A Prince George Vintage Motorcycle Club member got a call for help one day.
Terry Chilton made a final request to have his 2011 Kawasaki motorcycle fixed up and sold, with proceeds donated to the Prince George Hospice Society.
Several members of the Vintage Motorcycle Club answered the call to make it happen.
Club members Olaf Starck, Ted Kohlen, Guy Hudson, Neil Miller, Hans Rasmussen and Earl Dugdale drove their vintage motorcycles to The Citizen office for a chat about how it all came together.
“This fellow was a truck driver by trade and occasionally would ride his motorcycle with our group so in late 2023 he reached out to a club member and said ‘I’m not doing so well, I’d like to donate some money to hospice but I have no money but I do have this motorcycle’,” Stark recalled.
“He said ‘can I sign it over to the club and you guys fix it up and sell it and donate the money to hospice?’ And he died three weeks later.”
Starck said because the Prince George Vintage Motorcycle Club is incorporated they were able to do as Chilton wished.
“So some of the members went to get the bike and it was stored at Guy’s place for the winter,” Starck explained.
“We fixed it up that summer and it really didn’t need that much fixing up,” Starck said.
“When we do this kind of thing we make the bike’s safe for the road,” Rasmussen said. “We have approximately 27 members in the club and a lot of them have different skills.”
“We actually replaced key brake components,” Starck added.
“And we replaced the handlebars because it had a little bit of a bend in it,” Rasmussen said.
“And we changed the oil and replaced the battery,” Starck said.
“By the time that was all done it was at the end of the summer and that was too late to sell it. You have this window about six weeks long and if you can’t sell the bike in that time frame it becomes a lot harder to sell. So this year we started early and we found two interested buyers within two weeks.”
The local vintage motorcycle club are big supporters of the Prince George Hospice Palliative Care Society and the Prince George Legion, Hans Rasmussen, club member, said, so it was a great conclusion to the tune-up effort to donate to the society that accommodates those looking for palliative end-of life-care.
“As our members age a lot of them end up in Hospice and we think it’s a worthwhile organization,” Rasmussen added.
“There was another member who died in Hospice six or seven years ago and we did the same thing for him. We auctioned off his bike at the Father’s Day Show ‘n’ Shine and donated the proceeds to Hospice.”
“It’s kind of what we do,” Hudson, another member of the vintage club, added.
The club has committed to donating at least $500 to Hospice every year but with the sale of the 2011 Kawasaki KLR650 adventure tour bike they are donating $3,500 this year as Chilton requested.
“We look at Hospice and we all see it in our future, too,” Neil Miller, another vintage motorcycle club member, said.
“And they do good work.”
The Prince George Vintage Motorcycle Club is open to anyone who rides.
“We’ve got people who ride brand new Harleys in the club and that’s not a problem,” Rasmussen said.
But the machines lined up at The Citizen’s parking lot is a vintage motorcycle enthusiasts dream.
There’s a gold 1972 Kawasaki, a red 1983 Kawasaki, black 1970 BMW, black 2007 Honda and high vis 1985 Honda dirt bike and 1979 Triumph.
“We have some guys in the club that don’t even have bikes anymore,” Starck said.
“We’ve had lots of guys who come just because they like motorcycles,” Rasmussen added.
In the summers Vintage Motorcycle Club meetings are every Tuesday. It’s a ride night that starts at the A&W on Fifth Avenue and in the winter they meet at a pub and watch motorcycle movies, Starck said.
Everyone is welcome to join the club. For more information visit www.princegeorgevintagemcclub.org.
