Trail Rider Magazine

10 Trail Rider www.TrailRider.com "So there were a lot of bodies crammed into this room, but the most obvious desk was right in the middle, facing the door, and behind that desk like a mustachioed Buddha sat the legendary Super Hunky. I had been a dirt rider for probably seven or eight years and had read his stuff in the original Dirt Bike, so I was familiar with the legend, but here was the man in the flesh! He made a big show of ge ng up and shaking hands formally with me, but he did that with everyone, and I could tell he was immediately adop ng me into the Challenge Publica ons family. "Things moved quickly though, and within a month I was vic m of a major calamity when Challenge decided to quit publishing Dirt Rider magazine, and I was out of a job. Only 30 days in California and I was already unemployed! Talk about rough. But, like Krause, I had been invited over to the Hunky com- pound, enjoyed the tour, and occasionally went over Hunky's just to hang out, and he promised he'd call me if something came up. "I found another job, started working 9 to 5, and now and then Rick would call and invite me out riding. It was more than a year later that Hunk contacted me and offered me a job: he had been given the editor- ship of a couple of car magazines at Challenge, and they told him he could hire an assistant editor. I was thrilled when he offered me the job, but there was one problem: "Rick, I don't know anything about cars." "'You don't need to know anything about cars, be- lieve me,' he said, 'We'll get together and I'll teach you how to write about anything and make a good magazine.' So the game was on, except I had a pre- moni on of disaster and decided to not give no ce at my present job. Instead, I would take me off as needed, for as long as I could. "Good thing I did. When the appointed first day of work arrived, I drove to Hunky's house, and then the two of us drove to the office. He took me in and gave me a grandiose tour of the new office (another smaller room, of course with other mag- azine staffs in it), and told me to sit ght while he went in to see the boss and fill out the paperwork. He was gone an uncomfortable length of me, and when he came back it was as a completely differ- ent, humbled person. He cut to the quick: 'Clip, I'm sorry. When I went in to see the boss he told me he'd changed his mind, and that I could hire a freelancer to help, but another person on the payroll was not going to happen.' Good thing I kept my day job, right? "Hunky was extremely apologe c, and genuinely felt bad. I was comfortable knowing that I s ll had my exis ng job and jumped on the opportunity to be the freelancer at $200 a day, one day a month. $200 was s ll a fair amount of money in 1977, so I was happy for it. Hunky was s ll not at all pleased by his embarrassment, and made me a solemn vow: he said, 'Clip, I'm going to make it up to you someday, I promise you. Trust me on that.' The story of he and I working on the car magazines are tales of legend, and way too much to go into here. But about a year later Rick was offered his old po- si on of Editor of Dirt Bike, and he offered to take me with him. I jumped at the chance, and this me I quit that other job with no regrets." So the funny thing was, here on the second take of Super Hunky's Dirt Bike magazine (he had started it in 1971), we had a staff ready to go, and three of us were from "Back East"--Rick was from Youngstown, Ohio, Vic from Northlake, Illinois, and I was from Cherry Hill, NJ. The fourth member of the staff was Ned Owens, who hailed from the suburbs of Denver, Colorado; Ned had also worked with Hunky at Modern Cycle. A er a me, Ned moved on to a job with Works Performance, and a young guy named Brian George joined us. Then when Brian le , Tom Webb joined the team.

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