Willy, the Hot Redhead, and the Loaner Goldie

By Doug Boughton

To make a long story short, I got into bikes at the tender age of 13. By the time I turned 16, I was entering off-road races – scrambles and TTs – but only when I could find transport to and from the tracks. That changed when I befriended a National-level flat track racer…who had just gotten out of prison. Yeah, Willy Massey and his hot little redhead wife Suzy moved into the trailer next to us; it’s a long story.

Willy was the real deal, hard as nails anytime he needed to be, always on edge when he wasn’t around family, or with us young racers. Because he treated us like we were his age, being around him was an education in how to be an adult. But he never totally lost that criminal element, he had just grown more clever… plus he’d done 5 years already. He and Suzy allowed each other their unspoken sins, and he had a lot of them…a lot.

Of course you want to know how he ended up in the slammer: when Willy was a young and wild punk, he was in a 1%er motorcycle gang. I think he used to get really hammered with them, but after his prison stint, never. Someone in the club had the bright idea of stealing a safe from a local business: they backed a stolen tow truck right up to the business late one night, and busted the window to get inside. Once in, they wrapped a long chain around the safe and back out the window to the tow truck. Then they gassed it, and blew a huge hole through the side of the building. But they didn’t stop somewhere to lift the safe up, they just dragged it down the street, like no one’s gonna notice. They drove right to their clubhouse garage and pulled the door down, leaving a nice long scratch in the road for the cops to follow. Not the brightest bulbs.

When Willy and Suzy moved into his brother’s trailer, he brought along a Parilla 250 Wildcat Scrambler. At the time he was racing TTs and scrambles in the Amateur class, and a lot of them: it’s the perfect place to be for most of us, as National Expert is another world. God smiled on me because he had an extra slot on his race trailer. Willy became my bad ass Uncle, who transported me and my stripped down Honda 160 to events. During those drives, and generally hanging around him, he taught me so much about motorcycles and life. Willy was no longer racing flat track, but was still campaigning a Gold Star using another rider: he had blown out his knee on a sandy corner at the original Daytona beach track, and could no longer race that discipline.

Eventually Willy quit all his racing, but still wanted a daylight street bike, so he converted his full race Daytona Gold Star into a street bike; he dummied up some lights, and put a license plate on it. By that time he’d moved into a proper house, as he had a well-paying job as an ironworker. If I came over and mowed his lawn late on Sunday, he’d let me borrow his Goldie, so I could ride it during the week when he was busy at his job.

The Daytona-spec motor had a very high-compression piston, and the Competition magneto was locked at full advance. If you tried to kickstart the beast, you paid, so I always parked the Goldie on a hill, or if none was available, I had to beg for a push. It always fired right up.  One day I was down in Troy, New York, putting some money in my meager bank account. There were no nearby hills, so I needed help, and spotted this big biker type dude walking by. I asked him for a push and explained to him that the Goldie wouldn’t start using the kicker: it had to be pushed.

Well, he said he rode a kickstart Harley, and called me a pussy. Then he said he’d start the bike for me. I said, ‘be my guest.’ He lumbered onto the bike, rose up from the seat, and came down with a mighty swing of his leg, rolling the throttle as he followed through. Ptooeee! It was like the bike hawked up a huge lugee; he went flying off and landed on the ground, then the bike fell on him, hahahah. I helped get the bike off him; he stood up and said ‘Get on kid, I’ll give you a push.’

I stayed friends with Willy until he died; he gave me all his photos and so on. These images are mostly from the late 1950s, when I was just getting out of high school. Willy was what Hollywood was selling to the public as a leading man, but he was the real deal.   It was always like we were making a movie when he was around; kind of epic. I honestly don’t miss him though, because he’d just show up, get in your face, and want to go ride street bikes fast. In later years he would keep up with me on my ’93 Ducati Monster while riding an ex-cop Harley Dyna that was stroked and bored. He had a lot more mass to stop when we passed a line of cars, and used to curse me out if I caught him up short. Then all of sudden, he could be gone for years before you saw him again. In fact, he may not even be dead…