| Good Clean (Greasy) Fun: Boozefighters MC is a Way of Life
On Lincoln Avenue resides Jeff “Joker” Thompson, a Virginia Chapter member of Booze-fighters MC, the oldest motorcycle club in America. This is the iconic club, which “The Wild Ones” is based on, with Lee Marvin playing the role of its founder “Wino” Willie Forkner. Boozefighters love their history, and their image, which Mr. Thompson describes as …”like The Merry Pranksters.” After meeting many members during an after-Rolling Thunder Bar-B-Que, I understood the magic of BFMC, and the unique place it has in mid-century American pop culture. I was smitten. The roar of a passing bike will now cause my head to swivel in its wake, especially if the bike in question is a shiny Harley or Norton or Triumph ruling the road with cacophonous cool.
Motorcycle clubs came into being after World War II. Men came home changed and many found office jobs oppressive, even impossible to endure, after the horrible adrenaline rush of battle. The first bikes were makeshift and cheap—nobody had a lot of extra money for costly hobbies. Most future club members worked in machine shops and garages and used their creativity and knowledge of mechanics to fuel their motorcycles by what they called the “stroker motor.” The stroker motor was born of necessity: fashioned out of different parts salvaged from what was available, for free, in the garages of Los Angeles. A later evolution of this technique would be known as “the chopper.”
The original Boozefighters lived in Los Angeles
The original Boozefighters lived in Los Angeles, a place then composed not only of freeways, but also of wide-open road melting into countryside, uncluttered by smog and excess traffic. L.A. was also still predominantly blue-collar, with the flavors of Texas and Oklahoma and other dustbowl locales that its migratory populace brought to their new home; thus it had scores of juke joints and neon-lit dives. In other words, with its abundance of lazy weather and open space, it was a place meant to ride in. The dark canyon roads with their hairpin curves surrounded an enormous urban bowl of light, making it impossible to ever tire of the endless possibilities presented to an adventurous soul on two wheels.
Boozefighters are all about fun. They are not “one-per centers” (outlaws as defined by the US Government). This is a club founded upon the idea of an anarchic brotherhood bonded by a love of perpetual rebellion against stifling norms, but with a tacit honor code that assures that no harm will be caused.
So the American rebel was born
So what of the famous Hollister, California incident back in 1947? “The Wild Ones” dramatized an afternoon and boiled it down to those classic lines of disaffectation…”What are you rebelling against?” and the response…”What have you got?”So the American rebel was born: laconic, irreverent, and young. In reality the real Boozefighters were not nearly so ambitious. They rode into small town America for a lark, and then the media caught wind of their antics, staging photos of wanton decadence, which were then published in Life magazine. Upright citizens ate it up, feigning outrage, but probably secretly wishing it was they with the temerity to be so silly.
Americans owe a debt to the rule benders
Our collective sanity would be at risk without our class clowns to hold a mirror to our foibles, our need for rebellion, and then to laugh it all off. Men and women in gray flannel suits inspire claustrophobia, but a biker…we can live vicariously through him/her in the split second it takes for one to roar on by. Americans owe a debt to the rule benders, the seekers, for even the foolishness caused by them, because it’s the audacious among us that widens the possibilities for the rest of us to imagine a boundless future.
So what about Jeff Thompson and all his compadres, now spread out all over our great land? These days, the Boozefighters can even count a few celebrities among their ranks. Nothing stays the same, but we can hope that the blue-collar pragmatism and individualism that defined the founders’ lives on in their antecedents. Mr. Thompson lives in Falls Church with his lovely wife, in a house often ablaze with lights and parties. Their lives hearken back to another era of bohemianism unencumbered by the need for excess money or status. Our lives and circumstances have changed, but the uncompromising romanticism of BFMC will always be relevant, reflecting the present through the past, so that the rank and file of “the greatest generation” lives on, having bequeathed us with grit and oil and leather and roads still left to explore.
Resources: The Original Wild Ones: Tales of The Boozefighters Motorcycle Club By Bill Hayes. Motorbooks International, St. Paul Minn.: 2005.
Thanks to: Virginia Levry, Jeff “Joker” Thompson, Bill Hayes, and all the BFMC who posed for photos, welcomed us, and told us their stories. Photos by Foster Wiley.
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