You can beat my brains in. I don’t care. But don’t touch my bike.
DOUG (CHICKLET) MACDONALD of Satan’s Choice
Big Jack Olliffe was fresh out of custody and serving as interim president of the Choice in Guindon’s absence when Canadian moviemakers approached the club with a plan. Producer George Fras and his team wanted to make a truly authentic biker movie using Oshawa as the backdrop. Their low-budget movie The Proud Rider featured twenty-five-year-old former model Arthur Hindle, but they wanted to use members of the Oshawa and Toronto chapters of the Satan’s Choice as extras and saturate the film with their grubby realism. The plan was to use the Satan’s Choice name, and the tag line for their oeuvre was “Tough? You bet your…”
The Toronto Daily Star reported on Saturday, October 3, 1970, that on the first day of shooting, one of the Choice was arrested on an outstanding, unspecified warrant. Journalist Marci McDonald also described how a biker named Crow sported a glass eye diaper-pinned to the front of his jacket while another biker named Lovely Larry dangled an Iron Cross from his ear.
Co-director Walter Baczynsky explained to the reporter another advantage of employing real-life bikers. “Just think how we save on wardrobe and makeup.” It sounded good in theory, but the robust eating habits of Big Jack and his biker brothers caused the film’s budget to balloon by two thousand dollars. Big Jack alone could hoover down six burgers and still find room for a half-dozen doughnuts and a pint of milk. “Half the guys ain’t workin’,” Big Jack explained. “They don’t get to eat too regularly.”
Club members threatened to walk out after they were told they couldn’t have real booze for a party scene, until Big Jack sorted them out. Apparently, he hadn’t learned anything from his time behind bars for beating a man to death. “When they get outta line,” he said, “sometimes I gotta take a swing at them with my helmet.”
The movie was also the screen debut of Pigpen Berry, who was now thirty and sporting a beatnik-style goatee. He still had his Buddy Holly glasses, faraway look and sometimes crazy-shy manner. Big Jack couldn’t keep Pigpen fully under control, but no one really could. Trouble started on set when Pigpen’s clubmates dropped their pants to shock a script girl. True to character, Pigpen needed to top that, so he grabbed a nearby garter snake and bit off its head, then casually put the leftovers in his pocket for a later snack.
Scriptwriter and assistant director Chester Stocki described his mood to journalist Paul King of The Canadian Magazine as, “Scared, scared, scared. Just look at them.” One member explained the club’s leadership in terms that justified Stocki’s mood. “When Bernie went down, Bear was the obvious choice,” he said. “He’s big enough to back up what he says.”
Big Jack described himself to the journalist as a thirty-two-year-old father of sons aged two and nine. He had worked as a truck driver, welder and apprentice mechanic since dropping out of school in Grade 7, when he was fifteen years old. Big Jack sounded a little self-effacing and vulnerable as he explained that he grew his bushy red beard in a conscious attempt to cultivate an image. “I grew it to hide my chins and my baby face,” he told King. “I could get a job tomorrow if I cleaned up a bit and shaved. But I wouldn’t be happy.” The article made no mention of Big Jack beating Kitchener biker Arnold Bilitz to death.
“Don’t call us a gang,” Big Jack continued. “That’s a group with no organization. We’re a club, with a full set of officers. We answer only to ourselves. The Canadian Nazi Party offered us a ten-acre farm in 1967 if we’d agree to protect their political rallies. We told them to shove it. Now I’m not calling us goody-goodies, far from it. We only want to be left alone. But the cops won’t leave us alone. If we went around raping, and terrorizing towns, we’d deserve it. But we don’t. The first night the boys came here for the picture, they all stayed at my house. And just after midnight, we got raided by sixty cops, both local and provincial. A kitchen window was broken, a girl got cut over her eyes, and six of our bikes were confiscated. We hadn’t done a damn thing.”
Also in the cast of extras was Choice clubmate Ted (Blue) Anderson, a twenty-six-year-old on his third marriage who had once run a health club. “I don’t work. My wife doesn’t work. But we get by, by hook or by crook.” Anderson didn’t apologize for the hook and crook part, telling King that he was facing charges of robbery with violence and assault causing bodily harm. “First my club,” he said, explaining his personal values. “Second my bike, and then my wife and kids.”
Then there was twenty-three-year-old David White, who looked a little like General George Custer, with his flowing hair and whiskers. White told King he had spent eight years in English boarding schools and nineteen months in reformatory for assault.
Also on set was twenty-two-year-old Doug (Chicklet) MacDonald, the Toronto chapter president. MacDonald said that he lived in the clubhouse and that nothing made him prouder than his nine-hundred-pound Harley Dresser. “You can beat my brains in. I don’t care. But don’t touch my bike.”
King didn’t interview Giovanni (John) Raso, who was also on set. Raso was impressed as a young teenager by Guindon and joined the club when he grew up. Raso would go on to lead the Loners Motorcycle Club based in York Region, north of Toronto. “I met Bernie in the early 1970s. I always looked up to him. I thought he was a cool guy, a very smart man. Bernie’s Bernie. Bernie doesn’t take shit from anybody.” Guns were becoming a staple in the biker life, but Guindon still preferred to use his fists. “He didn’t have to [carry a gun]. It was a different life back then,” Raso said.
The movie features nice close-ups of Pigpen and Big Jack sans helmets. There are scenes showing bikes on a lawn, bikes running red lights and a bike wipeout. No one expected Ingmar Bergman and no one was disappointed.
The Proud Rider opened strongly in Toronto-area theatres, then crashed like a Harley with a faulty suicide clutch on a tight corner. Critic Clyde Gilmour of the Toronto Daily Star gave it a stomping, calling it a “ramshackle melodrama.” He sniffed, “The Proud Rider, a Canadian movie topping the bill at the Capri, was filmed in Oshawa in the fall of 1970 but kept out of release until now, making it eligible for consideration as one of the worst of 1972.”
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On the West Coast, Choice member Ken Goobie was working behind the scenes to make connections with the Satan’s Angels Motorcycle Club. “Goobie wanted to get a drug connection with them,” clubmate Cecil Kirby said.
“Goobie was a kind of a different kind of guy,” Guindon recalled. “He was smart, very smart. He wasn’t really a biker. He was a street person. He’d rather ride in his car than ride on his bike. It wasn’t in his heart. He just liked the association with the guys, what the guys could help him with and what he could help them with.”
Pigpen stayed close to home, where he was needed as the Satan’s Choice fought with the Wild Ones and Henchmen of Southern Ontario. Dynamite was ignited and crowbars were bloodied. The Henchmen’s Kitchener clubhouse was torched. In a clever coup de gráce, Choice members kidnapped two Henchmen. In exchange for their release, the rest of the club had to hand over their colours. Then, as a parting shot, one of the Henchmen had his legs broken when a car drove into him.
“I shot a couple guys,” Pigpen later said. “Never killed anyone. I was the general. Do this and do that.” He said the Henchmen had tough members, though they didn’t have a lot of them. “They were tough. They were not pushovers.”
As she became a young woman, Guindon’s eldest daughter, Teresa, didn’t have many memories of her father. Even when he wasn’t in prison, he was seldom in touch. “He wasn’t very active in my life,” she said. Still, she was a Guindon living in Oshawa, which made her different. One day, when she was fifteen years old and in Grade 10, she was summoned over the intercom to the principal’s office. She could guess it had something to do with her father when she saw a Harley-Davidson parked in the hallway outside the office. She went in. “There’s this big burly biker sitting there, and my principal is sitting there, scared to death.”
The biker told her that her dad would like her to visit him in prison. She didn’t go visit her father, but the clubmate’s visit to her school did have an impact on her life. Already, she felt that boys were afraid to date her because of her family name. Now it seemed like everyone was talking about her. “I quit high school after that. You know what an embarrassment that was?”