Church, Bill
Name/Title
Church, BillTags
Dirt TrackDescription
- Multi-time AMA Class A racing champion of the 1910s and 1920s - Factory-supported rider for the Indian Motorcycle Company - Early motorcycle daredevil Class A motorcycle racing, first organized by the Motorcycle and Allied Trades Association (M&ATA), then popularized by its replacement, the AMA, around the time of its founding in 1924, was for many years the most popular and prestigious form of motorcycle competition in the world. During an era that straddled both board track and dirt track competition, America’s most powerful motorcycle factories — Harley-Davidson, Indian, Excelsior-Henderson, Ace and more — hired some of the bravest racers that ever lived to compete against one another in the most daring and dangerous motorcycle competitions the world had ever seen. Class A machines were exotic, expensive and highly specialized for racing competition, with little similarity to the pedestrian machinery available in everyday motorcycle shops across the nation. No expense was spared in the development of these glorious machines, and the riders who rode these race bikes — often in excess of 100 mph, without brakes, on high-banked wooden board tracks — were celebrated as gladiator-like heroes. Bill Church was one of the most famous riders of that era, winning multiple Class A racing championships all while riding for the Indian Motorcycle Company, based in Springfield, Mass. Nicknamed “Wild Bill,” Church put his fire-breathing, 61-cubic-inch Indian Powerplus racer to good use by regularly beating better-known contemporaries such as fellow AMA Motorcycle Hall of Famers Albert “Shrimp” Burns and Erwin “Cannonball” Baker, at famed West Coast race venues, including the Beverly Hills Speedway, Culver City Speedway and Ascot Park. As successful as he was for his on-track acumen, equally adept at sprints and long-distance endurance runs, Church was perhaps better known for his off-track antics, with many anecdotes stemming from his behavior at activities related to the Los Angeles Motorcycle Club, of which Church was a prominent member. Church regularly won the LAMC’s various obstacle races and other random events like the “potato race” (where riders would compete to collect the most potatoes in a basket, and often in very creative ways, within a set timeframe), but one of his most infamous accomplishments was riding his Indian motorcycle up and over the roller coaster at the Venice Beach amusement park — with his best buddy and fellow racer, “Gasoline” Gus Martin, holding on for dear life on the back! By the late 1920s, Church’s racing career was winding down — as was the heyday of AMA Class A racing, which would soon see the exotic and ultra-specialized racing wonders replaced with more pedestrian, production-based Class C racers that rose to prominence in the mid-1930s after the Great Depression, when both the AMA and the surviving American motorcycle manufacturers worked to make racing more affordable and accessible for both the factories and the independent racers. But the Class A era remains a very special time for motorcycle racing in America, and Bill Church remains one of that era’s most popular and successful riders.Category
Class of 1998