By Chad Frey
Newton Kansan
Bill Ryan of Peabody is the owner of a unique business built around a custom motorcycle he and friends spent three years building. The American Legion Rider’s new ride is striking, standing out wherever he takes it.
He calls it the Iron Hearse. The custom-built bike and trailer is just that, a hearse.
“I did this to help out veterans,” Ryan said. “A lot of veterans are motorcycle riders. I was just motivated to help them out with it, and give them another alternative.”
It’s a way to give a veteran one last ride – a ride to their final resting place.
A search online found less than a dozen such services in the United States.
“There are not very many of them around,” Ryan said. “It is impressive to see it, it really is. All the work that went into that.”
Ryan is a veteran himself, serving eight years in the Air Force during the Vietnam era.
He has been a member of the Legion Riders seemingly forever, taking a leadership role when his health would allow. He’s shown for nearly three decades living in the Newton area his passion for veterans and motorcycles.
And his new business will support the American Legion. Ryan said 15 percent of each service he helps perform will be donated to the American Legion.
One of his biggest projects was helping with is the annual Legacy Run, an organized motorcycle ride from Legion headquarters to the site of the national convention each year. Along the way, riders make stops in each state they pass through to raise funds for the Legacy Scholarship Fund.
He also spent several years in charge of the toy run (a ride through Newton to drop off donated toys for the Salvation Army Christmas Program) in 2011.
He started his latest merger of his passions about three years ago, building a custom motorcycle around an engine. <n>“I have had this in the back of my mind for about 10 years,” Ryan said. “Once we got moving on the project, we did the bike first. I then found a trailer that was the right size for what I wanted and built the trailer.”
The trailer was transformed into a full hearse – windows on all four sides to show the coffin inside, red carpeting throughout to help cushion the ride and floor rollers to help move the coffin in and out of a rear door.
“I knew this would be more involved than I expected,” Ryan said. “I knew it was going to be quite the challenge.”
He invested somewhere around $12,000 cash in the project. He doesn’t really have an estimate of how much of his time went into the project over the course of three years.
It was, however, a great project for him at the time it launched. He had just finished up three years of illness that led to him being in pain every day.
That illness led him to move his primary business, Those Blasted Signs, that he founded on main street – in a building that served as the VFW post of Newton for several decades.
“I wanted to make sure I had this bike project finished before I retired from the sign business so I can jump into doing the other one,” Ryan said.
He said the Iron Hearse will be “available for anyone who needs it.”