Leno: My nine lives

I remember in 1978 when Bill Harrah, the famous car collector and casino owner, died. He was 66. I was in Lake Tahoe opening for the singer Johnny Mathis at the time, and I remember thinking, “Hey, 66, that’s pretty good.” Well, I’m 72 now, and, despite recent events, I’m certainly not ready to go!

I wrote in this column a few years ago that I thought I had one good motorcycle crash left in me. And then a pretty good one happened a couple of months ago. I was out riding my 1940 Indian Four with the sidecar and there was a fuel leak. I decided to pull into a parking lot, hook a U-turn, and head back to the garage. But some workers had strung a cable across the parking lot without hanging any rags or flags on it, and it hit me in the chest and took me right off the bike. I broke a couple of ribs and my collarbone and banged my knees up pretty bad. The bike kept going and crashed into a building, so we’ve got to patch that up as well. But it could have been a lot worse. I was out of the hospital in a day and back on stage a week later.

Riding any motorcycle, especially in Los Angeles, takes some skill and focus. Whenever I’m at a light, I look right at the other drivers and try to make eye contact so I know they see me. But that’s getting harder with everyone staring at their phones. It’s especially challenging riding vintage bikes because there’s a lot more for you to do. You have a manual choke, a manual spark adjustment, and on bikes like the Brough Superior, which was built before the twist-throttle became common, you have a lever for gas and a separate lever for air. So as you accelerate, you have to move both levers to increase the amount of fuel and air, getting it to match up all by ear.

So it’s kind of amazing that I have been so lucky, though I’ve had my share of close calls. For example, I was riding my Brough once and had just exited the freeway. I grabbed the brake right as I hit a bump and the wheel bounced up and the whole hub and brake came apart and locked up. I skidded down the street, but I managed to stay upright. And I realized that if that had happened on the freeway when I was doing 80, it would have been much scarier.

Once, I was at Sturgis, the big motorcycle rally in South Dakota, and this guy said, “Hey, I built this chopper. Would you ride it?” I said, “Well, OK, but I’ve got my wife,” and he said she could ride on the back (this was obviously a number of years ago). So we rode through town in a bit of a parade, and then when we got out of town, I opened the throttle. But the bike started to slow down, and I had to keep the throttle pinned just to maintain the same speed. At some point, I realized I had to pull over as the bike was getting slower and slower, and as I was coming to a stop—screech!—the front wheel locked up. The builder had fitted the brake on the front but didn’t adjust anything, and the pads were dragging and got hot. Finally, they seized on the disc. But thankfully for us, they seized at 3 or 4 mph.

Another time, we were doing Jay Leno’s Garage, and we featured a guy who was taking brand-new Triumph motorcycles and making them look like 1960s flat-trackers. They took the muffler off for the shoot, and it was so loud as we rode along shooting video. I was on the bike behind the camera car, and the crew said to open the throttle to make some noise. As I opened the throttle, the rear tire broke loose. I thought, “Wow, this thing’s got some power!” Then I applied the brake and the rear tire started sliding a little, so I stopped and took a look at the rear tire. The guy had put a crankcase breather on it that ended right in front of the rear tire, so the rear tire was getting covered in oil. I realized it wasn’t the tire breaking loose under power, it was simply spinning in its own oil—but miraculously, I didn’t go down.

When I think back on the number of close calls I’ve had on antique motorcycles, I realize how lucky I’ve been. But eventually everyone’s luck runs out, as it did with the steam car and the Indian, all within a few months of each other. But I’m still here, and while I may not have another big motorcycle crash in me, I hope I still have a few more miles to go.

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This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

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