The end days of Triumph in LA

Doing housework on my computer I just now came across this little piece about my reception at the Triumph headquarters on the edge of Los Angeles.

It was 1975 and I had come half-way round the world. They greeted me with laconic enthusiasm.

For ten days they looked after me in considerable comfort. They put me up at a quite stylish motel called the Griswold Inn, and they gave me another Triumph to ride while they took my bike apart.

The mechanic who was working on it didn’t care for conversation. He didn’t seem to understand that I had a personal relationship with the bike and that I was anxious to know how and why it had given me trouble.

In particular I wanted to know why I had run through two barrels and various pistons and rebores, but nobody there appeared to find that anything but normal. It was astonishing, in retrospect, that nobody paid any attention to the air filter, which was nothing more than a piece of paper in a perforated box.

Most of my troubles were caused by bad stuff getting into the combustion chamber. I only heard of K&N oil filters after my journey had ended, two years later, but apparently they had already been on the market for one or two years. Presumably they would have made a big difference, but nobody there seemed to either know or care. In fact, the prevailing belief in America seemed to be that Triumphs were only good for a few thousand miles of fun hauling ass before they fell apart.

Anyway, the people in the office were really just waiting for the company to crash around their ears. My mechanic told me he already had a job lined up at Yamaha.

What they did do was try to get a little publicity. And they told me, triumphantly, that they had secured an invitation to the Petersen Ranch on the edge of LA.

Looking it up now I see that there are two Petersen Ranches. One of them is a long-established spread belonging to deeply religious ranchers, devoted mainly to cattle – Holy Cows, I suppose. That is not where Triumph sent me.

The other Petersen was a publisher of mainly automotive magazines who had done well enough to buy his own ranch. Apparently, I was told, there were people there riding dirt bikes who would be enchanted to meet a man who had ridden half-way round the world.

Brian Slark drew me a map to find the place. It was a very simple map with only three or four lines on it. It looked as though it was just around the corner. He didn’t explain that it was a hundred miles away.

It was a time when the highway engineers were experimenting with rain grooves on the freeways and they were not compatible with my tyres. Half the time it felt like riding on a skating rink and when I arrived at the ranch I was very ready for some warm appreciation.

What I found instead was a bunch of overweight, self-important middle-aged men on trail bikes, in suits that reminded me of the Michelin Man. Some of them had been World War Two bomber pilots. Clearly I had not been expected and they took no interest in me at all, until one of them peeled off from the group and asked me where I’d come from. I explained what I’d been doing for the past two years and he said, “Oh, Yeah, I rode down to Guatemala one time.” For him that was probably an adventure to brag about. For me it was a trip down the road.

I had a beer and left.

Back at the factory I did make friends with a couple of mechanics who were working on a bike to break a speed record. One of them, Brent, was a particularly pleasant and thoughtful man and when my time at the Griswold was up and I had my own bike back he invited me to stay with him for a few days before heading North. I seem to remember that they lived in a garage in Paramount. It must have been a very big garage. Thanks to him and his very gorgeous wife, I learned that it was possible to live a pleasant, rewarding life in Los Angeles, after all.

From there, at the end of June, I rode north to San Francisco and, as you may remember, my life took a quite unexpected turn.