In summer 1963 honeymooners Morris Parker and Sandra Parker rolled their two-year-old MG Midget into a campsite on the beach at Badalona, north east Spain. The couple pitched camp beside a behemoth military ambulance, white with black trim and fenders. Two English speakers around Morris’s age had repurposed the late 40s British Bedford KZ into lodgings, workshop and transportation. They said they were motorcycle racers, but had no motorcycles. The temporary neighbors begged a ride to the Bultaco factory in Barcelona, a short drive down the coast.
Camping area/parking lot, Playa Badalona, Summer 1963
Morris was a North Carolina State architecture student who had flown into London, riding trains and boats to Holland, where Morris’ GI brother had procured the MG. The honeymoon was to be a tour of Europe on one paid-for meal and one bottle of wine per day. Badalona was to be just another overnighter, but it stretched to nearly a week. “It was so easy and nice and wonderful, we just couldn’t leave.” Morris recalled. He wasn’t overly impressed with the two racers. “They looked just like me.” He added, “But I was interested in their ambulance. I loved that truck.” So he gave them a lift to the Bultaco factory. “They would pile into the car, and I’d go down to the plant with those boys. It was kinda like a Spanish fort, and it had a big wall around it.”
Morris waited in the courtyard and watched workers bolt new Bultacos together under the trees, with parts wheel-barrowed out to them. “Boy we’re really in Europe, aren’t we,“ he thought, “Europe in 1963 was only 18 years after World War Two. People come back from Europe now and say it looks like the United States. It didn’t look like the United States then.”
Spain wasn’t like much of Europe back then. Generalissimo Franco might have kept Spain out of the war, and saved himself from the fate of Europe’s other dictators, but he was paranoid. Morris recalled some Brits pounding cheap beer in a cafe in Badalona. They cracked wise too loudly about Franco, attracting the Guardia Civil and their guns. “The soldiers hauled them out and deported them that night.”
After Badalona, Morris and Sandra continued their honeymoon, and never saw the racers again; but their stories would cross again 40 years later. The Bultaco-racer-ambulance-factory-MG-honeymoon story became Parker family lore, and all three sons grew up to appreciate foreign sports cars, Bultaco motorcycles, commercial trucks and machinery in general. One son road-races 70s two-stroke Yamahas; Bultacos hang on his barn wall.
Sandra Parker and the Midget, Europe, Summer 1963 (Morris Parker photo)
That Bedford ambulance with black trim had brought two other Americans to Badalona in the summer of ‘63. Andrew Richman and Ramon Robinson were fresh off the boat at the cusp of their own great adventure. Andrew, a kid from North Barcelona Street in Pensacola, Florida would eventually launch a career at Bultaco S.A.
Andy and high-school friend Ramon had cashed out in Florida and sailed to the Isle of Man that May, where they met Bultaco racer John Grace (real name Juan Gracia). Spanish by heritage, Grace was from Gibraltar but of English citizenship due to Gibraltar’s crown colony status. Grace would eventually hire Andrew and a host of other former racers to work for the factory. It was a pattern Andy would later repeat himself: former Bultaco racer hires former Bultaco racer to work for Bultaco. Modern Diversity and Inclusion departments would go ape-shit.
Andy waits for a race start
Bultaco’s genesis was a love of racing: a group of engineers at Spanish motorcycle maker Montesa, including co-founder Francisco “Paco” Bulto, resigned over Montesa’s 1958 decision to cease racing. They launched their own motorcycle company in the outbuildings of Paco Bulto’s farm and produced a Spanish Grand Prix entry before the end of 1959. Johnny Grace rode the top-finishing Bultaco in that first race, to second place. The “Bultaco” mash up of Paco Bulto’s name was purportedly Grace’s idea. The Bultaco thumbs up logo was because Bulto loved to see rider give the sign that all was well as they flew past the pits.
Bultaco factory Christmas card, 1964
Andy and Ramon stepped off North America to road-race motorcycles in the “Continental Circus” held on city streets and circuits across Europe. A small subset of events was recognized by the Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme (FIM) and awarded world championship points, but the majority were not. These “Internationals” were open to international race licensees, and they paid start and prize money. Start money attracted racers, and crowds were large. Barnstorming racers could live off the start money alone if they scheduled carefully, slept rough, and entered every race they could.
Andy (#127) on track aboard a Bultaco TSS
At the September 1963 race in Portoroz, Yugoslavia (now Slovenia), New Zealand road racer and Bultaco hero Ginger Molloy spotted a black stripe arcing off the tarmac into the paddock grass. A Parilla lay on its side, transmission seized. The uninjured rider was Andy Richman. “He picked a good place to fall off,” Molloy remembered.
Ginger and Andy struck up a friendship, later cemented with an overnight stay in a basement jail cell, during the ’64 GP race weekend in Skofja Loka, Yugoslavia. Organizers plied the racers with slivolich, a stout plum brandy, while hustling up the promised start money. Andy, Ginger, Ramon and others ended up incarcerated for public drunkenness and, according to Molloy, “dancing on tables and farting”.
In Europe, Andy and Ramon used letterheads imprinted Florida Racing Partnership to secure start money and sponsorship for tires and oil. Riders and manufacturers listed their racing accomplishments on exquisite paper stock, social media circa 1963. Ginger Molloy’s letterhead was more LinkedIn than Facebook: “Winner of More than 200 Races”.
An early version of Ginger’s letterhead. Thirty-two races grew to more than 200
Andy raced for five years, caravanning across Europe for start money. Some years he wintered in England, trading service work for shop space at the Parilla importer. He achieved some successes, primarily in the 125 class: a second place at Bevern-Waas, Belgium, 1964; a fourth place at the 1965 Costa del Sol, in Malaga, Spain. Andy got ink in Motor Cycle News, Cycle World, Motorrad, and a stack of Spanish newspapers. He gridded up with some of the road racing greats of the middle 60s: Mike Hailwood, Phil Read, Jim Redman, Luigi Taveri, Giacomo Agostini, and his friend Ginger Molloy. And finished behind them.
Andy on a Bultaco TSS
Ginger Molloy is accustomed to questions about his racing career. Even over the phone from New Zealand, it was clear those questions rarely regarded Andy Richman. “Oh yeah. Great guy, Andrew.” There was affection in his description of Andy as a “social” racer.
Two-time Formula TT World Champion Barry Smith, who caravanned with Andy, echoed Ginger’s comment: “Andy was a mid field rider; he was never going to be a World Champion, he was just racing to make a living and enjoying the travel and excitement that came with it.”
“He was the most calm and laid back character I have met; nothing seemed to trouble him. He just got on with life at his own pace.”
Andy (right-center, with cigarette) and other Circus racers relaxing, Opatija, 1966. (Photo courtesy Barry Smith)
Andy agreed: “In 1963 I went to Europe to road-race professionally. It took me five years and 13 TSSs [Bultaco’s lithe “customer” road racer] to find out I wasn’t very good. I somehow made a living, and enjoyed the life.” Andy wrote that 1963 and ‘64 were “disasters”, 1965 was a break-even year, and he turned a profit in 1966, even with a trip to Japan for the GP at Fuji. His logbook captures every expense, every breakfast, every tank of gas (including brand), in each country and currency.
Andy’s 1967 FIM race license
By late spring Andy knew 1967 would be his last circus. Bultaco was slow to deliver customer race bikes for the season; Andy needed bikes to enter races. His Plan B, a 350 Aermacchi Harley Davidson, was similarly slow off the assembly line. He mailed entries anyway, hoping to beg a ride at races for start money. Race organizers saw through the ruse.
Andy preps his new Peugeot race van, circa 1967
Andy finally got his Bultacos for the ‘67 season. At the factory that spring “picking up the last two TSSs I’d ever ride”, he told John Grace, now export manager, he was giving it up. Grace offered yet another Bultaco racer a job, and Andy accepted. He hired on in late 1967 as Southeastern US district sales manager for Cemoto East, Bultaco’s East Coast importer. He grew Bultaco sales in his region 40% by 1971.
Especially in the South, a US Bultaco dealer likely rationed floor space among motorcycles, lawn tractors and chain saws. Jackie Harrison was a 16 year old shop rat at Benson Saw Shop in Athens, Tennessee, in 1967 when the Bultaco rep sold him a Bultaco Metralla with special bodywork. He still has the bike Andy helped him push out of the van, windscreen cracked from a tip over at Bike Week 1968.
Andy’s father had raced sports cars in Florida, and those roots helped with PR. In a 1969 photo in Andy’s stash, six riders on a poker run, all with new Matadors, pose under a Pure gas station disc. Daytona royalty Jim and Bill France are two of the riders.
Florida poker run, November 1969, with the France brothers
Andy schemed as many competition events as he could get Barcelona to fund. In 1969, as rider/manager, he led an attempt at the International Six Day Trial in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, West Germany. Andy, Jerry Pacholke and Bob Maus qualified at a two day event in New York’s Berkshires, and crated and shipped their own Matador Mk IIIs to Europe. As meagre as the factory support may have been, it constituted the sole US-based manufacturer’s ISDT team.
Pacholke took a silver medal, and Maus a bronze, both well back from On Any Sunday icons Malcolm Smith, Preston Petty and John Penton. Per the dealer letter sent out touting the team’s success, Andy “creamed himself” in practice and was unable to start the event. The letter described valuable information gathered via “IBM tape recordings,” as a boon to future ISDT efforts: big data in 1969. Andy ran a few more two-day qualifiers, at least once on a not-so-appropriate Alpina trail bike he was developing, but didn’t ride in any subsequent ISDTs. He managed Bultaco’s 1970 ISDT effort in Spain.
Andy (on Bultaco) at the 1970 ISDT in Spain, as manager
Ginger Molloy stuck with Bultaco through 1969, and won the factory’s first grand prix, the 1966 Ulster 250 race. He often worked for the factory in the off-season. Straight from the last race of 1969, Ginger hauled a “rented” Suzuki twin cylinder motor to Bultaco engineers to be reverse-engineered. “They were going to put the clutch on the other end so it wouldn’t look like a Suzuki.” Ironically, Suzuki’s two-stroke expertise was expatriate European; Ernst Degner liberated it from MZ in East Germany to Suzuki when he defected in 1961. But it was for naught. “I realized when they didn’t make the 125 twin, I should have moved on years earlier. But they paid me and looked after me and they were quite good to me. I was happy.”
While Ginger waited at the factory to repatriate the Suzuki motor, a call came from America. It was Andy, with a proposition on the down low. Would Ginger race the 1970 Daytona 200 on a Kawasaki H1R? Andy could get the bike for $1,500.00, a promotion for the Daytona 200 only, and the bike had to leave the US afterwards. “Perfect for me!” Molloy recalls. Andy secured the H1R and arranged Ginger’s travel details, covering expenses with his Cemoto East Master Charge. “Bultaco didn’t know anything about it. I was sponsored by Bultaco in Europe, and unofficially also in America, on a Kawasaki.”
Ginger finished seventh in that star-studded 1970 Daytona 200, behind winner Dick Mann on a Honda 750, Gene Romero, Don Castro and Yvon Duhamel. Keeping his end of the deal, Molloy took the Kawasaki back to Europe, and campaigned it in the 1970 world championship. He finished second to a dominant Giacomo Agostini on the MV Agusta, and became an expert rebuilder of H1R crankshafts.
Ginger Molloy on the H1R
Two places behind Molloy in the 1970 Daytona race, on the second-fastest H1R, was Andy’s old friend from Florida, the king’s dessert, Royal Sherbet. Royal road-raced in 1970 and ‘71, until a crash at the end of 1971 season ended his racing career.
“Andy found me working at a Tampa Bay motorcycle dealership and got me hired by the Bultaco factory as a district manager.” Among his many accomplishments in the tiny Bultaco universe, Royal designed the leathers for Bultaco flat-track racer Mike Kidd. The motif became the paint scheme for the Astro flat-tracker.
A restored Bultaco Astro
The origins of Bultaco’s Astro have taken on a D.B. Cooper-esque aura since the bike was launched in 1972. Built in Spain for an American sport, the Astro became a Bultaco best-seller in the US. Spool hubs and 40-spoke wheels: crazy talk in 70s Spain. Whoever’s US-built flat-track Bultaco was sent to the factory for productionisation, Andy kept a copy of the design brief document. In addition to a laundry list of parts and dimensions, Andy’s archive contains preliminary styling sketches for the flat-tracker’s tank and seat section.
In early 1971, the factory took over Bultaco American Limited in Santa Clara, California, integrating vertically the entire US business. Andy was tapped as general manager of the west coast operation, and moved to a small place in Santa Clara. In 1972 Andy called Bill Haas, service manager for Bultaco’s east coast operation, and a friend from his Cemoto East days. Andy asked Bill to watch a West Coast kid race motocross on a Bultaco. Haas drove to Unadilla, New York and watched Jimmy Pomeroy fly. “He was an ace,” Bill Haas recalled, awe undiminished after 40 years.
Pomeroy was sponsored by University Honda-Bultaco back home in Washington. After conferring with Pomeroy’s parents, John Grace signed Jimmy as a Bultaco factory racer. Jimmy became the First American, winning the 1973 GP at Sabadell in Spain. The milestone win blew up motocross in the US. “It turned the factory upside down.” Haas said.
In late 1973 Bultaco’s US operations, now managed by John Grace, consolidated west and east coast offices to a single location in Virginia Beach. “Typical Bultaco decision,” Bill Haas says. “After they set up the offices they figured out we couldn’t get freight into Virginia Beach from Barcelona.” Andy was put in charge of parts and service nationally. He wrote that it “bored him to death” for the year he held the role, and in 1974 he became race manager, running Pomeroy’s motocross campaign in Europe and the US.
Andy Testing a Matador
As with the TSS road racers, the competitive days of Bultaco’s Pursang motocrossers were numbered. I get a sense that Andy could feel the moment evaporating, when the intersection of rider talent and a mostly competitive machine offered the whiff of a world championship for Bultaco. Andy had experienced racing in Europe as an American with very little support, and he wanted Pomeroy settled in a strange environment. As Bill Haas saw it: “Andy really knew what the hell was going on, what the differences were, what the riders’ problems were.”
Andy asked for a house, complete with a private cook, to make Europe as “normal” as possible for Jimmy. But the weak link wasn’t the wrist. The Pursang motocross racers were fast bikes, but suffered niggling ignition and other failures at heartbreakingly critical points. After his debut win in Spain in 1973 Pomeroy raced Bultacos in the world championship for four years, with one more win in Belgium during 1975 and a fourth place finish in the 1976 world 250cc motocross championship. The following year he jumped to Honda.
Andy and Jimmy Pomeroy, Dirt Rider magazine
Signing Pomeroy for 1976 was a major accomplishment for Andy, and he listed it on the resume he updated in late 1975, after being shown the door along with his entire management level. Bill Haas recalled when John Grace called them all into his office. “He didn’t want to do it; I understood. Andy took it pretty well.”
Bultaco ‘s American presence dwindled as Japanese motocrossers improved, currency exchange rates made Bultacos more expensive, and labor struggles followed Franco’s death in 1975. Near the end, Haas said, John Grace sold propane heaters out of a Virginia Beach building barely larger than a two-car garage.
Andy retreated to his mother’s place in Fort Lauderdale Florida initially, and then moved to Winchester, Tennessee. He had attended Sewanee Military Academy nearby and fell in love with the hills and woods of Middle Tennessee. He opened a foreign car repair and tuning shop in downtown Winchester and built a small log cabin on a rock jutting from Keith Springs Mountain. Eighteen years after his leap of faith to Europe, Andy was spinning wrenches and living a near-hermit’s existence, at his own pace. A friend recommended that Mary Motlow take her Volvo to Andy for service, and they hit it off immediately. Mary always referred to him as Andrew: “Andrew was funny, witty and very charming and very bright.” Mary thought Andy was at a crossroads in his life when they met, and so was she. Her first marriage was ending, and she and Andy married in 1982. Baby Alexandra arrived later that year. Mary’s sister Elizabeth said Alexandra’s arrival changed Andy profoundly and positively.
Elizabeth Motlow echoed Andy’s racing friends’ description: living in the moment. Gone was Andy’s string of Porsches: too flashy for Keith Springs Mountain. A sleeper “tuned” Datsun 210 kept Andy under the radar with the locals.
One day in October, 1984, Andy was headed home to the cabin, when he encountered a vehicle stopped in his lane of Highway 16. Andy pulled out to go around and drove straight into a car that had entered from a side-street. Andy died at the hospital. Mary was devastated, suddenly widowed with an infant daughter and a toddler from her first marriage.
Mary Motlow didn’t know much about her husband’s early motorcycle career. But when she learned of three old Bultacos that had been Andy’s, she wanted to save them, along with a cache of records, for Alex. Two of the bikes, sans engine or frame numbers, turned out to be brand new early sixties models, assembled from spare parts in the early seventies. Doug Behr, Bultaco West Coast service manager at the time, assembled them on Andy’s instructions for display in the Santa Clara offices. The third bike was Andy’s personal rider, a Metralla wearing the photogenic patina currently fetishized. All three were tucked neatly in the attic of the house Morris Parker designed for Mary, among Christmas decorations, random furniture and cases and cases of empty whiskey bottles.
Alex Richman and the Bultacos in her attic
Mary Motlow is the granddaughter of Lem Motlow, Proprietor on every bottle of Jack Daniels Tennessee Whiskey produced before 2012, and she saved bottles with the original label. In 2003 Mary hired Morris to design a house to be built on her property in Lynchburg, a piece of forested land near the distillery. As they shared personal histories, Mary explained what she knew of Andrew’s history with Bultaco, and Morris shared his own Bultaco story.
“Morris ran into Andrew. I have photographs of the ambulance.” Mary said. Continuing a tradition from his time at Sewanee, Andy wrote his mother, Leonora, from Europe, enclosing photographs with inscriptions on the reverse. Alex has a small collection of these photographs, sent by Leonora after Andrew’s death. In one, a 3” X 5” black and white, a dapper Andy sits on the hood of the enormous Bedford ambulance before the Pyrenees Mountains. The inscription reveals the nickname for the lumbering vehicle Morris loved: “Me and the ‘devil dog’ in the Pyrenees. We almost died wielding this giant beast. Summer ’63, near Andorra.”
A dapper Andy Richman sits on the Devil Dog near Andorra, Summer 1963
Two more of Andy’s photos show a group of young men (and one dog) around a table in a dark café, odd glass wine flasks tipped back. The inscription on one reads “Spain, July 1963. Ironically eating spaghetti. Seven Swedes. Badalona playa, near the Costa Brava.”
Andy (eating) and Swedish racers, Badalona, summer 1963
While this story was being written, 40 miles and 27 years from Andy’s accident, a drunk driver crossed the centreline and struck Morris Parker’s car, killing Morris and Mary as they returned from pre-Christmas visiting. Their deaths were seismic shocks to their families and friends, as Andy’s had been to Mary. Andy saved a Matador and a Sherpa S as display pieces in Bultaco’s Santa Clara offices. Mary saved them too, along with boxes of Andy’s own story, for her daughter.
Alexandra Richman (“Alex” in person) doesn’t remember her dad in first person. She laid out on her mother’s dining room table the letters, photos, trophies, leathers and other ephemera that connect her to Andrew. These are her touchstones, along with the cabin on Keith Springs Mountain where a nice English couple now lives. And the Bultacos in her attic.
Morris Parker washes his hair beside the Bedford in the camp at Badalona
One of Morris Parker’s slides from Badalona is of the camping area, filled with tiny colourful cars and impromptu canopies, a passenger train rolling in the background. In the other, Morris washes his hair outdoors over a bucket, devil dog in the background. I looked at Morris’s slides on Mary Motlow’s dining room table, beside the photos Andy sent home to Leonora. These separate memories of the same Badalona summer were reacquainted in Lynchburg, Tennessee fifty years later, carrying a slice of Bultaco history.