Pete Page: Zen Master with Machines

Reprint from : July 2010 Globe Miami Times

Walk through the doors of Livingston’s Appliance in downtown Globe and you’ll find the walls lined with new washers and dryers in the front. In the back, you’ll discover a shop that can only be described as “managed chaos,” where a tall, lanky guy with strong hands and a quiet demeanor is busy working his repair magic on various sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, and washers. But, if you take a closer look, you’ll see a framed and fading portrait of a motorcyclist on a GSX-R Suzuki taking a corner low to the pavement, a calendar showing famous road races in Europe, motorcycle ‘kitch’ and and enough dog-eared photos of Suzukis, Hondas, Triumphs, Harley’s and the like tacked up to the wall so as to dominate one whole section.

Pete Page, who owns Livingstons, is known by most around here as the “appliance guy. A few, it seems, know him as ‘British Pete’, and fewer still – those who ride bikes themselves- know that before Pete focused all his attention on appliance repair as being a duly respectable, steady form of income, he spent quite a bit of time racing motorcycles in England and touring this country from the back of a BMW.

Originally from Southhampton, England, Pete says he got his first bike in 1961.  The country was still feeling the effects of WWII – even then – and more people rode bikes and motorcycles with little sidecars as he was growing up than owned cars. When he was 16, he worked a paper route to make money for his first motorcycle. It was a 50 cc moped, and although its top speed was only 30 mph, it provided his first taste of freedom, which came with owning his own set of wheels. The racing would come later.

In a career that spans over 30 years, Pete has put more hours on a bike than most, covered two continents and 42 states, and wore out just a few bikes.

He started racing sidecars in 1975 when he was in his late twenties. These were stripped-down motorcycles with sidecars resembling a “perch” more than a “sidecar.” Using farmer’s fields where the crops were being rotated and the fields left to rest – both farmers and racers picked up a bit of cash by turning these fields into race tracks. Entry fees were about $25 and winnings never exceeded $100. The bikes were raced by tea

The bikes were raced by teams of riders. The “jockey” balanced behind the driver and flung his body to the left and right—much like sailing—to keep the rear tire on the track as the bike took turns at high speed.

“I used to race with a friend who would race solo, and then pop over and  “jockey” for me,” Pete said. “We were at this race once and had just taken a practice run.

My friend hopped off the bike and threw down his helmut declaring, “I’m not racing with you anymore. You frighten me to death! “ 

So Pete got on the PA and announced that #26 needed a jockey. Three guys showed up, and he picked a kid ten years his junior. Although Jim had only jockeyed a couple of times before this, he was a quick study, and the team was a formidable competitor on the track.

They made it to the National Championships one year, and while it took being good to get there, it took being very good to place. Pete says in the first race, they were sitting on the starting line with the National Champ on their left and the local Champ on their right. When the starter went off, the riders blasted off the starting line, and within the first turn, Pete said they were running fourth.

In a tough sport where taking calculated chances at high speeds define success, it is inevitable that wrecks will happen. But sometimes that wreck you walk away from makes you look at things differently – and say “enough.” For Pete, it was that day on the track when he and Jim were going hard at it, and another rider tried to pass them on the inside.

The rider clipped them and the force knocked Jim off the back.

“But I didn’t know he got knocked off,” Pete says, “so I headed into the turn and there is no one holding the back wheel down…and over I went.” He flipped so hard, his helmet came off, and his nose ended up on the right side of his face. It took a surgical team to patch him up, and he feels lucky to this day that it was only his nose that took the brunt of what could have been much worse.

That wreck marked the ending of one era and the beginning of another.

No more dirt tracks. The next bike he purchased was a Suzuki GSX-R.

”That was the bike to have, “ Pete says.  “You could squeeze 150 on that bike,” he says. Of course, nowadays, riders are doing 200.”

He says the day he was cornering his Suzuki going about 140 in a race, and laying it down so low to the ground that everything was scraping pavement…and a kid passed him on the outside and turned to give him a little wave of the hand as he sped past, Pete had to admit it might be time to retire from racin’

Pete turns to point at the Calendar behind his head, which shows a vintage photograph of the famous Isle of Man race. “Back in those days,” he says, “it was nothing to still be racing at 40 or 45. Nowdays, it’s sixteen-year-olds…and they’re winning!”

He goes on to explain that the Isle of Man consists of six 37 3/4-mile loops. In 1958, a Scotsman named Bob McIntyre became the first rider to lap the Mountain circuit at 100 mph. It would take nearly 50 years to bump that record up by 26 mph. Today’s record stands at 126 mph. Pete can only smile.

In 1992, just before his 50th birthday, Pete and his friend Allen decided to do a cross-country tour of the US. For two British boys, this was venturing into an alien – but awesome landscape.

In England you’d end up in the ocean if you rode more than 200 miles in any direction.

The idea of riding thousands of miles of blacktop and never running out of road was a strange kind of wonderful.  Pete wrote to fourteen BMW dealerships and told them what they wanted to do. Only one wrote back, he said. A dealership in Orlando Florida, said they had one such BMW on the floor and would have to order the other one, and would they send an international money order. No problem, Pete said.

The two left for the States three months later, flying into Orlando, where they found two brand-new BMWs awaiting their arrival. They did 42 states in six months, from Alaska to Mexico and everything in between. “It was great. People were friendly everywhere we went. They’d hear the accent, you know and want to talk.”.

They had barely arrived back in England with bikes in tow before they started planning a second trip. They had met another rider while on the first tour of the US, who talked about his journey from Fairbanks Alaska to Tierra del Fuego a small Argentinean province.  That sounded like just the ticket for their next big adventure and within a year, they were landing back in Orlando for their “South American Trip.”

It was on this trip that the two made a stop at Peg’s Cafe in Globe and met Jim Whitstruck, who would change Pete’s destiny. 

When we came out to get on our bikes, there was a note stuck to the windshield that read, “If you’re a biker, come see me. Pete said.  It was the name on the card – Moto Veloce- that intrigued him. 

At the shop, they met up with a short, broad, bushy-bearded man. It was Jim Whitstruck, who had moved to Globe several years earlier. He had been a staff photographer to President Truman. While the exact details of how he went from that to living over a motorcycle shop in Globe, Arizona may be lost to history, much about Jim’s eclectic passion for motorcycles and his photographic memory is stored in Pete’s mind.

 Inside, Whistruck’s shop was an array of “very unusual bikes, “a museum of sorts,” says Pete. Jim lived upstairs and rented the back for a motorcycle shop. “He had a lot of knowledge up here,” Pete says, “but Jim wasn’t as good with his hands. He needed a guy who could make all those unusual bikes run. And that was Pete.

The Great South American Road Trip ended at Globe on that fateful day when Jim offered Pete a job. His friend decided the Trip would not be so great going solo, so he returned to England.

Pete worked for Jim for nearly three years without a contract or salary – or any wage. “If we sold a bike, we’d split it fifty/fifty Pete says. The business was called Moto Veloce- Fast Motorcycles, and they were known for just that. In 1995, Jim passed away unexpectedly and and Pete found himself running the shop himself. By then, he was also doing all the repairs for the appliance business, which the landlord operated in the front of the building. Pete says he just couldn’t do both, and decided the appliance business was more reliable than the bikes, and he closed out the business.

Today, he works on smaller, less complicated machines: washers, dryers…, and sewing machines.

Yet, that quote from “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which says, “ The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you,” still holds sway here. Whether you’re talking about Bikes or Washing Machines, when they are out of kilter, Pete can fix them.

Note: Pete Page passed away in 2010 shortly after this article was posted in the Summer 2010 edition. We post this piece on our new website in memory of Pete and the role he played in the lives of everyone in the community who knew him best as the guy who could fix anything at Livingston’s Appliance in downtown Globe.

Linda Gross

Writer, photographer. Passionate foodie, lover of good books and storytelling. Lives in Globe. Plays in the historic district. Travels when possible.