No Regrets: Rich Ostrander AKA Dr. Sprocket

For more than 50 years motorcycles figured prominently in Rich Ostrander’s California garage. Now, it sits empty. In October 2024, Rich was diagnosed with a massive stage 4 terminal brain tumor. “No cure,” he says, bluntly. With surgery, however, “They got most of it, but it will be back, it’s a real aggressive type. Six months max if I take no action. With action, which I’m doing, maybe two or three years max if you cross your fingers and don’t hold your breath.” It’s a prognosis that would take anyone’s breath away, but Rich is facing his future with the greatest of dignity. “It’s life, you gotta’ be a realist,” he told me recently during a telephone interview. “I’m like the old farmer. It is what it is, and you can’t worry about it. If it’s right in front of you, you can grab it and wrestle it a little bit. But you can’t worry about it because unless it’s hands on there’s nothing you can do. I’ve had the absolute best life; you couldn’t buy it, you ain’t got enough money. I’ve got no regrets and wouldn’t want to do one thing different.” He adds, “Nobody gets out alive, the leading cause of death is birth. Once you’ve realized that you might as well get on with it.”

Getting on with it is exactly what the Chopper/Cut Down historian, antique motorcycle aficionado and metal guru is doing. Rich is a font of early custom motorcycle history, and for many years he shared his knowledge under the persona of Dr. Sprocket on the pages of Guy Bolton’s U.K.-based Greasy Kulture magazine. Importantly, Rich inspired our editor Paul d’Orléans to pen The Chopper: the Real Story. Paul says, “Rich opened my eyes to an aspect of custom motorcycles I could dig my teeth into, which is the real back story and roots of the American scene. I feature Rich’s research in my book, and used many of his photos.”

Born in Bradford, Pennsylvania two years after the Second World War ended, Rich has metal and oil in his blood. His father worked in the oilfields, and all his relatives worked either in the Case Knives or Zippo lighters factories or the Kendall, Quaker State and Pennzoil refineries. “My dad and me, we came out to Southern California in 1950 from Pennsylvania in a Model A,” Rich says. “I was always into old cars and started my first Model A restoration when I was 14.” He drove the Model A to school when he was old enough, but human-powered two wheelers also figured prominently. In fact, he was a competitive bicycle racer as a kid and his enthusiasm for the sport began when he was pedalling his heavy-duty Schwinn balloon tire bike. He moved on to racing a European chassis with Campagnolo gearsets and hand-sewn tires, often racing 200 miles in a weekend from L.A. to San Diego.

While in high school, Rich’s grades were good enough that he was allowed to spend a half year in an autobody shop class at Long Beach Junior College. “The guy who taught us was a grand master panel builder and sheet metal guy – old Mr. Hanson. He’d teach us how to replace quarter panels, build repair panels and do lead work, no Bondo in his class,” Rich recalls. “And he taught us to paint. Man, he put me on the path before anything. He gave me my craft for the rest of my life, he was the neatest old man with a handlebar mustache, always in an old shop coat who drove 100 miles each day to teach us.” Motorcycles didn’t enter Rich’s scene until he was in his late teens. “When I graduated from high school, I had my diploma in one hand and my draft notice in the other and I was going to ‘Nam,” he recalls. But first, “I wanted to go back to Pennsylvania to see my grandfather, so I drove back in the ’41 Chevy I bought the day before I graduated. I had a delayed enlistment to see him because I might not see him again, and then I went overseas. My hootch mate, who had my back over in ‘Nam, was Tom Roberts. Tom was a Hells Angel out of Oakland, California. I was there with him for about a year and a half, and he picked me up at the airport the day I got back and landed in Oakland. He de-programed me because I was a little scrambled. To de-program me, he got me onto a motorcycle.”

Rich’s first bike was a Dick Allen chopper, from “the chopper master down in Artesia.” It came from an ex-roommate, “Rotten” Richard Morris, who needed money. To raise cash, he sold Rich the chopper with a 1949 Panhead motor in one of Allen’s customized frames, complete with 24-inch over front end, suicide clutch and jockey shift, mechanical rear brake and no front brake. “I de-raked it and put a stock front end on it, and made a bob-job out of it,” Rich explains. “And then, it was game on. We were living in Long Beach, where we all rode long choppers with girder front ends. My next bike was a Knuckle basket I got for $500.” Another early mentor for Rich in the custom scene was Tom Burke, an L.A. chopper shop owner who was starting to build bikes for the Hollywood crowd. “Tom built the motor for that Knuckle; he was a really good buddy and he got me going down that road strong. He helped me build that into a really righteous chopper. I did all the mods on the chassis, molded it and painted it and put an 18-inch over Wayne girder on it. Wayne girders were beautiful, he welded for the atomic commission, and he made these girders up in Oakland.”

Apart from Mr. Hanson’s auto body class, Rich acquired fabrication skills from his dad, who worked on equipment in the oilfields while also wrenching on the family’s Model As. When Rich was still in elementary school, his father taught him rough and finish carpentry and concrete and masonry work. Plus, he absorbed plenty of lessons from his grandfather, who was a blacksmith. “They passed their knowledge on to me, and this was all a natural fit for me,” Rich says of his early motorcycle building days. He built the Knucklehead while recovering from an accident with a concrete truck chute. Not long after returning from Vietnam, he was working on a concrete job when the chute severed his right leg. Doctors were able to save the limb, but Rich was in and out of the hospital for over a year, in a full cast. That’s when he bought his first Panhead, followed by the Knucklehead.  He quit construction, and went to work for Ken Duke’s metal shop. “He asked me what I could do, and I told him I could paint, and he told me I could paint equipment that was going out the door,” Rich says. “Then, he asked if there was anything I wanted to learn, and I told him I wanted to get into TIG welding, and he sent me to talk to a World War II vet in the back. He put me on a track that put this all together and made my life – I went to work in every kind of shop you can imagine.”

His two-wheeled education continued when he began to hang around with, “Guys who ran or worked in early motorcycle shops that became members of the first AMCA chapter down in SoCal, like Bob Ross, Dewey Bonkrud, Johnny Eagles, Ed Kretz and JD Cameron,” Rich says. “This would have been 1974, and these guys would all come out to the La Mirada meet. I was like a magnet; I absorbed all that stuff and was immersed in it.” In 1975, Rich moved north to Sacramento and opened A-1 Welding Service, a design, fabrication and repair shop specializing in all types of welding, machining and fabrication. “Guys were cutting up VL frames to make single-leg Knucklehead choppers, so I went ahead and made up a fixture and was making full-on single-leg frames, so I didn’t have to cut up anymore original VL frames,” Rich says of some of the work he did in his shop. “And I was de-raking all the chopped frames and shortening up springers because we were just getting into stock bikes like full fender Knuckles and Pans, we were making the switch from choppers. That all came about from seeing the guys at La Mirada, where I’d see the full fender bikes, and we started making the transition.”

Rich says he’d take a bike back as close to stock as he could with what he had available or with the parts he could find at the time. “And we just kept learning and learning, educating ourselves and looking at pre-1916 bikes and Crockers, all of the old bikes that were around.” In Sacramento, there was another crew of racers and riders who shared their knowledge of motorcycle history with Rich. “I absorbed it, I was like a sponge,” Rich says. “I wanted to know what they did, I’d document their history; they never did it for themselves and they were just regular people. I collected papers and programs and photo albums – and wanted to share this stuff.”

A large part of Rich’s life has been the Antique Motorcycle Club of America, and he was around from the start of the Fort Sutter Chapter – the second AMCA California chapter – in 1982. The chapter traces its roots back to the Fort Sutter Motorcycle Club that began in 1932. It was an Indian-based riding club but had mostly disbanded by 1972. According to Fort Sutter’s website, many of the original members then founded the Fort Sutter AMCA Chapter, with newer members like Rich rounding out the numbers. As time passed and education began to move away from skills-based learning to cerebral pursuits, “We began to worry all these crafts like metal repair, welding, painting, stuff like that, were going to be lost because all of the old high school shops were closing or closed and turned into computer labs,” Rich says. “We thought it was all going to die.”

“Then, about 20 years ago, all these kids began picking up these old chopper magazines from the sixties and seventies and the chopper thing hit it big again, with shows like Born Free on the West Coast and Mama Tried in the East,” he continues. “These kids in town were looking for someone who knew about that world, and word went around that I rode choppers in the Seventies. Of course, I was riding stockers by then, but I’d ride my Indian 101 down to a show and they couldn’t believe, number one, that it ran, and number two, that I’d just ridden it 100 miles. They were riding long bikes and emulating what they saw in the magazines at the time, and mostly all they could afford were ‘cone Shovels’. I knew they were like us; that they’d get away from Shovels and get into the older bikes. And sure enough, after they started families and made some money, they started resurrecting old Knuckleheads that we would have passed on because they needed so much work. Then they started popping up on full fender bikes, and then Harley JDs and early Indians. It just exploded.”

That’s roughly when Rich began his Dr. Sprocket column in Greasy Kulture. It was all about motorcycle history, and Rich’s history in the chopper world. He contributed at least 50 articles, all directed toward educating younger riders about choppers and stock bikes. “Education is everything, and I’d help anybody and pass on my knowledge, hands on or in print,” he exclaims. Then, in late September last year, Rich wanted to ride his 1981 Harley-Davidson FXB Sturgis to the Yerba Buena Chapter AMCA National Road Run. He and his friend Bob Henry, who he calls “Young Bob,” rode some 700 miles over the duration of the event. “I’d just gotten the finest riding bike I’d had, a 1981 Harley-Davidson Sturgis, all dialled in, and it handled beautifully. I got to see a bunch of guys I hadn’t seen in a long time. But when we came back, I was over at Young Bob’s house, and I started slurring my speech like I was having a stroke. The next day I went in, and they did a C-scan and that’s when they found the tumor. I had a good surgeon, and I’ve had chemo and radiation, and I feel pretty good. They figure I can have two or three more years and I’m okay with that.”

Rich first met “Young Bob” at a swap meet about five years ago. On his table, Rich was selling a UL lower end. Bob came by three or four times before he finally bought it, but it was a connection that formed a bond between the two enthusiasts. “I turned him onto the AMCA, and a year later he became the president of the chapter,” Rich says. “His life path was pretty parallel to mine, so I was working with him and he’s now better than I ever was at identifying Harley parts. Well, I was coming to where I knew I was eventually going to leave this earth and I had my ’40 Knuck that came from a member of the original Fort Sutter Motorcycle Club. I’d restored it and then made a bob-job out of it. I thought about it, and talked to my wife Kathy about it, and I said I want to give that bike to Bob. He’ll never be able to afford a Knucklehead. He’s got a U, he’s got a Pan and stuff, but a Knuck would be out of reach. So, two or three days before Christmas I told Bob to come over with his trailer. I said I’m not physically able to push the Knuck back in the garage — we were having a roof put on the garage — and it was under a cover on the patio. Bob pushed it over near the garage, he was sitting on it, and I handed him the pink slip. He bawled like a baby for half an hour and when I could finally stop him blubbering, we loaded it on his trailer. It’s his now.”

It wasn’t the first bike he gave away or sold at a discounted price. Before Bob got the Knucklehead, Rich sold the ’81 Sturgis to Natalie, a young woman in the Yerba Buena chapter. “She rides the heck out of a 1935 VL,” Rich says. “And I thought she might like the Sturgis as a good road bike for the runs and not wear out the VL. I didn’t totally give it to her free, but I sold it for almost free, if you understand. I wanted her to have it and no one else.” Now, the garage is devoid of motorcycles, and he’s been passing along his extensive archive of photographs and early motorcycle history. And he’s happy. “Even when I’m gone, Bob will be riding the ’40 Knuckle, and Natalie, who we call Tunie, will be on the Sturgis. A part of me will still be around, and that means a lot to me.”