD. It was 10 years ago December that Betty Jean Parkhurst and I took over the newly launched CYCLE WORLD from the publisher that had paid me to create a new title and get it underway. Then we had many firsts in the motorcycle publishing industry to boast of, among them the first full-color cover, first factual and honest road tests, first tests with performance figures, and first regular European and Japanese reports on competition and new developments. At that time our competitors numbered two; now there must be 20 motorcycle magazines. B.J. and I started CYCLE WORLD in a back room, working seven days a week and living on pennies. I could become very nostalgic if I let it get the best of me.
A recent edition of the excellent weekly motorcycle newspaper, Motor Cycle Weekly, featured a flattering congratulations to CYCLE WORLD on its 10th anniversary, written by staffer Ralph Springer. Until I read it I had almost forgotten that it had been 10 years. Motorcycles, riders and the industry have certainly changed since then. As have our competitors for whom we have set the style and pace.
We have trained more journalists than some schools. CW alumni such as Carol Simms, Gordon Jennings, Chuck Clayton, Mike Griffith, Bryon Farnsworth, Dave Epperson, and Jerry Ballard have moved on, as people do, to other jobs in the publishing industry. Motorcycles we knew and loved have moved on also. There are no more Matchlesses, Royal Enfields, Velocettes, Marushos, Pointers, Indians, Dots, Francis Barnetts, scads of odd machines with Villiers engines in them, Güeras, (but Güera is one that will return soon, from Argentina instead of Italy), Ariels, Yamaguchis, Motobis, and many, many more. If I sound like one of the “belt drive bunch” from the old days, remember, this has all happened in only 10 years!
The "belt drive bunch," as we polite ly called them in mixed company in those days, were a group of very old men with good intentions, but terrible judgment and no foresight. They re fused to support CW in our early days because they felt we weren't needed and the tiny little backwards industry was just fine as it was. How wrong they were. Our first advertisers were Yamaha and the Berliner Motor Corp. Berliner is still run by the same incredible brothers, Mike and Joe Berliner, but Yamaha's Jim Jingu, a man years ahead of his time, is no longer with us. He's still missed.
Honda joined the early CW sup porters, but it was many years before the mighty BSA and Triumph organiza tions and Harley-Davidson rejected their old ways and faced up to what was happening with motorcycling, and CW. Young men with imagination, business ability, drive, ambition, and talent have taken over the industry. The future is even brighter today for us than in 1961. CYCLE WORLD led its field then, and we will continue to try to do the same now. Our little anniversary celebration has to include one staff member who has been with us from almost the very first, Patsy Platt. She is now Circulation Manager with Bond/Parkhurst Publish ing. Her husband, Jerry, is a life-long friend of mine. In the old days Jerry used to help with the road testing, gunking bikes, and repairing them when we broke some rare and valuable test machine. He still rides with us on occasion, but progress has caught up with him too, and he is busy in his own business now. Anyway, happy anni versary to us.
ANOTHER FIRST
Speaking of firsts, we have another around here that makes me feel pretty good. When we opened Saddleback Park four years ago it was the first motor cycle park. It is still the best and most active. Just in time for the 1971 running of the Trans-AMA motocross we in stalled the first mechanical starting gate in the U.S. They are fairly common in Europe and will be mandatory equip ment for International AMA races in 1972. Our gate was designed in Czecho slovakia and made by Joe Bihari. Saddle back's gate must be one of the longest anywhere at 153 ft.; it will handle 50 riders. We widened the starting line and created a long, slowly diminishing, up hill start that ends at a sharp left-hand turn, then straight down Banzai Hill. It was quite a sight to see all those fantastic riders get off the line in a precise, controlled move when the gate fell forward. We had over 33,500 people watching the Trans-AMA, the largest crowd ever assembled for a motocross, and one of the largest ever at any kind of a motorcycle race. A far cry from our first International at Saddleback in 1968 when we hosted the Inter-Am's premiere event with about 5000 spec tators. And, to end the list of firsts, the CYCLE WORLD show opens April 13 at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. The CW Show was the first motorcycle show in the U.S. (other than the dealer show run in conjunction with the Daytona racing week), and it has grown to become the largest in the world. It's not that we do things big around CW, it's just that with the help and work of a lot of people at CYCLE WORLD, we do them right.
