Ah, Phylo!
Doctor Maz Harris!
Maz approved the HAMC references in a text I wrote for a photographic book some years ago. I knew some of the early English Angels as a kid, including Crazy Charlie, Tiny and the inimitable Goat. Never met Buttons though. Maz was second generation. He was a very bright man. Anyway, I covered some of the topics and questions raised here. Of course, they'd all been covered before, nothing being new under the sun.
If sensationalist reportage of misbehaving bikers had inspired Kramer to make The Wild One several years after the event, it also inspired emulation of the new outlaws at the time by growing numbers of working class youths who dreamed of taking to the open road on the twentieth century version of the horse, like the roving cowboys or outlaws of old to escape stifling small town values and the neo-puritan morality sweeping across Middle America like a brush fire. Jittery state authorities and law enforcement agencies, already on the alert for Communists and Flying Saucers, prepared to defend society against this new threat to The American Way of Life. Many towns and counties enacted special laws aimed specifically at delinquent motorcyclists.
Within two months of Hollister there had been further incidents at another motorcycle sport rally in Riverside, California, provoked by bikers who proudly and loudly proclaimed themselves 'veterans' of Hollister. Responding to public outrage and calls by the League of California Cities for a statewide ban on motorcycle sports meetings, the American Motorcycle Association issued a pious statement assuring Middle America that "only one per cent of motorcyclists are hoodlums and troublemakers". The delighted hoodlums and troublemakers in question quickly adopted the one per cent tag as a badge of honour and '1%er' patches and tattoos have been part of outlaw biker heraldery ever since, as a look at Miller's portraits shows.
As a result of the outrage and fear whipped up by the media, outlaw bikers found themselves persecuted by law enforcement agencies and many of the ghetto gangs disintegrated as their members, tiring of constant shake-downs and fines for petty misdemeanours and trumped up traffic offences, traded their motorcycles to be "As happy as could be…In a home made for three" as the bitter-sweet lyrics of a Rockabilly hit of the mid-50s put it. Diehard ex-members of the defunct Pissed-Off Bastards of Bloomington and the Booze Fighters met up in San Bernadino on March 17 1948 to form a new gang without a name.
A few months later, they adopted 'Hell's Angels' as their gang name and began sporting special patches or 'colours' on the backs of their leather jackets, lending them the appearance of wartime flyers. The colours consisted of a winged deathshead in profile, wearing a leather flying helmet in deference to the connection with wartime flyers. Surrounding the deathshead patch were semi-circular top and bottom 'rockers' reading 'Hell's Angels' and 'San Berdoo' respectively, the latter an abbreviation of San Bernadino as the name was too long to fit.
Colours were initially sewn onto leather jackets but as law enforcement agencies began to pay closer attention to outlaw clubs and as local authorities enacted laws aimed at outlaw bikers and forbidding the public display of such regalia, many members attached their colours to cut-down, sleeveless denim or leather jackets worn over their riding gear. If the need arose, an Angel could remove and conceal his colours in seconds. Some members of other outlaw biker gangs who adopted colours did the same.
A couple of years later, in 1950, the Hell's Angels met up in Fontana, a flyblown stain on the landscape a few miles down the highway from San Bernadino, and formed themselves into the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club, adding a small patch bearing the letters 'MC' to their colours. Hell's Angels and other outlaw gangs of the time with names like Road Rats, Gypsy Jokers and Galloping Gooses also adopted the diamond-shaped '1%er' badge as a supplement to their club colours to show contempt for the AMA declaration and that they were genuine 'righteous outlaws'.
The San Berdoo chapter, which would become one of the roughest and meanest in the history of the Hell's Angels, was joined in 1954 by the Market Street Commandos who became the San Francisco chapter, duly abbreviated to 'Frisco' to fit the bottom rocker, and in 1957 by the Oakland chapter which would become the HAMC's Mother Chapter. As mean as some and meaner than most, the Oakland Hell's Angels were ruled by Ralph "Sonny" Barger who can be credited with overseeing the HAMC's national and international expansion programme throughout the 60s and 1970s. By 1969, the Hell's Angels had chapters on the East Coast, in and around New York, as well as their first foreign chapter in London, England.
Here's another passage relevant to some of the posts here:
Photographs of many outlaw bikers of the 40s and 50s betray a heritage firmly rooted south of the Mason-Dixon Line which is hardly surprising as many of them were the sons of those dispossessed sharecroppers and rednecks who headed West twenty years before. Long, bony bodies looking for something to lean against surmounted by watchful faces bearing the mark of generations of privation and disappointment. World War Two swept away many of the prewar social barriers and prejudices that had stigmatised the migrant workers from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and points South-East. Between 1941 and 1945, they metamorphosed into Californians. Their children had worked in factories or served overseas and many of those who came home had every reason to believe in the New Deal and Homes For Heroes promised by legislation like the GI Bill. To be sure, many returning servicemen did benefit from the GI Bill. GI Joe turned back into Joe Straight and acquired a nuclear family and a nice little house, Norman Mailer was able to become a writer and Paul Newman took acting classes but not everyone got to come to the party.
On the other hand, not everyone wanted to come to the party. Take Arvid Olsen for example. A native of San Bernadino, Olsen was a wild young aviator in command of a fighter squadron nicknamed 'Hell's Angels' fighting with General Chennault's Flying Tigers against the Japanese in China and Burma when the United States officially entered the War after Pearl Harbor in December 1941. When the Flying Tigers were transferred from Nationalist Chinese command to what would become the US 14th Air Force, many of the young mercenaries took an instant dislike to their new commander, refused to play ball, and joined other branches of the service. Olsen threw his lot in with the predominantly British Chindit guerrilla force, flying highly dangerous missions to resupply the Chindits deep inside Japanese-held territory in Burma. Despite several crashes and close shaves, Olsen survived the war and returned home to San Bernadino.
Jobless and without any real direction in life, the ex-fighter pilot did what many veterans were doing. He blew a chunk of his separation pay on the nearest thing he could get to an airplane, a motorcycle, and took to hanging around local bars in the ghetto and going for rides to nowhere with other unemployed and unemployable veterans and young men. As always, the West Coast acted as a magnet for anyone running after a dream or running away from a nightmare. Disaffected war veterans from all over the United States, alienated from society for all sorts of reasons, were no exception and many flooded into California. Short of money and work, they gravitated to low rent places like San Bernadino and Oakland where they had no trouble fitting in and making new friends amongst the local veterans and assorted misfits.
Congregating in flyblown bars and roadhouses with rickety juke boxes and lived-in waitresses, chugging cheap booze and benzedrine, their motorcycles parked outside in the buzzing heat, it wasn't long before these lost young men began forming gangs with self-descriptive names like Market Street Commandos, Pissed-Off Bastards of Bloomington and Booze Fighters. Like any ghetto gang culture, the emergent outlaw biker culture offered them a respite from the tedium of their directionless existence, a chance to belong someplace on their own terms, someplace where they made the rules, where they could walk tall for a change. It was also an escape from the working class subservience of their parents' generation and from the streetwise Black and Pachuco culture of the ghettos with which these white boys could never compete on equal terms. Ripping it up on cycles was their thing, gunning their motors, sweeping out of their reservations en masse on their iron horses like latterday marauding Indians, hellbent on showing Joe Straight what was what.
Arvid Olsen certainly rode out of San Bernadino with some of these gangs but he never actually joined them nor is he supposed to have been directly involved in the formation of the Hell's Angels gang in his home town in 1948 despite his link with the name. As well as Olsen's squadron, other wartime American flying units appropriated the Hell's Angels tag including the US 8th Air Force's 303rd Bombardment Group which was the first bomber unit to complete three hundred missions over enemy-held territory from bases in England during World War Two. The 303rd had adopted the nickname in honour of the crew of Hells Angels, one of their B17 Flying Fortress bombers, who had successfully flown forty-eight missions without mishap or casualties, like the crew of the more famous Memphis Belle. Some accounts of the origins of the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club suggest that ex-members of the 303rd were founder members. Who knows? The nickname had been widely popular with American aviators in various operational theatres before and during World War Two, since the release of Hell's Angels, Howard Hughes' 1930 movie epic about World War One fighter pilots in France.
Hollywood's influence touches all spheres of American life and culture and combat flying is no exception. Neither is motorcycle sub-culture. Two very distinct biker cultures emerged in the United States in the 50s in the wake of Stanley Kramer's seminal schlock-horror biker movie The Wild One which appeared in 1954 with Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin playing rival bike gang chiefs. Based on the Hollister Riot after Kramer read an article about the new outlaw biker phenomenon in Harper's Bazaar, the movie is rather tame by later standards but some idea of the moral climate prevalent in Eisenhower's America can be gained from Brando's touching admission that he himself found its violence disturbing at the time. In truth, The Wild One was only ever a bland exercise in name-calling, punctuated by some sub-spaghetti western fisticuffs between Brando's catatonically laid-back Johnny and Marvin's far grittier Chico but Marvin and Brando transcended the mediocrity of the movie to cast the die for bike boy chic.
For generations to come, rebels would adopt Brando's black leather cool or Marvin's roughneck grunge. The style and attitude of Marvin's character, the hard-drinking, rebellious brawler Chico in his dirty denim and his leather flying helmet and goggles, was far closer to the contemporary American outlaw biker scene than Brando's Johnny whose carefully crafted black leather look belonged more to dimly-lit homosexual bars and beat clubs than the ghettos and roadhouses of California. Not that Johnny completely fails to convey a sense of juvenile alienation amd deprivation to the audience: during his beating at the hands of a mob of vigilante townsfolk in buzzcuts and cardboard suits, his disdainful observation "my old man could hit harder than that!" imports a rare whiff of authentic tenement slum into the action.
But Marvin's unshaven, boozed-up biker on his bobbed Harley-Davidson or 'Hog', stripped of all but its essential parts, was more real than Brando's slightly camp tough on his distinctly un-American factory-fresh British Triumph Thunderbird. So much so that Frank Sadilek, President of the Oakland Hell's Angels from 1955 to 1962, rode all the way to a charity auction in Hollywood to buy Chino's blue-and-yellow hooped teeshirt and wore it in homage to Marvin's portrayal of the quintessential outlaw biker until it rotted off his body. But some cats dug Brando's look: the Outlaws Motorcycle Club based their distinctive Jolly Roger emblem - crossed conrods and pistons surmounted by a red-eyed deathshead - on the device painted on the back of the jacket worn by Brando.
Even though Marvin seemed to play his rôle for laughs at various points throughout Kramer's B flick, he possessed an edge lacking in Brando, a raw danger that eclipsed the latter's subtler insolence. Unlike Marvin, Brando never got a chance to paddle out to sea at night in rubber dinghy with a sharpshooter rifle to snipe at Japanese positions further along the beach. Marvin had served in the Pacific with the US Marines and was typical of the kind of individual who gravitated to the outlaw biker lifestyle in the 40s and 50s. His friend, the film maker John Boorman who cast him in various rôles, said of him: "He was in some horrific battles through the islands and on Saipan his whole platoon was virtually wiped out. All the rest of his life, I thought, he wanted to represent his dead comrades, the ordinary grunts. In every film he made, he was acting out those guys and their world. It was almost like a responsibility he felt he had". Had Marvin not fallen into acting when he came home from the war, his real-life passion for motorcycles, boozing, and brawling might well have led him into one of the outlaw bike gangs in the sprawling suburbs of Frisco or LA. Perhaps the respect that outlaw bikers like Sadilek had for the Hollywood star sprang from an instinctive recognition of Marvin as a kindred spirit.
Don't get me wrong, people! I love Marlon Brando. I interviewed him once and he was one of the few actors who really bowled me over. But as the text shows, I agree with Phylo's recommendation to look closely at Marvin and his gang in the movie. Mind you, the immortal line of the screenplay, for me, isn't that bit when Mary Murphy asks Johnny Rentboy what he's rebelling against: "Whatcha got?" It's that "My old man could hit harder than that" line, delivered with an audible sneer. The showroom-fresh 6T was a bit soft as well. The bike Johnny should have been riding in the film rather than on the backlot for the publicity stills was the bobbed Matchless proto-desert sled... I wonder how much Edward Turner paid for that bit of seminal product placement! LOL!
An article on a HAMC website states:
The former Squadron Leader of the 3rd Pursuit Squadron "Hell's Angels" American Volunteer Group (AVG), Arvid Olsen, was the only known person with specific military lineage to an actual unit which bore the name Hell's Angels that was affiliated with the foundation of the HAMC, which occurred in Fontana, California in March 1948. Arvid Olsen was an associate of the founders of the HAMC, he never attempted to or became a member of HAMC.The AVG, or more famously known "The Flying Tigers" (the name is credited to a United Press correspondent named McGrath for a article written on 26 December 1941) were a secret United States military operational entity, authorized and approved by then President Franklin D. Roosewelt, on 23 December 1940, under conditions of a SECRET Letter of Approval: refer to official file 150, FDR Library, Memoranda 1941.
Were I writing the text now, I would be more precise in saying that Olsen's involvement with the Chindits came later on, when he flew with the 1st US Air Commando, specially formed to airlift the 2nd Chindit Expedition into Burma, subsequently providing the Chindit raider columns with air cover, supplies and evacuating wounded and sick men. The 2nd Chindit Expedition involved one of the largest airborne invasions in history, second only, I believe, to Operation Market Garden. The much-discussed Nepalese Victoria Cross winner Tul Bahadur Pun VC was part of the gliderborne element. There were no men dropped by parachute although resupply missions involved parachutes. Olsen, on the other hand. would have been strafing Japanese ground forces, the local Japanese airforce having been effectively destroyed on the ground in advance the 2nd Chindit Expedition.
I think the original HAMC was probably inspired by the 1930s film and references to the two squadrons mentioned in my essay. It's a great name. Anyway, that's enough extraneous information for now. I'm off to bed...
PK