What Was Already There

By Jonathan Ryan Patterson

My great grandfather didn’t make a big moment out of it. While he was dying, among the things he said, he mentioned to Wiley, my grandfather’s brother, that the Patterson name wasn’t the bloodline name. Not a confession. Not a scene. Just something that came out when time got short and the truth got heavier than the secret. Wiley carried it and eventually it found my grandfather.

So he went looking.

What he found was in an attic in Jackson, Tennessee. Hot, quiet, smells like forgotten time. And there it was, deteriorating in the dark. Edges gone, paper brittle the way things get when nobody knew they needed saving. A long roll of butcher paper with a family tree drawn across it by hand. Still legible. Still enough.

He probably stood there a long minute just looking at it. Not saying anything. Just standing with the fact that everything he knew about his own name was written differently on something that almost didn’t survive.

The name wasn’t Patterson.

It was Pace.

That name goes back to 1616. Richard Pace crossed the Atlantic before the Mayflower left the dock, settled on the James River in Virginia and cleared 100 acres by hand. Built a life out of dirt and time. In March of 1622 a young Powhatan man named Chanco, whom Richard had raised in his own home, woke him before dawn and told him the entire Jamestown colony was about to be attacked. Richard didn’t sit with it. He got in a boat and rowed three miles across that river in the dark.

No guarantee he’d make it. No guarantee any of it would work. Just a man who knew what needed doing.

That’s my bloodline. I didn’t know it until recently. I’m still sitting with it.

I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I started getting serious about Bonanza. I just kept coming across these bikes and couldn’t shake the feeling that somebody should be doing something about it.

These weren’t cheap machines. The people who built them in the sixties actually cared. Real steel, real suspension, engineered like a proper motorcycle just smaller. Cycle World covered them. Collectors still track them down today. You don’t get that kind of staying power from something thrown together. You get it when the people building something gave a damn whether anyone was watching or not.

And then it went quiet. Early seventies, squeezed out, and Bonanza just stopped. But the bikes didn’t stop. Walk into the right garage right now and you’ll find one somebody has been working on for years. Their own money, their own weekends, their own time spent on something the rest of the world moved on from a long time ago. The brand went away but it never fully left.

That bothers me. Still does.

I kept coming back to the same question. Why is nobody doing anything about this. Not a cheap version. Not a name on a sticker. Actually doing it right. The way it was done the first time. For the people who never stopped caring about what it was.

And then the butcher paper and the bikes landed in the same place in my head and something I couldn’t put into words before just made sense.

My great grandfather carried that truth through his whole life and let it out quietly at the end trusting it would find its way. My grandfather climbed into a hot attic in Tennessee and brought down a piece of paper that was half gone and kept it. Richard Pace got in a boat in the pitch dark and rowed because it needed to be done.

None of them made a speech. None of them waited for the right moment. They just did the thing because it mattered and they knew it mattered and that was the only reason they needed.

That’s what I think about when this gets hard. And it does get hard.

We’re in Georgia building this back from the ground. Serialized frames, American made, small batches, no shortcuts. The apparel is out now. The frames are being finished right.

I’m not rushing it. Rushing is how you lose the thing you were trying to save. The whole point is doing it the way it should have kept being done. For the brand. For the guys in the garages who kept it alive when nobody else was paying attention.

The butcher paper is still in the family today. The name on it is Pace. The work in front of me is Bonanza and I plan on passing that legacy down to future generations. Not quietly, not on a butcher paper. But boldly, adventurously. That’s why I’m doing this. To pass the legacy through a name.

Bonanza is that name.

Jonathan Ryan Patterson

Steward, Bonanza Mini Bikes™