A few summers ago, at the end of a quiet, brief speech true to Arlin Fatland form, something unusual happened.

This was the year Fatland’s motorcycle shop in Denver, 2 Wheelers, turned 50 — a stunning run for independence in the increasingly corporate industry. There was no better time for Fatland to enter the Sturgis Hall of Fame.

And on that stage in South Dakota, apparently there was no better time to get engaged.

Fatland turned to Donna, his longtime partner in business and life.

“We’ve been chasing each other’s tails for maybe 30 years,” Fatland said. “I thought maybe it was time to ask if she would marry me.”

It wasn’t the question or the moment that was unusual as much as the emotion that took over the man.

He had built his reputation on toughness, as any small-business owner does, but perhaps none more so than a motorcycle shop owner in the 1970s.

It was a time biker subculture as we know it was rising, rising with factions and wars and booze and all. On a corner of West 38th Avenue, 2 Wheelers stood firm. As did the young man inside, hardly 30 with an idea to work hard and live fast, with long hair and a goatee that he’d keep all the way to that Sturgis stage.

Now he was gray and wrinkled, approaching 80. Now Donna said yes and fell into his arms. Now it appeared the tough guy had gone soft, eyes squinting, lips quivering, body shaking. He and Donna cried as a leather-clad crowd cheered.

“It’s been a great ride,” Donna said through tears.

A ride leading to another honor.

On Sept. 17, Fatland is joining the Colorado Springs-based Rocky Mountain Motorcycle Hall of Fame.

Compared with Sturgis, it’s a much more low-key, irregular ceremony; the public occasion that Sunday at the Rocky Mountain Motorcycle Museum will be the first in several years. The hall of fame is slowly populated, which is partly intentional, says its founder and executive director, Jim Wear.

He likes things the way they are: Visitors to the little museum get to know hall of fame members by reading pages in a book.

“If you get thousands of people in the hall of fame, you either have to have a massive amount of wall space to put it up, or you gotta put it on a freaking computer, and we’re not gonna do that,” Wear says.

Call it an old-school place for an old-school soul. To walk into 2 Wheelers is to enter that soul.

Welcome to the Biker Candy Store, as it’s been known since 1970.

Fatland sells old magazines, manuals and VHS tapes to go with everything riders need or never knew they needed from today and yesteryear. Helmets and goggles. Chains and wires. Tubes and tires. Handlebars and mirrors. Headlights and tail lights and pipes and panheads and shovelheads.

Nuts and bolts are kept in tall drawers at one end of the shop, while at the other end is Fatland’s most cherished space: the garage where he continues to build custom bikes, his true passion. Nearby is a fridge of Miller Lite.

Reads his upcoming hall of fame bio: “Arlin is a madman who loves choppers as much as he loves beer.”

Choppers were his specialty at a time the extended, low-riding bikes had yet to hit the mainstream. He was “like the godfather,” recalls Wear, who frequented 2 Wheelers as a teen.

“I’d wager there’s not another chopper shop that has been around as long as 2 Wheelers continuously, with the same owner, the same guy, behind the counter,” Wear says.

The guy’s work space is overlooked by a mural honoring Hamsters USA. It’s one of the industry’s leading charitable organizations that was born by a small group of ragtag, pioneering builders back in the ‘70s.

Fatland was among them, along with a close friend who shared a name and liking for a cowboy hat: Arlen Ness. Around the time Fatland opened his shop in Denver, Ness opened his in California.

In a trade magazine by Drag Specialties recognizing 50 years for 2 Wheelers, longtime industry watcher Tom Motzko simply put it this way: “Arlin and Arlen were part of the nucleus of early bike builders.”

Fatland is one of the few remaining. Ness died in 2019. Obituaries hailed him “the king of custom motorcycles.”

Fatland might not go down with quite the same, lofty title, and that might be partly due to his shyness, his spotlight avoidance.

At any rate, at 81, he shows no signs of going down.

“He’s still 100 mph,” Donna says.

Not long ago, he finished a bike he called Kool Miller Lite, for the beer he keeps stocked in the back of 2 Wheelers. Customers drink from the Kool Water Jug, as it’s labeled between racks.

“Kool” is a favorite word of the man of few words. He shrugs. “It’s just a different way to spell cool,” he says.

Different is one way to describe the shop, which some outsiders might find less than kool. Posters from the early days still plaster the ceiling and walls, posters of bare women.

This is indeed 2 Wheelers — a step into the old, rowdy, rebel era that Fatland came up in, that Wear sees as abandoned by today’s industry.

“Of course that is nothing that you’re gonna find at the mall or at a Harley dealer or whatever,” Wear says. “If you’re a franchise dealer, you have to conform with the corporate standard.”

For an industry grappling with inclusion, that’s for the better. Conformity, though, is far from a pillar of bikerdom.

From Wear’s view, the tribe was built by two camps, outlaws and gentlemen, and Fatland fell in the latter. “But absolutely, when you go (into the store), it’s just like 1970 pretty much,” Wear says.

Unchanged through decades of change. The years could have seen Fatland do as Wear did with his shop in Colorado Springs — another sale to Harley. If not by consolidation, Fatland could have folded like so many others under the pressure of the internet.

But while parts can be ordered online for cheaper, Fatland trusts he’ll have just enough business face to face. Just enough to pay the bills and afford a hobby with little to no financial return. The feeling of the parts fitting together, the first roar of the engine, the first run over asphalt — that can’t be bought.

Fatland has refused to change, and Wear can appreciate that.

“This is a guy who has always been true to himself,” Wear says, “and you don’t see that a lot, because people are chasing the dollar, they’re trying to push their career forward, they’re trying to get a bigger house, a nicer car, a bigger boat, whatever. And so they sacrifice themselves for quote-unquote success.

“And then they become the old man sitting on the porch thinking, I could’ve done this, I should’ve done that. Arlin? His only regret will be: I wish I had more time, because I’ve got these other three bikes going.”

•••

But yes, the shop Donna entered back in the ’80s “wasn’t very girl-friendly,” she says.

“I was kinda used to it,” she adds. “I was a leathersmith in a man’s world.”

She was a leathersmith making a living on the biker scene around Daytona Beach. That’s where she met Fatland. He had picked the town for his next retail outpost, following another in Sturgis.

Donna remembers him lining up 10 bikes he had trailered from Denver. “Made a nice impression,” she says with a wink.

But it was the kindness she was drawn to, the heart beneath the thick skin. He had the plain, Midwest nice of his childhood.

But no, he was not going to be the Iowa farm boy he seemed destined to be. Nor was she going to be the secretary it seemed the world was telling her to be. Of course they bonded over motorcycles — the freedom, the escape they provided.

Fatland got his first one, a Triumph Bonneville that he customized, shortly after moving to Denver in 1962. He was never going to get a bike back in Iowa; his mother would not have it, and the boy obeyed as ever.

“Typical farm boy,” he says. “Do the chores, do what you’re told, went to church every Sunday.”

He sometimes went to school. “Passed with flying Ds,” he says.

Though, he did take a liking to shop class, the ins and outs of machinery. However satisfied he could be with the work, he yearned to do it somewhere far, far away.

The idea was California, the land of cool. His ’55 Chevy broke down in Denver. He stayed for the mountains, and for the vision he had to sell parts and repair bikes so he could afford to build his own. Real kool.

The path to 2 Wheelers was disrupted by a draft notice. The Army stationed Fatland at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, where he jumped out of planes with the 101st Airborne Division. The thrill suited him, but not like the thrill of motorcycles.

An unwelcome sort of thrill met him upon opening 2 Wheelers in 1970. The neighborhood didn’t take kindly to the hairy, greasy, tattooed men suddenly showing up — particularly local toughs who saw their terrain threatened. There was a cost to being cool.

“They tried to burn us down, break the windows, steal (stuff),” Fatland says. “Little bit of everything to drive us out.”

There are stories of fist fights and gunshots. Of men loyal to Fatland staying at the shop late into the night, armed and ready.

“It wasn’t like it is now,” says a longtime assistant to Fatland, Dave John. “Now it’s a lot of girls and their little dogs.”

Gentrification came for the neighborhood. The brick block that is 2 Wheelers appears unfit, a thing of the past.

But Fatland isn’t going anywhere.

As ever, he refuses to change. Though, those tears on the stage at Sturgis hinted at something.

He seems caught by emotion again at the thought of Ness, the fellow builder and good friend he lost back in 2019.

“Went to the big funeral at his shop,” Fatland says. “Something like 500, 600 people.”

That says something about legacy. As for his own? Fatland bristles at the word.

“I’m gonna keep working my ass off,” he says.

In the garage, past the fridge of Miller Lite, another project awaits.