GENE WALKER, BOARD TRACK RACER

[David Morrill of Sylacauga, Alabama, submitted this story of Gene Walker, a legendary board track competitor for Indian in the 'Teens.  Morrill is a retired Orlando police officer, who rode five years as a motorcycle cop, and also raced motorcycles.  For more on Board Track racing, click here for my earlier article.]

Gene Walker on his Indian Powerplus, Daytona Beach Florida, 1920 (Don Emde collection)

Birmingham’s historic Elmwood Cemetery is the final resting place of several Alabama sports legends, from Paul “Bear” Bryant to Dixie Walker. There is another legend buried there who is all but unknown in his own home town. During his career, his exploits made the sports pages of the major newspapers, and his untimely death was mourned by fans nationwide. In the northeast corner of the cemetery is a simple marble headstone that reads: Gene Walker 1893-1924.
John Eugene “Gene” Walker got his first motorcycle in 1910 and rode it to deliver mail for the local post office. But in 1912, the Alabama State Fair sponsored a motorcycle race at the Birmingham Fairgrounds Raceway, and it was Walker who won the final race of the day. Bob Stuibbs, a local Indian Motorcycles dealer, took note, soon putting Walker on a new Indian eight-valve racer and racing him out of his downtown Birmingham dealership.

Birmingham Fairgrounds Raceway 1913/14, O.H. Hunt photograph (Johnny Whitsett Collection)

Big bikes with no brakes
Early racing motorcycles were little more than large bicycles with large powerful engines–and no brakes. They could reach speeds of 90 m.p.h. on the tracks of the day, and racing them was a deadly serious business.
The races at Birmingham Fairgrounds’ track drew large crowds who came to see top amateur and professional riders lap the dirt track at a blistering pace. By the fall race of 1913, Walker had established a reputation as the man to beat, winning every race he entered during the week long fall program and setting a new lap record for the track.
The following October, Walker entered his first professional race, the F.A.M. (Federation of American Motorcyclists) one-hour race at Birmingham. While he didn’t win, he was able to set a new lap record and ran with the lead pack throughout the race.
Walker’s ride with Indian

Indian Motorcycle memorial for Walker, 1924 (Don Emde Collection)

By 1915, Walker was hired as a factory rider for Indian Motorcycle Company and moved to Springfield, Mass., the company headquarters. Walker’s first national win came that same year at the F.A.M. National race in Saratoga, N.Y. The next few years were quiet ones for Walker, as professional racing was virtually curtailed for the duration of World War I.  As his mother’s sole source of support, Walker wasn’t subject to the draft. He continued to race in local Birmingham events and worked as a machinist for William Specht Jr., at his Harley Davidson dealership on Third Avenue North. According to one newspaper account, he even performed duties of a motorcycle cop during the winter. Walker returned to professional racing in 1919, winning six National Races. In April 1920, Walker, riding his Indian Power Plus race, set the first official motorcycle land speed world record of 115 m.p.h. on the sands of Daytona Beach, Fla.  That record became the centerpiece of Indian Motorcycle’s advertising that year and a 1920, Motorcycle and Bicycle Illustrated magazine declared Walker a “Champion of Champions.”

A typical board track race in action...Despite that success, Indian released Walker in 1922 for his refusal to ride in dusty track conditions at the sport’s biggest race of 1921 in Dodge City, Kansas. The company reconsidered that decision when he continued to win races on privately owned Harley-Davidsons, and Walker rejoined Indian for the 1924 season, winning the Championship race on the board track at Los Angeles.

On June 7, 1924, Walker was practicing for a race on the half mile dirt track at Stroudsburg, Penn.  While taking practice laps he swerved to avoid a woman crossing the track and crashed. The severely injured Walker was transported to Rosenkrans Hospital, where his condition seemed to improve, but on June 21, 1924, Walker died of his injuries. He was 31-years-old and left behind a widow and two children.
A few days later, Birmingham News sports writer Zipp Newman eulogized the hometown motorcycle celebrity under the headline:
MOTORCYCLE RIDING HAS LOST ITS GREATEST STAR IN DEATH OF WALKER

Bob Horton was also quoted in the Newman’s article:  “Walker was always a gentleman. His death marks the passing of the greatest motorcycle rider that ever lived.”

Walker's marker at Elmwood Cemetery

During his 10-year professional career, Walker won 19 championship races and numerous non-championship races on both board and dirt tracks. He set lap records on many of the tracks as well as several motorcycle land speed records. His lap record at the Birmingham Fairgrounds Raceway had not been broken when the track stopped racing in World War I. In 1998, Gene Walker was inducted into the American Motorcyclist Association’s Hall of Fame.

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JEAN DEPARA

Sharp dressed man on a Vespa 180 Sprint

There's been a recent shift in Fine Art photography with African subject matter; instead of being wholly photos OF Africa by outside professionals, several photographers FROM Africa have finally gotten their due.  The most famous of these is Malick Sidibé, who worked in Mali from the 1960s onwards, documenting street life and capturing the fashions and moods of Mali in his portrait studio (Studio Malick).  Included in his many portraits are a few props from his subject's lives, which often meant small motorcycles and mopeds, with sharp-suited young men or whole families draped over their hard-earned mounts.

Jean Depara in a self-portrait

Congolese photographer Jean Depara (1928-97) is having his first full retrospective, at Maison Revue Noir in Paris, until Feb. 18, 2012.  While his ouevre is similar to Sidibé, although his 'Jean Whiskey Depara photo studio shots were less interesting than photographs of the world he preferred to inhabit; the happening nightclubs and bars of Leopoldville (later, Kinshasa).  Depara bought a camera (an Adox 6cmx6cm) in 1950 to document his wedding, but he became enthralled with image-making, and the interaction of photographer and subject.

Young woman on a Velosolex moped

Leopoldville was named after nightmare King Leopold II of Belgium - his mother Louise Marie d'Orléans may be a distant relation of mine - who used the famous explorer Henry Stanley (the inspiration for Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', and Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now') to lay claim to the Congo as his private property, brutalizing and killing millions of Congolese in the process of extracting valuable rubber.  The Democratic Republic of Congo gained independence in 1960, and in 1966 Leopoldville was renamed Kinshasa (after a local tribe who inhabited the area when Stanley established his settlement in 1881), an 'Africanization' process common in formerly colonized countries after liberation. [Only Brazzaville retains the name of a European founder - for more on that, read my article from Men's File #4.]

Late night ramblings around a moped...

Depara was in the thick of a cultural explosion in the mid-60s, as the country experienced an exhilarating wave of energy after independence.  Kinshasa was musically the heart of Africa in the 60s, and Depara spent much of his time around the hot bands and night clubs, where his talents were noted by the famous Franco (Francois Makiadi Luambo), who needed an official photographer.  This suited Depara, who by this time had honed his technique with the camera as an image-maker, and as a tool for seduction of women!

Jean Depara captured an era of curious integration of American culture as well, as local sapeurs (sharp dressers) sometimes wore cowboy outfits - the 'Bills' - and these make an interesting contrast with the work of Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger and his 'Halbstarke'.  Mods and cowboys, women in (or out of) gorgeous dresses, Vespas and mopeds, Depara gives us a glimpse of a very hip world we in 'the rest of the world' didn't have a clue existed. 

The 'Bills', as in Buffalo Bill, with rolled-up jeans and flannel shirts, near the equator!

In the mid-1970s, as revolutions, coups, and communist takeovers swept Africa, Depara was offered a secure position as official photographer of the Congolese parliament, which he held until retirement in 1989.  Uninterested in color photography or the declining profitability of the genre, he hung up his camera afterwards, and lived a comfortable existence with his 'villa and a convertible'.  His work was published outside Congo only after his death in 1996, and is now appreciated by a global audience.

Electrified African music; Kinshasan 'mother of invention' amplification created a completely new genre - Congotronics!

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FRANZ KRIEGER, MYSTERY PHOTOGRAPHER

A crudely-erected obstacle course for the rider of this BMW R51

A laborer in New Jersey regularly cut the grass of an elderly German man, upon whose death he inherited 50,000 baseball trading cards, and a photo album which was clearly from a professional photographer during WW2.  The album held a curious blend of very personal snapshots, such as convalescing in a hospital, contrasted with closeups of Hitler and other heads of state during the eastward push of the Wehrmacht across the Soviet Union towards Stalingrad during 1941-2.

The mystery photo album

The laborer borrowed money from a New York garment district executive, and when he was unable to repay the loan, the exec was happy to take the baseball cards and photo album and settle the debt, recognizing the value of all-access photos of Hitler, obviously assembled by a professional photographer, although they bore no identification. This New Yorker recently fell on hard times after quadruple-bypass heart surgery, and anonymously contacted the New York Times to help identify the photographer, and to help value and sell the photographs, anonymously.  The Times put the story online in late June, in association with Der Spiegel, and within 3 hours the mystery of the album was solved via the internet.

A slowly advancing German military column, somewhere in the Ukraine, 1941.  Note the horses pulling Howitzers

Franz Krieger was a professional photographer in Salzburg between 1938-41, working on staff for the Nazi propaganda ministry, and very briefly joined the SS police in 1941, before quitting that notoriously nasty group, and joining the Goebbel's Propogandakompanie, which followed the military into battle, documenting the rapid advance of Hitler's army eastward, after Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Agression Pact, which had made temporary allies of Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939.  Hitler needed Ukraine's grain, and the oil fields of the Caucasus, to fuel his war machine, and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.  Stalin's pact with Hitler was sheer expedience, as Hitler's autobiography and political blueprint 'Mein Kampf' ('My Struggle') laid out a plan to exterminate or deport to Siberia all 'subhuman' Russians in the valuable grain and oil fields of the western USSR.  Stalin may have been simply buying time in 1939 to bolster his military, expecting to defend against an inevitable German invasion.

Two Propogandakompanie soldiers film the destruction of Minsk

Krieger documented the fall of Minsk and areas of the Ukraine, photographing ethnic Russian and Jewish prisoners taken along the way, the destruction of cities and towns, and the toll taken on German soldiers as well.  As the Propogandakompanie went further into the Soviet Union, Krieger quit the SS photo unit, and was sent to Bregenz (in Austria) to train as a simple soldier, becoming a supply-truck driver.  Krieger's move away from the elite and ideologically-driven SS (police and photo units) to the non-combatant status of a driver, hint that his initial enthusiasm for the Nazi party gave way to a distaste for the realities of war.  His imagery changed from the pageantry of pre-war parades and rallies in Salzburg, historic meetings between heads of state, to troop movements, destroyed homes, ethnic and military prisoners (and the horrors of their treatment), and haunted German soldiers.

Training to ride a DKW RT125 over a tipping board...

While back in Germany in 1942, Krieger documented the Motor SportSchule, at which motorcyclists were trained for battle.  His photographs show the unusual tactics and crude equipment used to raise the skill level of military motorcyclists, including giant teeter-totters and suspended truck tires the riders had to negotiate.  The motorcycles in the photographs are a BMW R51 and DKW RT125, the BMW being quite a hot machine for training purposes; more typical for the military were BMW R71 sidevalve twins, which, ironically, were also made in the Soviet Union under license, and continue to be produced in modified form to this day in both Russia and China, as the Dnepr, Neval, Chiang Jiang, Yangtze, etc, making this the longest continuous-production motorcycle ever.

Two German infantry soldiers showing the toll of war on ordinary men

Krieger was sent back to the Eastern Front in 1942, just in time for the siege of Stalingrad, in which Soviet urban guerrilla tactics stymied the German army, who were trained for rapid heavy-artillery advances with air support, and not small-arms combat.  With the Germans mired in Stalingrad, a heavy winter combined with a slow buildup of Soviet troops, who eventually surrounded the city, led to the defeat of the Germans and the turning point of WW2.  Hitler had not secured his oil fields in the Middle East nor in Crimea, and could not supply bread for Germany from Ukranian fields; in truth his grand plans were finished, although it took two more years and millions more deaths to drive the point home.  The battle of Stalingrad itself cost 2 million lives on all sides.

Kriegers' self-portrait in the mirror of his Kompanie bus

Our photographer Krieger was lucky though, developing jaundice before things got ugly in Stalingrad, and was sent by train back to Germany in late 1942.  He survived the war, and died a merchant in Bavaria in 1993.  How his photo album arrived in New Jersey is still a mystery.

Propogandakompanie buses, as seen in several of the photos

The Minsk Opera House shortly after the German occupation.  Now known as the Bolshoi Theater of the Repulic of Belarus, the building was clearly spared by German guns...perhaps because Soviet fascist architecture was so similar to German fascist architecture!

3 gents before the SportSchule, in Kochel am See

A Soviet prisoner in the Minsk prison camp

A very young Soviet prisoner in Minsk wearing Red Army budenovka hat

The lucky Hepatitis...Krieger at his Bavarian hospital

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MYSTERY RACER

A curious racing motorcycle appeared in my mailbox today, of an engine configuration I've never seen.  I have an idea that the chassis is a Smith frame from Australia, which was a scaled-down Norton Featherbed built to house mainly Velocette engines for 250cc racing, and which was based on the Beasley frame from England.  That this machine uses Velocette forks, gearbox, and wheels supports the theory.  Typically, Velo MOV pushrod engines were used in such frames, often with special cylinder heads in bronze or aluminum cast by enterprising tuners such as Carey.  Some frames housed sleeved-down KTT engines, which were certainly heavy but fast and durable.
Australian racers did battle far away from the epicenter of the motorcycle industry; spares took months to arrive, and tuning advice dispensed in a mere trickle from the factories.  So, the 'bush tuners' made their own racing heads, frames, or whole engines.  It appears this curious motor is entirely home-made, and appears to be an 'OP' (opposed piston) engine, in which two oppposed crankshafts move two pistons towards each other in a common cylinder barrel, forming between them the combustion chamber at the top of their stroke.  Fairly common in marine applications and sometimes aircraft, such an engine is very rare on a motorcycle!
There are as many variants on the internal combustion engine through its nearly two-century existence, as there are dinosaurs with outlandish teeth, armor, and body shape.  And, most are equally extinct, for the moment.
Can any readers shed light on this machine's history?

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