Here’s the man who doesn’t have any identity. But tonight he has the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Fire Department upset. He has the National Guard called out. Tonight he is somebody. Tonight he has an identity.
— Reverend G. Mansfield Collins, a Watts minister, speaking in the wake of the 1965 riots
As the most reprehensible celebrities in years, it was inevitable that their trek to Bass Lake would draw large crowds of horrified burghers all along the route. In Tracy, a town of about eleven thousand on U.S. 50, people ran out of stores to get a better look. I was standing in an air-conditioned liquor store buying beer when the outlaws rolled through town. Good God Almighty! said the clerk. He rushed to the door, throwing it open to let in a blast of noise and hot air from the street. He stood there for several minutes with his hand on the arm of a customer who moved up beside him. All of downtown Tracy was silent except for the roar of motorcycle engines. The outlaws passed slowly down the main street, as if in review, keeping a tight formation with no talk and strictly dead pan. Then, at the eastern city limit, they accelerated up to sixty-five and roared out of sight.
In Modesto, on U.S. 99 in the Central Valley, there were crowds on the sidewalks and photographers at downtown intersections. Some of the photos later appeared on the Associated Press wire. . . wonderful shots, Independence Day in California, with the natives taking to the hills, done up in the latest West Coast styles.
While the main clusters of outlaws rolled in lawful splendor toward the destination, there were others, late-running stragglers and double-tough independents, who were hustling to catch up. Somewhere near the Manteca turnoff a quartet of Hangmen from El Cerrito came thundering past. They materialized out of traffic in my rear-view mirror. I saw them coming before I heard the noise. . . and suddenly they were right next to the car, filling the sunshine peace of the morning with a roar that drowned out the radio.
Traffic veered to the right as if to make room for a fire engine. In front of me was a station wagon with several children in the back. They pointed excitedly as the hoodlums came past, almost close enough to reach out and touch. The whole line of traffic slowed down; the bikes went by so fast that some people probably thought they’d been buzzed by a low-flying crop duster. But that wouldn’t have bothered anyone for more than an instant. What made the sudden appearance of the outlaws unnerving was the element of intrusion. The Central Valley is healthy, rich-looking farmland. There are hand-painted signs along the road, advertising fresh corn, apples and tomatoes for sale at wooden stands; in the fields tractors moving slowly along the furrows, their drivers shielded from the sun by yellow umbrellas mounted above the seats. It is an atmosphere as congenial to crop-dusting airplanes as to horses and cattle. But not to outlaw motorcyclists: they seemed as out of place as a crowd of Black Muslims at the Georgia State Fair. The sight of these refugees from big-city saloon society running around loose in Norman Rockwell country was hard to accept. It was brazen, unnatural and uppity.
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Were it not for the presence of the unwashed and the half-educated, the formless, queer and incomplete, the unreasonable and absurd, the infinite shapes of the delightful human tadpole, the horizon would not wear so wide a grin.
— Frank Moore Colby, Imaginary Obligations
The Hell’s Angels as a group are often willfully stupid, but they are not without savoir-faire, and their predilection for travelling in packs is a long way from being all showbiz. Nor is it entirely due to warps and defects in their collective personality. No doubt these are factors, but the main reason is purely pragmatic. If you want the cops to leave you alone you have to shake em up, explains Barger. If we make the scene with less than fifteen bikes they’ll always bust us. But if we show up with a hundred or two hundred they’ll give us a goddamn escort, they’ll show a little respect. Cops are like anybody else: they don’t want any more trouble than they think they can handle.