Cycle News

VOLUME 57 ISSUE 8 FEBRUARY 25, 2020 P115 the Bonneville Salt Flats. This feat inspired Triumph to name their 1959 model the Bonneville. Pete Dalio retired, sold his Ft. Worth shop and went on the road sponsoring a young racer named Gary Nixon. In the early 1960s, the Dallas Triumph dealership was not doing well, and they asked Wilson if he could take over. As a working mechanic, Wilson didn't have the funds necessary to take on the Triumph franchise, but he still had a good relationship with his old boss, Dalio, and the two went into business as partners of the newly formed Big D Cycle in 1963. Wilson was a hard worker and hired excellent employees, and Big D thrived as a Triumph and Yamaha dealership in the 1960s. In the late 1960s, Big D sold off the Yamaha portion of the dealer- ship and remained an exclusively Triumph shop. Big D ran along smoothly until 1983, when Triumph went bankrupt. It seemed Big D was doomed. But a funny thing hap- pened. The shop never slowed down. "Jack continued on," Martin said. "He'd acquired enough stock that he kept selling new Triumphs for another couple of years. And starting in the 1970s when things first started going bad [for Triumph], Jack bought up a lot of other dealers and even imported a lot of parts from England. He had a big mail-order business for Triumph parts in the 1980s." Due in large measure to the vin- tage motorcycle craze that started in the mid-1980s, Big D was able to make a successful transition from dealership to vintage shop relatively painlessly. That's when Martin came into the picture, first as a customer buying parts for his Triumph, then a guy who liked to hang out at the shop. "I had a job back then where I was on the road a lot and then would get four or five days off," Martin said. "I just hung out at the shop, swept the floors and did whatever was needed, and Jack would give me a little bit of this and a little of that. I just wanted to help." Keith said he decided to go vintage road racing and Jack ba- sically built the bike for him. "He let me get in there and help just to sort of teach me how things were done." While going on his first racing trip to Savannah, Georgia, and Daytona, Keith called work one day only to find the company he worked for had been bought out and everyone was fired. "So here I was on top of the world doing my first vintage rac- ing and I find out I lost my job," Martin recalls. "Jack told me not to worry, that I could have a job at the shop when I got home." That was in 1988 and Martin has been in the motorcycle busi- ness ever since. Martin worked at Big D until the opportunity came in 1998 to open his own Triumph dealership. He opened RPM Cycle. Wilson, meanwhile, fell ill and eventu- ally sold Big D. The new owner struggled and in 1999 Martin stepped in to save what was left of the business and also acquired the rights to the Big D name in the process. "I talked to Jack about it—he was still alive at the time—and he told me to do what I needed to do to make a go of it," Martin said, his voice welling up with emotion in remembering his old friend and mentor. "Jack was a great old guy." With Keith, the legacy of Big D was in the right hands. In 2007, Martin sold RPM Cycle to an in- vestor and after nearly a decade's absence, re-opened Big D Cycle in the location it is now. Today Big D continues as one of the premier vintage restorers and racing shops in the coun- try. Over the years, Martin has acquired some of the most his- torically significant British racing machines in America. In addition to some significant land speed record motorcycles, Big D is also home to ex-factory Triumph and BSAs ridden by Dick Mann, Gene Romero and Gary Nixon, just to name a few. Keith and his crew are gearing up for the 2020 season, which, in addition to vintage racing, they are running again in the Motorcy- cle Cannonball for the third time as Team Norton, adding a fourth rider and machine to the squad this year. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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