Testing Their Mettle - Don Emde and Freddie Ludlow

Motorcyclists of yesteryear were made of sterner stuff. That becomes plainly obvious when reading motorcycle racer and author Don Emde’s book, Freddie Ludlow: His Life on Two Wheels. Ludlow, born in Los Angeles near the turn of the century in 1895, grew up alongside the nascent motorcycle industry. Today, the age of 13 sounds rather tender, but that’s how old Ludlow was when he quit school to get behind the handlebars of an Indian motorcycle to deliver messages for Western Union. Soon, he and his fellow motorcycle chums were racing, with Ludlow and crew taking on motordrome, boardtrack and dirt track events and just about anything else that tested the limits of man and machine. Clearly intelligent and resourceful with tools, Ludlow began working as a young mechanic at Will Risden’s Indian Motocycles in L.A. where he mingled with some of the brightest lights of the sport, including Paul “Dare Devil” Derkum and Jake DeRosier.

Don’s 176-page hardbound work capturing Ludlow’s tale is based on a photographic archive assembled by Ludlow himself. Chock-a-block with hundreds of black and white images detailing his adventures as a dispatch rider in the First World War, breaking land speed records, racing, and eventually becoming a motor patrol officer, the scrapbook was first given to Motorcyclist magazine publisher Bill Bagnall. “Freddie Ludlow gave it to him when he had to go into a home as he was getting older,” Don said to me during a recent telephone conversation from Laguna Niguel, where he lives with his wife Tracy. “Bill called me one day,” Don explained, “and asked me to come over. He said, ‘I’m getting older now and I’ve got to move up to Oakland closer to where my daughter lives – if I take this up there, when I die, she’ll just take all my motorcycle stuff to the dump.’” On Bagnall’s kitchen table, Don said, was something like a Christmas gift box. Inside was a 12-inch by 14-inch photobook wrapped in an old shirt, and although the covers were well-worn, the individual pages with approximately six 3-inch by 5-inch images to a side, plus some larger format photos, were in remarkable condition. Handwritten under each photograph by Ludlow himself in white ink were detailed captions.

“Bill didn’t want any money for it, and he gave it to me,” Don continued. “He said, ‘Freddie gave this to me, now I’m giving it to you.’ I thought man oh man, I’ve got to do something with this; I can’t just have it in my own archive, I have to share it.” It was a project, however, that Don wouldn’t tackle for approximately 20 years, but it was one for which he was well-suited, having been raised in a family immersed in motorcycles dating back to his grandfather, Louis “Joe” Emde, who began riding around the same time as Ludlow. In fact, the stories of the Emde family and Ludlow neatly mirror one another. “Joe got involved with motorcycles around 1912 or 1913, and he opened up a small repair shop in El Centro, California. He did a little bit of racing, but eventually the county needed a motorized patrolman on the road, and he was convinced to close the shop and he became the first motor cop out there,” Don said. Post WWII, Grandfather Joe moved the Emde family to the San Diego area and continued his career as a motor patrolman for the Chula Vista and National City police departments.

“My dad (Floyd) was born in 1919, and in the 1920s and early ‘30s, he saw his dad coming back and forth on Harley-Davidson and Indian patrol machines and he took an interest,” Don said. “With his brothers, Dad began riding and started racing prior to WWII. After Pearl Harbor was bombed, he went to work in San Diego building the B-24 planes at Consolidated Aircraft. When the war ended, he decided to become a professional motorcycle racer [much like Ludlow had after returning overseas from WWI]. He won a few, and by 1946 he was really starting to win racing against guys like Ed Kretz. In ’46, he was at 80 different race meets in a 52-week year, so he was often racing more than once a week.” His name was cemented in the history books in 1948, when he won the Daytona 200 aboard a 648 Big Base Indian Scout sponsored by San Diego dealer Guy Urquhart.

Twenty-eight years earlier, Ludlow had been at Daytona Beach. There, with the Harley-Davidson race team including Red Parkhurst, the Motor Company “established 18 professional solo speed records, plus 6 sidecar and 4 amateur records,” Don noted in his book. Ludlow was at the controls when he set the One Kilometer Solo, 61 C.I. Pocket Valve and One Kilometer Solo, One-, Two- and Five-mile Solo 30.50 C.I. Pocket Valve one-way speed records. Shorter in statue and quite trim, Ludlow was in the sidecar for the One-, Two- and Five-mile records with Parkhurst behind the bars of a 61 C.I. 8-valve racer. In a story Ludlow wrote for a 1935 issue of The Motorcyclist, which Don has included in his text, he said the “bullet shaped streamlined sidecar outfit…had a cover that was snapped on. So far as I know I hold the record for being the only fellow who ever managed to squeeze into that sidecar. I nearly suffocated on my runs down the beach in the outfit.”

In 1948, Floyd pocketed $2,000 from his Daytona race, but it didn’t stay in his pocket long. He and wife Florence used the money to become Indian dealers, and Don noted, “That’s how they got into being in the motorcycle business in 1948, but historically Indian was on the downhill side, and were on one knee financially even coming out of the war. My folks had a real problem just trying to make the business go, and Harley-Davidson convinced him he should maybe convert to Harley in 1949. They did and were exclusive with them in National City until 1964. That’s when they gave up the Harley-Davidson franchise as all the Japanese and British machines were hitting it big, and they took on BSA, Suzuki, and then Bultaco and Hodaka. Just a couple of years later, Dad opened a branch store in downtown San Diego and a third store in the State College area. By about 1968 they were running three stores, and I was riding by then and working in the stores.”

Born early in 1951, Don’s riding career started in 1962 aboard a 165cc Harley-Davidson 2-stroke. He began racing Southern California amateur scrambles and TTs in 1966 but was soon competing in all manner of racing including flat track and road race events. His experience riding 2-strokes, such as a Suzuki X6 road racer, put him in good stead when in 1969, he turned AMA Pro. “I thought I’d be riding Suzukis, but as it turned out, a guy named Mel Dinesen, a Yamaha dealer, offered me a sponsored ride in AFM racing on a 100cc Hodaka, and a 250 and a 350 Yamaha and a Production 350 Yamaha. I was riding four different classes a day almost every week for a couple of years. I was winning and was AFM overall National Champion in 1969 and got to use the No. 1 plates in 1970. Dad built me some BSA flat track bikes, and I was hired onto their factory team, with the Rocket 3s, in 1971. That whole thing blew up, though, and I had to find another road racer for 1972 and Mel Dinesen talked to Yamaha. That’s when the new 6-speed TR3 came out and we went over to Daytona and won the 200 with it. [With that accomplishment, Don and Floyd became the first, and only, father-and-son duo to win the Daytona 200. It was also the smallest-capacity machine ever to win, plus Yamana’s first Daytona win.] That was the height of my racing career, and I raced a bit after that, but took a job with Bell helmets, and eventually took on a job selling ads for a motorcycle magazine. That’s what opened my eyes to the publishing industry, and I decided to start a business on my own with a paid subscription dealer magazine and really wanted to get into publishing books.”

His first book was The Daytona 200: The History of America’s Premier Motorcycle Race, which he published in 1991. He updated the book in a revised 2004 edition, while also researching, writing and publishing several other titles, including UNLIMITED: The Fred Fox Story; Finding Cannon Ball’s Trail; The Speed Kings: The Rise and Fall of Motordrome Racing  [see our review here] and, in 2021, the Freddie Ludlow book. He’s currently at work writing about his dad’s life and times with motorcycles, which he hopes to publish soon. For the Ludlow book, which is finely crafted and a pleasure to spend time with, Don put to good use his personal archive that includes a massive collection of early motorcycle and bicycle journals, and hundreds of period photographs. Don focused on researching and writing about Ludlow in 2020. It was decided the book would be roughly the same size as the photographic scrapbook, with all of Ludlow’s images, which were scanned in high-resolution and cleaned up in Photoshop, placed on the right-hand page. On the left-hand pages are background stories written by Don and edited by Tracy, who has read and critiqued every page of every book he’s written, and some archival magazine stories penned by Ludlow. Supplementing the information are several of Don’s own period photographs and literature. Overall, it’s a tremendous piece of work, printed in the United States, highlighting the career of an intrepid early motorcycle racer, who, just like Don’s grandfather, eventually became a motor patrol officer. Ludlow joined the South Pasadena police force in August, 1922 and was mounted on two-wheels until he retired in 1955.

If anyone understands how strenuous it is riding in punishing conditions, it’s Don. As our conversation began to wind down, I asked Don, given all Ludlow’s accomplishments, which chapter of his life, and in the book, stood out the most to him. He mentioned Perfect Again. We laughed when I told him in preparation for the call, I’d opened my own copy of Freddie Ludlow to page 134, where in the chapter Perfect Again, Don recounted the 1922 Los Angeles Motorcycle Club Endurance Run in which Ludlow and fellow competitor Blick Wolter rode 4-cylinder Henderson machines on asphalt, dirt and in the sand while managing to achieve perfect scores. “It really stands out even with the boardtrack, Bonneville and Daytona Beach and flat track racing Ludlow did,” Don said, and continued, “Those were all big challenges, but just being on a Henderson 4 cranked up in the dirt with no rear suspension and little in the front, hitting rocks and different things at the speeds they were running and managing perfect scores, that’s amazing. And that’s one of my favorite chapters, too. I’ve ridden in conditions like that with Huskies and KTMs with full suspension, which was great fun, but I couldn’t imagine being on them on a big old road bike with street tires. He was very successful, and all those guys really seem to have been made of sterner stuff.”

Order a copy of Freddie Ludlow: His Life on Two Wheels, which is currently $20 USD (plus postage: $10 USA, $27 Canada and $65 International) or any of Don’s other titles by visiting www.emdebooks.com.