Mert Lawwill came into my life watching On Any Sunday, the motorcycle documentary I enjoyed with my young children dozens of times when we lived in Wisconsin. Not having been raised in a motorcycling household myself, Mert suddenly became a super hero to my little family.
Working in the bicycle industry for 24 years had its perks; one of them rubbing elbows with legends during the annual Interbike trade show. It was a thrill to meet Tour de France champions Greg LeMond, Eddy Merckx, Stephen Roche and other stars of the race scene. My first chance encounter with Mert came at Interbike when he was working with Schwinn in the late Nineties. My kids were thrilled when I called them to share the news.
I’ve spent time with Mert at various Bay Area bicycle and motorcycle events after relocating to northern California in 2006. In May 2018, Motorcyclist editor Chris Cantle assigned me to interview Mert at his home to talk about Lawwill’s prosthetic company. Here’s my unedited first draft, with photos I took to document the experience. The final article was chopped considerably, whittled down to a few paragraphs with gobs of captions to support Jay Watson’s fantastic photos.
Walking us through the house he built on a $15,000 plot of Tiburon, California land in 1968, the man Steve McQueen once told that he wished he could have traded places with points to the landscape paintings on the wall and reminisces. His mother was a school teacher and painter. His father, an engineer and painter. One sister was a concert violinist, another a successful painter, another a state beauty contest winner. His brother was an airline pilot.
Merton Randolph Lawwill was the black sheep of the Boise, Idaho family, choosing motorcycle racing, and the House That Mert Built is forever etched in the minds of racing fans from his starring role in On Any Sunday, alongside McQueen and Malcolm Smith in 1971, nominated for an Academy Award and cementing motorcycling as the new surfing for generations.
Outside, several mature redwoods pierce the sky, planted as saplings by Lawwill half a century ago. Custom bird baths and handmade doll houses are wife June’s creative contributions. A waterfall and brook split the narrow walkway to a hidden outpost; Lawwill mentions that he laid the rocks when he was recovering from back surgery.
The iconic garage where Lawwill tuned his Harley-Davidson for another flat track race in another part of the country is now a family room. A pool table resides in a game room with the coolest wall of photos and posters imaginable. In the upper right corner a framed 1973 black and white photo of Lawwill and McQueen is somewhat obscured. Lawwill is wearing a cast on his left hand, evidence of a crash in Washington State that nearly crippled him for life a few weeks prior.
He would retire from racing four years later, thanks to the generosity of McQueen, who flew Lawwill to Los Angeles for reconstructive surgery and picked up the tab.
After June requested a proper family room in 1980, he built a small two-stall garage workshop on the house overlooking the San Francisco Bay with a clear view of the Golden Gate Bridge and Sutro Tower. Like the man who built it, it’s small, compact, organized and productive.
He apologizes for the shop clutter, but the self-taught engineer knows what he needs and has the tools to do it. The space includes an old Sears Craftsman band saw, mill, sandblaster, countless metal shelves, with a veritable history lesson of the mountain bike hanging in the rafters. Lawwill was a pioneer of the sport, creating the Lawwill/Knight Pro Cruiser in the mid Seventies and advancing full suspension for Gary Fisher, Schwinn and Yeti in the Nineties.
A gleaming orange Lawwill Street Tracker sits on the lift on the left side of the garage, a proud number 1 plate residing opposite double mufflers that belch out a symphony of exhaust notes. Only 19 were made, starting in 2005. Danny Sullivan won the 1985 Indy 500, and received one from his wife as a birthday gift in 2010.
Yellow plastic bins are home to several magnesium, titanium and stainless steel components Lawwill assembles into products used by amputees to enjoy motorcycling and bicycling. Mert’s Hands have been in production for nearly a quarter century, built with fellow Mountain Bike Hall of Fame member Dave Garoutte, his former crew chief who has a machine shop in nearby San Rafael in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais.
Lawwill was the 1969 AMA Grand National Champion; two years prior, Factory Harley-Davidson team racer Chris Draayer lost his arm in a crash, and knowing Lawwill’s engineering propensity and can-do attitude, badgered him for a prosthetic hand so Draayer could get back to racing.
“Chris was always asking me to make him a hand; I didn’t know anything about prosthetics, so Dave and I were talking about it in the early Nineties, but nothing happened for about a year,” Lawwill said. “Chris got on me again about a hand, so I called a prosthetic company in Utah and told them my plan to make prosthetic hands for bicycle and motorcycle use.
“They said ‘don’t bother; for 90 percent of amputees their life is over, especially riding a bicycle or motorcycle.’ I said to myself ‘baloney! They just don’t know they can do it,’ so I went ahead and made one on my workshop mill with Dave and sent it to Chris, who told me it was horrible! I learned that our knuckles, wrist and fingers are where they are for a reason, and if I don’t mimic all those energy points precisely, the amputee will tell you instantly if it’s right or not.”
It took Lawwill and Garoutte a year to sell their first 20 functional hands. A second hand for Draayer—with several improvements—was approved, and he used it until his untimely death in a motorcycle accident in September 2004. The same design continues today.
“Dave’s such an outstanding engineer,” Lawwill said. “I’ll give him a part that I’ve made and he’ll make it pretty and better. Whenever we get behind on production, I’ll help him run the CNC to get caught up. He taught me how to use it. I create prototypes here in my shop, and he does all the production in his San Rafael facility.”
Some 25 years after building that first hand, the two have more than 300 prosthetics in the field.
“Now Dave and I make them in batches of 100,” he added. “I have a good distribution system in place with some prosthetic companies. Hanger Clinic is my biggest customer. It’s very rewarding work because you see how people’s lives are changed once they get their hands back on. There are two kids born without hands who I’ve worked with. One boy, from the Chicago area, wasn’t very competitive when he rode motocross one-handed and became withdrawn.
“He read something that Chris said in an interview about my hand and his father called me for one, and eight months later he was on the podium with a new lease on life. Now he’s a motivational speaker for the Shriners, and has been promoting the hand for years.”
Mert’s Hand retails for $2,000, a small price for the engineering and machine work that goes into the device, to say nothing of being able to ride again. According to Lawwill, prosthetic hands range in cost based on complexity, from just under $500 for a simple stainless steel hook to more than $10,000 for complex, robotic versions. Now, he and Garoutte are working on something else.
“My new product is a complete arm, electronically controlled with lock-out suspension,” Lawwill said. “What happens when an amputee is trying to go downhill or ride trails? A mechanical arm will fold up and end the ride. I put a shock absorber in the lower part, which they control with their good arm. I developed three positions: full-floating, slightly restricted or completely locked up just by using a thumb lever near the bar grips. Click, click, click!
“I haven’t even named it yet; guess I’m calling it the Mert Arm. We just finished testing a few months ago, and now we’re getting ready to start production. My tester in Las Vegas is very pleased with the progress so far.”
With everything Lawwill’s accomplished in the motorcycle and mountain bike worlds, and all he’s given to both, he can’t seem to keep from giving more.
“It gives me satisfaction to open up a new world for these people,” he added. “I’m so delighted to see them live life to the fullest again.”
What a wonderful human being.