Text – Blue Miller, Photos – Michael Lichter
Blue Miller (Yes, Blue is her real name despite the pink hair!) is a guest writer for this installment of “Lichter Notes.” Born and raised in England, she still lives and works there when not writing about and traveling on Route 66 in her 1965 Ford Mustang or 1946 Chevy pickup. She has been the editor of the UK magazine Old Bike Mart for two years, before which she was an editor at 100% BIKER for six years and Back Street Heroes for fourteen years. She is a friend who knows as much about custom bikes and motorcycle culture as anyone I know and whose wit and charm make her writing about it a pleasure to read. I trust you will enjoy her profile of the “Tramp.”
Over the last hundred or so years, there are a number of motorcycles that have become so much more than the sum of their collective mechanical parts. Some have become part of modern culture, others: chapters in history. And a fair proportion of this band of brothers have been V-twins.
Take, for example, the iconic photograph of a bathing suit-clad Rollie Free stretched out along the length of his Vincent HRD Black Shadow, familiar to people who’ve no interest in speed records, or the Stars and Stripes-bedecked ‘Captain America’ Panhead in Easy Rider or any one of TE Lawrence’s Brough Superiors. The bike you see here is arguably one of the most important V-twins in history because of its influence on V-twin performance parts, even if it is perhaps not so immediately recognizable as the Vincent or the Pan, or the Brough. This is the bike that built S&S Cycle.
In 2008, as part of its 50th-anniversary celebrations, Wisconsin-based S&S Cycle built a replica of a 1939 Harley-Davidson Knucklehead, which had belonged to the co-founder of the company, George Smith, Sr. This is not that motorcycle. This is the real deal.
George Smith was born in 1921 and, growing up at a time when both car and motorcycle manufacturing was first booming and then struggling due to the Great Depression, he quickly developed a natural talent for mechanical engineering which would lead to a lifetime fascination with two wheels. During World War II, he trained as a pilot but didn’t see combat due to the war’s end. Like many of his generation, he had tasted a brief experience of an environment so different from his native Chicago, and he emerged from his military service with a desire to fill that thrill gap. Like other young men, he turned to the racetrack.
At first, this took the form of car racing, and, having built himself a midget racer, he was both competitive and successful on the track. But he soon turned to motorcycles, driven by the need for both speed and to win – and the lure of a $1000 prize. When this huge sum of money was offered to the winner of a race series at a drag strip north of Chicago in 1952, the young Smith was determined to win it. He first had to convince his wife, Marjorie, that he could do just that. One would suspect that Marge, whom he had married when he was just 20 and who would be by his side when he started S&S Cycle (and, indeed, continued to run the company after his death), was not as hard to convince as one might expect.
So, George bought a 1939 Harley-Davidson Knucklehead, which had seen better days. In fact, it was little more than a basket case with a stock 61 cubic inch motor, but Knuckles had already acquitted themselves credibly in the speed stakes. Two years before George’s bike had rolled off the production line, Joe Petrali had already proved that, recording a speed of 136.183mph on Daytona Beach on a partially streamlined twin carburetor EL. By scrounging parts and making others, George increased the Knucklehead’s engine to 80 cubic inches, using Flathead UL 4-9/32-inch stroke flywheels and 3-7/16-inch bore cylinders. Then he modified the cylinder heads by welding each up to accept a pair of Riley carbs. Perhaps thinking of his aviation experience, he also experimented with different fuels, and it was with nitromethane that Tramp (as the Knucklehead was now dubbed) took to the asphalt at Half Day Speedway. To the amazement of the crowds and his fellow competitors on both two and four-wheels, Tramp turned in speeds of up to 125mph on the quarter-mile drag strip.
By the end of the 1952 season, it was clear to everyone that George and Tramp were unbeatable in the drag race series competition and, by rights, that thousand dollars should have been safely in his pocket. But the result had also become clear to the drag strip promoter, and, at the last moment, he withdrew the money, leaving George with the title of Mid-West Champion but no prize. Having subsequently met members of the Smith family, I can’t imagine that they are given to casually using swear words, but one would imagine that the air might have been a little blue when George Smith discovered that all his work and effort had been for nothing.
Except it hadn’t. That season with Tramp had only reinforced George’s need for more speed and had instilled in him a passion for racing that would last a lifetime. Unsurprisingly, his imagination was captured by the speed trials then taking place at the Salt Flats in Bonneville, Utah. He partnered with his friend, Stanley Stankos, and they persuaded Al Molenaar, a local Harley dealer who ran Southside Harley-Davidson in Chicago, to sponsor him to race at Bonneville in 1954.
Tramp’s engine was rebuilt with big bore cylinders bored from solid steel plugs and pistons cast at Stanley’s upholstery shop using homemade patterns and molds, skills George had learned in his pre-war apprenticeship as a die-sinker. It took a number of attempts to get the components right, but finally, George was happy with the results. Tramp went to Bonneville in 1954 with what was now an almost entirely homebuilt 92 cubic inch engine, still in the stock frame but fitted with a Harley K model set of forks at the front. On the salt, George made a run of 152.02mph, battling against, appropriately enough, Joe Petrali on his Knucklehead.
There is a cliché that no one ever races at Bonneville just once – and, like so many clichés, it’s true. But neither George nor Marge nor the family who accompanied them could have known that this would be just the first of many, many trips to the salt. They did soon realize that George’s talent for increasing performance and making tuning parts could be much more than a hobby, especially when other racers began asking him to make them parts and, in 1958, George and Stanley started S&S Cycle Equipment in the basement of George’s home in Blue Island, Illinois. One of the first items they offered was lightweight aluminum pushrods with solid lifter conversion units.
Stanley, however, soon found that he couldn’t combine the new venture with his own busy upholstery business, and so in 1959, he sold his share of S&S Cycle to George. So why did George keep the second ‘S’? Well, his wife’s maiden name had been Smith and Marge was already an active and valuable part of the company by taking care of administrative and bookkeeping duties, so S&S Cycle it stayed! Incidentally, Marge did far more than act as a secretary; she answered the phone, but in the early days, she also built and tested many parts herself, and customers soon came to learn that if they wanted technical information, then Mrs. Smith could provide everything they needed.
In 1969, the Smiths moved to Viola, Wisconsin, where S&S Cycle still has its home. George’s energies were now focused on ensuring people other than himself could go fast. Even the might of Harley-Davidson came to rely upon George’s components which were responsible for much of the MoCo’s successes at Bonneville. In the 1960s, he designed, developed, and produced the first of the famous S&S carburetors (along with the instantly recognizable teardrop air filter) and, in 1968, formed a partnership with Warner Riley to develop engines. Eventually, having redesigned virtually every part of an engine, it made sense for S&S to produce its own range of proprietary V-twin engines, beginning with the X-Wedge. Every S&S part is made in the USA, the vast majority using materials sourced from within a 400-mile radius of the Viola facility.
Although it was already a success, George Smith didn’t live to see the continuing achievements made by his company. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1980 at 59, leaving Marge to lead and guide the company until she passed away in 1992. But what of Tramp? Well, for many years, the motorcycle that was responsible for the genesis of S&S Cycle was lost. Or perhaps I should say it was never entirely lost. No one seems to quite know what happened, but it appears that it passed to Al Molenaar at Southside Harley-Davidson, who had sponsored the record attempt in 1954. The dealership was sold in the 1970s, and the old Knucklehead was part of the deal, tucked away in one of the storage units.
It’s a long story, much of which will remain undocumented, but some people knew that Tramp hadn’t disappeared or been broken. Indeed the Smith family tried to buy the bike back on several occasions, but the owner refused to sell. A replica of Tramp was built for S&S Cycle’s 50th-anniversary celebrations in 2008, and the trail went cold again until 2011. It was then that Cyril Huze broke the news on his internet blog that Tramp had been ‘found’ and purchased by bike builder and TV star Jesse James.
But, for the next six years, Tramp disappeared again just as it had for the preceding forty years. Then, to everyone’s amazement, it suddenly turned up at last year’s Handbuilt Show in Austin, Texas. It was the first time that just about anyone had seen it since 1959, and it looked pretty much as it had back in the 1950s. The new owner, Gary Wattis, had taken possession of Tramp just the day before, but, as well as attending the Austin show, he also displayed the Knuck at the entrance to Michael Lichter’s “Old Iron-Young Blood” exhibition in 2017.
They say that the Holy Grail is not a shining piece of gold, but rather a tarnished cup that many non-believers would ignore. There were people at Sturgis who walked past this worn and scruffy old red Knucklehead without giving it a second glance and others who stopped in their tracks, hardly believing that it was real. It may only be metal, but Tramp is indeed one of the Holy Grails of 20th century motorcycling history and that it has re-emerged, blinking into sunlight and the guardianship of Gary Wattis, is something for which we should all be grateful.
In 1979, Easyriders started to publish some of Michael’s motorcycle photography. He photographed a number of smaller events and features specifically for them, proved his abilities and then was off on his third trip to Sturgis in 1981, now on assignment for Easyriders, for whom he has returned there ever since. Also in 1981, after a solo exhibition of his work at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin, Ireland, which was boycotted by the League of Decency, Michael became disillusioned with the “art world” and again changed course. He stopped publicly exhibiting his photographs in favor of publishing his motorcycle work in Easyriders and simultaneously began developing his career as a commercial advertising and corporate photographer. By 1982, his studio was open in Boulder, Colorado. It wasn’t long before he developed a clientele that included companies like IBM, Sun Microsystems and Kraft Foods.
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2 comments
I saw the Tramp behind the scenes at Lichter’s show at the Chip after the Austin reveal. I’m glad the story and photo shoot have been shared. Thanks Michael.
I don’t know why guys write this stuff without contacting and talking to us, the second generation Smith Family, to get the truth and real facts. Some day maybe the next guy guy will.