At 8:30 AM on a Saturday in April, the heartier members of the Peoria Motorcycle Club have been hard at work since sunup. The club’s biggest race is four months away, meaning the mostly over-50 bike fiends here have four months’ worth of fences to repair, drainage ditches to dig, and bumpy terrain to contour. Chris Tucker, a towering, tattooed man who was a wall of muscle until he developed Parkinson’s disease three years ago at the age of 66, is sweeping up dead ladybugs in the club’s VIP lodge, a wood-and-brick structure built into a hillside. Brad Van De Veer, at 40 a youngster in this group, is obscured inside the cab of a bulldozer, with which he nimbly sculpts a hillside.
Within flat track racing there are four divisions: short track, half-mile, one mile, and TT. The Tourist Trophy style got its start in Britain at the turn of the 20th century, when motorcycle clubs started putting on backroad and off-road races to bring in tourists and raise money. Only two professional flat track races in the United States are TT; Peoria is one. The other, which has been around since 2001, is in Springfield, “but it’s just a little hill put in the middle of a flat track race,” says Val Schonberger, a resident of Chillicothe–15 miles north of Peoria–who hosts an annual party during race weekend. Each year Schonberger has 20 to 25 out-of-towners sleeping on the floor of his three-bedroom house–his record is 52 guests, three years ago.
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Bert Sanders, a strapping, avuncular 71-year-old who’s been a member of the Peoria Motorcycle Club for 35 years, and Tucker, a retired cement finisher, built the outbuildings for concession, the press, and VIPs and poured concrete for service roads on the club grounds.
“They awarded a tom turkey for first, a hen turkey for second, and a chicken for third,” recalls Sanders, the club’s informal historian. “And these were live. Can you imagine somebody taking a tom turkey home on a motorcycle? The only thing they could do was tie it on back or come back and get it later.”
Gladys died about five years ago but, true to her memory, the Ladies’ Auxiliary sold 2,500 PMC burgers last year in two hours. In the old days, they stored the ground meat for the burgers in ten-gallon milk cans, but then the race got so big the Peoria Health Department took an interest, so the milk cans have since been replaced with metal pans.
Sanders’s wife, Pauline, has been in the Ladies’ Auxiliary for 40 nonconsecutive years. She missed one year, 1977, when she divorced her first husband, also a club member. Club rules state that after a divorce, the wife has to leave the club and the husband can stay. But when Pauline married Bert in 1978, she was back in.
