If anyone gave one of my dealers a hard time, I was swift to use my type of justice on them.
Satan’s Choice member FRANK (HIPPY) HOBSON on life in Yorkville
The Satan’s Choice had seventy or so members in Toronto by early 1968, which put them on a par locally with the Wild Ones, well ahead of the Para-Dice Riders, which had thirty members, and far ahead of the once mighty Black Diamond Riders, which had dwindled to fifteen mainly older bikers. The Vagabonds remained the city’s dominant club, with a hundred members, many of whom could be found hanging around in Yorkville.
In the late 1960s, Yorkville was close to bursting on weekends with middle-class kids wearing granny glasses, love beads, paisley shirts, sandals and bell bottoms. Many were “commuter hippies”—in from the suburbs to buy marijuana and LSD and feel groovy until classes or work started up again on Monday.
At The Purple Onion coffee house, they listened to Buffy Sainte-Marie, who wrote “Universal Soldier” in the basement there. At The Mynah Bird there were go-go dancers in a glass booth, a pet bird that once appeared on The Johnny Carson Show, X-rated film screenings, and Neil Young and Rick James playing in the house band. For a limited time, a cook did his basting and frying wearing nothing but a chef’s hat. At the Riverboat, hippies fawned over Young, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, the Staple Singers and Phil Ochs. Sometimes Bob Dylan, Jack Nicholson and Eric Clapton were in the audience.
For the most part, the bikers and hippies happily co-existed, since the hippies wanted to buy drugs and the bikers wanted to sell them, as well as have sex with hippie girls. For Guindon, trips to Yorkville were a bit like visits to the zoo. It was interesting but not threatening, and he didn’t feel the urge to partake in any poetry readings or play the bongo drums. “I wore my big boots, my leathers, my patch. They did their thing and we did our thing.”
Flying the Satan’s Choice flag regulary in Yorkville was a biker fittingly nicknamed “Hippy,” who was originally from Kingston, Ontario, and whose real name was Frank Hobson. Later in life, he wrote down his thoughts on the road that led him to the Choice and Yorkville. Like many bikers, his childhood included a violent father: “My father was an alcoholic who was not afraid to slap me around. I remember some of those beatings when I was very young. Some of those were for very minor things and some were for things I had never done.”
Hippy’s father had a warm side too, and he sometimes took his son fishing. He was an army veteran and, like many a biker father, wanted his boy to grow up tough:
One day when I was about nine years old, a classmate was bullying me outside of our home. I was scared and did not want to fight back. My father saw what was going on and shouted out from the window, “You either fight him or I will tan your ass.” I punched the kid in the face and he started crying and ran home. From that time, I never backed down from a fight. That was both a blessing and a curse.
Like Guindon, Hippy found himself protecting his mother from his father at home:
My father’s abusive behaviour toward my mother and I came to an end when I was around seventeen years old. He would often come home drunk and push my mother around. On one occasion, I went into the kitchen and grabbed a pair of scissors and stood up to him. He cursed at me, saying, “I’ll kick your face in with my boots!” He had big, double-soled army boots and I was not looking forward to having them in my face. I was lucky; he backed down and went upstairs to sleep. From that day, my father left my mother alone. We never talked about it.
Hippy often wondered about the roots of his father’s rage, and one day he felt he found the answer. “My grandfather was gassed in World War I and he was never the same when he returned home.” The pain kept getting worse, and when Hippy’s father was five years old, he watched his father cut his throat on the kitchen floor. “My father never told me about his father committing suicide and I never brought it up.”
Hippy travelled to Windsor in 1968 in the hopes of landing a production line job at Chrysler. He succeeded and bought a customized BSA. It wasn’t a Harley but it was the next best thing: chopped, awash in chrome and painted candy apple red and tangerine orange with “Hippy” written on the gas tank. “I did this so that it would be easier for me to pick up girls. The hippie girls back then were totally freaked out with bikers.”
He became a striker for the Choice in Windsor, who had patched over from a local club called the Heathens in 1967. Its two dozen members were a tightly knit group. Strikers were gofers for full members, on call twenty-four hours a day to do menial jobs like scrub the clubhouse and fetch cigarettes and hamburgers. “Striking was likely the most difficult thing I have gone through. The problem with striking is that it demoralizes you. It breaks you down. There is really no ‘you’ anymore. It was like the basic training I took in the air force but worse.”
The Windsor Satan’s Choice was very close to the Outlaws in Detroit, which allowed the Detroit Outlaws free rein to treat Choice strikers any way they wanted. Once, Hippy was in Jackson Park in downtown Windsor with his girlfriend when he was spotted by a Detroit Outlaw. “He told me to get on his bike and said he was following a Queensman. The Queensmen in Windsor were rivals of the Choice in Windsor. He turned around and handed me a gun, telling me to shoot the Queensman when we caught up to him. It was my lucky day because we never did catch up to him.”
Three of the Detroit Outlaws—Yankee Tom, Scotty and Walter—actually lived on the Canadian side of the Detroit River in 1968, and often hung out in the Choice clubhouse. That led to Hippy planning a visit across the river with some Outlaws, including the Detroit president, who went by the unlikely name of “Harmony.” But he received a word of caution before setting out. Hippy had long hair and constantly wore black bell-bottomed pants. “I remember my brothers telling me not to go to Detroit with the name ‘Hippy’ and dressed in those bell bottoms. I went anyway.”
During that first trip to meet Detroit Outlaws, Hippy spoke with a Florida Outlaw nicknamed “Crazy,” who was said by the press to have crucified his old lady. Crazy told Hippy that the whole crucifixion thing was a hoax and that the story of her being nailed to an orange tree had been staged for shock value. Exactly how a crucifixion could be faked was not explained. But Crazy proved to be as crazy as the trip would get, and despite his apparel Hippy’s trip to Detroit was a success. “We really hit it off with those guys, and before leaving, they offered me a full patch.”
Hippy decided to stay on with the Satan’s Choice, eventually quitting his job at Chrysler and moving into an old billiards hall that had been converted into a clubhouse in Windsor’s Westminster district. His bed was a mattress atop one of the clubhouse’s many pool tables.
He was now a full-time drug dealer, driving to Detroit to buy kilos of marijuana and thousands of hits of LSD for sale in Yorkville. Sometimes Hippy brought the drugs into Toronto himself. Other times, he had them flown in from Detroit. “If it was weed, I would clean it up and bag it. I would distribute it to my people on the street, who were all hippies. I gave them a good commission for selling my stuff and I protected them. I would go around the next day and collect my money and give them more product. They were happy and so was I.”
Hippy had a girlfriend who used to turn tricks for him in Detroit. Tired of that scene, he took her to Toronto to try their luck, where she caught the eye of a Black Diamond Rider. He offered Hippy a bike and some cash for her. The bike was flush with chrome and metal flake, radiating drug dealer success. Hippy jumped at the offer. “I left Toronto with an amazing custom-built Panhead, five hundred cash and no girlfriend. Best deal I ever made.”