People collect for different reasons. Some are completists…they collect to own every variation of an item ever made. Others have a theme…something guides their collecting and they can’t rest until they have acquired items that show all aspects of that theme. Still others are brand loyalists…they want everything associated with a particular marque. Others collect to rekindle memories…items in their collections bring back better times. And people collect different things. All kinds of things.
As I surveyed the expansive and overwhelming contents of Bill’s Old Bike Barn, I wondered: What made Bill tick? What fueled his desire to collect? I asked the question and Bill answered it, but I’ll wait until the end of this blog to share the answer. Hold that thought and we’ll return to it.
When I knew we were going to Pennsylvania and my wife Susie Googled motorcycle museums…well, silly me. I thought we would find a motorcycle museum if I was lucky and it might make a worthy topic for a blog or two. Maybe an article in a motorcycle magazine. Susie gets the credit for finding Bill’s Old Bike Barn. I didn’t realize we had hit the Mother Lode. We had stumbled into a more advanced collection than we had ever seen.
No, wait: I need to restate that. It would be unfair to call what I found in Bill’s Old Bike Barn a collection. I realized when assembling this story that what Bill created is not a mere collection. It is, instead, a collection of collections. Bill’s Old Bike Barn might have started as a motorcycle collection, but it goes beyond that.
Way beyond.
Anybody can collect and display motorcycles. Well, not anybody, but you get the point. In the course of curating a collection, advanced collectors, the guys who go exponential and become collectors of collections, amass collections of all kinds of things. Then the question becomes: How do you display your collections? What’s the right format?
Bill had the answer to that, too.
Billville.
Hey, if your name is Bill, and you have a collection of collections, why not start your own town, and display each collection in different stores and businesses and government offices, all in a magical place called Billville. You see, if you have your own town, you will also have streets on which these shops are located. And you can park different cool motorcycles on the streets in front of the shops. The Billville concept solves several challenges simultaneously. The streets let you display the motorcycles and the shops. People see the shops and what’s in them and they want to add to the collection, so they bring in and contribute more things you can exhibit. The shops grow and the town of Billville thrives. Sense a pattern here?
Being a world-renown blogger and motojournalist, I had the grand tour of Billville, led by Bill himself. Bill led, I followed, and my jaw dropped with each turn and every stop in Billville. Billville. I get it. It’s brilliant.
We started in front of the Billville camera shop. I had my Nikon D810 along for the shots you see here. I’ve been a photography enthusiast all my life. I asked Bill if he was into photography, too, when he mentioned the camera shop. “Nah, I just had a few cameras on display. Folks see that and they come back a week later with a bag of old cameras. There’s more than 6,000 cameras in the collection now.”
There’s a very cool Norton parked in front of the Billville Camera Shop. The bike behind it is a Velocette. Per capita motorcycle ownership in Billville is off the charts. Billville is huge, the streets are long, the shops are amazing, and the collections are dreamlike. Pick a collectible item, and there’s a Billville shop housing a collection for it. Into Coca-Cola memorabilia?
You can’t have a town without a police department, and police paraphernalia are collectible. Billville has its own PD, with a police stuff collection.
Bill told a funny story about visiting firemen. After seeing the collections, they asked Bill if Billville had a fire department. When they asked the question, Billville did not. So the visiting fireman offered to donate their vintage fire engine if Bill would build the Billville Fire Department around it.
“Then I had to make a fire bike,” Bill said. After all, this is a motorcycle museum.
Bicycles? You bet. Billville has an interesting collection. Check out the badging on the one shown in these photos.
Some people collect toys. Bill is one of them. What would a town be without a toy store?
Billville has a post office and a restaurant. Take a look at the ornamental wrought iron surrounding the restaurant. Bill told me he purchased huge quantities of wrought iron when he was buying up motorcycle dealer inventories in Europe.
Are you into Avon collectables? Billville has you covered there, too.
There are several spiral cases throughout Billville. I thought they were purely decorative. But there seemed to be more to see upstairs, so I climbed one. My reward was more collections. How about phones? Yep, those, too.
Bill told me again about people bringing things to him. Matchbox cars? Why not?
Into horse collectibles? You bet.
As you might guess, there was an area for Elvisabilia (or should that be Presleyana?).
If you were wondering, Billville has a dentist’s office, too, complete with vintage dentistry equipment.
And, of course, Billville includes the motorcycles, motorcycle engines, and everything-associated-with-motorcycles collection. Bill’s collection doesn’t stick to only one marque. You’ll see Harley, Indian, Moto Guzzi, Triumph, Norton, Velocette, Honda, Yamaha, Zündapp, Peugeot, and many, many more motorcycles.
Bill’s collection is eclectic. The collections themselves are eclectic, and within the collection, the pieces Bill has exhibited vary widely. He’s not just a Harley guy or an Indian guy. He likes anything that’s interesting. You saw the prior blog about Bill’s favorite ride, a Zündapp. Other bikes pepper his collection, including one I always wanted…an early SL350 Honda twin. It’s the color I always wanted, too, and it’s in its 100% original, unrestored condition. I stared at the SL so hard I might have worn away some of its paint.
So, back to that question I posed at the top of this blog: What makes a collector collect? Everyone has their reasons, and like I said at the beginning of this blog, I wanted to know Bill’s. I asked the question. Bill smiled, lowered his gaze, and answered softly. “I like to see peoples’ reactions when they see the collections,” he said. That being the case, I think Bill must have really enjoyed our visit. We sure did.
Our first blog on Bill’s Old Bike Barn? Hey, here it is:
Bill Morris: The Man. It’s a great story.
Military motorcycle half-tracks? You bet!
With 200 motorcycles in his collection, Bill’s personal favorite might surprise you!
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Click the comments section of any post regarding the Indian Motorcycle Company and someone will be bitching that Polaris Indians are not real Indians. Within the first three or four replies you’ll see an outraged commenter laying out the perjury case on Indian. “It’s a lie!” they stammer. “Indian went out of business in 1953!” Along with constitutional scholars and threats of civil war Polaris Haters infest the Internet. Their selective-amnesia purity code and compulsion to complain loudly every time Indian tries to sell a motorcycle borders on fanatical. You couldn’t pay enough to get people so determined.
The paper magazine business has taken a beating in the last few years. One magazine that seems to have their stuff together is American Iron, a book that focuses on American-made motorcycles. Somehow these guys get away with charging subscribers what it costs to produce 13 issues a year. For those of you counting that is three more issues a year than Cycle World and Motorcyclist combined!
This photo may or may not be the new Indian FTR1200 that we’ve all been fantasizing about since Indian shoved both H-D and Kawasaki aside and took over flat track racing in America. Posted by Roger Gutterridge and brought to my attention by my internet buddy, Skip Duke, I have no way of knowing if this is the real thing.
