Joe Ryan and the Service School

Throughout Harley-Davidson’s history, many individuals have had an outsized impact on the company that reverberates long after they’ve gone. Joe Ryan was one of those people. His influence can still be felt rumbling around the halls at the company’s Milwaukee headquarters and in every dealership in the world. High praise for a man who retired in 1963 and passed away three years later. 

During World War I, in 1917, Harley- Davidson opened the Quartermaster School, which taught American soldiers the ins and outs of their new military-issued Harley® motorcycles. After the conflict ended, the company rechristened it the Service School, and continued offering a similar technical training to dealers, service technicians, and others. Today, it’s known as Harley-Davidson University® and will celebrate its 100th anniversary next year. Joe Ryan joined H-D soon after the Service School’s inception, and spent his lengthy career guiding and refining it.  

Born in Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania in 1893, he joined the U.S. Army during World War I. In 1919, H-D hired Ryan as a factory serviceman.  

Harley-Davidson factory servicemen had quite the job in the 1910s and 1920s. It was an era when the automobile and motorcycle hadn’t yet conquered the roadways, but were well on their way. The transition from horse and buggy to motorized vehicles defined Ryan’s earliest years with Harley-Davidson. In 1920, for instance, the Pennsylvania State Police bought 70 Harley-Davidson® motorcycles for its use. They only had one problem: Up until that time, the troopers had been mounted on horses. Few of the men selected for the new motorcycle division had ever ridden one, let alone patched a tire or repaired an engine.  

That’s where Joe Ryan and the Service School came in. Five troopers were selected to come to Milwaukee for a crash course in motorcycles. After training, they returned to Pennsylvania to teach the rest of the new motorcycle unit.  

From 1917 until the early 1980s, a “student record” was created for each person who came to school. Not much bigger than a 3 x 5-inch notecard, the documents contain a wealth of information. H-D Archives still possesses the records for the first five motorcycle-mounted Pennsylvania State Police troopers: Thomas Martin, Paul Worcester, B. G. Walters, Nevins Sees, and Joseph O’Boyle.  

Of the troopers, only Walters had any serious time on a motorcycle.  

Ryan and the other factory serviceman, Jay McDonald, had just a few days to educate the group and recorded their thoughts on the Pennsylvanians’ performances on the card. Worcester “would have made an excellent salesman for some dealer.” On the other hand, they felt they couldn’t get O’Boyle interested in the technical work.  

The five troopers returned to the Keystone State to instruct the others, but they didn’t go alone. Harley-Davidson sent Ryan and McDonald to assist, too. This was a normal job for the servicemen. They sometimes took the Service School on the road by training an organization’s employees on site, including overseas. In 1925, Ryan became the first Harley-Davidson employee to visit Japan, where he taught new motorcycle mechanics in Tokyo.  

Joe Ryan’s career with the company stretched 43 years, most of which he spent as Harley-Davidson’s Service Manager. Under his watch, thousands of technicians passed through the Service School. The Harley-Davidson Archives’ photograph collections contain hundreds of images of these classes. In many, you can spot Ryan tucked in among his students. 

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