1st Female Columnist for ‘Rider’ Celebrates Magazine’s 50th Anniversary
Grace Butcher has always searched for adventure.
Grace Butcher has always searched for adventure.
“Follow your Bliss” is her mantra and it has proved exhilarating and fulfilling for the young at heart and soul nonagenarian who never put the brakes on living to her fullest potential.
The 90-year-old Chardon resident lives on a small farm with her horse, Spencer, and looks after the acreage she grew up nearby.
She began riding horses around kindergarten-age and a few years later, dreamed of becoming a race car driver.
Then, she discovered running and with no women’s track team at Chardon High School at the time, she began hurdling over the limits of what female runners were “supposed” to do and breaking records.
Nothing fast slowed her down.
In an era when not many women rode motorcycles, Butcher searched for adventure on the same lanes as men and raced motorcycles from 1973 to 1993, writing extensively for Rider magazine, a motorcycle publication written by and for enthusiasts, and became the magazine’s first female columnist.
So, when on the magazine’s 50th anniversary, she was asked to write a column in their
“Exhaust Note” for the April 2024 issue, she quickly began hitting the keyboard.
“It’s exciting to be asked long after I stopped writing the column,” Butcher said.
She has written articles in Runner’s World, Sports Illustrated, Reader’s Digest and Ohio Runner and is an author of numerous books including, “Crossroads, Selected Columns from Rider.”
Butcher competed nationally and internationally in track since 1949, winning championships and setting records. As an avid two-decade motorcyclist, she rode her BMW in Europe and competed in motocross and road racing across the states and in Canada.
When her mocha green tea ice-cream arrives inside a local Chardon Japanese restaurant and her lunch date leaves, an admirer from a booth across serendipitously recognizes her and steps in to talk.
Anybody who’s ever met her can probably learn something from her.
According to “Once Upon a Time in the Vest: V 6 N. 58 Grace Butcher, One of America’s Legends in Track and Field,” Butcher became “a poet, a professor, a motorcycle racer and writer, an actress, a coach and an example of independence and self-fulfillment…”and in 1996, she earned Ohio Poet of the Year and retired from teaching at Kent State Geauga in 1993 as professor emeritus.
Her life is like a poem, complicated but simple in evoking emotion.
In Rider’s April issue, Butcher wrote:
“It all seemed surreal — pulling into the pits at Nelson Ledges road race track after another hour of all-out riding for the team in the 24 Hour of Nelson. Or quietly turning into the parking lot at school—Kent State University Geauga Campus—to teach my 9 a.m. English class. Or first-gearing it, feet down, behind an ox cart in Yugoslavia while the Yugoslavian Air Force jets swooped overhead when I was 40… or flying to California from Ohio to road test bikes for Rider.
“I felt as if I were in a movie, playing the part of a woman riding a motorcycle back in the day when ‘Girls don’t do that!’ — or certainly not nice girls. I felt like a female action figure — mild-mannered college professor one minute, helmeted and booted road racer the next.
“But hey, it was the 70s and the key word was ‘love.’ And I was in love with motorcycles! Along came a handsome young man, soon to be my boyfriend and motorcycle mentor, on his beautiful black 1974 900 BMW. Off we went with me on behind (of course) — but not for long. In about a month, I bought my first motorcycle, a 250 Suzuki. It was the end of October, hardly a good time to buy a bike here where we averaged 120 inches of snow per winter.
“I soon traded up for a 600 BMW and, when that proved too mild to keep up with them in fifth gear throttle roll-ons, bought my white 900 BMW, the 1975 R90/6. And that was that for the next 20 years.
“A most unlikely trip abroad with our own motorcycles on the plane with us through World Motorcycle Tours. We toured Yugoslavia, Austria and Italy. I’d never even ridden in the Rockies and there I was, twisting, turning, climbing through the Alps.”
As she recently reflected on her life, Butcher said her philosophy is to discover and fulfill her potential.
“That goes for man/woman or machine. I think my bike and I are both doing what we were meant to do … Well, my riding now is on my buckskin quarter horse gelding, Spencer, the love of my life these many years.”
Next on the map for Butcher is publishing a book on horse stories, lovingly dedicated to Spencer.
