From 1920 through 1924, Ace motorcycles were built in a ... - WebRing

Joe Stephan – Ace Mechanic Copyright © 2000 by Joe Stephan
“No, ‘Hurray for…’ Wait a minute. I’ll find out.” Joe was befuddled.
“My one supervisor at work; just came over. She’s Hungarian,” Doug stated.
“I was born there,” Joe replied.
“Do you get to speak it at all? You and your wife, do you speak Hungarian?”
“Oh yeah! I can speak Hungarian.” Joe assured him. “Very good! I have no trouble at all.”
“But you have no accent,” Doc insisted. “None at all.”
“A lot of people don’t know this,” Joe continued. “When my father heard that I wanted to get
married he said that I had to get out of the house. My father was stern in some ways and good
hearted in other ways. I said, ‘Pop, are you kidding?’
Tape stopped and restarted later.
Final Thoughts
“…I gave my son a ride on it…five bucks!” Joe was saying something about a used Ace
motorcycle that he picked up at about the time he left the factory.
“What year would this have been Joe?” Doc asked with interest.
“In the fall?” Doug can be heard saying in the background.
“It would have been. Let’s see, to be exact. I left in… It was in 1926 I left…twenty-five or
twenty-six.”
“An Ace for five dollars, and it was only a couple of years old.” Doug said somewhat amazed.
“It was an old bike. It had electric lights but he didn’t have a battery for it. I had to buy that
and some other stuff.”
“It’s nice to know that you had a hand in that engine right there—at one point,” Doug said
nodding towards one of the nearby Ace motorcycles that they had brought with them.
“You had your hands in both of them, back in the 20’s,” Doc repeated since Joe was having
trouble understanding Doug’s comment.
“This one here for sure,” Joe agreed.
“Both of them!” Doc insisted. “Both of these motorcycles. You worked on them. Your
hands.”
“Positively,” Joe finally agreed. “I put the tires on this one—well, on the racer. And the—”
“Did you ever get to ride the racer?” Doug asked.
“To tell you the truth, I never got that—I was too busy in the shop. When this was going on, I
was in the shop already, taking care of all the police in Philadelphia that had the Ace
motorcycles.”
“Do you have your camera with you Doug?” Doc asked. When Doug indicated that he did,
Doc turned to Joe. “We want to get your picture with each bike and maybe we can arrange—”
“I’ll sit on it. I can sit on them yet!” Joe told them.
“Can you get on it?” Doc asked.
“Oh yeah!” Joe insisted. “Of course, you’re going to help me a little bit.” Joe chuckled.
“Do it now?” Doug asked. “Put the bikes right here; the car is not—”
“Yeah, this was a Philadelphia cycle,” Joe said while continuing to look through Doug’s
collection of photographs.
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