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Motorcycling History: The Ace Motorcycle
William G.
Henderson
Ace Motor Corporation was a motorcycle manufacturer in continuous
operation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania between 1919 and 1924, and
intermittently afterward until 1927.
Essentially only one model of the large luxury four-cylinder
motorcycle, with slight variations, was made from first to last.
William G. Henderson, the driving force behind the company, had plenty
of experience and lots of back history with the Henderson Motorcycle
going into the founding of |
William G. Henderson
|
William and his older brother Thomas, who was working as a sales manager
at Winton Motor Car Co., formed the Henderson Motorcycle Company in 1911
in Detroit. By 1917 the
Henderson four-cylinder had become one of the premier motorcycles in the
country and was being exported to foreign markets.
That same year, they sold the company Ignaz Schwinn's company, Excelsior
Motor Manufacturing & Supply Company.
Schwinn is best known, of course, for co-founding the Schwinn
Bicycle Company, and eventually being sole owner.
Henderson stayed on for a time at Excelsior to help with the
transition, but left in 1919.
The founding of Ace
Motor Corporation
Henderson, while working for Schwinn during the transition at Excelsior,
had already begun designing a new motorcycle.
He couldn't do anything about production, however, because the
terms of the sale of Henderson to Excelsior included a two year
non-compete clause. Also,
Henderson was contractually no longer permitted to use his name on a
motorcycle.
In the fall of 1919, Henderson and Max Sladkin of Haverford Cycle Co.
joined forces and formed the Ace Motor Corporation in Philadelphia.
Henderson was once again chief
engineer for the new Ace Motorcycle and he again turned to the
four-cylinder concept. As a
result of his agreement with Excelsior-Henderson, Henderson had to be
careful to design a completely different machine from the Henderson.
When the Ace was introduced in
1920, it was met with favorable reviews, like the Henderson before it.
Production of the machine was slow in the first year, but by 1922 the
factory was going strong and Ace was on stable footing.
Ace made quite a name for itself in the press by way of accomplishing
some incredible feats. In
1922 Erwin “Cannonball” Baker rode an Ace motorcycle 3,332 miles from
Los Angeles to New York in just six days, 22 hours and 52 minutes,
averaging 48 mpg. In 1923,
riding a custom built lightweight Ace XP-4, Red Wolverton made
back-to-back timed runs on a section of Pennsylvania highway, averaging
129 mph. Then they bolted on a
sidecar, and he posted a sidecar record of 106 mph.
Just as the company was starting to enjoy success, William G. Henderson
was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident in December 1922, at age
39. Following Henderson’s death, Arthur Lemon, who had succeeded Henderson as chief engineer at Excelsior-Henderson, came over from Henderson to take over Ace’s engineering duties. It seemed as if the company would sirvice with its new engineer, but another problem was looming over Ace. An accounting error meant management had set the price for each bike at $335 less than cost, and the company was losing money on each sale. By the time the accounting department figured this out, Ace was solidly in the red. Despite efforts to correct the mistake, the company simply ran out of money. Productioin at the original factory in Philadelphia came to a halt in late 1924. The pieces were bought by a group of investors, who produced a few hundred bikes in Blossburg, Pennsylvania, before they realized that motorcycle productions was not the piece of cake they thought it would be. The Blossburg group handed over production to a second group of investors incorporated under the name Michigan Motors, who moved the factory to Detroit. The Michigan Motors groups didn't last long, with production coming to a standstill in late 1926. Looking to expand its product line, the Indian Motorcycle Company bought the rights to Ace in the spring of 1927 and moved production to its Springfield, Massachusetts factory. Indian was going after the police market, and to get that market they believed they needed to beef up the Ace accordingly. The Ace became the Indian Ace, and then by mid-1928 the Indian Four. Four-cylincer machines based on Henderson's Ace design continued in production under the Indian name until 1943. |
1923 Ace Four Cylinder Sporting Solo, restored by Leif Jönson
1923 Ace Four Cylinder Sporting Solo, restored by Leif Jönson, sold in 2019 by
Mecum Auctions in Las Vegas
1923 Ace Four Cylinder Sporting Solo, restored by Leif Jönson, sold in 2019 by Mecum Auctions in Las Vegas for $176,000
Erwin “Cannonball” Baker
Jay Leno with his 1924 Ace motorcycle
In the late ’80s, Rony "Ofnobank" Leibowitz robbed 21 banks in the
suburbs of Tel Aviv for more than $400,000. |
|
He had it all. Why did he do it?
Dubbed the “Biker Bandit” – or “Ofnobank” in Hebrew – because he was said
to escape the scene of the crime on his motorcycle – he quickly became
the country’s most adulated outlaw, outwitting the banks and police
without ever harming a soul. (He would threaten the teller with his
pistol but never shot anyone, only once firing in the air.)
“Why did I do it? It’s what
everyone wants to know,” says
Leibovitz, who has spent much of his time since he got out of
prison asking himself the same question and sharing his answer, and
other parts of his ordeal, with eager audiences who pay to hear him
speak.
“I didn’t do it for the money,” insists Leibovitz, who denies he was in
debt. “I was in distress. Some people do drugs, others jump off a roof.
This was my way of screaming out, of shocking the world, if you know
what I mean.”
It had to do with his family, he explains, a wealthy clan of
industrialists whom he likens to “J.R. Ewing and family – one always
pitted against the other,” he says, referring to the oil magnate from
the popular 1980s TV series “Dallas.”
At one point Leibovitz, the oldest of three sons, had a falling
out with family members that eventually ended up in court.
But his “acting out” even if directed at his feuding family – or
at the entire world – missed the mark, even as a call for attention.
“I was a putz,” he admits. “I mean here I was doing all this to yell, but
no one could hear me, because no one knew it was me – I had to keep my
whole life as a bank robber to myself.”
Not even his wife, Iris, knew. “One night while lying in bed, I felt I
couldn’t keep it to myself any longer and I turned to her and said:
‘What would you say if I told you I was the Biker Bandit?’ After a
minute of silence, she made a gesture of utter derision as though that
was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. Perhaps the most
bizarre part of the whole Biker Bandit story was that there was no bike.
His getaway
vehicle? There wasn’t one.
Leibovitz explains: “The second you commit a bank robbery, the police
are already on their way. I
didn’t want to be caught, so I walked outside—where there was never a
motorcycle—slowly, as not to draw attention to myself.
I took off my helmet and stuffed
my windbreaker inside it, then placed them in an off-street alley where
no one would find them. What
then? Could I go home?
Hardly.
The police closed off the entire
area. And where is the one place
they’d never look for me? In the
same bank that I had just
robbed. It was the hundreds
of onlookers who started the rumors. That’s
when the stories began about me putting my motorcycle on a getaway
truck. Have you ever seen a
truck? How would I load a
190-kilogram motorcycle onto a truck? I’d
just slip into the crowd. What
did I do with the money I had robbed?
There was nowhere to really hide it, so I’d go back inside with everyone
else and reload a portion of the stolen money into a number of accounts
that I had there.”
Prison and starting
over
Later, once the police had removed the roadblocks in the vicinity, he’d
pick up his helmet and casually head home, some of the money tucked
safely in his shirt. In the
course of 21 robberies, executed the same way, he stole about $400,000
and became a folk hero, portrayed as part Robin Hood, part sex symbol,
before he was finally caught in October 1990 near his parents’ home in
Ramat Gan, ironically outside a bank that he says he wasn't even
planning to rob. |
Since getting out of prison, Leibovitz has lived live to the fullest.
A former logistics officer in the IDF, Leibovitz runs a logistics
business, which he says is the main source of his income.
And he tries to do some good “to
make up for the past,” lecturing for free to youth and schools on why
crime and drugs don’t pay. Most
of all, Leibovitz simply enjoys life in a way he never did before:
“Only someone who has lost his
freedom can appreciate having it again.”
|
Rony Leibowitz, nicknamed Ofnobank (a combination of the words "motorcycle" and "bank" in Hebrew) due to his reported theft methods |
His
story was featured in Episode 52 of the Canadian TV series
Masterminds.
He has been approached by several
filmmakers who want to turn his story into a movie, “…But no one has got
the script quite right,” Leibovitz remarked. |
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