In Memoriam: Alan Paulsen and Clement Salvadori

Alan Paulsen (1947-2026)

Born in Trenton, New Jersey, in the early years of the postwar baby boom, Alan Paulsen started riding on a Fuji Rabbit motor scooter. He rode it to Indiana and back, kicking off a six-decade-long passion for long-distance motorcycle touring. Motorcycling was his great love until his health began to decline in the last few years of his life.

Alan enlisted in the Navy after high school, but a bad motorcycle accident prevented him from making a career of it. Despite injuries from that accident that resulted in chronic pain he endured for the rest of his life, Alan went on to ride more than one million miles on motorcycles, including 300,000 miles on his beloved Tuscana Green 2002 BMW K1200LT.

Following his discharge from the Navy in 1970, Alan moved to Los Angeles, where he studied motorcycle repair and journalism at Trade Tech. He served as Rider’s managing editor from 1981-83. While on staff, he met his wife, Nancy, during an all-female tour test organized by the magazine. Much to Alan’s bafflement, she showed up with a hair dryer and curling iron in her tankbag.

After getting married, Nancy received a Navy ROTC scholarship and they moved to Washington, D.C. Alan worked as a motorcycle courier for the Associated Press, delivering film and documents in the pre-internet days.

Alan and Nancy had three sons, and Alan was a devoted father and husband. After Nancy retired in 2006, they moved to upstate New York. Alan spent as much time as he could riding, averaging more than 20,000 miles per year for the next 15 years. During this time, he wrote many travel stories for Rider and other publications.

Alan rode a motorcycle in all 50 states and almost every Canadian province. Never content to simply hop on an interstate freeway unless unavoidable, he joined an organized tour to Italy and Switzerland and took several trips to Alaska. His first trip to Alaska in 1971 included the unpaved Alcan Highway. His final trip to the 49th state, in 2015, was chronicled in Rider.

For Alan’s travel stories in Rider, he rode loops around the borders of entire states, explored highways from end to end, and traced historic byways. He always followed his curiosity, captured great photographs, and shared interesting observations.

In his final years, pulmonary fibrosis limited Alan’s ability to ride. On April 5, Easter Sunday, he passed away surrounded by his family. He was 78.

Read some of Alan Paulsen’s writing that was published in Rider magazine.

Clement Salvadori (1940-2026)

Clement Salvadori was also a veteran and a motorcyclist for more than 60 years, accumulating more than a million miles on two wheels. Born in Massachusetts, Clem (as he was known) caught the motorcycle travel bug at an early age. While still in high school, he and a friend toured around Europe one summer, Clem on a 1954 NSU 250 and his companion on a BMW 250. They endured crashes, flats, bad weather, and minor misfortunes, but Clem was hooked.

The son of a university professor, Clem earned a degree from Harvard, served as a Green Beret in the U.S. Army, and worked as a diplomat. In the early 1970s, as the Vietnam War was winding down, he spent months traveling around the world by motorcycle, including the legendary “Hippie Highway” through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and India.

Clem began his moto-journalism career in 1975, when Easyriders magazine paid him for a story he had written about riding in Afghanistan. He was living in Boston at the time, driving a taxi and substitute teaching to pay the rent. In 1980, the editor of Road Rider, a motorcycle touring magazine based in California, called and offered him a job: “We don’t pay much, but you can have all the motorcycles you want to ride.” He mailed a few boxes of his belongings to the magazine, hopped on his 1966 BMW R69S, and rode west.

Upon arriving at the editorial offices, he met an attractive woman named Sue. A few years later they were married.

After a few years at Road Rider, a change in ownership led to Clem’s resignation – and a departing bonus that allowed him to ride around Europe for a couple months. In 1988, when Clem and Sue rode up to Laguna Seca for the races, they ran into Denis Rouse, the publisher of Rider. Clem was offered a job, and he began writing two monthly columns: On Touring (which later became Road Tales) and Retrospective, a series of biographies about older motorcycles.

Clem spent the next few decades writing and traveling, with his work published in Rider and in a series of books, including No Thru Road: Confessions of a Traveling Man and 101 Road Tales, a collection of his best columns in Rider. He became a reader favorite, garnering a constant stream of fan mail. Clem and Sue lived in a house that she built from the ground up in Atascadero, California, surrounded by books, cats, and motorcycles.

In January, Sue passed away unexpectedly. Over the next few months, Clem dealt not only with grief but with the aftereffects of a stroke. He passed away on May 1, soon after his 86th birthday.

Read some of Clement Salvadori’s writing that was published in Rider magazine.

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