Others he takes out on the road to show at conventions or at special races. Some of his bikes are on loan to the Motorcycle Hall of Fame Museum in Pickerington, Ohio. Some folks say I should put a sign out front, but I get lots of visitors without one.' They just hear about it I guess,' Hoellerich said. Most of the visitors to the museum are from afar. 'I figured I'd get some visitors when I got old, but now I get an unbelievable number of visitors.' 'It's gotten to be much more than I ever imagined,' he said. Traveling groups of motorcycle buffs, former trail bike riders from around the world, travel magazine writers and, of course, motocross families on the way to the races at some far-off dirt track, have all called Hoellerich at one time or another. If someone wants a peek inside, Hoellerich said, they should give him a call. There is no sign out front and no regular operating hours. And he does almost every bit of it himself.' I've seen him take a rusty old relic, and six months later, it looks like it just rolled out of the factory. 'I haven't put much money into it, but I have put a lot of work into it. 'Every day I do a little something - shine up some spokes, work on a part. He put up a barn, where he works on the bikes and keeps them on display along with plenty of other artifacts from the world of trail bike racing. 'I picked up a few here and there some guys just gave them to me,' Hoellerich said.

'That was during the infancy of motorcycle racing.'īy the late 1970s, trail bike racing was dwindling, and back on his Cheshire farm, Hoellerich started fixing up his old bikes, buying some from other former riders and restoring them. 'I enjoyed going to a few events,' Ouimet recalled. He helped develop innovations to the bikes to make them better in the dirt, and he traveled the countryside racing trail bikes. It was not unusual for a couple of hundred riders and their friends to show up for these sanctioned races throughout New England every summer and fall.Īnd Hoellerich, now 73, was among the best. Soon, organized trail bike races were growing popular.

Naturally, they took to racing one another, developing knobby tires for better traction in the dirt. In the early 1960s, trail bike racing developed from riders who would take their street bikes off road and onto trails through fields and forests. Ouimet and Hoellerich have known each other for nearly 50 years and were there together at the start of off-road motorcycle racing, then at the start of the museum. 'The machines he's got there were the very beginning of motocross,' said Ronald Ouimet, president and owner of Ronnie's Cycle Sales and Service. Hoellerich, two floors of shiny motorcycles - about 100 in all - stand ready to race again at the Museum of Vintage Trail Bikes. Taken from the 1960s and '70s, meticulously restored by award-winning trail bike racer and local dairy farmer James H.

Wanted to buy ossa motorcycle