On another studio job in the 1960s as a kid, Terry was learning grip duties during inset shots for a western. Note the pack of Marlboros in his Levi’s pocket. He started early. He gave up a lucrative, fascinating studio career for the club.

IN 1960 SMOKEY ROBINSON AND THE MIRACLES hit the Motown airways with their first hit, “Shop Around,” Elvis was discharged from the army, and the rock and roll era hit full swing. That same year Terry was busted for stealing gas and busting curfew.

“I swear I didn’t do it,” Terry said. He was fifteen and hanging with some buddies, one of whom had borrowed his father’s car, which they ran out of gas.

While Terry stood watch two of his buddies tried to siphon gas from a parked car when a black and white turned the corner.

“I’ll run this way to draw them off,” Terry volunteered, and he took off. The cops gave chase and apprehended him. Later that night, the two friends were caught stealing gas. They were cut loose while Terry was hauled to juvenile hall and booked on a curfew violation.

Terry faced a formidable choice: go to juvenile hall or into foster care.

His mom, Doris, reached her wits’ end. Terry faced a formidable choice: go to juvenile hall or into foster care. Terry was assigned to the El Monte High School continuation school on Saturdays only. Harry recognized Terry’s wandering, renegade ways and put him to work full time. Terry moved away from his family on Maxton and the courts assigned guardianship to Harry and Alma Woolman. He became a foster child instead of being incarcerated in the juvenile hall detention center, which would have set him on a devious track to personal doom.

Terry loved his mom, Doris, but he had to escape from his bastard, abusive, drunken stepfather, Everett. Ultimately the couple broke up, but Terry’s dedicated mother continued to look after Everett for twenty years until he died of cancer.

Living with Harry and Alma, Terry found himself in an entirely different, jubilant, creative atmosphere, one that encouraged learning, building, testing, social interaction, and constant creative exploits. A whole new world opened for Terry as he crawled into Harry’s Ford grip pickup and rolled into Jack Miles’s studio to work on a movie called Push Button Honeymoon. He learned brickwork, mechanics, construction, electrical work, respect for tools, and about being a prankster from Harry. It was nothing for Harry to pull a dynamite-based trick.

In 1965, during the Los Angeles riots, a car skidded to a stop in the street in front of Harry’s house, where Terry worked on a 1960 two-door Dodge from a movie set. An angry young black man shot Terry from the window of his rumbling coupe. The bullet hit Terry in the hip and knocked him from the curb where he was crouched while trying to install new brake shoes. Terry flew back twenty feet to the stucco garage.

“Hubert, another local kid, was helping me out,” Terry said, “but he didn’t drive too well. We scrambled into an old car and he rear-ended another vehicle on Soto street before we reached the Santa Anita Hospital.”

While Terry lay on a cold, stainless steel gurney in the emergency room, doctors told him the projectile was too close to his spine for surgical removal. He would be forced to wait until it dislodged itself before they could operate. He was given a stiff pain killer and released. A couple days later, he pulled into a Bells Olympic gas station to refuel. As he stood behind his Chevy, with the hose and spigot stuffed into his tank hosepipe, he twisted to look at the gas pump and the lead projectile shifted. He immediately slipped to the pavement, paralyzed from the hips down.

An angry young black man shot Terry from the window of his rumbling coupe.

“I never experienced such a cold, helpless feeling,” Terry said. Someone called an ambulance, which delivered him to Los Angeles General Hospital. He lay in the hospital as surgeons reviewed his X-rays, breathing in the smell of the surgical cleansing chemicals that filled the cold emergency room air, thinking he would never walk again. The doctors’ dour body language betrayed their hopelessness as they pointed at the glowing film strips on the light table and shook their heads dismally.

Terry was petrified. He could not move. His legs had turned cold and lifeless. Then a new, tall surgeon arrived, pulled the wavy blue curtain aside, and stepped into his crowded area. He snatched one of the X-rays off the light box and studied it against the bright overhead lights.

“What are you waiting for?” the doctor asked. “Christmas?” Without hesitation he called for Terry to be rolled into surgery, demanding, “Get the sheriff in here.” (By law, a cop had to be present when a bullet was removed.)

Nurses prepared the terrified teenager for surgery. A sterile, uniformed staff surrounded him. An abrupt, harried anesthesiologist put Terry to sleep. The surgeon quickly removed the bullet.

“Tag it and bag it,” he said.

The operation was an immediate success, saving Terry’s mobility. At that moment Terry learned how precious and tenuous life could be. Where darkness and violence seemed to dominate, Terry survived, raised animals, and looked out for his siblings. He developed a warrior’s understanding of battle and its potentially devastating consequences. He soon faced a turning point in a growing rock ’n’ roll era.

Terry missed his impounded motorcycle, but Harry wouldn’t let the young man fool with his collection of Indians. “I saved every nickel, dime, and quarter I made,” Terry said, “and started to build another motorcycle piece by piece.”

He bought a rigid 1950s Panhead frame from the monster San Gabriel Valley H-D dealership, Laidlaw’s, and a friend told him of a guy in the Devil’s Disciples who straightened and raked frames in El Monte. For $50, he had his frame checked and altered.

He stashed ’51 chopper parts at his stepbrother Eddie’s pad. From some struggling members of the Chosen Few he bought a 61-inch Panhead engine for $100, plus a transmission. He purchased parts weekly and tried to figure out how they fit together.

Alma loaded Terry up in her ’59 Ford station wagon and hauled him to the old, dilapidated El Monte continuation campus next to the football field every Saturday, religiously. He crawled out of the Ford, said his goodbyes, and watched the long, tan wagon pull away. He walked to the front door of the dour-looking building and studied the stained granite front steps guarded by a large, foreboding, concrete lion.

To Terry, the gloomy, ominous building represented nothing but structure and confinement. Terry strolled briskly through the polished linoleum halls and straight out the back door, crossed the football field, and exited the property through the chain-link gate. He crawled into Harry’s waiting ’59 Ford pickup and they cut a dusty trail to another studio gig. He never graduated from high school, and Alma went nuts when she found out.

Members of a couple of local motorcycle clubs, the Coffin Cheaters and the Henchmen, helped Terry obtain a 17-inch front wheel with no front brake.

“It kept spitting bearings,” Terry said.

After four months of tinkering and installing a 10-inch-over Wide Glide front fork, Terry was once more in the wind. He rode to Harry’s place, but Harry wasn’t impressed.

“You can’t make money with one of those,” Harry said. “You can’t bulldog it, can’t stand on the seat and ride in circles, and you can’t jump it.” It was a chopper, and choppers belonged to a special, outcast world of wild young men who didn’t fit in, didn’t want social structure, and didn’t give a shit about doing tricks on motorcycles.

After four months of tinkering and installing a 10-inch-over Wide Glide front fork, Terry was once more in the wind.

Terry hung out at the Tasty Freeze, trying to meet girls in tight-fitting Levi’s and bobby socks and learning that choppers didn’t mesh with the streets or culture of Los Angeles. Over the next two years he collected more than seventy-four tickets that ran the gamut from having no mirror, license, or horn, to leaking oil, to having loud pipes, to riding a flat-out unsafe motorcycle. He learned the streets of Los Angeles and started to hang out way too late at Richey’s Café on Garvey, the main boulevard in El Monte, just one of the concrete umbilical cords that held Los Angeles together.

Harry never punished or abused Terry for his teenage antics but initiated prankster tactics to discipline the seventeen-year-old when he stepped out of line.

“He tried pulling the coil wire on my ’56 Crown Victoria,” Terry said. One day when he was out too late, Harry jacked up the rear of Terry’s car so when Terry hustled to make it to work on time, the wheels spun helplessly in the air. Harry made his point.

Harry proved relentless in his quest to keep Terry out of trouble. He constantly took knives away from Terry. “Let me see that,” Harry would say, and Terry always offered up his hot new, razor-sharp blade.

“I’d never see it again,” Terry said.

In 1965, Terry hooked up with the wildest woman of his life. One night he parked his Panhead out front of Richey’s, the local after-hours coffee shop. He strolled in, winked at Corky, the tall, hot waitress, and made his way to the juke box at the end of the counter, opposite the Textolite and chrome booths. As he punched in a couple of new Elvis tunes, a big brute of a man made a comment and he turned to face him and the cute bubbly babe at his side.

“I’m going to shove that taco up your ass, punk,” Terry said, and the fight ensued. He yanked the big man out of the booth and kicked him out the front door of Richey’s. But there was something captivating about the girl beside the bruiser.

Like his mother, this wavy-haired blonde bombshell, Tekla, hated motorcycles. She hated chopper riders in particular.

The girl would become the second unruly woman to enter Terry’s life. Like his mother, this wavy-haired blonde bombshell, Tekla, hated motorcycles. She hated chopper riders in particular. They couldn’t be tamed, and that drove the nest-bound woman nuts. But there was a chemical attraction. The next night she parked her curvaceous form in a booth at Richey’s to wait for the wavy-haired Terry when he rolled in from work at the studios. They hooked up like two charged magnets and became as connected as his Panhead engine was to its traditional 4-speed transmission.

Tekla’s mother raised three girls and two boys on her own. One of Tekla’s sisters ultimately became Miss Palm Springs. They were a hot-looking bunch. Tekla’s mother supported the family by working as a hotel maid in southern California after she’d left her husband, the legendary Big Ed Thompson.

“I never met him,” Terry said of Thompson. “I spoke to him once, but it wasn’t good.”

Big Ed owned an antique shop in Sonora, California, a small town of around 4,500 people located almost dead-center in the state. Sonora was founded by Mexican miners during the California Gold Rush. Big Ed was a giant of a man who was known to clear the town of rowdy bikers armed only with a two-by-four.

“I saw him once from afar,” Terry said of Big Ed. A waitress in a diner pointed out the big man. “You ain’t seen nothin’ until you see big Ed Thompson,” she told Terry.

Apparently she was right, because according to Terry, “When the waitress pointed him out, I took one look and left.”

Terry would never forget meeting Tekla’s chain-smoking mom in their tiny El Monte bungalow.

“I knocked on the door and heard a clamor, and a squawking woman,” Terry said.

“He better be good-looking,” Tekla’s mom hollered as she yanked open the door. Like Tekla she was a wild woman, unruly and violent.

The relationship was stormy from the start. Terry was hardly Beaver Cleaver himself, and he instigated more than one violent encounter with Tekla. Take the time he started dating a short blonde named Judy, who lived in one of the bungalows next to the one in which Tekla’s mother lived. Things went fine, at least until Tekla found out.

“It was on and crankin’,” Terry said. Tekla barreled out through the front door of their bungalow with her mom in tow, dragged Judy into the front yard, and beat her unmercifully.

“I should have learned,” Terry said. “If she had said she was going to shoot someone, you could bet on it.”

Terry got his first real taste of the raucous wickedness this woman was capable of when he told her he wouldn’t marry her. She came unglued and shot up his car with a 30-30 Winchester carbine. In 1966 Terry buckled to Tekla’s marriage desires and they slipped across the border into Tijuana for an impromptu, illegal transaction.

An unrelenting, wild mare of a woman had snagged Terry and there was no way out. He couldn’t leave her, couldn’t run. She needed to feel the warm success of childbirth, and he was the unsuspecting missionary. In 1967, with Tekla pregnant, Terry relented once more and they were married on the U.S. side of the border.

Tekla barreled out through the front door of their bungalow with her mom in tow, dragged Judy into the front yard, and beat her unmercifully.

“Terry himself overreacted when he discovered Tekla with another guy. “I got a call from my brother, who was at Denny’s,” he said.

Terry rode into the parking lot, straight pipes blaring. He stormed the interior, where he spotted the sandy-blonde Tekla sitting across from a straight-looking, nondescript young Hispanic man. Terry didn’t bother to ask questions or study body language, his usual warrior security measures. He grabbed the short-haired kid, dragged him from the booth, and started to pound on him.

The kid broke free and darted from the restaurant.

“He just gave me a lift from Riverside!” Tekla shouted at Terry. “There’s nothing going on!”

“Don’t ever bring a boyfriend into my town,” Terry responded. Tekla never brought another man into El Monte again.

Terry’s life was burning along, and biker movies would add flame to his fire. Novelist Hunter S. Thompson’s biographical book Hells Angels shot up the best-seller charts in the summer of 1966. Director Roger Corman was impressed with the Life magazine image of a menacing pack of choppers rolling into a California cemetery for the funeral of a dead biker. He worked with screenplay writer Charles Griffith to create the biker movie, Wild Angels, with the cooperation of Columbia and American International studios.

The next year Terry worked on the Anthony Lanza biker movie Glory Stompers, starring Dennis Hopper and Jody McCrea. Terry worked with members of the Gypsy Jokers during the filming in an isolated woods in the San Fernando Valley. In the film the character Chino and his fictitious rebel motorcycle gang, The Black Souls, capture Darryl, leader of a rival gang called The Glory Stompers, and Darryl’s girlfriend, Chris. One of the Black Souls attempts to rape Chris, and Chino beats up Darryl. Subsequently, the whole gang jumps Darryl, leaves him for dead, and rides like mad wolves for a border town to sell Chris to Mexican white slavers. In the meantime, Chino’s advances toward Chris infuriated Jo Ann, his “momma.” A disillusioned former Glory Stomper named Smiley, now traveling alone, happens upon the wounded Darryl, and together they set out to rescue Chris.

“I taught Dennis Hopper how to ride a jockey shift,” Terry said. “He was difficult to teach when he was stoned, and he was stoned all the time.”

Terry’s life was rockin’. Aretha Franklin dominated the airwaves with her first soul record, “Respect,” ultimately becoming the most popular female singer in rock history. Together with Terry for just two years, Tekla was already pregnant with their second child.

“I taught Dennis Hopper how to ride a jockey shift,” Terry said. “He was difficult to teach when he was stoned, and he was stoned all the time.”

“Our first daughter died at birth,” Terry said. “I rushed Tekla to the hospital when her water broke and she went into labor, but something went wrong.”

Tekla was a different woman, hardened and scared, when their only son, Terry Jr., was born.

Meanwhile Terry dodged cops, doing his best to avoid adding to his collection of infractions. One summer day when his newborn son was just a week old, Terry spotted another rider broken down on Garvey Boulevard as he rolled toward work. With the warm Southern California sun on his back, the rumbling Harley singing in one ear and a new Temptations R&B tune warming the other, he stopped to help the rider. Gypsy, the broke-down biker was a young member of the Gypsy Jokers, riding an old tin-can Harley Panhead. Terry pulled over on the sidewalk. The long-haired outlaw was mechanically lost, his scooter a mass of rusting sheet metal and his engine covered in oil.

“The bike was a mess,” Terry said, “and I noticed that this scrawny biker wore a number of leather-sheathed knives. Some were like swords.”

He checked the points on the Harley. They were closed, which shut off the fire to his coil and ultimately the sparkplugs. Terry adjusted them with the back of a matchbook, which was approximately .015-inch (the point gap called for .022), and the bike fired to life.

A cop spotted the two wild youngsters in downtown El Monte and pulled them over. He immediately started to write Terry another ticket. He clearly didn’t like bikers and wrote him up for leaking oil on the sidewalk, parking on the sidewalk, heading the wrong direction, and operating an unsafe vehicle. Terry’s second motorcycle was towed away.

Terry’s outstanding tickets won him a quick trip to jail, even though he complained profusely that he just had a son and was trying to get to work. After spending several hours in a holding cell, he was thrust in front of the judge, who looked at Terry’s record with dismay.

“It’s a miracle you are still on the streets,” he said. “I’m sentencing you to thirty days, and you’ll never see that bike again.”

“I just had a son,” Terry said.

“Do whatever time you can, and we’ll take care of the rest, but don’t ever come before me again, or I’ll give you a year in County.”

It was an era of racial unrest that exploded on the streets of Los Angeles. On August 11, 1965, the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles experienced a complete social breakdown, devolving into a post-apocalyptic landscape of rioting and mob rule. The eruption of violence began when Lee Minikus, a California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer, pulled over Marquette Frye, an African American. Minikus believed Frye, whom he had observed driving erratically, was drunk. Frye failed to pass field sobriety tests, including walking a straight line and touching his nose, so Minikus arrested him.

The situation escalated when Minikus refused to let Frye’s brother, Ronald, drive Frye’s car home and radioed for it to be impounded. Frye’s mother intervened and the situation heated up. As events escalated, the crowd of onlookers grew from dozens to hundreds. As more police arrived, the mob became violent, throwing rocks and other objects while shouting at the police officers. Then all hell broke loose. The police arrested both of the Frye brothers as well as their mother, but it was too late to prevent the city from going up in flames.

Though the riots began in August, they were the result of much more than just the arrest of the Frye family. Racial tension had grown so thick it was almost visible. The riots that began on August 11 had been building steam for a long time. Investigations into the riots placed the blame on poverty, inequality, racial discrimination, and the passage in November 1964 of Proposition 14, which overturned a law that established equality of opportunity for black home buyers. Regardless the cause, the events of August 11 drove people to the breaking point. Violence spilled onto the streets and Watts burned for four days.

They wanted to kill us all during the LA race riots.

For the better part of a week, society completely broke down. Residents looted stores, vandalized property, and seriously threatened the security of the city. Many people engaged in fights with police, blocked the firemen of the Los Angeles Fire Department from performing their duties, and even beat white motorists. Others took advantage of the riot and broke into stores, stealing whatever they could and setting the stores themselves on fire.

Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker also fueled the radicalized tension that caused the explosion of violence by publicly labeling the people involved in the riots as “monkeys in the zoo.”

Eventually the National Guard cordoned off a vast region of South Los Angeles from Alameda Street to Crenshaw Boulevard, and from just south of the Santa Monica Freeway to Rosecrans Avenue, finally bringing the situation under control. Overall, an estimated $40 million in damage was caused as almost 1,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Most of the physical damage was confined to white-owned businesses that were said to have caused resentment in the neighborhood due to perceived unfairness. Thirty-four people died, twenty-five of them black, and an estimated 1,000 more were injured.

“They wanted to kill us all during the LA race riots,” Terry said.

Martha and The Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Streets” was used as a rallying cry when the racial riots ignited. Los Angeles disc jockey The Magnificent Montague’s slogan, “Burn Baby Burn,” took on a new meaning as the streets of Los Angeles went up in flames. Shit was happening fast in Southern California.

Terry did twenty-five days of his thirty-day sentence and returned home. It was not a good time for a white boy to be locked up among extremely angry black men, and it wasn’t an experience Terry cared to repeat. He never got a traffic warrant again.