So I was lucky enough to be chosen to submit a reader story for Helmet Hair Magazine. They asked me to write a brief story about my riding history and this is what came out of it.
Check it out when you get a chance!
I also received another email from this gentlemen who initially told me about Anke-Eve. He sent me a few more photos of her earlier in her riding career and later in life.
http://www.gearchic.com/Pics/anke3.jpg
http://www.gearchic.com/Pics/anke4.jpg
http://www.gearchic.com/Pics/anke5.jpg
I wish I could find her and talk to her. Sounds like she may have already passed away or is unreachable.
Here's the latest email from my new friend:
*****
Dear Mrs. Donn,
Thank you very much, indeed, for your kind lines and the interest you take in Miss Goldmann. Yes, she was a very good lucking woman at her time, and a spectacular rider. I saw her performing in many race circuits on her BMWs, and she was the only woman I knew in those years, riding her heavy bikes also in heavy frost when almost all the males stayed at home. I have lost contact with her decades ago, I only know she stopped riding and racing after a fatal accident of her then closest friend, and afterwards spent most of the year travelling alone (hard-core) with a rucksack only throughout the Sunda Islands,Laos, Kambodja, Vietnam, and Burma. This is why she is almost entirely forgotten today, and in the Internet age nobody goes any more through the old motorcycle mags of the 50s and 60s where her articles on motorcycling women and race erports appeared regularly. I read her in German, English, French, Spanish, and Swedish, and I also remember publications in Japan and the US. She was a good looking, long-legged woman, 6 feet tall, and a school teacher for German language at an US Air Force School. It is a matter of satisfaction for me that you take such an interest in her. When discovering the American WIMA section in Internet I drew their attention to Anke-Eve because I remember that, back in 1957 or 58, she was one of the six or eight ladies in Europe establishing the European WIMA section.
I her later years she lefts the BMWs and shifted to 750 MV Agustas. I believe she was the first and long time the only female handling these machines. Today, of course, thousands of women handle such competitive bikes, but at that time it was sensational. As your website is also focusing on motorcycle gear one thing has come to my mind that might be of interest to you: Anke-Eve designed her outfits herself, and one of the leading producers ("Harro") successfully put a one-piece racing suit on the market they had created on her request: it introduced a zipper running diagonally and sideways instead of frontally. Anyway, I shall add two or three to this message. Apart from my memory I do not have any documentation on her, but if ever you come to Paris (and read French): I know that between about 1957 and 1965 "MOTO REVUE" regularly published Anke-Eve's reports. I wish you all the best, and let me know what additional information you would care to have.
*****
