About 40 years ago, TIM STAFFORD operated his first motor vehicle, a twist-and-go Honda scooter called the Aero 50. It was a fine machine that served him well. But what the 18-year-old Stafford really desired was something with as much form as function, an Italian Vespa. About a year later, he saw a P200E in the local Auto Trader and bought it.
Soon, Stafford was tinkering with other Vespas, doing restorations for friends and amassing multiple others of his own, in what would eventually become his business. In his early 20s, he took a job at the local shipyard in San Diego. But the business—indeed the art—of restoration would progress to a level that would soon make his brief stint in the shipyard the only other job he ever had.
Motorcycles were defining who he was. But it was an incidental encounter with a couple of old BMWs that turned the velocity of his career truly meteoric and made him what he is today: the foremost authority and talent in the world of vintage BMW motorcycles. Which is funny when one considers that Stafford never really had an interest in this particular make of German motorcycle. But he did have an interest in another German make: the Zündapp.
He went home and cleared out all the Vespa stuff, devoting his work from this point forward exclusively to BMWs.
Stafford and a friend had met a guy at a swap meet who said he had a Vespa and a Zündapp for sale. He figured the Zündapp was a Bella scooter. But when he and his brother went to the guy’s home to investigate, they discovered a small-cc motorcycle bearing the badge of the German brand. He bought it, and promptly did nothing with it. But the idle steed stood in the family yard and thus the brand Zündapp got stuck in his mother’s head. And that would become this particular motorcycle’s profound purpose.
Stafford’s mother had a good friend in Fresno named Pat Haun, who was like a second mother to Tim Stafford. And she was a total moto-head. “She knew all the boys in town,” remembered Stafford.
Pat Haun had lost a family member. When Stafford’s mother attended the estate sale with Haun, she saw some odd-looking motorcycles. She inquired and the widow of the deceased dismissed them as strange, undesirable German motorcycles. To which Stafford’s mother replied, “Are they Zündapps?”
Soon, a 20-year-old Stafford was making trips to the widow’s Fresno home, running multiple loads with his Dodge Ram. He bought all the Zündapps, some whole, some in pieces. They were mostly 600cc, four-stroke opposed twins—like the BMWs he restores today.
BUY ISSUE 001
