Motorcycle collection goes on permanent display in RGV

EDINBURG — Years spent hunched over the roaring engines of choppers have dulled “Dirty” Dave Garcia’s hearing.

Say something a few feet away from him inside a quiet museum straight out of a motorcycle enthusiast’s deepest fantasy and he prompts you to repeat it.

But there’s some things that don’t warrant repeating, like the rattling noise a Harley-Davidson makes when it pulls up outside Dirty Dave’s Cycles.

In a minute, Dirty Dave kneels next to the bike, listens for the minor rattling over the purr of the engine and diagnoses the noise as a loose primary chain.

“I can’t hear voices but I can hear that,” he explains Thursday outside his shop on Richardson Road. “It’s something that you pick up on.”

In the years since Dirty Dave opened his shop, where the motto is “It ain’t done till it’s done Dirty,” the mechanic has been the go-to expert for a retired surgeon who cobbled together a private collection of motorcycles spanning 100 years of their history.

And that surgeon, Mike Sweeney, donated his collection to establish the South Texas Motorcycle Museum, which opened Friday at 4705 E. Richardson Road in Edinburg, said Serena Rosenkrantz, a board member of the newly formed nonprofit museum.

But credit Dirty Dave and a team of volunteers he pulled together for making the bikes and the museum run.

Dirty Dave, who says even his mother calls him “Dirty,” has worked into the morning for months to get the bikes on display into perfect shape.

The 70-plus bikes at the museum range from early-1900s models to a Harley-Davidson from the 106-year-old company’s centennial collection.

Thirty-four bikes were on display at Friday's ribbon-cutting, with the others rotated in at later dates. But for the grand opening, Dirty Dave and the museum directors selected some of the best specimens.

A four-cylinder Henderson built in 1913 is one of just a few left in the world. A replica Captain America from the 1969 movie Easy Rider is flanked by posters autographed by the film’s stars.

And a 1931 Indian gleams right inside the museum’s door — all part of a display that Dirty Dave says never fails to make jaws drop.

Dirty Dave gave Sweeney advice as he was compiling the collection and helped find the bikes at auctions and on the Internet. Once they were bought, Dirty Dave rolled up his sleeves and got to work fixing them.

All of the bikes at the museum are in running order, which is kind of the point in having them, Dirty Dave said. His experience in getting them that way comes from a life spent working on them and a passion for it that he believes is in his blood.

He named his now teenage son Harley and notes that the appellation, when combined with his own name, David, and with the teen’s relationship to him, son, forms the name of the iconic American motorcycle manufacturer.

But his passion for his profession is expressed in more than just his son’s name, he said, noting he loves bikes just as much as the enthusiasts for whom the museum was built.

Pressed to elaborate, he describes a day spent with Sweeney and other friends at the warehouse, where they took turns riding aging bikes with original parts, the kind he likes the best.

He talks about other parts of the world that embraced the motorcycle long ago while Americans insist on “big, jumbo cars and all this stuff.”

“Motorcycles is a passion,” he says. “Cars are too slow.”

Asked to name a favorite among a collection of bikes that spent time under his hand, he has trouble picking just one.

“All of them got their little story behind them,” he said. “I wish they could all talk, let us know about the people who owned them and where they’ve been.

“Unfortunately, they don’t talk.”

Then again, maybe they do — if you know how to listen.