Reporters picked up the quote with thinly veiled amusement, but it was at least a month before the initial, wild-eyed accounts of the Laconia riot were deflated by first-hand testimony from those without instant access to print. Even the Life article, on careful reading, indicated that many of the rioters acted in self-defense when police and National Guardsmen launched an all-out, indiscriminate attack with tear gas, bayonets, nightsticks, and shotguns firing rock salt and Number 6 birdshot. Many of those arrested in the mop-up didn’t own or ride motorcycles, and a fellow named Samuel Sadowski was sentenced to a year in jail after being arrested in a parking lot where there was no sign of rioting. According to an eyewitness, Sadowski’s only offense was a hasty retreat from the line of fire.* The police used full-bore riot tactics, which they’d been practicing for more than two months. The local police chief, Harold Knowlton, had called up two hundred National Guardsmen, sixty State Troopers and ten Civil Defense volunteers, in addition to his own force of twenty-eight regulars. We practiced for ten weeks in crowd control and riot tactics, said the chief. But we did it undercover. We didn’t want to challenge them.
* Cycle World magazine
Shore nuff he didn’t. The small army he trained was only for symbolic purposes. Just like the Hell’s Angels — they don’t want to challenge people either, but they manage to get provoked pretty often. One report of the riot quoted a local as saying, Luckily, there happened to be some National Guardsmen training nearby. If it hadn’t been for them, this town would have been a gutted ruin –and there’s no way of telling how many of our women would have been gang-raped, how many of our citizens might have been killed by those rotten bums on motorcycles. Thank God for the troops!
The Lord was taking good care of Laconia that night; his troops came in and shot hell out of the place. One of the most critically injured was a photographer named Robert St. Louis, who was shot in the face while trying to take pictures. Of the seventy reported injuries, sixty-nine were on the enemy side.* Life quoted a seventeen-year-old boy as saying: They yanked me out of a car and knocked me bow-legged. . . then one cop stood on my head while another put handcuffs on. Even the featured victim of the riot, a barber named Armand Baron, whose car was burned by rioters, attributed his injuries to the forces of the Almighty. While trying to flee he was hit in the mouth by a police billy and slammed on the hip by a Guardsman’s rifle butt.
* The same casualty pattern prevailed in the Watts riot in August. Of the thirty-four killed, thirty-one were Negroes.
The Laconia riot was one of the most predictable outbursts in the history of civil chaos. The main event of that weekend was either the forty-fourth Annual New England Tour and Rally (as reported in Life) or the twenty-sixth running of the New England Motorcycle Races (according to the National Observer). Other promoters had different names for it: The AMA called it a 100-Mile National Championship Road Race. But by any name it was a huge, traditional motorcycle gathering. Nonracing cyclists know it as the New England Gypsy Tour, and it is one of those scenes they all like to make. The idea is about the same as any Hell’s Angels run, but on a much bigger scale. Laconia, with a population of fifteen thousand in the winter and forty-five thousand in the summer, attracts anywhere from fifteen to thirty thousand motorcyclists for the race weekend.
They have been an annual event since 1939, a year after the Belknap Gunstock Recreation Area was built outside Laconia as a winter ski run and summer campground. William Sheitinger, from nearby Concord, is a founder of both the American Motorcycle Association and the Laconia races. The races were not held in 1964, because of a riot the previous year.
Anybody who knew anything about the event could predict to the hour that a riot would take place [again], said Warren Warner, manager of the county-owned Belknap area. They rioted here before, but nobody saw it because it was away from town. We had seventy local and state police here, but they took a look at the mob and decided not to do anything at all. The cyclists threw cherry bombs, swung knives and chains, and threw beer cans at the police. We had fires started, buildings burned, the chair lift started in the middle of the night and wrecked, and picnic tables chopped up for kindling. The people in town who wanted those races weren’t around and didn’t want to be around. I tried to discuss the riots with them, but there was always the rebuttal that ‘nobody saw em, so what’s the difference. . .’