My Road on Two Wheels #4: A Hall of Fame 114 Years in the Making — The Day Bessie Stringfield's Name Was Carved

Yesterday, in Deadwood, South Dakota, a name was read aloud. Bessie Stringfield — born in 1911, died in 1993. She was named to the Sturgis Motorcycle Museum's Hall of Fame Class of 2026, honored posthumously. The ceremony took place on August 12 at the museum's annual Hall of Fame Breakfast during the Sturgis Rally. Last time in this column I wrote about the summer a women's championship stopped being a showcase — that was about riders who are out there right now. This time, let me talk about the other side: how someone who has finished riding gets remembered.

Bessie started riding at 16, on a 1928 Indian Scout given to her by her adoptive mother. Between the 1930s and 1940s she completed eight solo cross-country rides — the first African American woman to do so. During World War II she served as a civilian motorcycle courier for the U.S. Army. After the war she settled in Miami, worked as a licensed practical nurse, and founded the Iron Horse Motorcycle Club. She owned 27 Harley-Davidsons over her lifetime. There is even a story that she won a flat-track race, then was denied the prize once she took off her helmet and officials realized she was a woman. Only after a life like that did people start calling her the "Motorcycle Queen of Miami."

What strikes me is the gap in time. She did her riding in the 1930s and 1940s. She entered the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2002, and her name was carved into the Sturgis Hall of Fame in 2026 — nearly ninety years after the rides themselves. The same 2026 class includes Mary McGee, the first American woman to earn an FIM license and a solo finisher of the 1975 Baja 500, honored posthumously with the Kickstand Down Award. I don't think either of them received nearly enough applause while they were alive. What follows is my reading rather than fact, but that gap was never a failing on the riders' side. A record doesn't survive just because someone rode. It survives because, afterward, someone goes and collects it. In Bessie's case, the people who did that collecting went further and created an award in her name — one that continues to recognize women leading in the motorcycle community. That, I think, is what it means for a name to last.

This August, that collecting was literally happening out on the road. Timed to the 86th Sturgis Rally, the Women Riders World Relay (WRWR) was underway — led by co-founder Liza Miller and long-distance rider Wendy Crockett on a coast-to-coast route of more than 13,000 miles, with a GPS track that spells "WRWR 2026" across the map of the United States, women riders joining leg by leg to complete it. Separately, Shantell Williams' Sisterhood Ride ran from Florida to South Dakota in tribute to Bessie — a return to long-distance riding for Williams after recovering from a crash. Both journeys converged on August 10 at Pearl's Jam at the museum, in the year of its 25th anniversary.

A word about Japan, too. Roughly 16.39 million men hold a motorcycle license here, against about 1.96 million women — about nine to one. In an analysis the Touring Mapple editorial team published on MotoMegane, they cited touring YouTube channels whose audiences run 99.2% male. I'll be honest: reading market numbers is not my strength, and I can't pretend to know how fast that nine-to-one will move. But here is one thing I do believe. Counting from the year she was born, it took 114 years for Bessie's name to reach that hall. Across those 114 years, the name survived because people kept riding. Whoever started an engine for the first time today is living inside the same kind of time. Motorcycles belong to everyone who wants to ride — and I write this column because I want to give the hesitant ones a push.