That time he ate the bird! He vomited that thing. You could hear the feathers cracking, the bones. Him chewing it down. The guts were on his chin, his chest, and then he barfed.
BERNIE GUINDON on Pigpen Berry
In the summer of 1974, Guindon walked free from prison for the second time. He was sent on his way with a train ticket to Thunder Bay in his pocket. “That was about the only fucking place I’d call home.”
Shortly afterwards, the good citizens and police of Thunder Bay braced themselves as 150 beer-swilling members of the Satan’s Choice and their bike-loving buddies prepared to descend on their community. Guindon had served his entire sentence and he was free without conditions. He could socialize with whoever he wished.
The bikers planned to gather on a property that was owned by a prominent lawyer on Spruce River Road for what was improbably billed a “convention.” Thoughts of two-wheeled terror brought a collective shiver to the land of the Sleeping Giant. Since poop-eating Pigpen was among the arriving delegates, concerns of an impending assault on the senses were justified. For Guindon, it was a chance to jump back into his old world with both boots.
At the top of the bikers’ agenda that weekend was a memorial service at St. Andrew’s Cemetery for John Raleigh. The club’s vice-president had been killed in August 1972. It was a particularly poignant day for Verg Erslavas. “I first met John when we were riding back home from a field day,” Erslavas said. “It was fall and we were on the Lake Superior stretch. The weather was brutal with freezing rain and wind blowing off the lake. Of course, we had no rain gear. No one wore it in those days. We met John and Jungle, a couple of Toronto guys coming up to Thunder Bay for a visit. They took a turn on the bikes, as we were cold and wet, and we jumped in the car to warm up. After becoming acquainted for a while, we became inseparable.”
In 1972, Raleigh had been atop Toronto president Larry McIlroy’s Harley on the last ride of his life. Raleigh took a curve at too high a speed, hit a bump and was thrown from the bike. “It hit me hard,” Erslavas said. “I really loved the guy. We gave him a great send-off and a headstone inscribed with ‘Satan’s Choice M.C.’ To this day, whenever I’m in T. Bay, I place a red rose on his grave and shed a tear or two.” Erslavas even named his son John after his late clubmate.
To bolster the forces of decency in Thunder Bay that August, police chief Onni Harty cancelled all leave for Thunder Bay police officers and brought in twenty-five reinforcements from the South Porcupine detachment of the OPP. Even the four-dog unit of the local OPP, which was in town for training, was put on call for active duty.
Branch 5 of the Royal Canadian Legion indefinitely postponed its annual men’s picnic, which had originally been planned for the same Sunday as the “convention,” at the adjacent picnic site, no less. Some three hundred dollars in meat was put into deep freeze as the former servicemen braced for the worst that Guindon’s hordes could offer. Restaurants and even a gas station announced their precautionary closures.
The abundance of caution made many locals only more curious. People ventured out to watch the procession of Harleys growl down Hodder Avenue to the cemetery.
“When we had that run, it was like the Choice’s big parade,” Erslavas said. “People were lined up three deep on the bike route…We were kinda proud of it…A lot of the girls wanted to meet the guys…Thunder Bay had some pretty friendly girls.”
After that, there was an explosion of…nothing. No chickens were beheaded, no businesses were trashed and no police were attacked. Pigpen stayed amongst his fellow bikers and, in the end, it was the motorcyclists and not the locals who suffered his antics most. “That time he ate the bird!” Guindon later said. “He vomited that thing. You could hear the feathers cracking, the bones. Him chewing it down. The guts were on his chin, his chest, and then he barfed.”