Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/127651
Time Remem ered b By Joe Scalzo odern racers engage in wild racing bu t don't lead wild lives. Where is the contemporary racer who fought the Ger m an s across Fran ce and then returned ho me from the Great War to race ferociously on the board tracks wea ring the aviator's helmet of one of his victims (as Otto Walker did), or quit racing to plunge in to Born eo's jungles collecting constrictor serpents and giant quadrupeds and also to put down a mutiny while he was the skipper of a yacht that was a rum-runner and the scene of a murder (Iohnny Branson), or became the biker buddy an d aide-de camp of the demented billionaire Howard Hughes and went to his grave without revealing a single Hughes confidence (loe Petrali), or, having gone to the penitentiary for mail fraud , rehabilitated himself by publishing his own life story as a barnstormer, politician, race promoter, and inventor (Floyd Clymer), or who for a dramatic performance fought a bull while riding a motorcycle and afterward went to live in Haiti with Papa Doc Duvalier and became a h igh p ri es t of voo- doo (Speedy Babbs)? ' All of th ese guys knew Sprouts Elder. And possibly all were, in some way, inspired by him. Who was Elder? He was a fabulous free-spirit and apparent utter good-fornothing who d em on strated , nearly three-quarters of a century ago, that when it came to motorcycle racing he was touched with genius. Fresno, in the fiery furnace of central California's San Joaquin Valley, was his home. His ancestors were tight-fisted Scottish fortune hunters who'd traveled overland toward the Sutter gold fields of 1849, but settled instead for scalding Mariposa County. They walked behind horses tilling arid fields, saved their money, and worked hard. Sprouts Elder's father slept by day, guarded a warehouse all night, and lived to be 98. His sunny-dispositione d son was somewhat the same - Sprouts, too, rested by day. He needed to be in condition for the monster p oker games in the city's gambling quarter which ran wide open all night long. He usually got trimmed, too. But he loved Fresno and regularly pined for it while he was away. Ott Wilson's Harley-Davidson shop was Elder's all-purpose fortress - the womb where he lived, received his mail, and worked when he felt like it; he was expert with connecting rods and fl Y: wheels. He also raced . Over "in the hill cli mbs conducted in the adjacent foothills, Elder was a breakneck rated the caliber of Petrali and Dud ley Perkins. He was regularly atta ining speeds of better than 100 mph while lashing abo ut Fresno's banked lumberdome. Around 1923, he boarded a tramp steamer and left the country. His departure resulted from - depending upon whose story was believed - Sprou ts ' developing a sudden urge to visit the