Rolling thunder

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Editor’s note: For one weekend each summer, the town of Chesnee sees its population swell to 10 times its normal size. During the annual Antique Bikes on Main festival, always held on the last weekend in July, thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts from across the Southeast rumble into town for the combination bike show, rally and swap meet.

While the 2020 Antique Bikes on Main celebration has been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, organizer Dennis Harris, owner of Chesnee Classic Cycle, is already planning for next year’s event. For the latest festival information, visit chesneeclassiccycle.com or call (864) 590-2141. For current public health recommendations on the coronavirus, consult scdhec.gov/covid19.

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy these profiles of the riders we met at the 2019 Antique Bikes on Main.

Bud Blair

The Antique Motorcycle Club of America’s Legends Chapter, which is located in Chesnee, helps set up and run the festival each year. The chapter includes about 100 members, ranging in age from 16 to 84, who are dedicated to sharing their love of vintage bikes.

“A lot of people will see them on a T-shirt, but they never see one in person or get to hear one run,” says Bud Blair, president of the Legends Chapter. He owns three bikes—a 1997 Harley-Davidson Heritage Springer, a 1947 Harley-Davidson Knucklehead and a 1942 Knucklehead.

“My love is my older bikes,” says the 57-year-old Blair, whose been riding since he was 9 years old. “It’s just the coolest. It’s like an old pair of blue jeans that’s your favorite. I’m not knocking new bikes, but I’m just an antique kind of guy.”

Pete Hill

It’s rare to catch Pete Hill sitting still.

The Greenville native has always been on the go, often at record-setting speeds, in a motorcycle racing career that piled up wins on tracks all over the United States and Canada, as well as Europe and Australia. The winner of multiple drag racing championships, Hill is recognized as the “world’s fastest knucklehead” and is a member of numerous racing halls of fame.

A short list of his accomplishments: In 1981, Hill won his first International Drag Bike Association championship. That year, he also won the American Motorcycle Association Drag Bike Top Fuel title aboard a modified 1947 Harley-Davidson Knucklehead. He would go on to win four more IDBA titles and four championships with the American Motorcycle Racing Association before retiring from racing in 1994.

Now 84, Hill still has a need for speed. Not long ago, he topped 120 mph during a run at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

Through it all, his wife, Jackie, has been by his side, serving as a business partner, racing crew chief, author of his memoirs and confidante. The couple recently celebrated their 66th wedding anniversary. Hill continues to run his motorcycle shop, Pete Hill Motorcycles in Greenville, just as he has for the past 47 years. The four-person shop, which includes his son, Tommy, does a little bit of everything, from welding to building engines and other machine work. Racing was fun, he says, but it also served as a testing ground for his ground-breaking mechanical designs.

“I had ideas that were a lot different from the competition and I wanted to try my ideas. That’s what I wanted to get out of racing,” Hill says. “If you win, it proves your ideas were correct. I was so far out of the norm with what I was doing that when it did work out, I was dominant for a number of years.”

Hill still tools around South Carolina on a street bike. He’s been pulled over a few times, but remarkably, the man who has driven motorcycles at speeds close to 200 mph has never gotten a speeding ticket.

“I’d say that’s just because the way I look,” he says. “An old man with gray hair who looks like he’s gonna be in a nursing home in a couple weeks.”

Ralph Coggins

A highlight of the annual festival is the Saturday Prayer Ride conducted by members of the Christian Motorcyclists Association. In 2018, 50 riders traveled to churches in Spartanburg County, collecting prayer requests before returning to Chesnee for a gathering to pray for every name collected, says Ralph Coggins, road captain for the Spartanburg-based Jabez Riders chapter of the CMA.

“We are there for any reason—a biker down somewhere that needs our help, hospital visits. We help bikers that are in need of anything,” he says.

The CMA is an international ministry numbering more than 200,000 members with chapters in all 50 states and 41 foreign countries. South Carolina has 13 chapters.

Coggins, who is now retired after working 20 years for the Spartanburg County 911 emergency call center and 23 years in the U.S. Army, says the group’s primary purpose remains “carrying the gospel of Jesus Christ to a lost and dying world. We do that by riding motorcycles and speaking the name of Jesus to people who need to hear it. Everything we do is all about Jesus.”

Mike Bruso

Among the 17 motorcycles that sit in Mike Bruso’s shop in Forest City, North Carolina, is a 2018 Indian that “absolutely rides beautiful” with a 3,000-watt stereo, heated seats and an adjustable windshield. However, he says, “It never gets moved. It just sits in my garage.”

Bruso says he honestly has more fun riding his older motorcycles, especially his 1939 Harley Davidson Knucklehead.

“The new bikes are like a new car,” he says. “There’s no squeaks, no rattles. There’s nothing to do. You just drive it.”

That’s not the case with the 1926 Harley-Davidson JD that he rode in Chesnee. It doesn’t use recirculating oil and offers little in the way of brakes, a different throttle control and the inevitable loose bolts and screws that come with being nearly a century old.

“There’s always something to think about,” says the 41-year-old Bruso, who makes his living as a mechanical engineer. “You’ve got to be prepared to fix something while you’re parked on the side of the road. It’s just a lot more interactive than a new bike.”

Louis Hale

A retired electrical engineer from Augusta, Georgia, Louis Hale had to think long and hard about which of his 20 antique bikes to bring to the 2018 event. He passed over a 1916 Indian, a 1916 Miami Power Bicycle and a beloved 1925 Excelsior Super X before landing on his tried-and-true 1920 Harley Davidson. “That’s just like how it came out of the factory, 99 years ago,” he says, pointing to his brown-and-bronze-tinted ride.

And to prove the bike is still just as capable as ever, he competed in the field events that test a rider’s balance, dexterity and control—winning the Chesnee competition that required him to place a tennis ball atop a line of pylons while riding his classic cycle through a marked course.

Hale says he enjoys collecting unusual bikes and seeing the other motorcycles on display at the Chesnee event, especially models with the original paint that aren’t “all clean and shiny.”

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Get There

While the 2020 Antique Bikes on Main celebration has been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, organizer Dennis Harris, owner of Chesnee Classic Cycle, is already planning for next year’s event to be held on the last weekend in July. For the latest festival information, visit chesneeclassiccycle.com or call (864) 590-2141. For current public health recommendations on the coronavirus, consult scdhec.gov/covid19.