ACE-HY MOTORCYCLE CLUB RIDES AGAIN
Vintage-bike enthusiasts resurrect name of Calgary club founded in the late-1930s
In early April 1939, legendary prairie motorcyclist and retailer Walt Healy and several others established the Ace-Hy Motorcycle Club of Calgary. Healy had long been a member of the Calgary Motorcycle Club, but it seems he was interested in more riding adventure.
“I don’t think Walt liked the direction the Calgary Motorcycle Club was going,” says Brian Lawrence, a vintage motorcycle enthusiast who helped rejuvenate the Ace-Hy name earlier this year. More about that in a moment.
“The CMC was more of a street riding, touring group,” he continues. “The Ace-Hy was more about hill climbs, hare scrambles (early-style motocross), ice racing and flat-track racing; Walt basically wanted a club that was more oriented toward outdoor exploring, or, the way I see it, the sport of motorcycling.”
The CMC was established in 1926, and 92 years later, it is still going strong today. The Ace-Hy didn’t last as long, with enthusiasm for the group losing spark in the mid-1960s.
But the Ace-Hy name wasn’t forgotten by people like Lawrence. Thanks to his passion for vintage motorcycles, he had befriended Healy and was entrusted with some films and trophies from the Ace-Hy collection.
“That was almost 18 years ago, and I wanted to return as many of the trophies as I could to those surviving members whose names were last engraved on them,” Lawrence explains. “One of those people was Art Gavel, who now lives in Vernon. He helped put me in touch with a few other members who were still around, and I became something of a caretaker of the group name, documenting some of that AceHy history.”
Fast forward to early 2018 and another motorcycle group, this one the Antique Motorcycle Club of America. According to the club’s website, the AMCA was established in 1954 in New England by four antique-motorcycle enthusiasts. In the years since, it has grown worldwide and now has more than 11,000 members and 75 affiliated chapters, including three in Canada.
One of those was the Wild Rose Chapter of Alberta, and Lawrence, a member of the AMCA, was also involved with that group.
“There was a year or two of activity, but it sort of floundered,” Lawrence says of the Wild Rose section. “And then, earlier this year, the AMCA president reached out to those remaining Wild Rose members asking if there was still any interest, otherwise the chapter was going to be shut down.”
Lawrence and a few others didn’t want to see the section go under and quickly held some meetings.
“I took it a few steps farther, because I thought it would be a perfect time to resurrect an old Calgary club name,” Lawrence explains. “I stepped up to be president, and suggested we become the Ace-Hy chapter of the Antique Motorcycle Club of America.”
Everyone agreed that was a good idea, and the change was officially recognized in late spring.
Since then, the Ace-Hy group hosted a vintage motorcycle ride on July 21 that saw a dozen enthusiasts flogging their old machines on the rural roads around Gull Lake in central Alberta.
“What’s important about the resurrected Ace-Hy is the fact that we ride our old machines,” Lawrence says. “I can ride my new Harley-Davidson with anybody any day, but it’s way more fun when you’re riding an old bike with other people also riding old bikes. If you’ve got a vintage motorcycle, don’t just hide it away. And that’s what we’re about — using them. We also want to share our knowledge and help others looking to repair or get an old bike back on the road.”
On that Gull Lake run, Lawrence was riding his 1946 Harley-Davidson 45, a machine he restored more than 20 years ago. Ace-Hy secretary Kaetyn St. Hilaire rode his 1956 Triumph Thunderbird on the run, a machine I wrote about last November.
Lawrence has also been entrusted with two photo albums packed with archival images of the early days of the Ace-Hy group. He’s been sharing some of them through the group’s Facebook page.
While working as the president of the new Ace-Hy chapter of the AMCA, Lawrence would also be interested in hearing from previous members of the original AceHy Club of Calgary, or members of their families. Send him an email at bj.lawrence@shaw.ca.