CONCRETE CANYON RIDE FOR THE CHILDREN

ONE MAN’S MISSION
Photos Courtesy of Theresa Radkey, SCRC
Chapter 384
“In 2002, they gave me five days to live. I’m very happy to be fifty three,” says Dave Kaufman, First Officer of the Southern Cruisers Riding Club, New York City Chapter 384, a life long motorcyclist and cancer survivor, who has created one of the most unique motorcycle fund raisers in the county.

Now, he wants to have children who have not had a chance to live to have that same chance, doing his bit with The Concrete Canyon Run..

During the eight months of treatment in those dark days, he walked around the hospital, wandering past the children’s rooms. The experience was traumatic.
“I saw the kids—kids who had not yet had a chance to live being kept alive, very sad and not understanding what was going on in their short lives. It was a devastating experience”, he says.

After he got out of the hospital, he would return to visit the kids, bringing them do- rags and entertained them with motorcycle tales. The kids loved it. But the downside for him was the kids who did not make it.

“Sometimes I’d go back and one or two of them would not be there. They didn’t make it. It just got to me”.

A life long motorcyclist, he connected with Southern Cruisers and formed the New York Chapter. He found out that the SCRC official charity was the St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which gave him the chance to give something back. “I was a cancer survivor, and some of these children were not. It was my chance to give something back”, he says

The Concrete Canyon Run was born.

The title is self explanatory; hundreds of motorcyclists from as far away as Georgia, Maine and Michigan rolling through sixty miles of New York’s man- made canyons, from the financial district, to Ground Zero, to Times Square and terminating at Coyote Ugly before heading out to New Jersey for the after-ride party, which goes on to…whenever. You don’t want to miss riding through the below ground-level street tunnels

From a dry run in 2002 of eighty or so riders, the ride grew to over three hundred riders in 2004. the run is the premier event for the chapter’s fifty plus members, who devote untold hours to making it work. In 2005, there would have been over six hundred riders, had the run not been rained out.


To date, the run has earned over thirteen thousand dollars for St. Jude, and 2006 it promises to be even bigger again. “I want this to be a good fun time for everybody, and to raise a ton of money for St. Jude”.
Let’s try and help him out.