They fired me and then they said they’d give me back my job, if I quit riding my bike to work.
BERNIE GUINDON
Formalizing a status that had never been in doubt, Guindon was voted national president of the Satan’s Choice at age twenty-two. The title placed him squarely on the radar of ambitious police officers. His club members also made themselves hard to miss. They travelled in a pack that included—aside from the bikes and the snazzy, plastic, glow-in-the-dark grinning devil patches on their backs—a green 1948 Packard hearse, complete with a coffin in the back. For a time, a dummy took up residence in the coffin. It never doubled as a beer cooler, as some suspected. “It just blew people’s minds,” Guindon recalled.
He was a commanding presence, despite standing no more than five foot nine and weighing about 150 pounds. Sometimes he travelled in a black 1956 Cadillac stretch limo with his 350-pound, wildly bearded second-in-command, Big Jack Olliffe, also known to members as “Bear.” Though he was no fitness enthusiast, he knew how to fight, which helped in meting out discipline. Despite Big Jack’s considerable girth, he’d had enough martial arts training to boot a tall man in the chin.
The Choice might look unkempt and out of control, but they did have some rules. “You could buy hot [bike] parts but you couldn’t steal them,” Guindon said. “There were a lot of bike thefts. Parts were expensive and they weren’t plentiful. You used to have to order them right from Harley-Davidson.”
Another rule was more an attempt to stop fights than legislate morality. “You couldn’t come on to another guy’s old lady.” That rule wasn’t carved in stone, however. In one extreme case, a biker contracted a social disease from the old lady of another biker. The bikers’ friendship carried on, and the woman departed the scene.
Guindon was strongly anti-drug at this point. He beat and expelled members for any illegal substance use. Eventually, the rules were relaxed and only needles were prohibited, unless they were medically prescribed. Membership was closed to any current or former police officers or prison guards. Rules also forbade homosexuality and repeated excessive drunkenness.
Members also had to have a motorcycle on the road by the Victoria Day weekend, the third week of May. In most of Canada that marked the start of riding season, which continued until Labour Day. The mileage would be noted on both dates, and a club member who hadn’t racked up serious travel could expect to lose his patch. “If he didn’t put any miles on his bike, he’s out,” Guindon said. “You’re not a biker. You’re a wannabe.”
For Satan’s Choice members, those bikes had to be Harley-Davidsons, except for first-year strikers, who were allowed to ride British Nortons, Triumphs and BSAs. Under no circumstances was anyone connected to the club allowed to be seen atop a Japanese motorcycle. They might be good bikes, but they were alternately associated with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the establishment and the cringe-worthy “Nice Guys Ride Hondas” ad campaign.
One rule mattered more than all others: members couldn’t be rats. Nothing was simpler or more important than that. They couldn’t co-operate with police to deprive someone of his or her freedom, even if that person was an enemy. Members could beat or even kill someone and not violate club rules, but they couldn’t rat on anyone under any circumstances. Even associating with a rat was trouble. Sponsoring someone for membership who turned out to be a rat meant the sponsor would be lucky to escape with a one-month suspension and a ban from holding club offices.
The thrill of roaring about in a pack while wearing a big devil’s head patch proved to be too much adrenalin for some new members. Guindon found himself pressured to enter skirmishes created by new Satan’s Choice members whose shiny new patches made them feel ten feet tall and invincible. “We tried to stop those guys from fighting the small clubs, but we couldn’t.”
The club didn’t have a clubhouse yet, so they met in the basement of a home on Colborne Street in Oshawa. It was hard for neighbours to miss members as they rode in. Hawke sported a six-inch beard cut like a Pharaoh’s. Vice-president Carmen Neal had a nasty scar across his nose that made the violence in his past impossible to ignore. A member named Puff wore his devil patch on the back of a fur coat.
The Choice strived for attention but bristled when they got too much. Guindon felt that an Oshawa cop named Forgette was watching them all too closely and going out of his way to make life miserable. The constable was stopping Choice vehicles for making too much noise or not having working signals or other violations the Choice president considered petty. One day, Forgette hit Guindon with both a traffic ticket and a challenge. “If you want to get even for this, we can duke it out in the ring at the [boxing] club,” the cop offered.
When Guindon agreed to the bout, Forgette added, “I think it’s only fair to warn you that I was a pretty good boxer in the navy.” Guindon didn’t know anything about Forgette being some kind of navy boxing champion. He did know that he badly wanted to give him a righteous beating. “He was a bully. He’d beat the kids up with the billy [club].”
They met at the Cedardale community centre in Oshawa. Guindon handled him easily and, sensing that victory was imminent, began to have fun and prolong the bout. “I just played with him.” After that, Guindon didn’t miss an opportunity to taunt the officer. “I’d meet him downtown. I’d say, ‘For-shit, isn’t it?’
“He’d say, ‘You know it’s Forgette.’ I’d say, ‘That’s what I said. For-shit.’ He’d get fucking mad.”
One summer afternoon, Forgette showed up in a cruiser outside Guindon’s Browning Avenue bungalow. According to Guindon, Forgette sucker-punched him and in response he immediately shifted into a fighting stance, popping him with three straight shots and then dropping to the ground on top of him. Forgette’s partner came to his rescue, pulling Guindon to his feet and handcuffing him. He spent the next three months in the Guelph jail that had once held Jack, serving an assault sentence. Upon his release, Guindon returned to work at GM, but the mood had soured considerably. Company executives didn’t like the way he rode his Harley to work instead of a GM car or how he wore his Satan’s Choice crest into the plant. They particularly didn’t like how some GM workers were finding their way into his club. Had they known that a Grande Parisienne headlamp lit the road for Guindon’s Wild Thing, they wouldn’t have liked that either. “They fired me and then they said they’d give me back my job, if I quit riding my bike to work. It was my only way of getting to work. I told them to stuff the job up their ass.”
Contrary to the popular image of boozing bikers, Guindon defied his father’s example and remained a strict teetotaller. “When we were kids, we used to steal booze from my dad. I was a bad drunk. I knew at a very early age that booze and I don’t mix. I got drunk and stupid. Fighting. I always felt bad the next day,” he said, then hinted at the discipline that allowed him to stay on top of his unruly club: “If you want to get respect from people, you’ve got to respect yourself.”
Boxing was another rebellion of sorts against his father, who kicked his way through many fights. Bernie never used his feet in a fight. His fists were enough, and he continued to get better with them. He rode the Wild Thing to gyms where greats like George Chuvalo, Clyde Gray and Muhammad Ali trained, such as the Lansdowne Boxing Club in west-end Toronto and Sully’s Boxing Gym at Dupont and Dufferin Streets, downtown.
At Sully’s, visitors could expand their nostrils with the sweat of the greats and the not-so-greats, as the club didn’t have air conditioning or showers. The air at the Lansdowne Boxing Club wasn’t so pungent, thanks to several live-in cleaners. “There were a lot of old guys staying there overnight,” Guindon said. “They cleaned up.” A sign posted by the pay phone warned that police might be listening in on calls.
Middleweight boxer Spider Jones had served a two-year stint for robbery at the Millbrook provincial jail, near Peterborough. While inside, he’d heard of Guindon’s tough reputation as a street fighter. “Bernie was a legend in the joint,” he said.
Jones had an unsettling feeling the first time he saw Guindon ride up to Sully’s on the Wild Thing. He had had some nasty clashes with racist bikers while growing up in Windsor and East Detroit. “There was a lot of shit going on then, back in the 60s, racial stuff,” said Jones, who is black. “I used to fight bikers a lot.” Since getting out of jail, Jones had been living upstairs at the club. “I remember him coming in on his big chopper,” Jones said. “I didn’t know what to expect.”
Jones was pleasantly surprised. “When I first met Bernie, we just hit it right off,” he said. “Bernie didn’t give a shit about your colour. He was a gentleman. I know he was a biker, but he was a gentleman.” Guindon didn’t fit with the bikers’ beer-swilling image, which Jones also appreciated. “I was a teetotaller too.”
Sully’s was a pure boxing gym, not a fitness centre with a few punching bags, and Guindon loved it. “You knew you were in a club. It smelled like sweat. You knew there were guys working out in that club.”
Guindon wanted tough, high-level sparring partners, and Jones was able to fill that role. He showed Guindon a different style of fighting that was becoming popular at the time. “He was totally different, like Muhammad Ali,” Guindon said. “Moved around.”
Jones outweighed him by twenty pounds and was good enough to win three Golden Glove championships and eventually turn pro. Even with his size advantage, he felt he had to bring his A game into the ring with Guindon or suffer the consequences. “He was a tough guy, a helluva fighter,” Jones said. “He was very serious.” Most of the time, Guindon got the better of him, Jones said. “He was a natural fighter.”
Jones considered him “a stone warrior” whose power belied his smallish stature. “He had a lot of power and he could wear you down. He liked to hit to the body. He would keep coming at you. He knew how to slip and slide and counter…Boy, he could bring it. He’d get in your kitchen big time. He’d make you feel like you had eaten some bad food.”
Guindon also spent time in the ring with Clyde Gray, who was moving toward boxing’s top level. “When we used to spar, I hit him with some good shots,” Guindon said. “I didn’t hold my punches. He didn’t like that. He thought he should be the only guy to do the hitting. A lot of pros are like that…He was a jabber. Right hand. An all-round good fighter as far as I was concerned.”
Long-time Canadian heavyweight champion George Chuvalo was considerably bigger than Guindon, so they didn’t get into the ring together. Still, Chuvalo liked what he saw when Guindon rode in to train. He called Guindon a “good stiff banger,” whose big punch was his left hook. Chuvalo already knew plenty about left hooks, since he possessed a tenderizing one of his own. They both also shared a no-nonsense, in-your-face style. “I don’t remember him going all over the ring like Muhammad Ali,” said Chuvalo, who fought Ali in two epic losses that went the full distance.
Instead of dancing about, Guindon pressured forward with a non-stop, old-school attack. He was happy to trade punches, with the hope of finding chin space for his left hook. His right hand also had stopping power, but it was the left hook—showcasing a Satan’s Choice tattoo on the bicep—that routinely rendered opponents horizontal. Chuvalo recalled that Guindon sometimes livened things up with a leaping left hook. That punch seemed to come out of nowhere. “Sometimes you’d get lucky with it,” Guindon said. “Usually the other fighter isn’t looking at a left hook to be thrown at him from that distance. He’s sort of relaxed.” Chuvalo remembered the leaping left hook as being a genuine threat, since boxers are conditioned to expect their opponent to lead with a jab. “He landed it with some accuracy,” Chuvalo said. “It’s a rare punch.”
Like Jones, Chuvalo was impressed that Guindon could be a ferocious competitor and then show genuine respect for his opponent once the punches stopped. Chuvalo maintained that was in the best tradition of his sport. “I think it’s the most dangerous sport,” he said. “There’s a very healthy respect for an opponent.”
The heavyweight wasn’t impressed only with Guindon’s manner in the ring. “He was a decent guy,” he continued. “He wasn’t a wise guy.” Jones agreed: “He was a good mentor. He helped a lot of people.”
Sometimes Guindon drove in from Oshawa with Jack, whose later memories were of the hits he took, rather than any he meted out. One particular blow to the midsection from his brother remained sharp in his mind decades later. “He hit me so hard I stood there in shock,” Jack said. “It was like putting your hand in an electrical socket. A shock went down your whole body.”
When his workouts were over, Guindon often hung around with members of the Satan’s Choice at Webster’s all-night diner at 131 Avenue Road, on the fringes of the Yorkville hippie district. There was cheap food and edgy music like Bob Dylan’s “Gates of Eden” on the tabletop jukeboxes. “They [hippies] were well behaved. You never saw hippies looking for trouble.” On any given night, there was a good chance you’d find bikers from the Vagabonds, Para-Dice Riders and Black Diamond Riders. Often, some of the club leaders would be on hand. “You’d talk to the presidents and try to solve problems,” Guindon said. “If one of our guys was having a problem, you try to settle it before it gets out of hand.”
Jones sometimes dropped by Webster’s too and said he didn’t have any trouble from the all-white motorcycle club members. “I stayed out of their business. Who am I to judge them?” Guindon, he observed, took a live and let live attitude in public. “He [Guindon] didn’t go around intimidating people. As long as you didn’t mess with him.”
One night, Jones was at a Yorkville hangout near Webster’s when half a dozen whites started giving him a rough time. Jones went over to Webster’s, where Guindon was talking with some club members. “I told him what was happening. Bernie came over with some of the guys.” Once they saw Guindon and his friends, the mood dramatically changed and the racist slurs suddenly stopped. “Bernie backed me up that time,” Jones said. “Those guys didn’t want to fight anymore.”
“He didn’t go with the N-word shit,” Jones said. “Nigger calling. He didn’t like that shit…Bernie wasn’t no racist.”
Despite his serious training, Guindon continued to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day. He had smoked from the time he was a kid, back when he could steal them from his father’s bootlegging customers. His father tried to force Bernie to stop by making him inhale until he threw up. Bernie refused to be bullied and his smoking continued.
When smoking caused his fitness to lapse, he could often gut his way through his three- to five-round amateur bouts. If his left hook connected, as it often did, bouts were considerably shorter.
He blamed a lack of sparring partners and not cigarettes for conditioning problems. “I never was in good shape. I didn’t have nobody to spar with.” Dragging his brother into the ring as a sparring partner was frustrating. “Jack would say, ‘Fuck you, I’m not going to go with you. Don’t hit me.’ [I would say,] ‘Jesus Christ, Jack, what do you think I’m here for? You’re in the ring.’ All I’d do is speed punches at him and he’d still get mad because I hit him.”
On one trip into Toronto, Jack forgot his athletic cup and he warned Bernie about it before they stepped into the ring. The sparring set went well for a while, until Bernie lost himself in the action. “He came up with an uppercut and caught me square in the balls,” Jack recalled. “I must have laid there for twenty minutes before they took me to the dressing room. Bernie kept on sparring.” Jack was taken to a doctor in Oshawa, where he was given pills and a courtesy athletic supporter. He couldn’t recall his brother ever saying he was sorry but didn’t really expect it anyway. “I was kinda pissed off, but what can I do?”
Guindon was still training with Monsignor Kelliher in Buffalo as well. One night, he and the priest were in Salt Lake City for a boxing tournament. Guindon was in his club colours and the priest was in his robes.
“Come on, Bernie,” the priest said. “You’re wearing your colours. Don’t be wearing your colours.”
“You wear your colours and I’ll wear my colours and we’ll get along just great,” Guindon replied.