William Wells Bennett, pioneer American motorcycle racer seen onboard an Indian 30.50 ci single dirt track racer in his home state of Kansas ca 1910.
The sense of freedom, adventure, and uncut joy that comes standard to every kid when they first throw their leg over a bicycle is something rarely matched in life, if ever. It truly is one's first taste of sovereignty, the ability to create and control your own experience, interact with and expand the world around you on your own terms, and live within the thrills and meditations of the moment. Imagine how amplified those same feelings must have been in 1900 when the world didn't expand endlessly on screens forever in hand but was instead limited to the tangible, immediate proximity. For a child, books and imagination could take you far, but the real world ended at the horizon. The bicycle, very much the revolution of the day at the turn of the 20th Century, offered a chance to push that boundary ever farther, for as far as one was willing to pedal. For a skinny boy in Wichita, the bicycle became the center of his world; it became a passion that would shape the life of an American motorcycling icon.
Considered to be one of the greatest cross-country motorcyclists of all time, William Wells Bennett was born on June 24, 1891, in Wichita, Kansas. Perhaps it was the geography of America's breadbasket that first molded Bennett's natural endurance as it was no doubt an effort to chase down the horizon in that endless expanse. As a boy of no more than 8 or 9 years old, he would pedal for miles along the dusty rural roads around Wichita, most often going it alone as none of his buddies were up for such strenuous wandering. It was on one of those long solo rides that Bennett caught his first glimpse of an automobile. He recalled being fascinated by the machine and gave chase for as many miles as his legs and lungs could handle. By his own account, it was in a similar fashion that he also encountered his first motorcycle sometime around 1901. It would have been one of the earliest machines available in America at that time, most likely an Orient which were being sold by the Schollenberger Brothers on North Main Street. The story goes that the man on the motorcycle was having a hard go of it, pedaling his heavy cycle as he wrestled to get it going again. Bennett later recalled having been unimpressed, he was just as happy to pedal on by, but it wouldn't be long before he too was hooked by the new contraptions.
There were several bicycle shops in Wichita at that time, it was the height of the bicycle's golden age, and the young Bennett was a regular, hang-around kid. By 1904 many shops began offering motorcycles, engine kits, and motoring parts along with their standard fair. Bennett was always underfoot, listening in on the motorcyclists telling tales of their two-wheeled adventures, offering to clean their machines and run errands for them, hoping to get a ride out of the deal. When one of the local shops, perhaps George Liston's or Barnes & Newcomb's, placed an order for a new motorcycle, Bennett caught his big break. The deal was that once the new machine arrived if he could uncrate and assemble it, they would let him ride it around town to drum up interest, and if anyone came to purchase one, he would get a commission. Young Wells Bennett was only 13 at the time; one can imagine how quickly he must have agreed to such a deal.
Still in school, Bennett began working on motorcycles at every opportunity over the next two years, becoming somewhat of a demo rider in the area. In 1906 he found himself in his first contest, a rough ride through deep sand to see who could control their machines the longest; Bennett proved to be that person. The 15-year-old felt that he had waited on the sidelines long enough, races were happening more and more, and there were prizes to be won. That same year, with a calculated clerical error on the registration form's age section, Wells Bennett entered his first road race, which he won. The young Bennett's racing career was off to a great start. As the machines became more popular, sophisticated, and reliable, communities of riders emerged and began forming clubs like the Wichita MC in 1908, which started creating events around their beloved machines. Naturally, motorcycle tours became competitions, exhibitions turned to sport, and the local dirt horse tracks became venues for a thrilling new event, flat-track racing. Young Wells Bennett was rarely if ever, absent from an event.
However, he was absent from school and dropped out in the 8th grade, initially working with his father at the Western Union Telegram Company before taking a job with Standard Oil, racing, and riding at every chance throughout the region. He crisscrossed the state on endurance runs, racing flat tracks on the county fair circuit, and trying to steal any city-to-city record that had been established. Bennett rode a variety of machines, including Thor, Yale, and Indian, both single cylinders and twins. His passion grew more and more lucrative over the years, and by 1910 he had earned a reputation as the fastest man in Kansas, rising amongst the ranks of regional amateurs like Ray Weishaar, Speck Warner, and Erle Armstrong. Also, in 1910, the Short Grass Motorcycle Club first formed, with Bennett as a member. The club was quite active and comprised of serious, distance-oriented riders who organized several successful endurance competitions and road runs, including an annual run to Denver, Colorado.
Bennett began earning a decent living on the race track, pulling in a cool $110 onboard his Thor single at the Fourth of July races held at the Cowley County Fairgrounds in Winfield in 1912. The amount may not seem like much now, but Bennett's work in the saddle that day pulled in double the average man's monthly salary working 60 hours a week. One month after that race in Winfield, in August 1912, Bennet arrived in Denver with the other's from the Short Grass MC as part of their annual 1,100-mile run, but what he found in Denver would change the course of his life from that moment on.
Denver was home to not one but two of the increasingly popular board track motordrome stadiums that had been popping up in cities across the country beginning in 1909. At a 1/3 of a mile long and banked at 47 degrees, the wooden bowl inside Denver's Tuileries Amusement Park must have been quite a sight to behold for the 20-year-old Kansan. On August 19, 1912, Bennett took in the races at Tuileries where a local star, 17-year-old star Curly Fredericks piloted an Excelsior 7, a 61ci ported twin brute, to win both the 3 and 5-mile open events. Never too comfortable on the sideline, Bennett made his way to the paddock to bend the ear of the racers. Moments later, having never before stepped foot inside a banked race track, Wells Bennett had talked his way into a 30.50ci Indian single and an entry into the next race. The announcer introduced the "Kansas Champion" to the crowd, and after a 2-mile sprint around the steeply banked boards of the Tuileries Motordrome, with an average speed of 70 mph, Bennett crossed the line having won the first board track race.
Within a month, he and his fiancee Margie left Wichita for Los Angeles, where Bennett quickly established himself as one of the top board track racers in the country. Now a professional motorcycle racer, Bennett began touring the country racing at the various motordromes which were popping up faster than ever. Bennett began the 1913 season in St. Louis as a featured rider on the country's steepest track at 62 degrees. He was pulled from St. Louis and contracted to become the Captain of the Detroit "Tiger Squad" team as the city-centric American Motordrome League took shape. He later recalled of his time in the motordromes that he would run 2, 3, and 5-mile races 3 nights a week for 22 weeks in those days, resulting in over 330 races at breakneck speed on the boards each season. Wells found success and notoriety inside America's motordromes, it was a risky way of life, but with hundreds of dollars up for grabs each week, one could make a good living if they could just avoid dying.
He signed with Excelsior in 1914 and remained a force on the boards, but, as the motordrome's popularity and sustainability began to wain, Bennet returned to his roots on the dirt ovals. His skills on any surface, at any speed, and at any distance strengthened his relationship with Excelsior. He competed as a signature rider for the company's factory team, excelling on board tracks, dirt ovals, and road races until WWI's outbreak halted professional racing in the States. But there was still opportunity during the war years. With Bennett's seemingly innate comfort in the saddle for long distances, he focused on endurance runs and cross-country records. New city-to-city records became his bread and butter as they offered Excelsior new opportunities to advertise their machine's ability, and Bennett was the perfect man to have in your stable for such endeavors. Three-Flag events from Canada to Mexico became lucrative investments for the manufacturers, as did lowering the transcontinental marks, and Bennett, along with Indian's long-distance ringer Erwin "Cannonball" Baker, would trade records back and forth for years to come.
When the ceasefire was called in Europe, the American motors again roared back to life, professional racing resumed in 1919, and new forms of competition emerged. Long-distance road races showcased not only the grit of the riders but the rugged reliability of the machines. Races like the ones in Dodge City and Marion became the most significant events upon racings return, and Bennett often led the pack, finding himself on the podium if not for mechanical gremlins. Flat tracks were still popular and a specialty for Bennett and his Kansan brother Ray Weishaar, who had become a staple member of the Harley-Davidson Wrecking Crew. Gone were the circular motordromes on which Bennett had found much of his early success, but what had grown from their concept were new massive wooden tracks, America's earliest superspeedways. These larger board track speedways were wider and much longer, seemingly tailor-made for higher speed, longer distance racing, something Bennett was no stranger to. By the 1920s, Bennett was a seasoned veteran; he was in his 30's but still chasing after titles, records, and wins.
His notoriety also landed him a unique opportunity in Hollywood in 1921. He was hired by the Fox Film Corporation to be the stunt coordinator on a film adaptation of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The silent film featured contemporary elements, including a fleet of around 200 motorcycles for which Bennett was responsible. As he was already in LA for the production, Excelsior thought it would be a good idea to send him down the road to "the Motorcycle Hill" in San Juan Capistrano. It had been an Excelsior, after all, that first reached the top when Cal Lambert made the first successful ascent of the 40-72% grade in 1917. The title had since most often gone to Harley-Davidson's Dud Perkins, but that was before Wells Bennett showed up. In April 1922, Excelsior sent a new, heavily modified Model M factory hill climb special to Bennett, a lengthened and braced frame complete with a paddled tractor band rear tire. Bennett found himself straddling the beast at the bottom of the hill in San Juan Capistrano in front of a crowd of nearly 50,000; when he reached the top, he took the crown off Perkins' head and added it to his overflowing treasury of two-wheeled conquests. His most heralded act in the saddle, though, would come the following month.
On May 30, 1922, on the Tacoma board track speedway's aging timbers, Bennett cracked the throttle of his stock 28 HP Henderson DeLuxe, Excelsior's 4-cylinder line of machines, and covered a record-smashing distance of 1,562.54 miles, a total of 781 laps in 24 hours. He sustained an average speed of 63 mph, on wood, on a motorcycle, for 24 hours, in 1922. Bennet had to be helped off of his machine given the toll the ride took on his body, but he beat the standing record, held by his old pal Cannonball Baker, with nearly 2 hours remaining on the clock. The distance that Wells Bennet covered that day in Tacoma set a record that would stand unbroken for another 15 years and be printed in ads, magazines, newspapers, and books for decades to come. Though he was growing long in the tooth for the racing game, he was still eager to run whenever he could, but the sport itself had begun to change. Speeds were at hair-raising heights on highly-specialized machines, big venues fell into disrepair, manufacturers were scaling back or eliminating factory programs, and auto racing became increasingly popular. Many of Bennett's generation, at least those who had survived the golden age of competition, were moving into other ventures at the time. It was following Bennett's arrest in LA during one of his Three-Flag runs that the M&ATA outlawed all future competitions on public roads, which put an end to his transcontinental ambitions and was perhaps the catalyst for retirement.
In 1924 Bennett retired; he and his wife Margie moved from Los Angeles to Portland, where he opened an Excelsior-Henderson dealership. Bennett befriended Mark Weygandt, of Excelsior, Illinois, an avid outdoorsman and famous guide at Mt. Hood outside Portland. There he continued to ride all over the Hood River Valley, even having a go at riding his Henderson DeLuxe to the summit of Mt. Hood under the guidance and encouragement of Weygandt. Though his attempt fell short of the 11,200-foot summit, only reaching as far as the Cooper Spur around 8,500 feet, Bennett's ability in the saddle and experience in how to market through accomplishments set him in a good position as a dealership owner for the coming years. His dealership was a lucrative and active hub for motorcycling in the area through the 1920s, but unfortunately for both Bennet and the Excelsior company, the financial crisis of 1929 struck a hard blow. Bennett sold his dealership and moved back to LA, taking a job as a service representative for the Ford Motor Company. Not long after, in 1931, Excelsior, who had begun production in 1907 and risen to become one of the Big Three American motorcycle manufacturers, closed their doors. Over the years, Bennett moved around within the motoring industry and living in the Los Angeles area, but in the late 1940s, he made his way back to the Hood River area, buying a ranch in the Parkdale Oregon area. Somewhere along the way, he and his wife Margurete parted ways, perhaps she preferred LA to an Oregonian farm, but in 1950 he remarried Mrs. Beulah Ann Jones, the widow of his old friend Mark Weygandt. There they lived out the rest of their days in Hood River until Bennett's death on May 31, 1969.
Wells Bennett was such a prolific motorcyclist that it would be an exhausting undertaking to record all of his accomplishments. With his interest at such a young age, he became a part of the first generation of enthusiasts, one of the first class of professional competitors in America, and one of the few among the pioneers to succeed in so many forms of the sport. From dirt tracks to motordromes, from road races to speedways, hill climbs, endurance runs, and transcontinental records, there was seldom a podium, title, or record that he didn't hold. For his contributions to American motorcycle culture, William Wells Bennett was inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2000. For a skinny boy from Wichita who never wanted to get off his bike, he had quite a ride.