Wall of Death

They brought the Wall of Death to the HD dealership again this 4th of July. Here are a few couple pic from my Iphone.

Not a wheel but a vertical wood wall. Why is it fun, fun to watch. The guy on the old Indian has a side shift and was fun watching him shift it while going around the wall. We have a lady about 80 now in our chapter by the name of Cookie Crum who rode the wall for 8 years when she was younger of course.
JB, only the performers ride the wall, crap I got dizzy just watching them. One guy who was on the Indian locked the throttle down and rode around with no hands on the bars, no thanks I'll stick to riding vertical on pavement.

check here johnny................lots of history in those walls!!!!!

Wall of death (motorcycle act) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Might be dumb to you JB but if you watched it, you would see that those performers got to have a lot of skill to do that. You just don't get in one a ride. The lady in our chapter who did it when she was younger was inducted into the hall of fame at Sturgis last year. Lot of skill and a lot of guts.

Here is a write up of her.
To question the authenticity of a woman who earned the nicknames "Queen of the Hell Drivers" and "Queen of the Daredevils" by driving a motorcycle on an apparatus called the Wall of Death wouldn't seem to be the best of ideas.
Still, for most of the 60-plus years Cookie Crum spent on and around motorcycles, people who didn't know her did just that.

Maybe it was her model-like looks, cascading blond hair and fashionable white leather get-ups, or maybe it was simply that she was a woman in a field dominated by men, but inevitably someone would tell her she didn't look like a motorcycle rider.

For years, Crum, 77, has bitten her tongue, smiled and asked, "And what exactly does a motorcycle rider look like?" But Aug. 5, when Crum becomes one of only a handful of women to have been inducted into the Sturgis (S.D.) Motorcycle Hall of Fame, the longtime Clackamas resident will have another, more pointed response.

She can simply direct the uneducated to the profile detailing her work as a pioneering female trick rider and tireless motorcycle organizer and advocate on the Web site for the hall of fame and say, "Explain that."

"Opportunity to travel with show and learn thrilling, well-paying profession. Will teach personable girl with nerve and courage to become motorcycle exhibition rider in Motordrome. Pay while learning. This is a highly regarded profession and a rare opportunity."

Fredrick D. Joe/The OregonianCookie Crum manages to make it over to the local Harley dealer weekly to talk bikes.The 1949 ad in a Sarasota, Fla., newspaper under the heading "Travel and Adventure" virtually screamed at 17-year-old Margery Coffman.

She had long before decided high school wasn't her thing. She'd been riding motorcycles behind her parents' backs since she was 14, and after a stint touring the country riding animals with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus she'd grown to love the limelight that came with performing for an audience.

"I wanted something different," she said. "I never wanted to sit in an office all day."

She answered the ad, upping her age just a little so she would qualify, and soon was hired.

During the next eight years, Coffman, under her stage name Cookie Ayers, would make her living crisscrossing the eastern and southern United States with various carnivals and shows as one of the pre-eminent female riders of the motor drome, or as it was more commonly known, the Wall of Death.

The motor drome earned its nickname as one of the early-to-mid-20th century's intersections of shock value and entertainment, and performers occasionally did die on the wall, or, as in the case of Crum's friend Samantha Morgan, die years later from repeated injuries from mishaps.

A circular contraption with high, 90-degree walls, sometimes with a sloped section between the Wall and the ground, the dromes married science with the excitement and power of motorcycles and mixed in some panache in the form of the gutsy and acrobatic riders.

Riders built up speed on the flat bottom of the drome and then made their way up the vertical sides, sticking for no reasons other than centrifugal force and an extremely well-developed sense of balance and riding know-how. Once up, riders would delight fans standing atop the walls by riding with no hands, sitting sidesaddle, standing up on the cycle or even staging two-person races, all while speeding around parallel to the ground.

Michele Thomas, Crum's daughter, grew up watching her mom thrill crowds "like a ballerina on a motorcycle."

Courtesy of Cookie Crum"It was as natural to me as anybody else walking down the street," Cookie Crum says of her riding."What I remember is the inhalation of breath, that scared but thrilled sound that people made before every show," she said. "It just takes your breath away that anybody can do that, and that they do it with such grace and ease."
Even Crum was susceptible to the magic of the Wall.

"When I'd go in the drome and push my bike over, back against the track and start to go up on the wall, it was as natural to me as anybody else walking down the street," she said. "But when I'd go upstairs and look down into the drome and see the guys ride, I'd think there's no way I could do that. It was the weirdest feeling."

Hundreds of dromes toured the country in the 1940s and '50s according to Jay Lightnin', a veteran daredevil and proprietor of one of the three dromes still touring the U.S., but a female rider such as Crum was a rarity.

"It was basically kind of unheard of," he said. "A woman on the motorcycle on the street was unheard of, never mind in a carnival on the Wall. Back in her day she was looked down on by the rest of society, she was an outlaw and no good, and she wasn't only biker trash, she was carnival biker trash, to make matters worse."

Crum was always aware of the stereotypes about bikers and went out of her way to combat them.

She never wore the traditional biker black outside the drome, and throughout her riding career she wore almost exclusively white, from the scarves she used to pull back her long blond hair to the leather boots she'd wear while riding across the country.

"I never owned a black leather jacket or pants," she said. "Because to me that was the bad guys, I didn't want to be the bad guy. I wanted people to look at motorcycling and see that there are nice people there."

After eight years, two marriages, one baby, one divorce, no serious injuries and too many shows on the Wall to count, Cookie decided to give up her title as Queen of the Hell Drivers. She briefly moved to Portland with her 8-year-old daughter and second husband and, soon after, moved to Medford and opened a Harley-Davidson shop. The store lasted six years, and so did the marriage.

While working an assortment of jobs in Southern Oregon, Crum continued to spread her passion for motorcycles by joining nearly every cycling organization that existed, and where they didn't exist, she'd start them.

She married for a third time only to lose her husband in a motorcycle accident, and eventually married a fourth time, in 1985, to a fellow Honda Gold Wing rider named Bob Crum. The ceremony took place atop their bikes in the MGM Grand Reno, and she became Cookie Crum. ("I never thought about his name!" she swears.)

Together they founded a motorcycle magazine and spent years riding across the West with Cookie's white boots and jacket never ceasing to catch truckers off-guard.

Bob knew what he was getting himself into from the beginning. "She was a rider," he said. "I never thought anything else about it.

"You could tell that she was a take-charge person when you first met her, so you never gave it another thought. Nobody's going to tell her what to do."

Two years ago, Cookie Crum did something even harder than riding the Wall standing up -- she sold her last motorcycle. After 60-plus years with a bike, the breakup wasn't easy.

She visits the local dealership almost weekly to talk bikes and fawn over the new Harleys. She attends as many bike chapter meetings and rallies as she can find time for, spreading the enthusiasm for motorcycles and sharing the stories from her life that have made her the woman she is.

Those qualities made her the ideal candidate for the Sturgis Hall of Fame, according to Christine Paige Diers, the hall's executive director.

"The fact that she rode the motor drome when she was young and made her living that way for a number of years is very impressive, but it wasn't just that," she said. "It was also the fact that she's a great ambassador for motorcycling, men and women. She's encouraged people to ride, she loves to ride and she tells everybody she knows that people should be riding."

With her induction looming, Crum has become a sought-after speaker at motorcycle-related events. As part of the closing for her speech, she asks her audience how they explain their passion for their bikes and riding to non-riders, pausing before telling them she has never figured it out.

Yet after listening to her tell the fantastical stories from her life with the same passion and zeal with which she lived them, you sense maybe she actually has.

a hell of a woman!!!!!!

She still is. Had to laugh at her the other day, her husband bought a new Harley Trike and she refuses to ride on it. She has a Heritage.

that is funny!!!!!

Gee Sarge she is around 78-80 now you must have been pretty young. I saw her and her current husband today over at Mcky D's across from the HD dealer looking at a really tricked out Roadking. She will never give up riding until she can no longer crawl. Pretty impressive women and pretty sharp still.