Me and Arlen became very good friends, really quick. Time goes by so fast… you know? I was running with Arlen and Donnie, the whole crew and they were all 10 years older than me.ĬS: What was the reception for you like? You know, since you were not only the young guy but you were from the East Coast with these bikes.ĭP: I can tell you this, I really do owe a lot to Arlen Ness. Yeah yeah me and my father and my next-door neighbor put up the building and I had a little fab and assembly area and one half of it was a spray booth and that’s where we did it all.ĬS: So in 1975 at 25 years old you were the young guy of the day.ĭP: I was definitely, I was always the young guy. It was a little bigger than a one car garage behind my father’s house. At that point, well the last job I had was 1970 and that’s when I built my first shop. Now this was 1975, I already had the shop then and I was 25 years old. Anyways we got there and it was a huge, huge show. The exits off of the highway were closed, all the hotels were full, I remember we stopped at a rest stop and we went in and there must’ve been 25 people asleep on the floor of the men’s room that’s how packed it was, it was crazy. We went through a blizzard to get there and I mean it was an unbelievable trip, it got to be so bad that you couldn’t do anything but keep going. So me and my buddy went with my girlfriend (who later became my wife and later my ex-wife), we drove out there in old van I had. Finch was very much involved and Arlen, he was involved and yeah, they had a backer, a guy that backed it all, put the money up… it was a first-class deal. You member Yosemite Sam, don’t you? Sam was big then, he was like one of the top guys in the industry back in the early to mid- 70s and he did really wild paint work and fabrication, wild stuff you know, a lot of molding and Sam kind of put the show on. What ended up coming out of the interview was that even I, your lowly paper pushing editor, learned quite a bit about these men and the early days of the custom scene.ĬS: So, we’re watching the third generation in my time in motorcycling come through the scene and I really wanted to get together with you to talk about the beginnings of the Donnie L Smith Show and how you and Donnie met.ĭP: It was at a show named “It’s called Detroit” in fact I have a poster at my house, a big original poster from that show. Since the Donnie Smith show is right around the corner and we are all heading up that way, I thought that a nice look into the history that some of you young bucks might not know about some of the big names in this industry would be in order. To start that off, one of the O.G.s of our culture’s rich and storied history, Mr. I spent much of the holiday break visiting several shops of people whom I have always been inspired by. Originally Published In The March 2017 Issue Of Cycle Source MagazineĪn effort to get over the winter doldrums, the mid-build blues or the foretelling of the slow business of the motorcycle industry this time of year drags with it, I decided to take a look back in an effort to move forward.
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