Officer Schick* has good reason to arrest all three of us. Or at least detain us. He’s busy responding to the scene of a minor traffic accident when he spots us riding up Connecticut Route 34. We take a driveway that forks off the road but he breaks from the accident to climb an embankment and block us.
There’s no denying that we are attempting to trespass. It’s also an area where high voltage overhead power pole work happens daily. Schick is both amused and annoyed and he takes particular interest in one member of our three-man crew who rides a funny looking bike with no seat. As I sit on the back of a camouflaged utility ATV, clutching both sides of the rack, Doug Henry sits at the controls. He explains why he needs to get onto this property.
Doug wants to wear down the patrolman. I keep quiet and so does Doug’s friend who is next to us on a trials bike. Schick laughs. He can’t figure out what’s funnier, the fact that these three knuckleheads are riding off-road vehicles on paved secondary roads or that they think they’re going to get on this property, a rock quarry across the street from Oxford, Connecticut’s Stevenson Dam. Henry doesn’t let up. He has talked his way through this situation his entire life.
After school on weekday afternoons, Henry and his friends rode for five miles on a network of trails, paved roads, backyards and railroad tracks, down Route 34 and across Stevenson Dam to ride at a place they simply called The Dam. This is the spot that made Doug Henry into a championship caliber rider and I want to see it. It was illegal to ride there in the early 1980s and it’s still illegal today.
Yet, if Henry hadn’t discovered this crude New England gem across the street from the Housatonic River–if he had folded the first time the cops ran him out–there’s a good chance he would have become just another weekend warrior on the New England Sports Committee series. Instead, Doug was as relentless as the whoops and rocks that fill the quarry and he became a three-time AMA Pro Motocross champion, an X Games gold medalist, a member of the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame, a pioneer, a hero and a national treasure of American motocross.
But Doug Henry is the most determined person you’ll ever meet and it’s clear he’s not going to stop talking until Schick moves out of the way.
On His Own
Douglas Arthur Henry grew up in Shelton, a town in southwestern Connecticut whose industry has seen more robust times. His father, Bill was a machine fabricator with Sikorsky Helicopters and his mother, Beverly was a grocer. Doug was the youngest of three. His sisters had horses and he got a 2.5 horsepower mini bike at age four. He wore an eight-inch wide trail around the entire house, a path that got more broken in when he graduated to a YZ80. That’s when Gary Morrison remembers seeing him. Morrison, a neighbor, cut through Bill Henry’s 10 acres on his way to The Dam. Doug’s speed on the little trail impressed him.
“I’d just watch him ride in his yard and I said, ‘Man, you should go racing,’” Morrison said. “I told him he should go up to Southwick and watch the races and get into it.”
Doug credits Morrison for that push but he didn’t make it to Southwick for his first race until 1984 when he was 14. He became a top NESC racer, won his first title in 1988, but harbored no expectations of a future in motocross. They didn’t buy a motorhome and trailer, didn’t travel to Ponca or even the AMA Amateur Motocross National Championships at Loretta Lynn’s.
Motocross wasn’t the only thing in his life but it was what he loved the most. He played hockey in the winters and as an adult he joined a men’s league to stay active. Henry loved racing so much that, starting in 1987, he binge-worked for weeks at a time to save enough money to get out of New England and race the Winter Series in Florida. One year he logged 16-hour long days between two jobs: loading UPS trucks and welding. He also did work in machine fabrication and sheet rock. In Florida, he slept in his van, ate rice, cereal, peanut butter and jelly on hot dog buns and soup from the can. And the most peculiar part is that he wasn’t trying to make a career out of racing.
“This is all like a big vacation to me,” he said in a 1993 Inside Motocross interview. “I’m just waiting for someone to come along and say, ‘That’s it, you have to go back to work now.'”
His father supported his son’s ambitions but was still skeptical. When Doug turned 18 in September 1987, the financial responsibility of riding and racing shifted to Doug. Bill helped him keep the bikes running, made and fixed parts and occasionally came to the races but deep down he felt like his son should be working a normal job.
“He wanted Doug to work at McDonald’s,” Stacey Henry said, recalling a phone conversation Bill had with Doug while he was living out of his van in Florida one winter. She remembers sending care packages to him in Florida while they were dating. Doug and Stacey were married in 1993.
“I was so proud of him getting out of the valley and trying to compete because all he knew was New England,” she said.
After his annual trip to Florida concluded in 1990, Doug didn’t come home right away. He went to the supercross races in Dallas and Pontiac first. Stacey, who had recently earned her degree in graphic design, spent that winter as a ski bum. She met him in Dallas. They were broke but had fun.
“I loved it because it was such a testament of what you really need,” she said. “You live so simply and you do what you love and life is pretty good.”
They heated up their rice and soup with a Coleman camping stove, slept in the box van in parking lots and even slipped into hotels in the mornings where they would bribe the chambermaids with a few dollars to let them shower in a vacant room.
“You don’t have to tell that story,” Stacey said to Doug, half wincing.
“But we were quick!” Doug said with a smile, seeking justification.
They sought out the Yamaha box vans after the race so they could collect any discarded items–plastics, chains, sprockets–from the factory mechanics. A Damon Bradshaw number plate still hangs in Doug’s old garage. The Henry family didn’t waste; fix it, reuse it, make it last. He couldn’t afford to buy Paul Buckley’s photographs when he raced local New England Sports Commission (NESC) events. Doug went as far as combing the track after the race for tearoffs that were clean enough to be reapplied to goggles. “It was a bonus when someone pulled them all off at once! Huge score,” he said.
In the summer of 1990 Doug said he almost had to borrow money. He was on financial fumes at a race but he took the last transfer spot and earned enough money to continue. “I just wanted to qualify,” Doug said. A hundred bucks got me to the next race.”
These were the moments Dave Arnold, Honda’s Team Manager, noticed in the early 90s when he was shopping for a 125cc rider. Bevo Forti told Arnold to vet Henry. The details of the time and place are fuzzy but Arnold specifically remembers observing Doug in the pits at a race. On a wet, miserable day, Doug pulled his bike out of the trunk of what Arnold remembers to be a small rusted Chrysler. He had no crew on hand, not even a friend.
“I watched him in the drizzle take the thing out and he just seemed happy to be participating in the sport,” Arnold said. “He was just into it. He went out on the track and did a good job. The bike had bent bars, bent levers, jacked up grips. At the time I think he did a lot with very little.”
Doug’s entire life story can be linked together with anecdotes about making do with what he had not wishing for something better. Henry never blamed the tools. He always blamed the carpenter. One of his tools? The Dam.
Inside the Pit of Hell
The bespectacled young woman who smashed up her car stands on the road below us with an ice pack pressed against her cheek. Officer Schick must sense her glare because he turns to her and says, “Have you called your mother yet?” She nods.
He turns back to Doug and relentingly says, “Five minutes. And have someone come pick you up. Do not get back on the road.” We’re in.
The Dam is a chaotic network of whooped out and rocky trails and berms that intersect and collide. Wild olive bushes choke the path because the track isn’t maintained. Most of the course is just wide enough for the ATV Doug rides. He has not been here since he was paralyzed in 2007 and he remembers it being much more open, not as congested with shrubs and branches. But still, many sections of the track have not changed and he points out a rolling incline whose path disappears into the Ash trees.
“This is where I thought of Stanton,” he says.
“Jeff Stanton?” I ask.
He says his imagination wandered while he rode. On tough sections of the course he thought about racers he admired. He felt that if he could get through that section well lap after lap then he would get stronger and faster. He still remembers who he thought of on the course and where. By the late 80s He had to imagine because his riding partners no longer challenged him.
“If you were outside the rock quarry you knew Doug was riding his 125 because the sound never shut off,” said Ron Lombardi, a childhood friend. “He was wide open the whole time and it was not the traditional sounding ‘rev, shut off, clutch, shift, rev’. The only time it got quiet was when he was in the air and then the ground would literally shake when he landed. No joke.”
Not even ‘The Godfather,’ local fast guy Bruce Hawes could keep up. Hawes lived across the street from the track.
“Bruce actually had numbers on his number plates,” Doug said, as if that gave Hawes some kind of extra certification. Hawes remembers his first encounter with Henry. In 1984 he bought a new Kawasaki KX250 and saw a teenager on a YZ80 at The Dam. He showed the young man a lap around the track. Being a rock quarry, the endless options for design and layout changed weekly.
After that one lap he “Stuck to my ass and I was amazed at how fast he was,” Hawes said. “I had to push just to get away from him and he was on a little 80.” Hawes recalls young Henry coming over to his house to ask him how he was able to ride for so long on the rough track. Doug wanted to soak up as much knowledge as he could.
Doug loved these tips. He wanted to know everything he could about getting faster, better. “Everyone else was just happy to get out and ride,” Stacey said. “He had this appetite, ‘More, how can I improve?’ He had this passion that wouldn’t quit.”
Maybe it’s because most of the guys who rode at The Dam were on 125s, 250s and even 500s and he wanted to keep up. Maybe he was tired of being blasted by rocks the size of hand grenades. He simply wanted to be faster and he tried every tip and trick he could get. He fastened his fingers to the levers; used a 2 x 4 on his seat to force him to sit forward; taped off the bottom of his goggles so he had to look ahead and not down. When the master brake cylinder of his 1989 YZ125 blew, as they often did, he didn’t ride home. He learned how to ride faster with only front brakes.
“You crash and you break a clutch lever, you’re not swapping a clutch lever out, you’re riding the rest of the day without a clutch lever,” he said. “Bent bars? You’re riding the bike because it was so far to go back and forth so you rode with what you had.”
Riding at The Dam looks like a cruel experience to outsiders. It doesn’t get groomed and the whoops look like Southwick after a professional race. The squared edges catapult riders. The rocks break fingers and the course is so narrow that passing possibilities only come to the most creative of riders. The spiderweb of trails intersect and merge so if a rider shows up during a session and doesn’t check in, collisions happen. On the scale of motocross track quality, it ranks between suffering and hell. But if a rider can master this place, anything else is like fresh blacktop.
“It was all I knew,” Henry said. “Other than a trail in the woods, as crude as it was, that was the closest thing you could get to a track to ride on. That’s all we really had.” Stacey likes to tell the story of Doug bringing his Honda and Yamaha teammates there to ride even if she feels like the memory might be slightly exaggerated today.
“They didn’t want to ride it after five minutes,” she said. “They talked about how difficult it was and how harsh it was.”
In the early 90s, Doug bought a piece of property nearby where he had a trailer and a small supercross track in the front yard. “Terrafirma”, the first installment of the popular Fox Racing video series, opens with a scene shot here. The Dam had become so instrumental to his program that he got special permission from landowners to ride there. He rode there frequently until 1999 when he moved an hour north to Torrington. After that he made only an occasional appearance.
The Bikes Always Win
When he signed with Honda in 1993, Henry thrived and won the 125 Eastern region supercross title and two 125 Pro Motocross titles (93-94). After nearly five years as a privateer and working odd jobs to pay for racing, being teammates with Jeremy McGrath and Jeff Stanton at American Honda wasn’t a total relief. He knew he had the best equipment available and he wanted to keep what he earned. He viewed the one-year deal as a positive. It forced him to work harder to get a renewal. He also admits he had no idea how much effort teams put in to win. He remembers 12 guys hovering around his bike at the first test session. “I wasn’t only winning races for me now,” he said.
Henry soaked it all up. He loved testing. Having a bike set up just for him seemed incomprehensible. Doug didn’t even wash his bikes as a privateer. He and his dad pounded out dents in the exhaust by hand, they made shock bladders out of coffee cans, fabricated an enlarged 50-tooth sprocket in order to get more life out of a stretched chain. He used to get satisfaction from being the guy who beat the riders that showed up to the track with crisp gear and a trailer full of new bikes. Now hewas that guy.
“You could give Doug some advice and he would take it and he could process it and he could work with it,” said Pete Steinbrecher, Henry’s mechanic at Honda. Steinbrecher followed Henry to Yamaha in 1996 because, “He’s Doug Henry. I was never going to get another rider like him.”
Henry liked working with Steinbrecher for the same reasons that Steinbrecher liked working with him. As a privateer, Doug noticed Steinbrecher. On the road, between races, he woke up early for runs and saw Steinbrecher outside a Honda box van working on a bike. He felt Pete put the work first and he secretly hoped that they’d team up someday.
Doug quickly became a fan favorite and not just to the people in New England. Everyone noticed his work ethic and obvious love and appreciation for racing and life. When he broke his back in 1995 at Budds Creek he realized how much he affected the lives of some of his fans. They showered him with cards and letters. When he felt low, he read through them.
“I got so many letters from fans and people I didn’t know,” he said. “Maybe I gave them one little signature, a ‘hi’, or a shake of a hand. That little bit of time you spend with someone, you don’t realize how much that means to them. Those letters really brought me back and helped me out in a time when I needed them.”
His long comeback from the back injury, having the guts to try a four stroke motocross bike, and coming back from the double wrist injury in 1997 to win the 1998 250 (now 450) Pro Motocross title earned him hero and legend status in the eyes of his fans. Even though he was always grounded, Stacey found it difficult to share her husband like that.
“Underdog. I won’t call him a hero,” she said. “Nobody saw who he was. Then, all of a sudden, the world caught on and, yeah, it’s hard to compete with the affection of the masses.”
In 1990, Bill Henry pulled Stacey aside and said “Stacey, the bikes always win.” Stacey remembers exactly where she was when she heard that. “Bill felt obligated to explain to me how Doug was,” Stacey said. “I appreciated that.”
Stacey and Doug divorced in 2017 but still live near each other in Torrington. Their children, Ian and Brianna, are grown and out of the house. Seeing them together it’s clear that they still care about each other very much.
When he retired from full-time professional racing after the 1999 season he and Stacey tried to be gentleman farmers. Doug couldn’t stomach slaughtering the pigs and they quickly determined that he wasn’t very good at farming. On a scale of one to ten, Doug gives himself six tenths of one point.
“Wow,” Stacey said laughing at Doug. “I would have said three.”
When asked what happened to the farming dream, Doug quickly raised his fist in the air as if taking a victory lap and said, “Supermoto came along!”
Last Lap at The Dam
Doug often smiles but his grin meter nears a 10 as he bench races with his friend Jim Barlow, who straddles the Beta trials bike while we take in the sights of their childhood riding area. Doug mimics the motions of a motorcycle working a rough section as they talk about how they used to ride at The Dam. When Henry moved to Torrington, Barlow bought the Oxford property. Doug likes it because it keeps alive his connection to this area. Paralyzed since March 2007, Doug still rides motocross on his modified YZ450. The Dam, however, is much too rough.
The rain that threatened all day starts to fall lightly and we make our way to the exit. Three power pole workers who had been watching us approach on foot. Doug apologizes and says we’re leaving.
“Aren’t you Doug Henry?” one of them asks.
“I am!” he says.
“See, I told you that was him!” another one says, jabbing his co-worker.
They gather around the ATV for a photo. Doug offers his ball cap in exchange for a construction hard hat.
Snap.
With the closing of a shutter, three young men from New England can prove to their buddies they were last people to ever see the legend Doug Henry ride at The Dam.
*Name has been changed.
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Great piece on a wonderful neighbor. Gary Morrisson and I worked at the same Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, Kawasaki dealership in Monroe CT. Gary AKA Mel, was just a kid at the time and started there as a builder un-crating the new bikes and getting them out on the floor for me to sell. So many of us learned to ride the dam back then and we could take the tracks and weave our way down to the dam and try to sneak our way in. Still do,…shhh don’t tell anyone.
Dougs’ digs in Oxford were a short walk across my front yard, through a short stretch of pines about 300 yards from the house. His practice sessions were my alarm clock. Mostly screaming bean eaters. Then, one day a four stroke out in the woods and life changed as we know it. I miss the smell of Castrol R 30 in the morning.
There were some wild summer parties out there, and still are. I always wondered who bought that piece. I have been living there since 83 and just recently my son and family is taking over.
Thanks for reading, John! I met the guy who owns it now and I can’t remember his name!
Also, your secret is safe with me. Just don’t let officer “Schick” catch you.
Great read! I never knew Doug “I wish I did he seems like a great down to earth guy” . Although I didn’t know him personally a lot of my friends did and it was great seeing a hometown guy go to the top! I do however remember the Dam we used to call it the Oxford pits. I used to race quads back in the mid to late 80’s and very possibly could have rubbed elbows with Doug with out even knowing it! I grew up in Monroe and we also had a network of trails the old Housatonic Railway which was our highway to every where! When I was 12 years old in 1984 we made our first trip to Daddarios sand and gravel pit in Newtown Ct now Owned by Tilcon. From that day on it was a whole new world opened up to me and my friends! We would ride there from sun up to sun down on weekends and almost everyday after school! Any given weekend there’d be 40-50 people riding there. We had tracks set up, jumps, sand dunes, you name it! IMO was the best riding spot ever! Now it’s all overgrown and mined out and Sand Hill plaza now stands where another great riding spot used to be that we called “Nagy’s.” In 1985 the Police were cracking down on ATVs so we all got together with Sippin Cycles in Monroe and formed “Monroe Riders”. We would get permission from property owners for our organization to ride there one of them being the Dam or Oxford pits. Was a cool place to ride but was more catered for dirt bikes due to all the whoops. Was not nearly as big as the Newtown pits but was still a fun spot to ride in. A lot of great memories at both places, was truly a magical time for riding.
Semi pro drag racer and Police Officer
Lou Proto
Lou! Wow, it’s awesome to hear how influential these riding areas were to so many people. Thanks for sharing your story and thank you for reading! – Brett
Loved it what a great article. I still remember the Wednesday night Damn rides with all the guys. That was a very special place that made a lot of guys very fast. There are so many local riding spots just like the Damn around that area for decades people from all over would come to that area in CT to learn how to ride really rough unpredictable tracks. It all started with Doug! He was always such a nice guy willing to take the time to elp out any rider that would show up at the Damn as long as they showed respect to everyone. Doug was always a huge influence in my life and is why I made a career in the Motorcycle industry. Doug is a Legend on and off the track and I have always felt he didn’t get the high profile credit as his other competitors. But that never bothered Doug because thats the type of guy he is. This is the best article that I have read in years and I am glad to see people in the industry still respecting what Doug did and is still doing! Cheers
Wow! You made your career in motorcycles because of Doug! That’s awesome. Thanks for the kind words and for reading the article. Share it with a friend who needs to read it. Thank you. – Brett
NICE ARTICLE, BROUGHT BACK SOME FOND MEMORIES. REAL QUICK, THE YEAR WAS 2000. FIVE GUYS WALK INTO NEW HAVEN POWER SPORTS AND WALK OUT WITH BRAND NEW RM AND KX 125’S. THANKS TO THAT REV CARD. ONE OF THE GUYS BROTHER WORKED THERE AND ALSO WAS A FRIEND AND AT ONE TIME MECHANIC FOR DOUG. AS FOR THE DAM IT WAS A CHALLENGING PLACE TO GET TO AND RIDE, ESPECIALLY FOR A GUY WHO WAS LATE TO THE MX GAME AND STARTED OUT ON THAT 125. I SWORE DOUG CAME THROUGH DID A FEW LAPS ONE OF THE TIMES WE WERE THERE AND THEN VANISHED IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE, LOUD AND FAST. (sorry about the caps)
Chris!
Thanks so much for sharing that story. Love hearing about brushes with greatness like this.
Great story! It’s awesome to read stories about people you think you knew- I had shot photos of Doug since the late 80’s thru most of his racing days even Supermto & a few races with the cage on his Yamaha. It is great to learn the back-story to how these guy’s began.
Kinney! It’s an honor to have you in here reading. Thank you so much.
I do not know if I like the story more or the comments left by the people who were locals reminiscing. As always BJ, great story!
Great memories coming out of the wood work, right!? Thanks so much for reading, David!
GREAT TIMES the dam was fun but kept my on my toes for sure,remember carrying crazy larry out to the road with knee bones sticking out of his skin!thanks doug for the memories,jim meenan and dale tucker
Yikes! Poor crazy Larry!
I thought I’d a a few lines on Doug during the 2006 AMA Supermoto season which made a stop at Waterford Hills, MI. My wife and I headed out to shoot photos and watch what has to be considered one of the best racing series ever. (Something the AMA never got right!) That day was epic watching Doug and Jeff Ward battle it out for the win. One thing with Doug when you watched him was his smooth effortless style. Henry grabbed the hole shot in the first race and built up a decent lead before high siding and falling back. Wardy took over the lead and would beat him in the first race, Doug ended up forth. The second race Doug grabbed another holeshot ran off with the win while Ward followed him in second. What made the day most memorable was just how approachable Doug was after the race. He spent a long time signing autographs and talking to the fans, I mean he went the extra mile and then some. He and Travis Pastrana (who also raced) were the class of the day. Sadly by the time the 2007 race rolled into town Doug was finished due to his Supermoto career ending injury. What a classy guy, racing in all forms need more racers like Doug Henry. Total respect!!!!!
Jim! Honored to have you reading my work and commenting. thank you. Bring back Moto Scribble!
Awesome story! Its cool how riding spots like this can be related to by people across the country. I am from the Midwest. I had a spot very similar to this my friends and I rode in High School. When I was a very young boy, I went to a babysitter across from the sand/gravel pit while it was in full production. I remember lots of activity and huge cranes and workers in all kinds of machines working there. 15 years later in High School I decided to investigate the place I remembered from my childhood. Production had stopped years earlier, but so much sand remained and it was just abandoned. I found a quad trail leading in from the back way. I rode in one day and was I was hooked. After that we started riding it all the time. I remember on days off school my friends and I would go there and ride all day long until dark. We had a very good track formed and I think it made us all better riders. When I graduated and moved away to college, riding there slowed down. That sand pit is still there today untouched. I hope to buy it someday and open it up to a new generation of young riders.
Mitch! Thanks for reading. I grew up in Michigan and we also had a place just like you’re describing. I often wonder what became of it. Please tell a friend about We Went Fast!
Great read! Brings back memories of everything bikes, the 1980’s, and the jump from BMX to MX. I grew up in Maine, which had no shortage of wooded trails and quarries to ride. I have no doubt that Doug Henry was an inspiration to all of us back then. These days I’m in the beer business, but as an aspiring writer, I may incorporate him into my next work of fiction! Thanks so much for this very informative piece. Well done!
Rick! Thank you so much for reading and for the nice comments. I love the beer business! This means you and I can be friends. What’s your brand? I love trying new brands.
Send over your story if you finish it!
I live literally a 1/4 mile away from one of the entrances to the dam , its not uncommon to see dirtbikes screaming up and down this road going to or coming from there, I only went there a couple times myself on a quad and watched all those crazy [email protected] since many of them are friends of mine from the Doug Henry era but I am a car guy so my time is usually spent burning the tires in some kinda HotRod up the street in front of the entrance near me to the pits…..
Chuck! Thanks so much for reading. I’m glad to hear that The Dam is still getting some use. I’d love to ride it myself someday.
I believe I have video of when Doug and team Honda was up there.. it was my backyard.. from 1982-1995.. used to bring my young sons up there to watch…
Epic track for sure at the dam. I remember it in 1970 as a diamond in the rough, as we put a track together there. Even that early on we had police encounters…but most ended well.
Never knew the Doug Henry era there , I was gone by then, but rode there often on my low pipe CZ 380. I used to ride with Douglas (Doc) Hill #35 EXP of The metropolitan Sports Committee who taught me much, So glad to hear of an AMA champ riding it. Was always a fan of Doug Henry…what a rider!!