He didn’t much like watching his father, who was
a butcher, do his work. He didn’t like the killing. An animal lover, he refused to go hunting with his dad. (I’m not a hunter,” he says. “No sir! I wouldn’t kill an animal for anything.”) He raised his own pigs, and loved them, and would
You NEVER forget your
best one By FRANCIE HEALY “Either the bike goes or the wife goes,” says Hilton Browne, age
84, a twinkle in his eye. Looks like the bike won. Until recently, it had its own spot in
the front room of his house, sitting there immaculately clean and polished like a piece of fine art. Hilton never married. Motorcycles have been part of his life since 1944, when he was
16 and could legally drive. They have been his friends, his children, his world. He knows them literally inside out. He loves the way they work, sound, perform. Like a great maestro, he knows every sound in the symphony of the motor, and precisely what tweaking it needs. He rode his bikes on the back roads and highways, through
Lanark, around Calabogie, up to Renfrew, even to Toronto and back in a day. He took his bikes apart and put them back together again. He washed and buffed and fine-tuned them. He has stopped riding them now, but only recently. They’re still
fresh in his mind. He talks about them with passion and knowledge. Hilton Browne is a legend in the world of vintage motorcycles.
He’s friendly, funny, enthusiastic, knowledgeable and full of stories. You like him the moment you meet him. “Everywhere you go with Hilton,” says his long-time friend
Leighton Brown, a fellow vintage motorcycle enthusiast, “you run into someone who knows him.” Part of that is likely because of Hilton’s former job as a popular
wholesale confectionary salesman to all the little country stores throughout Eastern Ontario. And besides, he’s just the kind of guy you want to say hello to. He grew up on a farm south of Russell, Ont., “out past the pine
trees at the end of the village… some are probably still there”. He remembers those years fondly. Well, mostly.
10 BOUNDER MAGAZINE
www.bounder.ca www.bounder.ca www.OakRidgeconstruction.ca 613.274.2625
Designs by Gerhard Linse BOUNDER MAGAZINE 11
OakRidge Construction
Specializing in Maximizing
your available space!
scratch them behind the ears “until they lay down like babies”. And that made it all the harder on him when they came to their intended end. But he and his dad (“a big man with strong hands”)
did enjoy fishing and spending time together at their hunt camp near Flower Station, north of Hopetown in Lanark County. (The gravel roads were not a good place to take a bike, he says. Made them too dirty.) His Dad died when he was 92. He had gone completely blind, and yet he still liked to go up to the hunt camp and stay there for a week all by himself. Hilton took him there then. He speaks respectfully of his father, highly of his
mother, and with unabashed sweet affection for his grandmother. His grandmother used to knit so much and so often
that she developed a knitting callus on her thumb, which Hilton remembers as if it were yesterday. His mother loved and grew flowers, and, says Hilton, used to bake the best rhubarb pies in the county. She would stay awake at night, worrying about him, until he got home on his bike.
HILTON ON SEABISCUIT
“She knew when I was out girlin’,” he says, grinning. He had an older brother who later became an Ottawa
policeman and provided him with a nephew, Jimmy. He’s proud of Jimmy. Hilton never, ever, in his whole life, took a drink.
He hates alcohol and always has. However, he used to smoke Winchester and Buckingham cigarettes. They were unfiltered: “I wouldn’t give you five cents for a crate of
continued on page 12
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35