He survived so many harrowing moments on the track and then years later managed to overcome numerous health issues; we were beginning to think three-time AMA Grand National Champion Joe Leonard was truly invincible. He was one tough son of a gun, but age and illness finally caught up with “Moke” one of the truly all-time greats of motorsports period, much less motorcycle racing.
Leonard died on Thursday, April 27, 2017 in a San Jose nursing home. He was 84.
There aren’t many people still around who had the chance to watch Joe Leonard race motorcycles, but the people I’ve talked to who did said he was deceptively fast. He rarely looked like he was tearing up the track, but the stopwatch didn’t lie.
“Joe was smooth,” said friend, mentor and former competitor Paul Goldsmith. “He was one of the smoothest riders I ever raced against. He always had great equipment and he used it to the maximum extent. Joe was really tough to beat.”
The stats are undeniable – by the numbers Leonard was simply phenomenal. He was a three-time AMA Grand National Champion (he won the very first AMA Grand National Championship Series in 1954). During his record-setting career in the 1950s and early ‘60s Leonard established the mark that all other racers aspired to when he won 27-career AMA Nationals, including two wins at the Daytona 200. Leonard’s record held for a decade until Bart Markel finally broke it in Columbus, Ohio, in 1971, by taking his 28th AMA National victory.
Leonard went on to become a champion auto racer. In 1971 and 1972, Leonard earned back-to-back USAC Championships. He had some good success in the Indy 500 and is best remembered for the race that got away. It was in 1968, racing one of the STP Turbines, he won the pole and was leading the race with less than 10 laps to go when the car quit running. Leonard called it the toughest day of his racing career.
On a personal note, as a kid growing up in Indianapolis, Joe Leonard was my first racing hero. Like nearly all Indianapolis Public School kids, we took a field trip every May to the Speedway. My first visit was in 1968 and watching Leonard swoosh around on the ultra-quiet, florescent orange, wedge-shaped turbine is an image that will forever live in my mind’s eye.
At the time, I was just a kid and had no idea about Leonard’s previous life as a national championship motorcycle racer.
It was 30 years later that I first got to know Leonard when I did his biography for the Motorcycle Hall of Fame. Besides being a great racer, Joe was also a world-class story teller. He was also the kind of guy who made you feel like a fast friend. I was so captivated by Joe’s storytelling skills that I called to chat with him two or three times a year, just to hear more stories. I continued doing so up until very recently. The last time I talked to Joe was when he was recovering from a stroke. In spite of serious health challenges for decades, whenever I talked to Joe he seemed to be in good spirits. He sent me a photo of him recovering in his hospital room with whisky bottle on his lap.
Did I mention the stories?
Joe told me the story about Al Gunter who had a ’57 Ford Ranchero that he installed a supercharger. He and Charlie West would caravan behind Gunter’s hot rod in Joe’s Nash Ambassador.
“Some of those trips cross country we’d be running through Wyoming in the middle of the night and Al would open that thing up and we’d draft him with our car, pulling a trailer on the back. If we lost the draft Al would pull away from us. But we’d get him back, I’d turn off the lights and catch him and he didn’t even know we were there and then all of a sudden swing out and pass him. He’d about run off the road it scared him so bad.”
Then the time Everett Brasher flipped a Caddy full of racers.
“Everett had just won Langhorne,” Leonard recalls. “Pennsylvania was dry on Sunday, so he all loaded in Everett’s ’49 Cadillac to head to Maryland to celebrate. On the way back Everett said, ‘This Cadillac flat runs.’ So, I said, ‘Go ahead and hook up.’ Brad Andres was in the middle, Charlie (West) was on the passenger side and me and Fernando, my mechanic, were in the back. Everett had a couple of spare motors in the trunk too. He was bragging the thing would do 110, and I said ‘Well Everett, you’re only going 102!’ Everett said, ‘Hang on.!’ And I said, ‘You better hang on, there’s a corner coming up and that sign said 35 mph!’ Everett wasn’t looking at the road, he was looking at his speedometer. 105 miles per hour around a 35-mph curve don’t work out too well and you know what happened. We went topsy-turvy.
“We flipped it and luckily the roof only hit once or twice. We were down eight feet in a gully, but it landed back on the wheels, so that was one stroke of luck. We were out with a flashlight looking for Harley engine parts that had flown out of his trunk. Everett tried to fire the Caddy up and it had broke the motor mounts. So we got a jack and got it close to being in place and Everett cranked it over and it rattled and smoked, but it came to life and we drove it out of that gully. Those ’49 Caddy’s had tall roof and it was smashed about halfway down. We drove the thing the next day on the Pennsylvania Turnpike with no windshield. That was better than winning some races.”
But for all the fun-loving times Joe had, he had a reputation for having a big heart too. You could hear the emotion in his voice when Joe reminisced about his wife Diana, who preceded him in death, dying in March of 2000.
Leonard saved fellow racecar driver Mel Kenyon’s life at Langhorne, Pennsylvania in 1965. Kenyon was knocked out after a crash as his car ignited in flames. Leonard, who was involved in the crash with Kenyon, jumped out of his car and without thinking about his own safety, pulled Kenyon from the flames.
Joe also said one the most memorable moments was the time, as an Indy Car driver, he visited sick children in hospital. “I didn’t know how it was going to be,” Leonard remembered. “When I was a kid I met a race driver and just stood there frozen looking at him, but it turned out to be a wonderful experience getting to meet those kids.”
Joe Leonard was one of the true legends of the sport and the thing I’ll miss most are all the great stories.
Memorial services, followed by a reception, will be held on Saturday, May 13, 2017 at 1:15 p.m. at Oak Hill Funeral Home & Memorial Park, 300 Curtner Avenue, San Jose, CA 95125. All friends are invited. A celebration of life follows in the Reception Room until 4pm.
Keep Joe’s tradition alive and bring your favorite story about the man himself.
