Cycle News

VOL. 52 ISSUE 27 JULY 7, 2015 P127 bedding. And boy, watching those races was such a good time and they were running so fast around that racetrack. I came home and I had a neighbor who raced motorcycles, he raced Indians. He'd fallen off and broken his leg at a race at Marys- ville. I said to him, 'You're not going to be able to ride the rest of the year, how about letting me borrow your motorcycle?' "I was just a kid, but I knew how to work on stuff and I told him I'd fix anything on it, paint it, whatever he wanted. He told me yeah, but he had a partner on the motorcycle who owned half of it. So he introduced me to Floyd Nicodemus, who became my lifelong friend. Floyd hauled me to the racetrack and I made enough points as a novice to get in the amateur class." Racing in the immediate years after World War II was pretty lean, but that ended up helping Klamfoth. "There were so few experts racing after the war," Klamfoth said. "They would take the fast qualifiers out of the novice and amateur classes to fill out the Main. I was fast qualifier and won some of those races when I was still a novice." After such a rapid rise from novice, a Colum- bus Norton dealer asked Klamfoth to race one of its bikes at Daytona. "That's the year I finished second in the amateur race," Klamfoth explained. "And based on that I was picked up by the factory Norton team the next year, my first year expert, and of course won the Daytona 200." And with that Klamfoth's pro racing career was off and running. Klamfoth's record of three- consecutive Daytona 200 wins was tied, but not broken until 1998 when Scott Russell took his fourth victory at Daytona. As a young man who grew up on a farm in the Mid- west, Klamfoth had his eyes open to the rough and rugged world of pro motorcycle racing very quickly. Klamfoth's mentor his entire amateur season was fellow Norton factory rider Billy Matthews, a veteran Canadian rider who'd won Daytona in 1941. Matthews was a gritty racer who'd been rac- ing since the early 1930s and would race wherev- er they paid him. That included a stint in England as a Speedway rider after the war. "Billy and I raced as a team that whole year after I got second at Daytona as an amateur," Klamfoth said. "We drove around in a Frazer Manhattan with a trailer on the back. He taught me how to turn the Norton into a half-mile bike. Those things were rigid frames, rigid fork and everything. Billy would ride high, wide and hand- some, right out by the fence. "Billy was a drinker. He'd be ready to race, most of the time, but one year at Daytona, Nor- ton actually posted a guard at his door the night before the race. The year before no one knew where he was and they went looking for him and found him down at the Seaside Bar. We'd travel around to the races and after the races, even on a Sunday, he'd go up in the stands to find some- body who could get him a fifth of liquor. And he'd sit in the back seat while I drove and drink that whole fifth of liquor. I hate to tell that story, but that's how it was in those days. He taught me how to race, but fortunately he didn't teach me how to drink." The money wasn't bad for a motorcycle racer in the 1950s. You wouldn't get rich, but if you won, that money would get you pretty far. "I think winning a novice race only paid about 15 dollars," Klamfoth remembers, "but amateurs got maybe 70 dollars to win and if you won a feature at an expert race you'd get about 130 dol- lars. Daytona was the most; you got 2500 dollars for first. If you won Laconia you got about 750 dollars. Springfield was about the next highest purse. I think Bobby Hill won 12 or 15 hundred for that one. This was in the days where if you made 400 dollars a month you were doing pretty good." Race day at Lima is always fun, but getting to spend a little time with Klamfoth there was icing on the cake. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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