I Made Her a Quiet Promise: Part 1

As I started to post this I received an email that Mike is in the hospital with a serious case of pneumonia. I, and I am sure you folks, wish Mike a speedy recovery.

Ex-soldier, motor sports racer, and newspaper man Mike Traynor, always an avid motorcyclist, founded the Ride for Kids charity events and the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation. I had the opportunity to talk with Mike about his life and passion.

WM: How did you get interested in motorcycles?

Traynor: There is a picture of me on a Honda Dream 250. I had hair then. I turned it into a race bike. It was my great love, and interested me in riding. I was in the army, in Japan. I worked with engineers in the army and we built a quarter mile flat track and a half mile TT course. We all became motorcyclists and racers. I was the president of the Smoke and Draggers Motorcycle Club. I have no idea where that name came from. It was there when I came to that duty station. We raced with fellow soldiers and had a high number of Japanese college students who had bikes. We had a lot of fun.

WM: You got the Ride for Kids program going in 1984. Would you like to talk to us about that start-up?

Traynor: It was about the occasion for the first Ride for Kids in 1984. We attached the Ride for Kids to an AMA race that was being held at Road Atlanta that weekend. I came up with an idea that I would start up this charitable motorcycle event. We got a great full page about the race and the disease. We promoted Ride for Kids participants could get discounted tickets to the race. We had 100 people come to the event. It wasn’t easy. But we were off and running.

WM: To some, motorcyclists still represent a bad public image. Did you run into image problems outside the motorcycle community?

Traynor: There were two cities that did create problems. But, we were able to work around that by going to a neighboring community. We were challenged when we brought the program to Florida, because of Daytona. Television does sensationalize events. Unfortunately some things happened there that were not in the best interests of the motorcycling community. They were very aware of that. I gave them the names of police agencies, park districts, mayors, all kinds of people. After that they warmly embraced us. They were doing due diligence, that’s what they should have done. We don’t have much problem with that now. Mostly because Ride for Kids has achieved such prominence, and much more leverage.

WM: When did you first become aware of the huge impact the Ride for Kids program had on the cure of pediatric brain tumors?

Traynor: It was gradual. In the early days it was very difficult to give our money to people if we demanded it be used for pediatric brain tumors. The researchers weren’t bad guys and gals, but because they had programs being funded by universities, and philanthropic money, they had their research projects going in the direction of adults. They were going to have to hang a left if they were going to do pediatrics. These were business people. It wouldn’t make good business sense for them to do that. We didn’t understand that in the beginning.

As we became more successful , and that happened more and more quickly over the next few years, we began to amass much greater sums of money that we could put into research. It was quite reasonable for them to say “I’ll take the money and put it into adult brain tumors. And we’ll put it in a specific tumor because some kids get this tumor, too.” So we weren’t wasting our money. There is a trickle down effect from some of the adult brain tumors. We were doing the kids a favor in the only way the research community would allow us. That was perfectly reasonable once we understood what that was all about.

In 1992 we launched the national Ride for Kids program. That was because we had the money from Honda to be able to afford to do that. They were giving us motorcycles to give away. They were also giving us a good sized check to help us cover our operating expenses. Our financial growth became exponential at that point. Probably over the next five years. I would probably say around ’97 we began see a lot more acceptance of researchers wanting to do childhood brain tumor research. We were getting more and more exposure in the general media in more and more cities.