Man Buried Riding His Harley Davidson
84-year old Billy Standley of Mechanicsburg, Ohio, who recently died of lung cancer, was buried straddling his Harley Davidson motorcycle in a casket made of Plexiglas and plywood. According to his family, it was a funeral he started planning 18 years ago.
“This was his dream,” said one of his daughters, Dorothy Brown.
David Vernon, director of the Skillman, McDonald and Vernon Funeral Home in Mechanicsburg, said that, when Standley first asked him about it, Vernon gave him one condition:
“I told him, ‘I have no problem doing this for you, but I don’t want you to come off that motorcycle.’ ”
So Standley and his sons designed a brace that hooked into the bike and led up his back to surround his rib cage. Five years ago, Standley went before the Champaign County Board of Health, which told him he’d have to come up with a special vault and drain all the fluids out of the bike before he could be buried with it.
A company in Springfield designed a modified septic tank for a vault. He bought three plots in a cemetery outside Mechanicsburg, next to where his wife, Lorna, is buried, so there would be enough land to bury him.
Standley and his sons also designed his casket. They painted the wood bright green, like the fields Bill imagined riding through for eternity. They painted the floor black with a single white stripe, like the highway that would take him wherever he was headed after this life.
“He lived to ride,” said his son Roy Standley.
His life was the stuff of legends.
