Mike Traynor
Seventeen years ago, a newspaperman named Mike Traynor saw what brain tumors did to little kids and wondered what he could do about it. Then the telephone rang.
It was Roger Edmondson, wanting Traynor to promote the Road Atlanta round of his new roadracing series. "I asked Roger what he had for a budget, and he said, 'Not a cent.' I told him I'd have to get back to him because I wasn't sure how to promote a roadrace with no money." Edmondson needed people at his race. Traynor needed a strong story to get the word out. Then the light went on in Mike Traynor's head.
Traynor, you see, was a motorcycle guy. Had been, in fact, since 1959, when the Army sent him to Japan, where he got involved with a certain little Honda motorcycle. He was the shorttrack Champion of Hokkaido on a Honda Dream, and finished 11th in WERA Medium-Weight Production on a Kawasaki GPz550 with his 17-year-old son as co-rider and his two younger sons as pit crew. The family recreation vehicle was a motorcycle, not a motorhome. Traynor the motorcycle guy knew the type of people he rode with-and knew they'd help.
"My first impulse was to help these kids," Traynor says, "but I wanted very much to show people that the motorcycling community was more than what they saw on television." He's done both. Since that first ride he organized in Atlanta in June '84, the motorcycling public has revealed the size of its heart by raising more than $10 million to stop childhood brain tumors-tumors that are fast becoming the leading cause of cancer deaths for anyone under the age of 34. The people who build motorcycles proved they had a heart also when American Honda came aboard as a corporate sponsor in 1991. Could the cause have come as far as fast as it has without Honda? "Not in a million years," says Traynor.
Anyone helping kids in trouble gets back much more than they could ever give. "In 1999, Ride For Kids generated 94 million media impressions," Traynor says, "and almost every single time in a story mentioning the motorcycling community coming together to do something positive." Still, the most positive thing is the progress Traynor and the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation of the United States have made in their fight to save children's lives.
A kid with a brain tumor in 1984 had a life expectancy of five months. Today, thanks largely to research funded by the Ride For Kids, that same kid has a life expectancy of more than three years. The power behind that difference is a story that has become all too rare; one person who saw people in pain and did all he could to ease it. Deep down, Mike Traynor knew something else in 1984 that's been proven 10 million times since: Once they see these kids, thousands of other motorcycle people will do something to help them.
Traynor's work is helpful, inspiring and positive. Which makes him the perfect recipient of the inaugural Greg McQuide Motorcyclist of the Year award.
To learn more about the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation and the Ride For Kids, call (800) 253-6530 or visit www.ride4kids.org and www.pbtfus.org on the Web.
By Kevin Wing
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