"The only guy who had a motorcycle was an uncle who took me for
'a ride when I was probably 8 years
old,· Leonard says. "We went riding
down to Mission Valley at night on
an old Harley 45 with running
boards. I was hanging on for dear
life because he kept scraping the
floorboards and scaring me. I
always remembered that, the fascination with the motor, the wind
tutelage of one Guy Urquhart, the
owner of the Indian shop that Floyd
Emde rode for when he'won at Day·
tona Beach in 1948.
"Floyd quit right after he won
Daytona and switched to Harley,"
Leonard says. "The Triumph was
wouldn't have the first idea of how
to ride it. My job was to take them
out and ride them over by the Navy
base, or wherever, and just show
them how to shift it and stuff like that.
Then I got to use the shop's demonstrator on the weekends.·
the brand that I loved because
that's what Jimmy Phillips rode.
"But my deal with Urquhart was
that I would come down to his dealership to teach some of these
sailors how to ride. They'd buy a
motorcycle, and a lot of them
blowing, and then I started watching
Jimmy Phillips, who became my
idol. •
Phillips was a Navy man stationed in the San Diego area and
one hell of a talented motorcycle
racer, running Triumph machines
out of Lou Kaiser's motorcycle
dealership. Phillips was the man to
beat at the "field meets· that were
held down in the slough just three
blocks from the Leonard home. A
sort of motorcycle Olympics, the
field meets consisted of drags, team
events, Australian pursuits and a TT
as the grand finale.
"I was indoctrinated," Leonard
remembers. "At these field meets, I
kept getting more and more interested in motorcycles. and of course
that was a much easier thing to get
into."
Leonard's first steps into the
motorcycling world came under the
RIding the cushion, Dodge Cltr.
Kansas. 1960: L_nard liked the
cushion tracks the bes1, bu1 sap that
he never met a racetrack that he
didn't like.
DUD I
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SEPTEMBER 12, 2001
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