Floyd Clymer astride a Harley-Davidson Motorcycle
Clymer was a clean-living teetotaler who never smoked, always wore a business suit and started what was once the biggest automotive publishing organization in the world, Clymer Repair Manuals. The Clymer manual became shorthand among home mechanics as a useful guide to vehicle maintenance and repair.
His motorcycle obsession started early.
Clymer was a scintillatingly fast dirt-tracker who could run on pure adrenaline, a wild and crazy guy on a motorcycle to the very end, a businessman who loved the limelight, a master at promoting the image of motorcycling.
A boy wonder operating his own auto sales agency before he was in his teens, young Floyd sold 26 Maxwell, REO and Cadillac cars in two years. He did this in 1904, at the age of 10 from a tiny, catalog-filled office next to his father’s doctors office in Berthoud, Colorado to which his father, a country physician, had moved the family after Floyd was born in Indianapolis.
President Theodore Roosevelt declared him “The World’s Youngest Automobile Dealer.”
As a teenager, Clymer lost the bulk of his hard-earned profits by investing in a now-forgotten motorcycle called the Thomas Auto-Bi. Clymer was captivated by the motorcycle's “Next to Flying” ad slogan, although the snail-like and unreliable Auto-Bi impressed nobody else but him. Clymer’s investment was worthless.
By then, Clymer had discovered motorcycles and he knew right away that he was hooked. Noticing his skill and cunning, Harley-Davidson telegraphed for Clymer to enter the 1916 Dodge City 300-mile race as replacement for injured star rider Otto Walker.
Floyd Clymer's Historical Motor Scrapbook
In 110 degree heat, on an unfamiliar, ill-handling machine that “packed a lot of dynamite” into its 61 cubic inches, Clymer set fastest lap in practice, and in the race led Harley factory rider Irving Janke around the dusty horse track, both riders mounted on the potent four-valve Twins.
After setting two new world records-83 miles in the first hour, 100 miles in 71 minutes, Clymer blew a tire at nearly 100 mph, headed into the pits, then got back on track and blazed into the lead again, until a broken valve sidelined him at the 218th mile.
By 1916 he had become a member of the Harley-Davidson factory team. Clymer set a world 100-mile record that same year, in addition to a Pikes Peak record, but was eventually forced out of competitive motorcycle riding by a back injury.
Clymer, undaunted, turned to promoting AMA motorcycle races in the Midwest and elsewhere.
Sometime in the mid-1940's, Clymer, perhaps unknowingly, created a new genre of journalism.
He put together a selection of photos, text, statistics, and articles on old cars first published when they were new into a single, thematically chaotic volume called Floyd Clymer's Historical Motor Scrapbook.
Clymer’s last great crusade was trying to resurrect the Indian motorcycle.
Clymer attempted to purchase the Indian motorcycle brand in the 1950's, and was successful in buying it in the early 1960's. By 1967, he had begun distribution of Indian-branded minicycles, using names such as Papoose, Ponybike and Boy Racer.
While his minicycle line continued, and expanded, into the 1970s, the realization of these full-sized Indian cycles came to a halt when Clymer died.
