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Like many of my fellow motorcycle enthusiasts, I found out about the passing of Motorcycle Hall of Famer Dale Walksler while scrolling through Instagram yesterday. I read hundreds of comments left by riders, many of them friends of mine, expressing their condolences and sharing their experiences with meeting Dale and his son, Matt, while visiting their museum, Wheels Through Time, in Maggie Valley, North Carolina. The commonality among the messages was that everyone who met Dale at the museum felt within a few minutes like he was an old friend.
I had the same experience when I visited the museum many years ago.
I had recently finished building my old custom Triumph and was blown away by the insane collection of antique bikes at the museum. Dale came out while I was drooling over one of his bikes, a super rare Crocker speedway racer. I told him about my late 1960s Triumph and he said, “60s? That’s practically a new bike! I’ll show you an old bike.”
He returned a few minutes later with a 1903 Indian, basically a bicycle with a small single-cylinder engine. He showed me the starting procedure for it and began pedaling it in place up on its stand and it fired to life within a few cranks. I remember how loud it was and the exhaust burning my nose a bit. He rolled it off the stand and did a burnout right there inside the museum.
“This is an old bike!” he said, as we both cracked up.
His son, Matt, came out and they showed me around the museum and took me back into the workshop, showing me some of the bikes they were rebuilding. Both were just genuinely excited to share the glory of old motorcycles. Anyone who knows me has certainly thought at one point or another that I am a goon for being so abnormally crazy about motorcycles. Not Dale or Matt. They knew what it was like to crawl around in cold, greasy junk piles looking for parts at swap meets or to stay up all night in the shop trying to get to an old bike ready for a run.
I think this is why anyone who ever had the pleasure of meeting Dale feels genuinely bummed about his passing. The guy was a true-blue motorcycle nut. One thing that made his museum so different from others is that he kept the motorcycles in running order and fired them up, so people could enjoy them as they were meant to be.
As I read through the comments on Instagram, I wasn’t all that surprised to see so many other folks had a similar experience to mine when they met him.
Ride in peace Dale! You will be missed!
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