Cycle News

P100 CN III OBSERVATION CHECK I n our seemingly "small" motorcy- cle industry, there are countless people who have made significant impacts. From motorcycle builders to race promotors, to product de- signers to moto journalists, to riding coaches to dealership owners, and to many of the motorcycle riders and racers themselves, there have been many who have made the world of motorcycles a much better place. Unfortunately, often when these people leave our industry to start a new career perhaps, or sim- ply retire, they do so without much, if any, fanfare or recognition for what good they have brought to our community. They leave with hardly a goodbye; one day, you just realize that they aren't there anymore. Sad, really. Our sport is too small for this to happen. If you're a long-time reader of Cycle News, or not all that long, really, there is a name you used to see all the time in these pages, pretty much every week, in fact. And you might not have noticed its disappearance, or you probably wondered whatever happened to it and then turned to the next page years ago, Kinney Jones hung up his camera equipment and called it a career. And that was that. KJ, as many of us in the motorcy- cle industry knew him, spent most of his extremely active life shooting photos of motorcycles, motorcycle races, and motorcycle personali- ties. There is a very good chance that if there's one shot that you've seen in a magazine that has forever been locked away in your mind's image bank all these years, perhaps a classic shot of Jeremy McGrath doing a NacNac, or James Stewart doing one of his patented "Bubba Scrubs," or Larry Roeseler blitzing it across the Nevada or Baja deserts, there was a good chance Kinney Jones took it. KJ shot thousands of photos for Cycle News and our sis- ter publications, such as Personal Watercraft Illustrated, aka PWI, in the day. And he shot for other maga- zines, too, including Cycle World and, well, many, many others. On a personal side, I only know one or two other people who have been in this industry longer than KJ. In fact, we vaguely knew each other back in the late '70s and early '80s before either one of us worked in the motorcycle community. We raced against each other at local MX tracks, and he was always faster than me! He would sometimes show up at the races on a motorcycle sidecar with his Honda CR125 Elsinore pok- ing up from the passenger compart- ment, blow everyone away on the track, and leave. Kinney is (still to this day) just as talented on a motorcycle as he is behind a camera. (And he's still faster than me, even with 100 pounds of camera equipment on his back—insert pissed off emoji here.) I joined the Cycle News staff in 1983 and had soon gotten to know Kinney pretty well while he was working for Malcolm Smith Rac- ing Products (By the way, it was Malcolm Smith himself who gave Kinney his first real break in the BY KIT PALMER K J Unfortunately, many motorcycle industry hard workers, such as photographer Kinney Jones, retire from the sport without any fanfare.

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