Cycle News

VOL. 51 ISSUE 37 SEPTEMBER16, 2014 P111 Thiessen said his biggest payday came when he finished second to Bobby Hill at the Dodge City 200 Mile race. "I made $1200 that day, and that was a lot of money in the early '50s." The way that Thiessen earned a factory-backed ride with BSA in the beginning was quite a story in itself. Thiessen, still an amateur, went east to race at Daytona in 1948. In the Amateur 100-Miler, Thies- sen crashed hard early on. The fall punctured his lung. "The air was escaping from the hole in my lung and I had little bubbles pop up on my body and my arm," Thiessen said. "I had to hold my breath in the turns." In spite of being in pain and having a hole in his lung, Thiessen remounted and finished the race only to be immediately tended to by medical person- nel. The word about Thiessen's brave ride got out and BSA importer Alfred Child was so impressed by the fortitude shown by the young rider that he told him he was going to sponsor him and put him on BSAs. From that day forward Thiessen was a BSA factory rider. He stuck by the brand for the rest of his racing career. By the early 1950s Thiessen was one of the lead- ing expert riders in the country. Being somewhat iso- lated in the Pacific Northwest meant that he would not be able to fully contest all the AMA Nationals, but when he did race he scored solid results. At home he was the dominant rider of his era. He was multi-time Pacific Northwest TT Champion. One of Thiessen's earliest big wins, is when he beat Canadian National Champion Trev Deeley in a big regional TT race they called the Death Head Derby, in which the winner was awarded a trophy that featured a skull (suppos- edly found when they were building the track, but ac- tually a dental lab model). "The track had a right hand turn over a bridge and then you'd race underneath the bridge," Thiessen said of the track in Olympia, Washington. "I think I won that race four times." Hap Alzina, the West Coast BSA distributor who'd long sponsored former Daytona 200 winner Ed Kretz, recognized Thiessen's talent and in 1951 took him to Bonneville for a speed record attempt on a BSA Golden Flash (650cc Vertical Twin). The speed record required two runs, the average of both being used. On the first run, Thiessen re- corded 151 mph, but cracked an oil feed line on his bike. The team only had a half-hour to make repairs before Thiessen had to make his return run. "Alzina put some more nitro in the tank," Thiessen said, but had no time to adjust the carburation since there was only a minute left before they had to get the bike back on the track. On the second run the bike was going 150 mph when the motor seized. "I pulled in the clutch real quick and the bike coasted over the finish line," Thiessen said. "I was coasting fast enough to beat the record with a 143 mph average." What Thiessen failed to say, and was only men- tioned by his wife later, was the fact that during his record run Thiessen (in order to cut down wind resistance) made both passes on the dry lakebed shirtless. Needless to say had he pitched it when the bike seized on the return run, it wouldn't have been pretty. The record made big news and BSA advertised the accomplishment all over the world. The big shock for Thiessen came when, as a reward for his excellent ride, Hap Alzina presented the record-set- ting BSA to him. Gene will turn 87 in a few weeks. He and his wife Lois still live in Eugene, Oregon. He's thinking of finally selling the record-setting BSA on which he set the Bonneville Speed Record. "That bike has only been ridden twice," Thiessen said with a grin in his voice. "I ran it once on the Ro- samond Dry Lake and then at Bonneville. I'd like to see it in a museum." CN BIRMINGHAM Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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