The Power of Print Media

The recent passing of Rick "Super Hunky" Sieman took us all by surprise. Honestly, those of us who knew him well (and were on his weekly call list) were aware that his health was declining, but really, who of us would even think he was close to the grave? Rick was a powerhouse, in strength, energy, and will, and to think that all that force was suddenly halted was almost unbelievable. But he proved himself mortal after all, and because we knew that he was the last person to linger over something as trivial and commonplace as death--one time he told me that death was easy, anybody could do it; that living the good life was the best thing to spend energy on--I decided to call up our old friend Vic Krause and put together a celebration of life, rather than some weepy lament, for the inimitable Super Hunky.

Like humans the world over, Rick's life was complex. A sign painter, weightlifter, a voracious reader from childhood, a Navy man, waiter, author, Journalist, creator and founder of Dirt Bike magazine, fierce activist for riders’ desert access rights, father of two beautiful girls and a son, husband to three beautiful wives (American, Canadian and Mexican--not all at once). Regrettably, we only have time and space for the facet of Rick's life that indelibly imprinted itself on us all, off-road dirt biking.

To start this tribute, it's probably best for me to paint a picture of how we all met. We're going to start with Krause, because he came along first--I was the latecomer. You might know Krause better as Mister Know it All, a character imagined by Rick in the early days of Dirt Bike magazine. Rick wanted to have a technical, question and answer column in D.B., and needed a name to hang on it, and ultimately the job was handed to Krause. There is much debate over exactly how the name Mister Know it All was decided on, but it was pulled off of a list of possible column titles that the two had cooked up, and the list covered an entire page of a yellow legal pad. But first, here's how Vic and Rick got together.

Vic: "I caught the offroad bug at an early age, in 1969, and became absolutely obsessed with the German Maicos. The first one I bought was a used pile of junk, and I went to school on it mechanically. Eventually, I got good enough working on it that I figured out how to make it run for twenty minutes three times a day, and that was a miracle, but in the process, I became a real Maico aficionado. And I actually did finish a race on the bike occasionally.

"So I became a dealer for Maico--you had to buy two bikes to become a dealer. Maybe three bikes. And I bought them from Maico East, Dane and Dennis Moore--the Moore brothers, I wonder what ever became of them? Now I'm a Maico dealer, and I wanted to go to a dealer show. Come to find out they were having a dealer intro in conjunction with the Anaheim trade show that year. 

 "So I go to Anaheim and walk into the Convention Center show that first morning. I've got a Maico t-shirt on, and I'm walking down the aisle into the show, and coming in from the opposite direction was Rick. Didn't know him from Adam, he could have been the man on the moon for all I knew, but guess what t-shirt he had on? He had that huge Maico badge emblazoned on his chest and the two of us snapped together like magnets. 

"And then the BS began! We must have stood together there talking Maico-ease for two hours, in front of this poor guy's booth and probably blocked out all his potential customers that morning! "Did you ever do this...?", "How did you do that...?", "What did you do when the swingarm bolt stuck in that bushing?" We went through every piece of gruesome maintenance we ever had to do on that bike, and in the process, we were instant blood brothers in this growing Maico cult. 

"The friendship expanded because we were both obsessive-compulsive. Rick kept prevailing on me to come out to California. "Krause, you gotta come out, there's gonna be a Suzuki intro at Indian Dunes, we can go riding out in the desert..." So, I said how long should I come for? and Rick tells me "A week!" So I tell my girlfriend, just watch the store, and I drop everything and go out to L.A. So like four weeks, five weeks, six weeks later, I hear from my girlfriend back in Illinois, and she's like "Krause, when you coming back? All the bikes and most of the riding gear is sold out!" I just got addicted to California--the weather, the bikes, all the riding, all the crazies I met, and in the process Rick and I became the closest friends. The girlfriend was not thrilled."

Paul: "My story is just as convoluted, but I'll try to keep it short. In 1977 I came to California to seek my fortune, as my good friend Rik Paul had been handed the editorship of the original Dirt Rider magazine, published by Challenge Publications in Canoga Park. I remember showing up for work the first day and learning that all the motorcycle magazines shared one fairly large room. Rik Paul and I shared the room with Modern Cycle, plus a road bike magazine the name I can't remember, but I do recall the editor's name was Jeff Peck (not unlike the famous guitarist), and a minibike magazine of unknown parentage (I think the editor worked from home).

"So there were a lot of bodies crammed into this room, but the most obvious desk was right in the middle, facing the door, and behind that desk like a mustachioed Buddha sat the legendary Super Hunky. I had been a dirt rider for probably seven or eight years and had read his stuff in the original Dirt Bike, so I was familiar with the legend, but here was the man in the flesh! He made a big show of getting up and shaking hands formally with me, but he did that with everyone, and I could tell he was immediately adopting me into the Challenge Publications family.

"Things moved quickly though, and within a month I was victim of a major calamity when Challenge decided to quit publishing Dirt Rider magazine, and I was out of a job. Only 30 days in California and I was already unemployed! Talk about rough. But, like Krause, I had been invited over to the Hunky compound, enjoyed the tour, and occasionally went over Hunky's just to hang out, and he promised he'd call me if something came up.

"I found another job, started working 9 to 5, and now and then Rick would call and invite me out riding. It was more than a year later that Hunk contacted me and offered me a job: he had been given the editorship of a couple of car magazines at Challenge, and they told him he could hire an assistant editor. I was thrilled when he offered me the job, but there was one problem: "Rick, I don't know anything about cars."

"'You don't need to know anything about cars, believe me,' he said, 'We'll get together and I'll teach you how to write about anything and make a good magazine.' So the game was on, except I had a premonition of disaster and decided to not give notice at my present job. Instead, I would take time off as needed, for as long as I could.

"Good thing I did. When the appointed first day of work arrived, I drove to Hunky's house, and then the two of us drove to the office. He took me in and gave me a grandiose tour of the new office (another smaller room, of course with other magazine staffs in it), and told me to sit tight while he went in to see the boss and fill out the paperwork. He was gone an uncomfortable length of time, and when he came back it was as a completely different, humbled person. He cut to the quick: 'Clip, I'm sorry. When I went in to see the boss he told me he'd changed his mind, and that I could hire a freelancer to help, but another person on the payroll was not going to happen.' Good thing I kept my day job, right?

"Hunky was extremely apologetic, and genuinely felt bad. I was comfortable knowing that I still had my existing job and jumped on the opportunity to be the freelancer at $200 a day, one day a month. $200 was still a fair amount of money in 1977, so I was happy for it. Hunky was still not at all pleased by his embarrassment, and made me a solemn vow: he said, 'Clip, I'm going to make it up to you someday, I promise you. Trust me on that.' The story of he and I working on the car magazines are tales of legend, and way too much to go into here. But about a year later Rick was offered his old position of Editor of Dirt Bike, and he offered to take me with him. I jumped at the chance, and this time I quit that other job with no regrets."

So the funny thing was, here on the second take of Super Hunky's Dirt Bike magazine (he had started it in 1971), we had a staff ready to go, and three of us were from "Back East"--Rick was from Youngstown, Ohio, Vic from Northlake, Illinois, and I was from Cherry Hill, NJ. The fourth member of the staff was Ned Owens, who hailed from the suburbs of Denver, Colorado; Ned had also worked with Hunky at Modern Cycle. After a time, Ned moved on to a job with Works Performance, and a young guy named Brian George joined us. Then when Brian left, Tom Webb joined the team. Brian and Tom were both southern California born. I think the point I'm trying to make is that on the staff of DB, we were all from different parts of the country and brought our regional perspectives with us, making for a very well-rounded staff.

Vic: "Rick came from Youngstown, Ohio, but wasn't he most at home in the desert? He raced Indian Dunes, DeAnza, Hopetown, all those classic races, but the desert was his domain, specifically the Ponderosa--you know, where the Dirt Diggers (Rick was a member), used to hold desert races in the late '60s, early '70s. Out in the wide-open desert, that's where he was the happiest. He took countless guys--I don't know, Ake Jonsson, all the Maico racers, Andre Malherbe, lots of very famous racers--out to the Ponderosa and suck them into chasing him, and then he'd ease into the whoopdedos and just plant these guys! Boom! They'd go over the bars--he would just love it!"

Paul: "You're right about that. I spent a lot of time trail riding with Tom Webb, at Texas Canyon and Frazier Park, staying on tight singletrack most of the time, and Rick would join us occasionally, but his heart was in the desert--he liked going fast, wide open. He dragged me out to that damned Ponderosa site, but I couldn't see the attraction--nothing but creosote bushes, heat, dust and whoopdedos."

Vic: "I remember he talked me into racing Barstow to Vegas in 1974. I shipped my buddy Ron's 450 Maico out to Rick (I didn't want to trash my own bike!). We went out to the desert that weekend and we were on the line at Barstow to Vegas. I was in way over my head. He got out of sight, and I was thrashing around for hours, following these other guys who seemed to know what direction to go, and we happened upon this guy in a Death Valley sand wash with his bike leaned against a rock, and it’s Rick. What are the chances? He's got the mag cover off of his Maico, and I come up and stop and he hollers, 'Krause! Krause! You got a matchbook with you?' And I did find a pack of matches in my pocket, and he rips the striker off and starts filing down the points on his Maico--you remember they had a points ignition back then. So he cleans the points up, puts the cover back on and vroom! He was back in business. I told him I had the scare of my life about a half hour earlier and wasn't sure I was going to make it, but he said, 'Come on, you stick with me, I'll get us both to Vegas and we'll finish this thing.' 

"So he took the lead and I followed, and you know we made it to Vegas and actually finished the race. I still have that finisher pin to this day." (Note: At the time, it was very unusual for Eastern riders to come out and try to ride something as crazy as Barstow to Vegas, so it turns out that Vic Krause also became part of an elite society of Eastern racers who actually rode B to V and managed to finish it. The actual legend of B to V at the time was that no rider from east of the Mississippi ever rode Barstow to Vegas and finished it on the first try.)

Once he got to Vegas, Rick was again very much in his element. He really enjoyed Marsh-Wheeling cigars and the company of friends around a poker table--especially when his friends were losing to him--and it turns out we all have stories about Rick in casinos.

Vic: "Rick was a hustler, too. He had an angle on everything. Remember his get-rich-quick schemes? He really enjoyed Vegas, it was like his natural home. I remember one time he called me up and said 'Vic! You gotta come out! Come out next week!' and I said, well, give me a reason, is there a race or something, what's going on? And he told me "No! We're going to Vegas! I've got a system worked out; we can't lose! Come on out and we'll make big money! It's foolproof!'

"So I don't know what's wrong with me, I'm either greedy, gullible, or ready for adventure, and I go out. He tells me to bring $300 with me and we'll both go home rich men. So I get a ticket, leave the business again--this time with a new girlfriend, because the old one quit the last time I spent six weeks with Rick--and I go out. Rick had this old red truck, a real beater, and we drove to Vegas in this rat of his. On the way, he rolls out his system to me. In his "system," you go to the roulette wheel and put down two bucks on red or black, whatever. If you win, you pull your winnings back, but if you lose, on the next roll you put up four bucks. If you lose again, the next time you go eight--sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four--and in his mind, it would almost never go to $128 before you'd win and rake back all that money. If it did, that's why you wanted that $300, so you could put up that final $128 bet. What could possibly go wrong?

"I'm thinking, this is insane. I don’t know why I'm doing this. The worst that can happen, I figure, is I can lose 300 bucks. So we drive to Vegas in this old clapped-out truck, we get there and he's so excited he's vibrating--you know how he was. And he's so worked up he says, 'Krause, you have to go to a different table, or they'll figure out we're running a scam on them, and they'll throw us out!' So I go over to a different table, watch it go red a couple of times, and then I put my first two bucks on black. Bam! I lose. I put my four bucks up--wham! It's gone. Eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, a hundred and twenty eight...and I'm broke. I think I was at that table four minutes, and I lost every dime!

"Now, this is embarrassing. You know, I have a Masters degree in Engineering, but I also have a minor in Probability Theory. I know completely well that a system like this has an eventual negative outcome. Eventually, you're going to wind up busted. If you're lucky enough to get a streak you can win a little money, but you have to be able to stop before the streak ends and you lose it all. I knew all that, but here I was, my whole wad was gone, and it wasn't even ten o'clock in the morning yet. That wheel went red 13 times in a row the moment I walked up, what's the odds of that? I'm serious, I'd been in a Vegas casino for a total of ten minutes and I was already totally broke.

"Dazed and demoralized, I shuffled on down to the other end of the hall, and here's Sieman at his table. Chips stacked up eight inches high--one stack, two stacks, three, four--he's got a small fortune in winnings in front of him, and he's only been playing, what, thirty minutes? He'd never lost once, everything ran his way. He's got a cigar burning and I walk up, he whispers 'Krause! How'd you do? Look at all this money!' I can't speak.

"He dragged up all these chips and went over to the cashier, turned them all in for cash, and then he's standing behind this kiosk counting it like some kind of shylock money-lender. 'Krause! Look! I won like 378 dollars! How did you lose? It's not complicated..." I'm still too stunned to say anything. 

"I tell him the table went red 13 times in a row, and he's still convinced that I did something wrong. So he says 'Here, we'll go back and you just stand next to me for luck.' So we go back, I stand and watch while he just continues to win. Oh he'd lose one or two, but then he'd win six, seven times in a row. He piled up another three, four, five hundred dollars! Then he'd gather it all up, scurry back to the teller window and cash it in, so he'd have the cash in his pocket. He went like this all day--win some, cash it in, go back to the tables. I'd stand there next to him and watch; what else am I going to do, I haven't got a dime. But at one point I go off to the men's room, and when I get back he's panicking. 'Krause! Where'd you go? Don't you ever leave! I lost seven times the minute you walked away! Don't leave my side!' So I dutifully keep standing there, and you know he just kept winning, and winning, and winning, on a stupid double-up strategy that everybody knows is a losing proposition. The dealer was dumbfounded. But Rick just stood there and beat the odds, and he was ecstatic." A lot of fun followed, but the truth is, we ended up back in L.A. with no money, a $50 beater truck with a new $2000 stereo system in it, and about three million dollars in memories. 

Paul: "I guess this is a great time to reveal the source of Rick's "Super Hunky" nickname. There's been a lot of myth spread about where that name came from, but I'll set the record straight. Rick grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, in a family that originally came from Czechoslovakia, or from what became Czechoslovakia after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire following World War I. There happens to be a lot of Czechs in Youngstown, and though calling a Czech a "Bohunk" was relatively disparaging, it was accepted as local slang describing someone of Czech descent. What a lot of folks don't know about Rick is that, in his youth, he was a very serious weightlifter, and he worked out constantly, with an eye on a possible Olympic career. With an affinity for high weights and lots of time in the gym, his gym-mates started calling him "Super Hunky," as in "Super Bohunk." Somehow the name followed him from Ohio to California, although Rick always claimed to hate that nickname.

Vic: "Is that true? I never knew that..."

Paul: "It was in Rick's book, Monkey Butt. Didn't you read it there?"

Vic: "I know I've got that book around here somewhere...."

Paul: "Of course, you know as well as me that Rick just lived to pull off stunts that drew all kinds of attention. Lots of it positive, but of course plenty of it negative as well."

Vic: "You mean like the time he rode a Triumph chopper in the Mint 400 desert race?"

Paul: "Yep, and the Fastest Dirt Bike ever, with the 130 mph KTM 495, and of course any of his chain lube shootouts, or the two-stroke oil shootout."

Vic: "Um yeah...the petroleum engineers in the industry weren't happy with any of his oil shootouts. Let's just say his methodology was unique, but his readers related."

Paul: "Yes, but here I want to point out something, and I think you'll agree with me. In all of these stunts or radical approaches to stories, his goal was to draw attention to Dirt Bike magazine. It's important to note that he was always promoting the magazine, and he was never promoting himself."

Vic: "Duly noted, and very true. Unlike me, he was definitely not interested in self-promotion. I want to add something else to this, too. In all my time with Rick, I never heard him utter a bad word about anyone. Oh there were guys in the business he didn't like, and he would tell you so, but I never heard him disparage anyone's name, not verbally, and not in print."

Paul: "Unless he was joking, and usually the jokes were on us. I heard the name 'Pinhead' and 'Pencil-neck more than a few times."

Vic: "Yeah, we did receive our fair share of abuse."

Paul: "But it was all in fun, and again, it was all to draw attention to the staff, and the magazine, not to individuals. 

Vic: "His allegiance was to the readers of Dirt Bike magazine. Every month, Rick shared the tribulations, the frustrations, the comical adventures, and the joy of the challenges of offroad riding and racing. He amused, entertained, informed, exposed, and after a fashion, educated his readers, and built up a huge fan base that stretched across at least a couple generations."

Paul: "The folks who read the magazine never saw what went on behind the scenes, Man, many times I thought he was such a pain in the ass, with his editorial meetings and his careful crafting of exactly how each issue was put together. In the beginning, I thought it was so much trouble, but then after a while, I realized it was part of his gift and genius. It meant everything to him that there was something for every reader, every issue. No matter who you were, you could usually find something you liked every month, even if the cover story was about a Maico 440 and you really didn't care a hoot about Maicos. More often than not, you could find an article in the magazine that seemed like it was written just for you."

Vic: "A quote popped into my head yesterday when I was thinking about this. It goes something like, they won't remember you for what you said, or what you did, but they will remember you for how you made them feel. That resonated with me because I realized that Rick--just like Bruce Brown before him, with On Any Sunday--had his own way of validating this crazy sport of ours, he had his way of making all his readers feel like they were part of an extended family, that what we did for fun had meaning. That it wasn't just you and your friends riding around in circles in a vacant lot, that we were all a fraternity of dirt bikers, and you could find that family everywhere you went if you just poked around. And when you got there, you were part of that family too.

"You know, recently a new buddy of mine (turns out he was a dirt biker back in the day and a DB/Hunky fan) stopped by the hangar and we were talking about what Dirt Bike magazine meant to him. He told me, 'Vic, that magazine gave hundreds of thousands of young men, and some intrepid, spunky girls, a chance to dream every month. A fair number of these dreamers never had the good fortune to ever own a dirt bike, but they loved Super Hunky and his magazine. When you facilitate the dreams of a multitude, when you emphatically and powerfully make them feel special, you are simply unforgettable. Long live Super Hunky!" 

Paul: "Well said. Let's leave it like that."

Vic: "I'm gonna miss the old rascal."

Paul: "Me too."