Cycle News

VOLUME 58 ISSUE 7 FEBRUARY 17, 2021 P105 "Penton had moved its dis- tributorship from Oregon down to Sacramento," Cranke said. "They talked me into going up to one of these two-day quali- fiers up in Trask [Oregon], so I went up there and rode it like a motocross. My score said that I won, but nobody could believe that I won, so they adjusted my score so that I ended up second [laughs]. I was okay with that–I was just a hippie, and everyone else was real serious about it. But I just loved it. I mean, here you were out in the woods, and I was from California and had always done a lot of trail riding anyway. It just kind of grabbed me." Cranke soon found himself absorbing all the information he could about the International Six Days Trial (later renamed the International Six Days Enduro). ''I'd read all the magazines," Cranke says. "What I really liked was the little bikes, the little 50cc 8- and 10-speed bikes. I thought, 'God, I'd just love to do that someday.' "So, after I got back, the guy that was running Penton West, John Penton, and told him, 'I told you this guy was good,' but John Penton believed that anyone from the West Coast had only ever ridden in the desert. So, he said, 'If he's so good, then send him back here to Ohio for the last qualifier.''' Once Cranke got there, Pen- ton didn't hesitate to stack the deck against him just a little bit. "Penton gave me and [Dick] Burleson and some guy named [Bob] Grodzinski 175cc Puchs, and they were just pieces of shit," Cranke remembers. "Penton was playing with the Puchs because he was thinking about import- ing them. Of course, he had two Penton teams there, with all the boys. So, I took my die grinder back there and reworked [ported] Burleson's and my Puchs so that at least they would run with a good 125. The event was just a mud bath, and I ended up being second overall to Carl Berggren on a 250cc Husky, and only the two of us got gold medals. And the Puch team won the team trophy, which just humiliated everyone." Penton had seen enough, and Cranke says that the next thing he knew, he was offered the chance to ride a Penton on the trophy team for the ISDT in Czechoslovakia in 1972. "I rode in the 125cc class," Cranke recalled, "and that's how it started." Cranke went on to earn a gold medal at every ISDT from '72 through '76, an incredible string that was broken when the ISDT returned to Czecho in 1977, where he earned a silver medal. All of these were earned aboard Penton motorcycles, the brand to which Cranke is closely linked. "Then in '78 I didn't finish," Cranke remembered. "I was rid- ing a Yamaha, and I punched a hole in the primary case on the first day. That was the only time I didn't finish." Cranke returned to form in '79, however, landing a gold in the 500cc class aboard an SWM in West Germany. Ultimately, he earned seven golds and two silvers in 10 attempts. "Then I was just done," Cranke says. "I'd had a long and wonder- ful career." Now [2005] living in Washing- ton, Cranke manages a tooling manufacturing plant. He still rides often with his two teenage sons, and he says he still does it for the same reason that he always did— and gold medals have nothing to do with it. "My whole thing was that I love riding motorcycles," Cranke said. "If you ask Dick Mann what he re- ally liked about racing, he would tell you that he loves to ride mo- torcycles. Malcolm Smith loves to ride motorcycles. For me, I never cared if anybody ever recognized me or talked to me as long I got to ride motorcycles. That's what I did." CN Carle Cranke was inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2000. He passed away in 2020 at the age of 71. This Archives edition is reprinted from issue #30, August 3, 2005. CN has hundreds of past Archives edi- tions in our files, too many des- tined to be archives themselves. So, to prevent that from happen- ing, in the future, we will be revis- iting past Archives articles while still planning to keep fresh ones coming down the road. -Editor Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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