A Marine Bought This BMW R60 in 1960. His Stuntman Son Still Rides It.
Petrolicious profiled Tom McComas and the 1960 BMW R60 his father bought new the week he left the Marine Corps — a bike that stayed in the family through a stolen-and-recovered teenage joyride, a 2,300-mile father-son trip, and a nut-and-bolt restoration.
Some vehicles carry more family history than mileage. That's the case with a 1960 BMW R60 that Petrolicious profiled in April 2016, owned first by a Marine Corps veteran and, decades later, by his son, Hollywood stuntman Tom McComas.
According to the interview, McComas's father — also named Tom — caught the BMW bug secondhand, from a fellow Marine who wouldn't stop talking about his own bike. "As soon as he got out of the Marine Corps the first thing he did in 1960 was buy a 1960 R60 motorcycle," the younger McComas told Petrolicious, noting his father had owned it for "the last 55 years" at the time of the interview.
The bike became a fixture of the son's childhood long before it became his. He said it was "my baptism into the sport of motorcycling" — the first bike he ever rode, at age two, and the one he taught himself to ride on. It also featured in a family story he didn't confess to for years: at 13, he took the R60 without permission, drew a brief police pursuit after an officer noticed it had no headlight on, ditched the bike in a driveway, and hopped a fence to get away clean — arriving back at his father's office just in time to watch him take the call reporting the "stolen" bike recovered.
Ownership passed from father to son around 2013, on the last day of a father-son trip McComas described to Petrolicious: a chartered flight from Burbank to Las Vegas, followed by a seven-day, 2,300-mile ride through Utah, Arizona, California and Nevada that ended at the Rock Store in Malibu. It was there, McComas said, that his father told him: "I don't think that there's anyone better in world that would appreciate this more than you, and I'd like you to have it."
McComas then set about restoring the machine rather than simply preserving it. He swapped the original bench seat for a solo Denfeld seat and sent the bike to Rick at Black Kat Motorwerks, whom he described as the most knowledgeable person he knew on that particular BMW. The restoration replaced "every nut and bolt, and piece of metal," re-plated to original spec, with the frame and bodywork refinished at a shop called Golden Hammer. McComas said he opted to paint rather than powder-coat the frame, aiming to keep it "truth for truth, the way the bike came from the factory."
On the 2,300-mile trip, the family alternated between three BMWs of very different eras — a K1600, a GS1200, and the 1960 R60 — and McComas said the oldest bike, not the newest, won out as the most comfortable of the three, crediting its riding position and neutral balance at highway speed. Petrolicious published the interview, conducted and photographed by Ted Gushue, as part of its long-running series spotlighting owners and the personal history behind their cars and motorcycles.
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