Route 66 Cruisers Ambucs - Springfield, MO

What a great night for a build! We can’t wait to give these Trykes to their recipients.

Happy Memorial Day to all our families and friends. We hope you have the opportunity to get out and enjoy the sunshine today.

Hello Facebook friends and family,

My name is Matt Kell and I am one of the founding members of the Route 66 Cruisers Chapter of AMBUCS and l'd like to share a little bit about myself and how I got involved in this great organization.

I was born and raised in El Cajon, California, a suburb twenty minutes outside of San Diego. My family had a four-acre farm where we had a dozen Llamas, dogs, turkeys, rabbits, snakes, and a large aviary with around a hundred birds. Our neighborhood was full of horse ranches where there was plenty of open spaces to ride on bikes, motorcycles, four wheelers, go carts, and scooters. That is where my love of mobility started. It was the eighties and I would go out in the morning and would not get home until dark. We all had so much fun cruising around on our bikes and getting into trouble (Just kidding Mom, we were angels). I couldn’t have imagined a world without my bike. That nightmare came true in 1993 when my parents decided we were moving to Missouri. Uprooting a thirteen year-old from sunny San Diego to a small town of two thousand in Missouri was not my idea of fun. The 250 acre land we moved to may have been good for the Llamas but it was all woods and had no flat surfaces to ride my bike. I was devastated.

Fast-forward to my fortieth birthday. I have an amazing wife that I have been with for almost fifteen years and a ten year-old daughter. My life has been very fortunate but I wasn’t really doing anything to help others. My wife has been involved with many charity organizations in the past and really wanted me to get involved with something. It was right around this time that a long-time friend, Lee Hart, reached out to me about starting up this chapter of AMBUCS. When I heard it was about helping people that don’t have the opportunity that I had to ride bikes and get out there, I knew I had to get involved. The rest is history and it’s been an amazing ride (pun intended) so far and I know it will continue to be.

I looked for pictures of myself as a child on my bike and they just do not exist. We didn't all have cameras with us 24/7 back then.