Old AFM photos 1989 and 1990 (or there about)

WoodsChick

I Don't Do GPS
I have a (cheap-o) negative scanner if anyone wants to borrow it. PM me if interested.

Well, hell...I guess I gotta go digging around the basement now and find all those negatives. Thanks a lot, pal! :mad


No, really...that's cool! Thanks! I'll PM you when I find them! :thumbup




WoodsChick
 

EastBayDave

- Kawasaki Fanatic -
I don't think so, Bob :)
-big letters for EastBayDave so he can see them :thumbup
EBDave, I'd love to help you scan your photos, but as you can see (or, uh...maybe you can't? :)) my scanner isn't the best as it leaves diagonal streaks on the scanned photos. If you don't care, I'd be more than happy to scan your 8X10's for you when I get back from a week in Nevada. I'd like a solution to the slide thing, too, as I have tons of slides from the early days of Eric's racing (`84.)
WoodsChick
Thanks man, haven't been on much due to eye pain. Don't need to make larger as I just use the Cntrl+ & Cntrl- keys for zoom in/out. Takes longer to read as I gotta scan sideways as well as up & down. Pleaes forgive typo's as I ain't seein' shit Captian. :laughing Gonna be a long winter as they gotta do the other eye yet, & this one still ain't healded for another 10 weeks they say minimum...ack! :thumbdown

SuperMike I have a (cheap-o) negative scanner if anyone wants to borrow it. PM me if interested.
TTanks SM. Exactly what we need; would be really cool to find one dhat does both slides & negatives. But hey, we take what we can get. Now who's gonna go get it? Me can no drive at them moment...

Guess I better start digging up all those pics eh' ? Got boxes & boxes of em someplace/buried in the garage me thinks...up in the attic. Someplace...

I'm outta here for now....(which I could change this to a darker color?)

-ebd
 

EastBayDave

- Kawasaki Fanatic -
This thread needs to be :bump
thanks for the bump, I'd totally forgotten about it. Still seeing blurry & cross-eyed = the two eyes see differently. Just had the 6th eye-surgery last week. Ugh. Then there's the glasses that don't work. Seems it's never over...

Yeah I'll dig some up; I just figured out we have a scanner on my kids pc which is one of them "multi-use" printers. It scans too. The problem is getting the kid off the PC long enough to use it (he's magnetically attached to it. Still another 1.5 months of Summer left...)

Once he's back to school I'll have access for the days anyway...:laughing
 

Jakemate

Pastafarian Minister
Anyone know any of these guys?
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Yeah, I know Chris Quinn. He's still local, (was my neighbor for 14 years. :laughing He still has The Wheel Works in Hayward, lacing up spokes. Still has a metric shit tonne of little duck stuff and oddball bikes kicking around.
 

budman

General Menace
Staff member
And familiar last names of racers we know today :teeth

WoodsChick

Yup... several second gen racers from those on the list.... or 3rd who knows..:laughing

Wish mine was on the list.. I wanted to go AFM racing in '74 and my Dad so no f'ing way. "Go to school and when you are out of college you can do whatever crazy shit you want. I am not paying a dime for you to go kill yourself."

I was 16.
 

EastBayDave

- Kawasaki Fanatic -
once kids go back to school (about a month), I'll have access to kids machine w/it's scanner. Then I'll pull out the big box w/it's thousands of shots of AFM & AMA races from "back in the day"...:thumbup
 

Butch

poseur
Staff member
One pic below features KSJO's infamous morning show jocks.

Perry Stone and Trish Bell.. Perry was canned for telling Girls Scouts to keep their cookie money..

In reality he was a super nice and refined gentleman. Put a mic in front of him and that changed.

You can find JoMo in the back round of one pic.. same old shoes.

Wow, Lew Fast... That guy was my neighbor here in East San Ho in the nineties... Had a YZ490.

Back in the day, when the only way to get on the track was race. I was always at the back, but hey. #980, 450 SS on my RZ...
 

Deftone

I am not weird, you are.
Awesome pics.

I remember Kurt Marriner, met him through some friends. Didn't he have a custom painted Eye ball helmet? I was hanging out with Dave Kunzelman and Joe Carillo at Sears Point and we saw Kurt crash his RZ500 in T1. Big pile up. I think Joe was racing a TZR250.
 
Anyone know any of these guys?
Yes.

Elkin in 3rd on 500 production means it was probably the year after he was #1 in that class. He went into 1 at Ontario up front on the first lap, fell off somehow (?) and got run over about ten times. While he was in ICU at Upland, Ed Unini went down in 8 or 9 at Sears, got run over and died. Jerry is now living in Novato, didn't race again except for the one time I stuffed him into my leathers and sent him around Sears on my RR-250 in practice. No, that was not me going 12 miles an hour. Ed's dad, "Pops" Unini, did tech for the AFM for years. He'd be old by now tho. Ed's sister showed up at the funeral in a see-through mourning dress. That's something you don't see (through) every day ... hey, it was the seventies.

Greg Sachs got killed somewhere ? I don't remember how, and Ed Sachs did engineering on submarines, made a wrong turn into a hot area one day and a few years later died of brain cancer.

Ewen McKechnie and Rich Arian went to the Isle of Man a couple years after this, didn't do all that well but had a great time. Rich should be around somewhere still but no idea where. His obnoxious brat kids should be grown up and out of the house by now :)

Was Garoutte still riding that 360 Honda twin in 250 GP this year ? That thing was funny. Loudest bike you ever heard, you could tell where he was all the way around Ontario. Twist the throttle and it didn't go any faster, just made more noise :)

Jack Baker ... was it the next year that he was riding a Willy Striker's 250 ? Typical loudmouth Jack, was working at Willy's shop one night and got Willy's guy so pissed off that the guy put a slag hammer through Jack's head. They took him to the hospital and pulled it out, didn't hit any vital areas on Jack. Willy quit racing tho. Best welder you'll ever know, he moved up to Forestville after that. Jack had a beautiful little 250 Ducati. Why does everyone think they need a 1000 cc superbike ? A 250 lb thumper is more fun.

Rudy Galindo ... the LA guys always came up and kicked ass :( They thought nothing of throwing a bike into the wall, take the carcass home and throw it in the dumpster, come back out with a new one next week. Rudy's 250 caught fire and burned to the ground one week, two weeks later he was back with a new one.

That may have been the race where a turn worker found a nest of rattlesnakes on the outside of two. Turn workers said, "Not us, babe. We ain't goin' there." Bill Ralston (race director for years) with the hot wife (Joanne ?) told us at the riders' meeting "No turn workers in two, rattlesnake nest there" and for the rest of the day, you'd see guys who didn't mind 120 mph in ten with that concrete wall on the outside, tippy-toeing through two at about twenty-five mph. Could have made up about ten places there but *no one* was going to mess with rattlesnakes.

Tommy Bright ... he was always hanging around the previously-mentioned hot (and nice) wife with his tongue hanging out. People should remember him, wonder where he went ?

Who was it that always had a beer bottle in hand ? Had his pit guy standing in seven with a cold one, he'd grab it as he went past ? Ran 500 production and some other classes ? fast, funny. I want to say Gennady Liubimsky but it wasn't. Lipanovich ! take that, Alzheimer's ! Jim Lipanovich. Faster when 'under the influence' than sober. Probably not peecee to say that these days ? but it was the truth.

Rhett and Doak, the Cotter twins. Ran production on Nortons and BSA Victims usually but also had a pair of Kwacker Green Meanies. Would go out and spend the race trying to turn off each other's keys, grab the other guy's rear frame loop and get a tow, generally mess with each other. People used to play around a lot ... Rhet was driving for UPS up in Northern California as of a few years ago. "Few' being less than twenty, I guess.

Rusty and Gilly ... I think Gilly only raced a couple times, he couldn't stand not being first always but damn, could he ride a bike. Was in the elevator install / maintain / repair business last I heard.

I don't see Marc Salvisberg in the results but there must have been a hundred RD-350's in that class. Marc is Factory Pro now, everyone knows him.

Jimmy Deehan is not in the standings but he was often running something or other, showing everybody how it was done. Or going faster than rational on a Norton, anyhow. 2 o6's were quick then, but it was a different track. I remember the 250 GP race when everyone was running under two minute laps, that was a big deal. Of course Rayborn did 1 52's on a flathead but Sears was new then. You had to account for the weeds and bumps in 1976. It was a real race track, not an asphalt billard table.

Deehan was not entirely sane. Used to have the backing of Motorcyles Unlimited, when Craig was but a wee lad. What was his dad's name ? Super nice guy to racers and a strong accent. Alex ! Alex McLean ... And the parts guy there ran AFM sometimes, similar haircut to Paul Ritter but a dry dry sense of humor. Always gave you a discount. Funny as hell, good rider. Ritter was good but remote. Maybe hanging with the crazies just wasn't his style :)

Judkins, maybe crazier than Deehan, if that's possible. Picked up a hitch-hiker on the Ride once (now who is going to accept a ride from a bike on the ride ? Maybe need to redefine crazy ...) and overcooked it into the lagoon. Good guy, fast, didn't put so much emphasis onto the points thing, just rode what he wanted. I mention this because he is black and that wasn't a factor in anything. "Diversity" and "tolerance" are not new-fangled. The new-fangled part is making a big deal out of it. In 1976, at least in Northern California, if you acted like a decent guy you were accepted as a decent guy. And Judkins was. Is ? Where'd he go ?

Pat Hennen on a Suzuki twin showed up a couple times, or maybe a year or two earlier. That thing was the baddest sounding two-stroke ever, sounded like shredding concrete. That was pre-mufflers. Mufflers are actually nice but it's a different experience. San Jose with no mufflers was baaad !! On a 250 start grid in '76 you had to run IFR - more than one beginner when the flag dropped found that his engine wasn't even running.

Harry Hunt was the Dunlop tire guy, should get some credit. Also sold Krober tachs and ignitions. Of course you know what we all nicknamed him ... Dunlops were THE tire then, this was a year or two before Goodyear had anything. Some Michelins. The very first Michelin slicks were all white, would have been perfect for racing that Hudson Hornet :) Treaded tires mostly, maybe right about then the first slicks were showing up.

Chambers is still around, living in Richmond collecting the rents from his unsuspecting commercial tenants. He needs to work on the Snidely Whiplash mustache and round up a Sweet Nell to complete the transition.

I don't see Marty Siegel on here but he always ran up front. Broke his back on the Ride, came back to race again, fell down no big deal at Willow ? Or maybe Ontario, went to get in his van at the end of the day to drive home and fell over dead from a brain clot. Marty was always fun.

Paul Unmacht ! Ran open production or maybe 750 Production on a Laverda triple. The Laverda was really a twin-plus-one, strange idea but Paul ran it pretty hard. Laverdas, Ducatis, Morinis and such were "strange" then, not socially acceptable. Fine at AFM but in general, no one bought Ducatis.

Kari Prager would have been running his BMW single at this time, too. The reason he's not in the standings is that it never lasted more than 3/4 of a race. Kari was well known later in life for touring activities, as was Paul.


Should be some more names, if I get past the Oldtimer's I'll put them up ... a good time was had by all. It seems like it was more fun then, less high-pressure. Definitely less expensive. Motorcycles looked like motorcycles, too. If anyone had ridden what's now a common "sport bike" they'd have been laughed off the planet. Jerry bought a 250 Ninja for his daughter to learn on a couple years ago ... stupid 400 lb p.o.s. She'd have been better off with a Tiger Cub. Some things are not better than they were forty years ago.
 
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WoodsChick

I Don't Do GPS
I don't see Marty Siegel on here but he always ran up front. Broke his back on the Ride, came back to race again, fell down no big deal at Willow ? Or maybe Ontario, went to get in his van at the end of the day to drive home and fell over dead from a brain clot. Marty was always fun.

Marty Siegel went down at Willow, turn one or two I think, and my buddy David Gibbons ran over him. He had nowhere to go. Marty died of internal injuries.




WoodsChick
 
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