He only took his cane to me once. I hit him with a right and down he went. He never tried that again…You had to be careful with him. Those canes were thick.
BERNIE GUINDON on fighting a disabled biker
As a teenaged father, Guindon supported his young family by hoisting cattle hides on and off an assembly line in a tannery. He was seldom home, and when he was there, he was often impatient and abusive. That’s what Teresa heard in retrospect, growing up, although she was just a baby at the time. “I confronted him years later,” Teresa said. “He doesn’t remember a lot of it. Some of it he does.”
In 1963, Guindon scored the motherlode for a high school dropout in Oshawa: a union job at General Motors. Suddenly he was doing better financially than his father ever had. The couple and baby Teresa moved into a nice brick bungalow on tree-lined Browning Avenue, edging their way out of Oshawa’s troubled south end.
Parenthood and life on an assembly line were helping move Guindon up in the world, but they were also leaving him supremely bored. He started up a new motorcycle club called the Phantom Riders and began obsessing about how to make it better. While the name had a certain coolness, the club’s crest of a ghost riding a chopper looked like something a grade-school kid might draw. “We were saddled with the worst-looking crest in Ontario,” he said.
Phantom Riders rode Japanese bikes, BSA Triumphs and Nortons, but many of their bikes were old police-issue, American-made Harleys. Guindon wasn’t troubled by his gang riding Harley Panheads that were once used by police to chase criminals, including some of his club members. “If you painted it, who would know it was a cop bike?”
Guindon began work on a custom chrome fantasy bike, built out of a 1953 Harley-Davidson Panhead. He salvaged some of the parts from old army bikes and lovingly coaxed them back into service. The twin front lights were from the local GM plant and had originally been intended for a Pontiac Grande Parisienne. He did much of the work on the bike inside the GM machine shop. “It took me all winter to do it,” Bernie said. “I had to go everywhere to find parts and get them chromed. The chrome shop was in Toronto.” His friend Vince Carducci from the Para-Dice Riders in Toronto painted Guindon’s new ride a metallic tangerine colour, offset by gold plate and chrome everywhere else.
Guindon enjoyed the attention and feeling of power that his fantasy-come-true brought him. He had come a long way since he and Jack were scared kids hiding out from their father in a junkyard. Now he was front and centre on the street where he used to live, atop a one-of-a-kind, badass, otherworldly creation that was unmistakably his own. The fact that his father hated motorcycles made the feeling all the better. “People would say, ‘Geez, that looks like a wild thing.’ ” Guindon agreed and named his ride “The Wild Thing.” (This was before The Troggs’ hit song “Wild Thing.”) Guindon cut an impressive figure as he looked out between its high-rise handlebars and over its ridiculously extended front forks. “I used to love riding that thing,” he said. “Going around corners, it was like a transport truck. On a straight line, it was great. The seat was cozy. I was king of the road.”
When not on the road, the Phantom Riders honed their fighting skills in a “fight club” Guindon ran out of the basement of his new home. The basement often hosted fellow workers from GM, as Guindon tested them to see if they were club-worthy. There was a heavy bag, a speed bag, and a ring for fighting with a concrete floor to fall on, if you took a hard shot to the chin. The first rule of Guindon’s basement biker fight club was to always be on guard, for there was no medical care and little sympathy for anyone starched with a hard punch.
Canadian anthropologist Daniel R. Wolf described outlaw bikers as an urban, industrial, bohemian subculture generally drawn from the lower middle class. “If the labourer is a young man in search of himself, he will find nothing in his self-image at work that will excite him; he had best look elsewhere,” Wolf wrote in The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers. “Men who are chained to these circumstances share a compelling desire to escape.”
That certainly described Guindon’s basement fight-club regulars, who included Carmen Neal, the club’s Oshawa vice-president, whose temper often got the better of him. “I had to put him in his place,” Guindon said. “He was okay. He settled down.”
There was also Reginald Robert (Reg) Hawke, an alcoholic with a massive upper body and stumps for legs, who walked with canes and drove a customized tricycle. His short temper was made worse whenever someone called him “Shorty.” Hawke fought by his own rules, which included his personal brand of kendo. “He only took his cane to me once,” Guindon recalled. “I hit him with a right and down he went. He never tried that again…You had to be careful with him. Those canes were thick.”
Hawke served as the club’s first secretary treasurer, which meant he was in charge of picky things, like remembering anniversaries and communications. It was an important job—bikers are particularly sensitive about anniversaries. Many had had birthdays and other key dates repeatedly spoiled when they were children and still craved a little recognition.
Guindon’s wife, Veronica, hated conflict. She even had trouble returning defective goods to the store. But even she had her limits, and she felt she had to do something to protect her young family from the men who were consuming her husband’s time. “My mother loved him to pieces, regardless of what he did to her,” Teresa said. “My mom gave him an ultimatum: you pick the family or the club. He picked the club.”
Veronica moved to her parents’ home, where Teresa was raised in a God-fearing, sheltered environment. “You’ve got to play it a day at a time and hope the next day is better,” Guindon said, thinking of the lost time with his daughter and the dissolution of his young marriage. At the time, however, he was more a biker than a husband or father. He didn’t dwell on the loss.