CA - Sonny Angel: A Motorcycle Legend Calls It Quits

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Sonny Angel: A Motorcycle Legend Calls It Quits

A haven for bikers and weekend warriors since 1953 is for sale
By Dave Good • Wed, Mar 7th, 2012
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Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailShare on printShare on redditShare on stumbleuponMore Sharing Services7 Sonny Angel Courtesy Photo The Edge: "There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over." -- from "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
Sonny Angel, who is 84 or 87 still goes to work every day in National City. He runs a motorcycle shop on 18th Street, a mom-and-pop sized operation that bears his name that he's operated for 58 years. Angel is a legend and a speed-hungry daredevil who made his name in the latter part of the 1960s on the road race circuit. He's a Tennessee salesman and he's a master machinist, having turned chunks of raw metal into gears and sprockets and parts for vintage bikes, even an urn for his wife's ashes. It sits on a scrap of royal blue fabric on a back shelf behind the counter.
"She got cancer and I spent five years taking her back and forth to the hospital." She died three years ago. They'd been together by that point for 54 years. Angel's lined face cracks into a grin. "We still got along." He answers the next question without being asked: how is he getting along?
"You do the best you can do with what you've got to do it with."
And now, Sonny Angel's shop is for sale. He says he's got a deal on the table. He thinks maybe two months until the new owner steps in and takes over the running of what has been the ultimate man-cave for true bikers for going on six decades.
The air inside is redolent of two-stroke oil and of legend. Angel's own trophies and photos and memorabilia and such from back in the day cover the baby-blue pegboard walls. Cycles and parts are everywhere, even overhead in a custom loft Sonny fashioned from the recycled steel beams of what was once a 90-foot tall radio station tower.
Motorcycle Classics magazine: "This is how motorcycle shops used to look and smell."
There are dozens of coffee cups on the counter, and a coffee pot, and a box of donuts. Stopping by Sonny Angel's is a tradition that goes back to the days of pals he's outlived like Burt Munro, the World's Fastest Indian. Whenever in town the New Zealander stayed at Angel's and then they'd ride bikes out to Potrereo for breakfast and to points beyond along the serpentine I-94. But those days are over. Now Sonny's own red 'Guzzi now sits idle on the showroom floor.
"I had to stop riding three months ago. My equilibrium's not too good any more. I just found that out." He can still drive his truck, but he can no longer ride solo on two wheels, a fact he seems to take in stride.
"I'm 84."
"87," calls a shop attendant.
"I knew it was one of those."
Motorcycles, and high rates of speed were possibly the two first loves of Sonny Angel's life. As a young man he was not one to turn down the challenge of a parking-lot drag race:
“My Harley was fast,” he told Motorcycle Classics, “but I got in a big wobble and got over the handlebars at about 115mph. I crashed, the bike caught on fire, and I beat the fire out with my jacket, but it burned my jacket and sleeping bag. He [his competitor] gave me an old leather jacket and some safety pins to hold it together, so I took that and hit the road for California.”On the singed Harley.
Sonny Angel opened his shop in National City in 1953. It cost everything he had and for the next five years he bunked and shaved and showered and took his meals in the parts room in back.
The next year Angel showed up at Bonneville at the salt flats during Speed Week where he ratcheted a friend's Harley all the way up to 110 mph, dismounted, and later told the guy he could have walked faster.
He returned to Bonneville the next year with a modified Vincent and punched out a top speed of 144.69. Nearly 30 years later he would again approach the salt in quest of the magic 150mph and he would miss again: 144.95 was his best time through the traps.
Angel eventually did break the 150mph envelope on the dry lake bed at El Mirage, on a borrowed Vincent with a replacement piston after he'd blown one of the jugs and bent a valve that he'd hammered back into shape. There are some who might call that foolish, running on junk parts, but then a buck-and-a-half on two wheels gains admittance into a rare club of motorcycle speed demons.
By 1956 Angel was road racing on courses throughout California and having good luck. In 1960 he took two Yamahas (he was one of the country's first dealers) to the Isle of Man where he beat the pack with a top speed of 112 mph. There's a photo on the back wall of Angel on his Yamaha from that day, enlarged enough to see every detail including the wet track.
"Yeah," he says. "It was raining that day."
Sonny Angel's shop today is a ghost of what it once was. The bones are still there, but the operation is winding down. Now, instead of rows of vintage racers out front an old white pickup truck slumbers next to a few cycles. Off to the side, a road-weary Yamaha dirt bike with one of those Christian fish signs on the tank slowly rusts away. If you want to see what's for sale, you have to walk into the show room; the sweet stuff doesn't get wheeled out onto the tarmac these days.
"Well, I've got to start thinking," he says, "about doing something else."
Conspicuously absent are two bikes that enthusiasts made pilgrimage to National City over the years just to lay eyes on: a stock vintage Vincent Black Shadow that gleamed from a pedestal/shrine in the far corner of the showroom, and Angel's own '47 Vincent, the stripped-down viper with lead weights taped to the seat that he rode at Bonneville.
"A fantastic bike," wrote Hunter S. Thompson of the Vincent Black Shadow. "The new model is something like two thousand cubic inches, developing two hundred brake-horsepower at four thousand revolutions per minute on a magnesium frame with two styrofoam seats and a total curb weight of exactly two hundred pounds."
Also absent is the crated Norton Commando that Angel refused to assemble out of righteous indignation. He took delivery of it in 1974. He sold it recently on eBay.
"I don't remember for how much - $25 thousand? Whatever, it was a fair price."
A shop compressor kicks in from somewhere in the back - a giant wheezing thing gargling oil.
"I had four [Nortons] at the time. But the salesman said I had to buy another one in order to keep my relationship with Norton. I said okay, send the sonabitch." But he never built the bike. Instead, he put it in storage -- for the next 38 years.
It turns out the crated Norton sold to the person who would in turn decide to come back and purchase the whole shop. When the asking price for the store comes up, Angel falls silent. Possibly he did not hear the question. But as one bike enthusiast put it with a knowing smile, "Sonny Angel never sold a cheap bike."
After the shop changes hands Angel says he'd like to go back to the Isle of Man for one last visit. When he gets there, would he like to run a victory lap or two? No.
"I'm a watcher any more," he says. "Not so much a doer."