John Penton, who set a transcontinental speed record in 1959 on a motorcycle built for street use and then helped to revolutionize off-road racing with his own brand of light, nimble bikes, died on Sept. 7 in Amherst, Ohio, west of Cleveland. He was 100.
His death, in an assisted living facility, was confirmed by his son Jack Penton.
Mr. Penton never lived more than a few hundred yards from the farm where he grew up in Amherst. But he developed a sense of risk-taking and adventure — and a fighting spirit — by playing quarterback and pole-vaulting in high school, and then by serving in the merchant marine and the Navy in the Mediterranean and the Pacific during World War II.
“Two things about my father,” Jack Penton said in an interview. “He was extremely competitive his entire life, and he was in charge.”
After the war, Mr. Penton and his four brothers began selling motorcycles out of a repurposed chicken coop. (Later, they had a dealership.) In 1948, Mr. Penton began riding off-road motorcycles hundreds of miles over muddy trails, deep sand, rocky terrain and watery crossings in endurance competitions in the United States and Europe.
Mr. Penton did not invent the dirt bike, but his vision of a smaller, more durable motorcycle expanded the possibilities for off-road riders in the United States. The Sturgis Motorcycle Museum and Hall of Fame, in a South Dakota city that draws hundreds of thousands to its annual motorcycle rally, called Mr. Penton “the godfather of off-road motorcycling.”
Mr. Penton’s motorcycling career was marked by grief early on. In 1958, his first wife, Katherine (Marks) Penton, a teacher, died of multiple sclerosis after nine years of marriage, leaving him to raise three sons alone.
Distraught, he entrusted his children to the care of relatives and tried to find consolation by competing in off-road endurance races in the Midwest, Georgia and Florida, and by taking a solo trip to Mexico.
“I was really mixed up,” he said in a 2014 documentary about his life, “Penton: The John Penton Story.”
Traveling home from Mexico in late 1958, he rode nonstop from California to Ohio, prompting one of his brothers to challenge him to attempt to break the transcontinental motorcycle record, riding from New York to Los Angeles.
At 5:59 a.m. on June 8, 1959, Mr. Penton set out from New York City on a 35-horsepower BMW R69S, outfitted with an oversize gas tank and a fender rack to hold rain gear and candy bars. To record his progress, he carried Western Union letterhead that he got stamped at tollbooths along the route.
In St. Louis, a cycling group, including two police officers, was expecting him and provided an escort through the city, offering him two ham sandwiches and two cups of milk, according to the podcast We Went Fast.
Mr. Penton intended to stop only to refuel. But by the time he reached Flagstaff, Ariz., he was exhausted and seeing double. So he set two alarm clocks and slept for an hour, then hit the road again.
On June 10 at 8:10 a.m., he arrived at the Western Union office in downtown Los Angeles, having traveled 3,051 miles. His official time — 52 hours, 11 minutes, 1 second — broke the previous record by over 25 hours. Mr. Penton’s record stood for nine years.
Asked why he took the endurance challenge, he told reporters, “Some people like to climb mountains.”
But off-road racing was his greater enthusiasm. In the late 1940s, Mr. Penton began to realize that smaller, more agile off-road motorcycles could outperform heavier, unwieldy roadster models like Harleys, Triumphs and Indians. By the 1960s, he was determined to design a bike that would not have to be modified for off-road use.
In 1967, while in Europe competing in a six-day team endurance event that is considered the Olympics of off-road racing, he paid $6,000 to the Austrian company KTM, a manufacturer of bicycles and mopeds, to build a prototype for a design he called the Penton.
The first Pentons were delivered in 1968; the 125cc model weighed 185 pounds, about half the weight of some bikes Mr. Penton had ridden. The Penton came with innovations like a folding gearshift lever to prevent the bike from being caught on rocks and in muddy ruts, and an air-filter system that enhanced water resistance to keep the engine running smoothly.
“Our claim to fame,” Jack Penton said, “was that it was ready to perform at the highest level just as you bought it” — no modifications needed.
In 1978, Mr. Penton sold his distributorship to KTM, which rebranded the motorcycle with its company name. By then, more than 25,000 Penton motorcycles had been sold in the United States, according to the American Motorcyclist Association.
Mr. Penton was also at the forefront of other innovations. In the 1970s, he collaborated with an Italian ski-boot manufacturer to create motorcycle boots with a metal plate to protect a rider’s shins, under the brand name Hi-Point.
“John was always in the right place at the right time when things happened in the evolution of the dirt bike in America,” Todd Huffman, who directed the 2014 documentary about Mr. Penton, said in an interview.
John Alfred Penton was born on Aug. 19, 1925, in Amherst. His father, Harold Penton, was a farmer who died in 1938, leaving his mother, Nina (Musselman) Penton, to run a household of seven children. She tried (and failed) to discourage her sons from restoring and riding a mothballed 1914 Harley-Davidson that her husband had ridden to the Ohio State University, where he studied engineering and horticulture.
Motorcycling became Mr. Penton’s passion. He won the 500-mile Jack Pine Enduro in Michigan, one of the country’s oldest off-road motorcycle races, four times.
In an oft-told story, in 1958 Mr. Penton rode his racing motorcycle from Ohio to the Atlanta area and on to Daytona, Fla., where he competed in off-road endurance competitions, and then drove home with a trophy strapped to the back of his bike, drafting behind Greyhound buses and semi trucks.
“Sometimes you could almost shut the throttle off,” he said in the documentary.
In addition to his son Jack, Mr. Penton is survived by Tom and Jeff Penton, two other sons from his marriage to Katherine Penton; a son, Tim Penton, from his 57-year second marriage to Donna (Thompson) Penton, who died in 2017; two stepdaughters, Laura Hochenedel Reid and Barbara Hochenedel Penton; 13 grandchildren; and 17 great-grandchildren.
Mr. Penton was inducted into the American Motorcyclist Association Hall of Fame in 1998. (Tom and Jack Penton are also inductees.)
He was known for an extraordinary tolerance of discomfort caused by his crash injuries. By his count, he broke every rib at least once.
“Obviously,” Dick Mann, a former national motorcycle champion, said, “he had a bad connection from his brain to pain.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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