I’m sure that a number of readers of this column, particularly those aged 60 or higher, will recall the names of two internationally-known leaders of the 1970s and 1980s countercultural rebellions in the United States, Sonny Barger and Eldridge Cleaver. I’ve met both men in Fallon, and will always remember their visits to the Lahontan Valley News and Fallon Eagle-Standard.
Barger, 83, who founded the Oakland-based Hells Angels motorcycle club in 1957, which had thousands of members world-wide during its heyday, made headlines last month when he died at his home in Livermore, Calif. He had smoked three packs of Camel cigarettes daily for 30 years, and several years before his June 29 death of stage four liver cancer, doctors had removed his vocal cords. But he learned to speak again through a surgically inserted hole in his throat that gave his voice an eerie, menacing rasp.
Modesto-born Barger, a brawler from a broken home who dropped out of third grade to join the Army at age 16 on a forged birth certificate (he was thrown out of the Army when his deception was revealed), spent a total of 14 years in various prisons following convictions ranging from murder and kidnapping to drug-dealing and conspiring to blow up a rival’s clubhouse. He said he had always wanted to ride motorcycles after watching Lee Marvin’s thuggish performance in the 1953 movie “The Wild One” so “I could also party and have a good time like Marvin.”
Barger, the bearded and beefy road warrior, later became a prolific and best-selling author who forged a mythology of the outlaw biker in pop culture and challenged and defied traditional social norms and customs and all dictates of conventional culture.
I met Barger and some of his motorcycle-riding companions in the early 1980s when I drove from home to our newspaper office on a quiet Saturday morning to check out the mail. Pulling in the parking lot behind me were about two dozen motorcyclists, and one of the men asked me if they could use our bathrooms, adding that the clerk at a nearby convenience store “had told us you had a nice new building and the bathrooms must be clean.”
Taken aback, I stuttered, “Well, OK. Come on in.” In just a few minutes, the men’s and women’s bathrooms and the bathroom in the press room were in full use by the all-male contingent. One of the cyclists introduced himself as Sonny Barger. He told me that he and his group were en route from Las Vegas to Reno where they were to have dinner with the Northern Nevada chapter of the Hells Angels.
I asked Barger to join me in my office, and he told me about his life while eating an apple.
“My family was dirt poor, I hated school and my teachers. I hit several of them which didn’t go down well with the principal. My father was married twice and both of his wives ran off with other men,” he said.
Sonny himself was married four times. His fourth wife, Zorana Katzakian, survived him. “I’m a renegade. I never liked being told what to do. I would have made a great newspaperman because I always ask a lot of questions. Maybe someday you’ll give me a job as a reporter,” he said. After 15 minutes or so, I could see that Barger was getting itchy to leave and head off to Reno. The other bikers had completed their sanitary obligations and, I must say, they left the three bathrooms in pristine shape. I shook everybody’s hand, they hopped on their Harleys and sped off to Reno. I never saw or heard from Sonny again.
As for Eldridge Cleaver, my visit with him took place a couple of years after Barger and his motorcyclists had come to town. Cleaver, a towering and imposing man, was a leader of the Black Panther Party and its violent, militant offshoot, the Black Liberation Army, a fervent, outspoken opponent of racism and, like Barger, had spent many years in prisons for murder, mayhem, rape, assault and drug possession. He was 62 when he died of crack cocaine addiction and prostate cancer in Pomona, Calif., on May 1, 1998. Barger had lived 24 more years than Cleaver.
I met Cleaver when he was on parole and doing 1,200 hours of community service after pleading guilty to participating in an ambush of Oakland police officers in which he and two of the officers were injured and a Black Panther Party member was shot to death. Two years or so before I met Cleaver, he had returned to the U.S. after fleeing abroad, where he lived in Cuba, Algeria, North Vietnam, North Korea and the Soviet Union to avoid imprisonment for the Oakland police shootout. Cleaver, who had become a Marxist during his seven-year overseas stint on the run, had become a Christian upon his return to America and joined the Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) and a handful of evangelical churches. He also became a Muslim, but that relationship didn’t last long.
I was in my office one day when Cleaver telephoned me, seeking an audience. I replied, “I’d like to meet you too,” and the next morning he appeared bright and early at my door. He said that he had been given permission by his parole officer to remain on probation and do his 1,200 community service hours “in God’s work,” which translated into him founding and running a church. He called the church a “revivalist ministry” and asked me to travel there with him to see it and learn of its good work. We drove there in our respective cars, and in a half hour or thereabouts we had come to the church edifice, a large, dilapidated old house with a cross atop its roof that was located on a graveled road off Highway 50 west of Fernley. The church had been rented by Cleaver and named by him, “The World Headquarters of the Eldridge Cleaver Crusades for Christ.”
When we entered the “edifice” as Cleaver called it, he introduced me to his wife, Kathleen, who made us a salad of fruits and vegetables. She was friendly and outgoing and introduced me to a half dozen church ladies who were washing windows and cleaning carpets. Another woman was teaching a Bible class to some youngsters. Cleaver escorted me to his office, opened one of several packing boxes piled high on the floor and pulled out the weirdest-looking pair of men’s pants I have ever seen. While I listened and looked on in astonishment, Cleaver said that while in exile in Paris, he and a “famous French clothing designer” had invented a new line of “revolutionary” pants that featured a frontal sock-like codpiece which outlined the wearer’s genitals.
“Here, try on a pair, David,” said Cleaver, handing me a dark blue pair which he said would fit me. “I’ll also take a photo of you wearing them,” he stated.
“Are you out of your mind? Are you crazy?” I asked him as I headed for the door, said goodbye to Mrs. Cleaver, and drove back to Fallon.
A year or so later, she divorced husband Eldridge, alleging he had beaten her nearly every day of their 20-year marriage. By the way, because this is a family newspaper, I couldn’t be too specific in my description of the pants. If you want to read more, go to Google, type in “Eldridge Cleaver’s pants,” read all about them, see the photos and get a good laugh.
It wasn’t long before Cleaver’s pants invention made world headlines. His Nevada religious disciples drifted away, he returned the church building to its owner, sales of the pants dived, Cleaver halted their production, he was forced into bankruptcy and his friends and the media said he had gone “bonkers.” He moved from Nevada back to the Bay Area, became a conservative Republican, and ran, unsuccessfully, for several Republican offices in Northern California. The once-fiery, anti-racist Cleaver, whose “Soul on Ice” autobiography sold more than 2 million copies, was dead broke and worked part-time as a Berkeley tree trimmer, scavenged bottles and broken-down chairs and was arrested for cocaine possession and burglary. He moved to Pomona sometime after 1994, and that is where he died.
David C. Henley is publisher emeritus of the Lahontan Valley News and Fallon Eagle-Standard.
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