Call Dottie Mattern one of the world’s fastest grandmas. A year and a half ago, she set a land speed record of 94.7 miles per hour on a motorcycle. But it wasn’t your average bike. It was an antique, American-made 1937 Indian Scout, a no-frills little machine with no windshield, no speedometer and no cushy suspension. Mattern was 62 at the time. No big deal, she says—the bike was almost 70.

“Did she tell you what a badass she is?” asks Scott Olofson, who founded an all-women’s vintage motorcycle racing team, the Acme All Stars, two years ago, around the same time he started Acme Motorcycles, his sales and repair shop in Fairview. 

“I’m a grandma!” Mattern exclaims. (She has five grandchildren). “You can’t say ‘grandma’ and ‘badass’!” But that’s exactly what she is. The Fletcher resident has been racing dirt bikes since the 1970s and swears the word “retire” is not in her vocabulary. “When I cannot throw my leg over the bike I might have to look in a different direction,” she says. 

The All Stars team now includes Mattern, Linda Cluxton, Cheryl Johnson and pit-crew supporters like Cathy Haker. The youngest is 44-year-old Johnson, an assistant professor in the nursing school at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee who, like Mattern, raced dirt bikes when she was younger but never raced a road bike. Cluxton, 56, who lives in Arden and is the director of communications at Christ School, had never raced before and says she looks to Mattern for a kind of big-sister inspiration.

Mattern, a retired developmental-psychology professor who looks stunning in head-to-toe black leather, says there are some people who fix up old bikes for show and some who fix them up to race. She’s in the latter category. Pictures at the Fairview shop show her in action. In one, she leans so low into the curve that her knee almost touches the ground. In another, she grips the handlebars of the Indian and waits for a green light, while in the background, her opponent, on a modern bike, seems to be racing in another era. 

She seems to be ready for anything in most aspects of her life. Consider her tennis career. Mattern didn’t take up the sport until age 50, starting as a ball girl. Now she referees, and also frequently competes with her peers. With her son at a Serena Williams match a few years back, Mattern remarked that the only way to get closer to the game was to sign up for ball-girl duty, racing across the court to fetch stray balls. So she signed up for the training at a local tennis facility—along with hundreds of teenagers. “There’s always something out there to learn and do,” she says.

Her passion for motorcycles goes further back to her 1960s college days at the University of Maryland. She first rode a motorcycle during a weekend trip with a then boyfriend. The pair hopped onto his bike and toured the hills of western Pennsylvania. Not content to ride on back, she asked him to teach her to drive and recalls nearly burning out the clutch. “He must have liked me a lot,” Mattern says.

She bought her first bike at age 21. It was a Honda Step-Thru 90, “more like a scooter than a motorcycle,” but it provided transportation and she could ride it while wearing a dress. Then in 1969, the young schoolteacher got a chance to combine her love of teaching with her passion for motorcycles as a program coordinator for the Northeast YMCA camp in her native Baltimore. In the planning stages for the camp, the director suggested getting horses for the kids; Mattern proposed motorized mini-bikes. Realizing she was serious, the director ordered 24 mini-bikes and gave Mattern free rein to create an educational curriculum centered on safety. The program was a hit and led naturally to racing. “We had the first national mini-bike competition in 1970, with 6-foot trophies so big the kids had trouble getting them in their parents’ cars,” Mattern recalls.

Mattern burned through many bikes in the coming years, buying her first dirt bike about the same time she worked for the YMCA and briefly trying a monstrous road bike that topped 450 pounds. In 1979, she attended her first gathering of the Antique Motorcycle Club of America, which then had just a few thousand members. Today the AMCA has 14,000 members, and Mattern served as the club’s national secretary for 15 years. One member, in 1979, let her test-drive a 1931 Indian Scout, and she fell in love. Even today, she can’t quite describe what’s so compelling about the experience. “It’s just so different,” she says. 

George M. Hendee and Carl Oscar Hedström built the first Indian motorcycle in 1901 in Springfield, Massachusetts. Early models looked like turn-of-the-century bicycles with small motors, but the bikes evolved into seat-of-your-pants speedsters used by top racers of the day, as well as the U.S. Army in the World Wars (alongside another American classic, Harley). Many speed and distance records were set on Indians in the first half of the 20th century. The 2005 movie The World’s Fastest Indian, starring Anthony Hopkins, tells the tale of New Zealander Burt Munro, who modified a 1920s Indian Scout and set several records with it. 

Mattern rides a 1936 Indian Scout, known as a “suicide clutch” because of its foot clutch and hand shift, instead of the modern, simpler adaptation of shifting gears with one foot while keeping both hands on the grips. Imagine speeding along on a bike operating the clutch with one foot, keeping the other foot on a footboard and using one hand to operate the throttle on the handlebar. For such feats, Olofson, at Acme Motorcycles, says Mattern is his hero. She set the land speed record of nearly 95 miles per hour in Maxton, North Carolina, the site of an old WWII airfield. Several times a year, people gather to attempt speed records in trucks, cars, motorcycles—anything that runs—and they thunder down The Maxton Mile. “When you do 94 miles per hour down an old, bumpy, weedy runway on an Indian, you feel like you’re doing 200. It was a thrill,” Mattern says.

A year ago, Olofson convinced Mattern and Cluxton to attend a fall racing school at Nashville Speedway. Cluxton recalls that their classmates were 12 young men. “The guys had seat warmers for their fancy bikes, and no end of special gear,” she says. “Our motorcycles don’t even have stands—we just lean them anywhere we can.” One of their pair of 1970s-era Hondas broke down at the school, and the two women had to share a bike in practice races. They got funny looks, but Cluxton says Mattern reassured her, saying, “Don’t worry. We’re paying attention. They’re not.”

Racing motorcycles is often more about technique than raw speed. There are corners, hairpins, bowls and other tricky challenges on a typical motorcycle track, which is curvier, tighter and more “technical” than an auto track. Cluxton says the young guys at the racing school would often wipe out, but Mattern and Cluxton, handling the curves more subtly, didn’t.
Cluxton grew up with four older brothers, learning to ride on a small Suzuki 125 dirt bike that belonged to one of their friends. Her first bike was a Husqvarna 250 dirt bike, bought at age 20 when she started photographing races. As a freelance photographer, she followed the U.S. International Six Days Trials team to Europe in the ‘70s and ‘80s, traveling through Italy, Austria, England and Czechoslovakia. She photographed many of the heroes of the day, such as Malcolm Smith, who was featured alongside Steve McQueen in the documentary On Any Sunday. But Cluxton never raced, though she kept up occasional riding until giving birth to her first child about 20 years ago.

In 2006, Cluxton felt the first tug of the racing bug. She had offered to photograph her friends, who were attending the American Motorcycle Association’s International Women in Motorcycling Conference in Athens, Georgia. While focusing her camera on them in their racing suits, Cluxton had her “aha!” moment. “I can do that,” she thought.

And she could. Her first real race, last year at the Barber Motorsports Park near Birmingham, Alabama, was exhilarating, and she recalls thinking, “This is what I’m supposed to be doing with my life.” Her bike broke down in her first race, but by day two, Cluxton pulled through with a fifth-place finish.

Mattern says her first thought, in the 2007 Barber race, was simple survival. “It was my first time in a road race with people trying to run over me,” she says. At least she didn’t crash in the practice race. The next day, her mission was not to crash and not to be last. On the third day, the mission was not to crash, not to finish last and to actually pass someone, which she did—even after her clutch blew out on one of the last laps. “There are no guarantees,” she says. “You have to just get out there and grab it and live it.” 

The Acme All Stars’ next race will be at the Barber Vintage Festival on October 17-19 at Barber Motorsports Park near Birmingham, Alabama.