Adam Xavier thought riding a motorcycle in Los Angeles was scary, until he took a trip to China last summer. The chief executive of RoadLok, an El Segundo company that makes motorcycle locking systems, traveled to the Chinese city of Hangzhou to set up a factory. His business partners there, members of the Dragon Riders motorcycle club, lent Xavier a Harley and took off down cobblestone streets through a narrow market to see a local temple.
“These guys were zipping through,” Xavier, 32, said. “My knee hit a cartful of live chickens, and the guy pushing it started yelling something at me.”
As they rode closer to the temple, the bikers scaled a steep grassy hillside and Xavier could barely control his bike.
“The back tire wouldn’t catch, and I said, ‘I’m sorry to be a pansy, but I can’t get up there,’” Xavier recalled. “This one guy said, ‘We can’t make it either but didn’t want to say anything.’”
He’ll have a chance to return the favor this August when he hosts the Chinese businessmen on a ride from Los Angeles to South Dakota for the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.
Xavier noted he’ll have to instruct his friends from the “Wild East” that they need to use their turn signals and actually stop at red lights.
Marshalling Charity
After 9/11, most of Eric Knirk’s friends who had been deployed to Afghanistan returned home safely. But after attending a fundraiser for the family of a special operations soldier who did not, he learned that nonprofits raise money for children but not spouses.
So Knirk, vice president of Torrance’s Fremont Associates Inc., and Nick Rocha, a friend of the slain soldier, started Special Operations Survivors in 2002 to do just that. The organization, now national, has a board of directors and administrator, and it raises money from businesses to provide widows with grief counseling, seminars and tuition scholarships – whatever they need to get on with their lives.
“We wanted to establish something that could help from that point forward and anticipate the need,” Knirk said.
Just recently, Special Operations Survivors began a new task – raising money to help widows pay for child care while they attend college or trade schools.
“My co-founder Nick and I took it from an idea of helping one man’s family in need, to realizing that this struggle has been going on for years, and that’s there going to be more and more need,” Knirk said.
