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Sports|John Penton, ‘Godfather’ of Off-Road Racing, Dies at 100
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/sports/john-penton-dead.html
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He set a transcontinental motorcycling speed record, and then helped to revolutionize off-road riding with his own brand of nimble bikes.
Sept. 15, 2025Updated 6:24 p.m. ET
John Penton, who set a transcontinental speed record in 1959 on a motorcycle built for street use and then helped to revolutionize off-road racing with his own brand of light, nimble bikes, died on Sept. 7 in Amherst, Ohio, west of Cleveland. He was 100.
His death, in an assisted living facility, was confirmed by his son Jack Penton.
Mr. Penton never lived more than a few hundred yards from the farm where he grew up in Amherst. But he developed a sense of risk-taking and adventure — and a fighting spirit — by playing quarterback and pole-vaulting in high school, and then by serving in the merchant marine and the Navy in the Mediterranean and the Pacific during World War II.
“Two things about my father,” Jack Penton said in an interview. “He was extremely competitive his entire life, and he was in charge.”
After the war, Mr. Penton and his four brothers began selling motorcycles out of a repurposed chicken coop. (Later, they had a dealership.) In 1948, Mr. Penton began riding off-road motorcycles hundreds of miles over muddy trails, deep sand, rocky terrain and watery crossings in endurance competitions in the United States and Europe.
Mr. Penton did not invent the dirt bike, but his vision of a smaller, more durable motorcycle expanded the possibilities for off-road riders in the United States. The Sturgis Motorcycle Museum and Hall of Fame, in a South Dakota city that draws hundreds of thousands to its annual motorcycle rally, called Mr. Penton “the godfather of off-road motorcycling.”
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