Larry Lawrence | June 22, 2016
Brownie Betar and his Indian Hillclimb machine.
In 1932 the local motorcycle shop on Pearl Street in Albany, New York, got a phone call from the governor’s office. It was FDR calling to see about getting his wheelchair repaired. The shop’s mechanic Brownie Betar began work on the governor’s chair. “I told my boss, ‘These wheels don’t look good at all,’” Betar said. “It had those hard, solid chuck tires. He said, ‘Build him a couple of wheels.’” So Betar assembled up a couple of air tires for the governor. “When I brought that back he got on that thing and went around that great big kitchen, you’d swear he was five years old, and he said, ‘Boy this is good!’” So thanks to the ingeniousness of a motorcycle mechanic, the future president was able to get around much more easily.
Abraham “Brownie” Betar was not only a first-class mechanic, but a leading hillclimb racer of the late 1920s through the 1940s. He later inherited an Indian motorcycle dealership, which years later was the go-to place for Indian motorcycle restorers.
Betar was born in 1909 and like many kids of that era, he went to work at a young age, helping to support his family. He became a newspaper and telegram delivery boy and pedaled his bicycle everywhere. He finally saved up enough money when he was 16 and walked into “Slim” Nelson’s Indian shop, then Albany’s premier Indian Motorcycle dealer in Upstate New York, and bought his first motorcycle, a 1923 Indian Chief with a sidecar, for $175. Betar became a regular at Nelson’s shop and the shop owner became fond of the outgoing teenager and within a few years hired him. Betar’s eyes really lit up when he found out he was going to be paid $15 per week. He was said to have sent $10 per week to his mother and still was able to live well with the five bucks left over.
Brownie Betar was one of the leading hillclimbers from the mid-1920s through the 1940s.
Betar joined one of the busiest Indian dealers in the country and there was a lot of activity. Nelson’s shop not only sold and serviced the Indian motorcycles it sold, it also had a contract to service the police motorcycles of the Albany Police Department and New York State Police.
Betar became an expert Indian mechanic and developed a specialty of tuning carburetors. His reputation grew and reached the doors of Indian headquarters in Springfield, Massachusetts. Indian invited Betar to Springfield to show them what he knew about setting up carbs and before long, there were regular trips to HQ for Betar, who would find rows of motorcycles for him to “tune”. He was offered a position at Indian, but he turned it down due to his loyalty to Nelson.
Betar became somewhat of an honored guest at Indian, not only being brought in to solve problems with bikes that weren’t running quite right, engineers also enjoyed taking Betar to the experimental department where they would show him the projects the company was working on for the future and seek his opinion on the designs. This was in the 1920s and the Indian factory was near its peak and even though he was a regular guest, Betar said he never toured the entire factory. “It was bigger than anything I ever saw,” Betar said of the Indian’s Springfield operation during that era.
Brownie (standing) featured on the cover of The Vintage Cycle.
At about same the time he began working at Nelson’s Albany Indian shop he also began his hillclimb career, along with teammate, friend and fellow mechanic Tommy Paradise. Betar and Paradise took a methodical approach to finding the best combination of torque and horsepower to tune their Indian hillclimb machines.
Thanks in large part to Betar’s tuning, Paradise was able to win an AMA National Hillclimb Championship at Muskegon, Michigan in 1941. Betar never won a national title, but he won numerous regional events and was a leading national contender almost every year.
Betar could be flamboyant on the hill at times. He described one humorous incident after an unsuccessful attempt up the hill.
“I started up the hill and got most of the way up when the bike stopped. I was so mad that I started it up in the middle of the hill and gave it gas back down the hill. I was heading straight for the crowd when I turned the handlebars sideways and skidded to a stop right in front of them. Everybody waved and clapped at me, so I waved back with a big smile. They didn’t know I had to clean my pants afterwards,” he joked.
Brownie also did what they called short track racing at the time, now called Speedway. He earned several regional Speedway titles. He also raced midgets as well.
In 1948 his mentor Slim Nelson passed away. When he was called to the reading of Nelson’s will and was shocked to learn that Slim left him the motorcycle dealership. Betar kept the name of the shop the same for a time, but later changed it to Brownie’s Indian Sales.
On one visit to the Indian factory in the early 1950s, a secretary he was friendly with, took him aside and told him that she thought the company was in serious trouble and wouldn’t last long. She advised him to buy all the parts he could.
“How could they be in trouble?” Betar thought. “They are one of the largest manufacturers in the world.” To his regret what the secretary told him ultimately proved to be true. When Indian stopped producing motorcycles, Brownie sold other machines, mainly British brands, to stay in business.
Fortunately for Betar, the shop had such a huge stock on Indian parts, thanks to its longtime contracts with the various police departments, that when the vintage motorcycle craze took off in the 1980s Betar was perfectly placed to meet the growing demand of restorers. Even though he was sitting on a goldmine (Steve McQueen once offered Brownie $250,000 for his entire stock and this was in the late 1970s), Betar never got rich off his inventory. Instead he worked into his mid-1990s, filling orders at more than fair prices and repairing bicycles just to make ends meet.
In the mid-1990s Brownie finally decided to retire and the entire contents of his shop was hauled to Florida for a big auction. Unfortunately, old Brownie never got to enjoy the windfall of that sale, since shortly after he fell ill and was confined to a nursing home. He died on Dec. 30, 1999.
Brownie Betar left a legacy as one of the true Indian Motorcycle loyalists and for those who knew him said he lived a life full of enthusiasm for the sport and the brand he loved.