Indian Sport Scout racers: Old Warriors
It’s the stuff of dreams...
January/February 2007
Phillip Tooth
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Amazingly, all but one of the Indian Scout racers Larry Feece unearthed run. Not bad, considering they sat unattended in a shed for the better part of 30 years.
Photo by Phillip Tooth
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It’s the stuff of dreams: Stumbling across a windowless, tumbledown tin shed, you push open a door and peer inside. There, abandoned and lost to time, sits a battle-scarred race bike that hasn’t turned a wheel in 50 years. Only this time, the dream is real.
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That’s just what happened to Larry Feese Sr. — except there wasn’t just one old warrior covered in dust and cobwebs. Forcing open the door to the tin shack, Larry let his eyes adjust to the darkness and slowly counted. One … two … three … four little Indians.
But before you start wishing you had Larry’s luck, stop and consider this: Luck doesn’t just happen. You have to make it.
Making the luck
Twenty years ago, Larry helped his local Yamaha dealer in northern Indiana value old bikes brought in for part-exchange. “Most of the bikes I looked at were nothing special, although occasionally something interesting would turn up. But I never expected to be asked to appraise old Indian racers.”
The seller told Larry he had bought them in the late Fifties from a man named Buck Rogers and had intended to convert them back to road bikes, but never got around to it. He had cancer, and what he really wanted was a new V-Max …
“There were four modified Sport Scout racers in that rusted tin shack, each with the gas tank finished in the same maroon paint. Every one was wearing the number plate from its last race, and two even had the tech inspection tags still clipped on the handlebars,” Larry says. “The tires were flat and rust was breaking out like an ugly rash on some parts, but otherwise they looked just the same as the day they were parked.”
When Larry told the owner what he thought they were worth his face lit up. “Wow!” he said. “But what fool would pay that much for a bunch of old Indians?”
“This fool,” responded Larry.
Larry delivered a new V-Max and set it up in the seller’s basement. “I don’t think he ever rode it,” Larry says. “But he liked sitting on it.”
As Larry started looking for information on the original owner, the last thing he expected was to talk to Buck Rogers: “I phoned him up and heard this real weak voice at the end of the line. But when I told him that I had found his Indians he perked up and spoke loud and clear,” Larry remembers.
Buck, Larry discovered, had been a development engineer for Studebaker, and was responsible for getting a V8 into Studebaker’s civilian trucks. In one of his more enjoyable telephone conversations, he told Larry why the gas tanks of his Indians all wore the same war paint: “That was Champion Maroon, a Studebaker color. Studebaker sponsored an Indian race team — only they didn’t know it!”
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