Ed Hileman grew up in Kattanning, Pa., north of Pittsburgh. As a young boy, he lived across from a drive-in theater, and worked there part time. He modified a bicycle by putting in a lawn mower engine and “rode around the drive in theater day and night and annoyed the neighbors.”

When he turned 16, he bought a wrecked Honda 150 motorcycle for $250, fixed it up with help from his dad and started riding it. After high school, he went to Pittsburgh and attended Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics. While there, his Honda 150 broke down. Those bikes had a weak spot, he said. Every 15,000 miles, the crankshaft would break. Being a mechanic, he fixed his own. He soon realized he could make money fixing the crankshafts of others who owned the same model bike, and put himself through school fixing bikes.

After graduating from the Institute, he bought a 1968 CB 350 Honda. Shortly afterward, he joined the USAF. His first duty station was in Chanute, IL, where he stayed for about a year while going through a computer technical school for flight simulators. He then got orders to March Airbase in Southern California. That’s where he started racing, on both Flat Track and what’s called TT, which is a kind of off-road dirt racing on a track that is half oval and half a course where riders go over a jump, he said.

March Airbase was close to a couple well-known race tracks.

“The Air Force encouraged everybody to interact with the surrounding community to make the Air Force fit in,” he said.

Hileman picked up an XL 250 motorcycle and converted it to a straight dirt bike, and later into a flat track bike. He built the motors himself and said that was when he really learned to build motorcycles. In the Spring of 1973, Ed was transferred to the Philippines for two years. Around that time, he flew to Tokyo, Japan and picked up some used racing bikes, the same kind he had been using in the states.

Hileman said the Air Force allowed those stationed overseas to send anything in the mail at no cost, and a lot of people did. Mechanics broke the bikes down, pulling the engines out and dismantling them, packed them in boxes weighing 70 pounds or less, and shipped them for free. A week later, all his motorcycles were at his mailbox at Clark Airbase. He picked them up, assembled them at the base hobby shop, and kept them at his barracks.

Hileman was used to having a van to carry his race things in, so he bought a van at March Airbase and had it shipped to the Philippines six weeks before he left. Two days after he got to Clark Airbase in the Philippines, the van was there. He had hidden motorcycle parts in the walls of the van, covered by carpeting and stuff, so no one would steal them.

Other Air Force people at Clark also raced, he said, and got their kids involved in racing.

“We had a whole group. That’s the most camaraderie you’ll ever have, and the most tremendous thing about the Air Force because you have all these friends. I have tons of pictures, and their kids are all grown up and have families now. Jim Bradford and myself and one other guy started the Thunderducks racing team. The Thunderducks were in the Philippines for years after I left,” he said.

Hileman put racing bikes together in the Philippines. One of his bikes was a CR 250, called The Elsinore. It was the first two stroke engine Honda ever made for racing. They raced those bikes for about two years.

Hileman was the 1974 Philippine National Motocross Flat Track Champion in the 250 class and the open class – he rode the same bike for both.

“Everybody thinks that’s a big deal but it’s easy to look like an eagle when you fly with sparrows,” he said. “You have such a little group, and the natives...don’t get me wrong, they had some fast people, but I was a good amateur, a really novice expert, but it was easy to shine among the sparrows.”

In 1974, the Miss Universe Pageant came to the area where he was stationed. Miss Aruba was the 1974 Miss Universe Pageant second runner-up, he said, and stayed behind after the pageant to make movies in the Philippines. The movie she starred in was called “Miss Aruba Comes to Town.” A lot of the racing centered around the pageant, which was a huge event.

“We would get to Cabanatuan City in Luzon Province and the Mayor would greet us and give us total carte blanche. We’d take our dirt bikes out and race them, doing donuts and wheelies through the main streets of town – just show our tail. There was no OSHA, no safety regulations. We had a race team from Subic Bay. A lot of the guys from the Navy and Subic Bay would show up.”

He said Navy C-130’s would fly them to Davao, Mindanao in the Southern Province to race, but they had some trouble with the communists, getting shot at and coming back with bullet holes in their tailgates, etc. so the Air Force didn’t let them go back.

“Mindanao is really barren, but they had Motocross road racing,” he said, “but it was very amateurish. They were using their little 125 dirt bikes and it was supposedly a road race. You’d run through the streets of town and do things, and it was so impromptu. They turned these monasteries over to us to live in and use as our pits for our three or four day nationals.”

Hileman said that right behind Manila is Fort Bonifacio, behind which lies the home of the American Cemetery of the Bataan Death March. Jackie Enrile, the son of Juan Ponce Enrile, second in command under Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, used to race with them. He’d probably be about 45 years old now, Hileman said.

Jackie was the elder Enrile’s 15 or 16 year old son. He was guarded by the secret service everyplace they went on the island, Hileman said. Jackie wanted to race, and companies gave him motorcycles to race.

“He’d come out to the race and get out and practice, and he’d go running and we’d blow him off and bump handlebars and stuff and have a great time, but before the race something would always happen. He’d have a failure. He’d never get on the track during the race. I think they were afraid he was going to get shot or something during the race. They had guards and military around the track to protect him,” he said.

Jackie Enrile befriended Ed and his group at Fort Bonifacio, where Juan Ponce Enrile’s office was. When they got there, Jackie Enrile gave them a soldier workforce with dump trucks and bulldozers. Ed and his friends Jim Bradford and Tom Heller designed a huge 2.1 mile Motocross track in the wilderness area near the cemetery. The soldiers bulldozed and shoveled and made berms, and finished the track. Then they came out and put up towers “like the Wide World of Sports has for the cameras,” and they held the first Philippine National Motocross Championships. Ed took 1st Place on the track he helped design.

“I was such a grandstander. I’d go out and I’d be running away with the race, and then I would crash my brains out and everybody would pass me, and I’d have to catch up. Then on the last turn I would cut somebody off and finish in front.”

Ed said the National Championship was not unlike professional wrestling because it was largely for show. He retired from Moody AFB in 1989. Moody was one of the last bastions for flight simulators, he said, before that function was taken over by civilian contractors. Ed said he has flown ultra-light aircraft, raced motocross, windsurfed, and scuba dived for most of his life. He raced Motocross in Valdosta for about a year, then started his dive shop, Southern Ocean Sports, and didn’t touch motorcycles for 11 years.

He opened Tropics Tanning Salon, which was the largest tanning salon in Georgia with 25 beds in one location. Tropics was doing really well for a while, but as more tanning salons entered the market, the business dried up. He lived in his van in the parking lot for five and a half years, pouring all his Air Force pension into his business. He now owns his own 40 foot bus which he charters for dive trips to Key West.

Ed lived in the back of Red-Line Cycle Center for about a year and eventually bought the whole building in 1996. Red-Line services and repairs Suzuki, Yamaha, Harley Davidson, and other motorcycles. His chief mechanic, Tim Ozley, attended the Motorcycle Mechanics Institute in Orlando, and is certified to work on Harley Davidsons, as well as other makes.

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