Forgiving Floyd

Forgiving Floyd

UP FRONT

David Edwards

“He was an enthusiastic, fast-moving, ancient old swindler—an irascible pirate.” So says Cook Neilson, former Cycle magazine editor, of one Mr. J. Floyd Clymer.

As you can read in freelancer Andy Saunders’ nicely done piece in this issue, Floyd Clymer’s life was an absurd, multi-pronged caper encompassing everything from pre-WWI racing to a stint as jailbird in a federal pokey to almost dragging Indian out of the grave and back into business.

More germane to our case, Clymer was publisher of Cycle magazine at the time Cycle World came into being. He was not overjoyed, back in 1962, about having competition.

“Cycle had been loafing along for years, its growth stunted and its lines of communication barely extending beyond Floyd’s friends in the motorcycle industry,” Cycle World founder Joe Parkhurst wrote in a 1975 article commemorating Cycle's 25th year. “Good old Gordon Jennings (CWs first tech editor, later editor of Cycle) had the right name for Floyd’s friends: the Belt-Drive Bunch. The BDB was a formidable group of old-timers who had survived and gotten rich from the sale of a few thousand bikes each year. Some of them had been in the business since the ’20s. With all due respect, they were a hell of a bunch of stubborn old coots.”

Neither Clymer nor the entrenched old soldiers of the bike biz had much good to say about a snotty-nosed newcomer magazine that proposed to tell it like it was, long-standing sensibilities be damned. Parkhurst again: “Editorial integrity and quality, though essential to the success of a magazine, were not readily accepted by an industry that never ever heard a disparaging word about its products. The havoc we created, when a 125cc Bultaco TSS went faster down Riverside Raceway’s backstraight than a 750cc Royal Enfield, did not go unnoticed.”

Bigger fish got fried, too. “Don Brown was sales manager at Johnson Motors, Triumph distributors in the West. He almost lost his mind when our 1962 Triumph Bonneville would only go 110 mph,” relayed Parkhurst. “We broke an early-established precedent by re-running it. It did a whopping 112 the second time. To say that we didn’t exactly endear ourselves to the industry would be a gross understatement.” Hoary industry-types went away tweaked of nose, but readers loved the new book’s directness and its vitality. Almost from the first issue, CW outsold the competition. “It is fair to say that Joe Parkhurst invented motorcycle journalism as it is today,” wrote Cycle's editors in 1975. “Despite the fact that Floyd Clymer’s Cycle had a 12-year head start, Parkhurst’s fresh and innovative Cycle World established am instantaneous circulation lead that Cycle was unable to overcome for five years. Cycle World came by its success honorably-by publishing fair and often critical road tests, by presenting readers with good graphics and good prose, and by flexing and changing with the times.” At the time, though, ol’ Floyd would have none of it. “How gullible can you get?” he whined. “Does anyone believe that any new magazine entering this rough-and-tumble field can do in six months what it has taken the three leading motorcycle magazines in the U.S. from 13 to 50 years to accomplish?”

“Cycle always ran such things as the full and complete minutes of AMA meetings...right down to the last yawn,” explained Parkhurst. “We never mentioned them. Moreover, Cycle would print every single solitary news item sent to them. We ran what we thought might be of interest. Our road tests were pretty thorough...Floyd had figures from the brochures and ads.” Clymer also had quirks aplenty. When mountains of paperwork amassed atop his desk, the man would simply close that office off, move to another and commence the same silly procedure all over again. And almost to his dying day, Clymer delighted in one particular piece of stunt riding: “When I was 14 years old, I learned to ride a motorcycle backward, and I never forgot how,” he’d explain. And sure enough, there’s a picture of Clymer in a double-breasted business suit, cuffed trousers and wingtips, perched ass-backward on the gas tank of a Triumph Speed Twin, hands and feet working the controls.

One trick Clymer couldn’t pull off was the resurrection of his worshipped Indian Motorcycles. Infamously frugal and into his 70s, Clymer threw caution to the wind and sank a cool quarter-mil of his own funds into the endeavor. Keystone was the importation of Friedel Munch’s colossal, car-engined Mammut 1200, but the German builder’s eccentricities and Clymer’s blind optimism were a poor business combo. Besides, as Cook Neilson remembers, “The Mammut was one of the world’s worst motorcycles.”

But the basic idea was right. Within three years, Honda would take the fourcylinder, across-the-frame concept and create the brilliant, blockbuster CB750. Clymer also was sure there were buyers for big, American-style highway cruisersHarley-Davidson’s skyrocket success in the Eighties and Nineties proved him right. With his sporting Scout V-Twin prototype, Clymer even foretold the coming of machines like Ducati’s 916, Honda’s VTR and Suzuki’s TLs. He was also first to realize that minibikes should be scaled-down motorcycles, not lawnmower-based contrivances, though his Minnareli-motored Boy Racer sold too poorly to prove the principle. Clymer’s visionary skills left him, though, when he forecast, “Honda will never make it: They are spending more money on advertising than they are taking in.” Clinker predictions, thwarted dreams and larcenous nature aside, it’s clear that Floyd Clymer loved motorcycles. “With the acquisition of Cycle, I was again part of the motorcycle fraternity in which I spent many of the happiest years of my life,” he once wrote. “Motorcycling is a truly wonderful sport...it is splendid recreation.”

Hard to hate a guy like that. So, Floyd, you obstinate old bastard, all is forgiven-wherever you are.