Francis "Cliff" Clifford

OAKLAND TRIBUNE July 28, 2006 by Michael Manekin, Staff Writer

His name was Francis Clifford, but they all called him Cliff -- Not that the name "Francis" bothered him.

He was christened "Cliff" over the loudspeaker, at his first competition, doing what he loved best, racing motorcycles -- and that's the name that stuck.
Francis "Cliff" Clifford was an important figure in American motorcycles, and for gearheads in Bay Area, he was practically a legend. He was a racer and an ace mechanic, and he cared passionately for motorcycles. Like the vintage Harleys and Indians he rode, he was tough, brash, and respected by the younger generation. Clifford, 86, died at his Pacifica home Monday of complications of myelodysplasia syndrome, a disease which affects the bone marrow.

Born May 13, 1920 in Calgary, Canada, Clifford was raised by his grandparents. At 15, he traveled to San Francisco and found a job working as a bike messenger for Postal Telegraph. One day, in front of the telegraph office, Clifford encountered his fate: a Harley- Davidson JD with a "For Sale"sign. He paid $5 down and promised to pay the rest in installments.
A few years later, Clifford entered his first race, on a half- mile dirt track in Lakeport. There he was clipped by another rider, propelled into a wall, and left with a broken leg. But Clifford's friends propped him back onto the bike and sent him back into the race. One hundred yards down the stretch, he ran into a side rail and broke his right ankle. After the race, Clifford didn't wait long to get back on a bike, riding around town with his injured leg on the tank.

Clifford continued riding and racing until he was drafted during World War II, when he became an underwater welder in the Navy. After the war, he returned to San Francisco and found work at Hap Jones, a landmark motorcycle accessories distribution company, as a motorcycle mechanic.

In 1948, Clifford rode his custom-built, custom-tuned Indian 101 Scout to the Reno Speed Trials. There he traveled 106.38 miles per hour, and won. For the next five years, Clifford raced every Saturday and Sunday -- traveling, at one point, to Milwaukee to meet with Walter Davidson of Harley-Davidson, who gave him a tour of the manufacturing plant and presented him with a brand new set of leathers.

He was married in 1961 to Guillermina Gonzalez, whom he met on a trip to Mexico, and together they had two children, Cindy and Robert, before Mina died of leukemia in 1976.
As a union mechanic, Clifford fixed thousands of bikes -- balancing motors, straightening frames, grinding cams, relieving cylinders, restoring and repairing parts -- and developed a reputation for excellence. Along the way, he also worked as a fisherman and a San Francisco cab driver. After retiring in 1982, Clifford gradually attained a certain fame among a younger generation of motorcycle enthusiasts.

Clifford represented the best qualities of the motorcycle men of his generation, according to Tommy Perkins, owner of the Dudley Perkins Company, San Francisco's Harley Davidson emporium.

"The guys of his era weren't just mechanics, they were really bike builders," he said. "They could straighten a frame, weld the tanks and fender, rebuild the engine, go out and race it, blow it up, and go back and rebuild it from the ground up."

Clifford didn't have any much patience for chrome, vintage parts or the kind of bike that folks haul to exhibitions for show. "He wasn't a show guy," said vintage bike enthusiast Ray Ebersole. "He was a get-it-going guy. He's the end of an era, the way I look at it. "Guys like Cliff perverted me," he said. "He cured me of all that showy stuff. Now my bikes are greasy and dirty and solid rust."

For Clifford, a product of the Depression, necessity was the mother of invention. He didn't just fix bikes but cars, washing machines, and stoves. Clifford custom-made parts for his hunting guns and refilled his brass shells with gunpowder. Once he turned a broken-down fridge into a smoker for the salmon he loved to fish. "Guys like Cliff were proud of being able to take care of everything in their lives -- from smoking fish to making their own bean salad," said Ebersole. That's how a man saved money. And money, which was scarce, never got spent improperly or impractically. When his son Robert wanted a bike, he found him a girl's bike on the side of the road, welded a piece of metal to its frame and painted it black. Once, for his daughter Cindy's birthday, he bought her a pair of jumper cables; for her wedding, he presented her with an electric welder.

And like many men of his generation, he talked plain, calling the shots like he saw them. If he didn't like a meal you cooked, his daughter Cindy said, he'd tell you so. And, according to his second wife Helen, he didn't suffer fools gladly either, earning a reputation for being "irascible" and "crusty."

He was so completely clean of -- and pardon me for saying this -- the bull," said Helen. "He was free of neurosis and did not go around inflicting his feelings on everyone." When Clifford endured heart surgery some years back, his only complaint was that the doctor didn't release him from the hospital early enough. Several years later, when he underwent radiation treatment for prostate cancer, he braved it stoically. And a year and a half ago, when he was diagnosed with myelodysplasia syndrome, he suffered silently -- even though, according to his wife, he would have just as soon died the day they told him he couldn't go down to the basement to work on the bikes.

Now that Clifford's gone, that Pacifica basement is dank and quiet, filled with abandoned carburetors. At the center of the workshop, his lathe stands idle, draped with a blue quilt. The bikes have been given away, sold, or otherwise removed. Only one motorcycle remains -- a 1931 Indian 101 -- and two days after her husband's death, Helen Clifford removed the wool blanket from the chassis and took a moment to reflect on a world without men like Clifford.

"Everybody's running around the world like Chicken Little," she said. "There's global warming, a meteor's gonna hit the Earth, an earthquake's coming to San Francisco, a volcano in Yellowstone. For Cliff, he wouldn't concern himself with that. He'd say, 'What's the point?' Worry about what you can change. Take care of what's in front of you.'"