Installment #03 – 1970 Yuma Prison Run

It was 1970 and the summer sizzled, so much so that the asphalt softened from the unrelenting heat as I prepared for the Yuma Prison Run. My first club run. I was riding my first Shovelhead and working on a 45 trike. The 1966 police Shovel from the Long Beach station was stripped, although I had yet to take an engine apart at that point. I got so I could change a paint job in a matter of days by carefully tapping off the chassis from the driveline, removing the rear wheel and controls, and airbrushing a new paint scheme.

I started out with a Triumph tank painted some god-awful color and tilted at an odd angle over the frame. The damn thing looked horrible. I made my own footpegs from long strips of brass hex stock and made a shifter knob to match. The carburetor was a Tillotsen and I made my own air cleaner. Even then I didn’t want to risk the longevity of the engine by running an open velocity stack. I fabricated odd covers with screens, old bike parts and used socks for filters. I could spend an entire day on some bizarre contraption only to discover in a 10-minute ride that it should be unbolted and shit-canned.

The rear fender was a ribbed English job with an AEE p-pad bolted to it. My seat was the matching solo job, which never fit the bike properly. The bike was rigid with struts made from the original fender rails. The front end was extended 6 inches without raking the frame. I changed handlebars constantly. At one time I made the bike a left-hand throttle with the clutch on the right and a jockey shift. For awhile I didn’t have a ratchet top, but I made it a foot shift using the jockey top. It was a good trick trying to find gears.

While at a swap meet one weekend, I bought a motorcycle gas tank that had been custom metal-flaked. It was a sharp-looking paint job so I bought the damn thing, not knowing it was from a Kawasaki. I went home re-painted the entire bike to match and mounted the tank. It looked OK, but only held enough gas for 85 miles. Anyway, I prepared to ride with the Outlaws MC, the Hangmen, and some other club to San Diego for the night. They planned to meet up with another chapter of the Outlaws and another SoCal club, then ride inland toward Arizona.

We left on a Friday night from San Pedro. Most of the members were dressed in black. Their LeviÕs were coated with grease and oil until they were as effective as leathers at blocking the wind. At the time I couldn’t afford a full-blown motorcycle jacket and never liked ’em anyway so I took a welder’s roughed-out leather coat and put it over any jacket I had. I even used dense leather welding cloves for the long gauntlet they afforded. I thought it worked. I didn’t know until decades later when I tried on an authentic riding jacket, how cold I was.

With a chapter of the Hangmen MC, we rolled south into Friday evening traffic. I remember it was bumper to bumper and these guys kept riding faster. Through Orange County we were doing 75 between cars while less than a bike length apart.

At one point we stopped to eat. In 1970 when several packs of outlaw bikers converged on a vinyl and neon franchise restaurant, the management called the cops, half the waitresses hid in the dressing room, and squeamish patrons hurried their families to eat faster so they could pay the bill and get out. We didn’t pay much attention. The leaders asked each table how we were doing. When they got the thumbs up, it meant they could pour on the fuel. Our next stretch we ran at 90 mph. Pulling into the restaurant, there were 50 of us. When we fired up to leave, our numbers had grown to 75 guys on home-built choppers flying across the concrete between traffic at 90 mph.

Some 25-30 miles out of San Diego, I remember tripping on the ride, all the bikes, the patches flying. I was at the back of the pack as a guest. Most of us were high on one thing or another and I started looking at the lights above the freeway. They glowed with a halo effect, but I just concluded that I was high. Suddenly, like a mighty snake, the entire pack cut across all four lanes and off the freeway. We filled a gas station with bikes, and I discovered that one of the two riders riding number two in the pack had blown an oil pump and pumped all his oil out onto the following riders. Some of the members directly behind this big sonuvabitch were coated head to toe with 60 weight. The film on my glasses was causing the halo effect in my vision. The pack regrouped and rolled out. I volunteered to hang with the brother’s bike until they could send a truck.

We partied into the night at the home of one member, some slept on the floor, on couches, in the yard with their bikes, you name it. I smoked some hash with some girls and got so paranoid I wanted to hide under a rock. The next morning, still reeling from the herb, we packed up. We splashed water on our faces and formed up outside. I remember not taking shit with me. No toothbrush, no ditty bag, no change of clothes. I usually carried a military blanket rolled up with a couple of things in it over my headlight, strapped down with bungie cords.

We pulled out and got less than a mile and had to stop. I heard a terrible screeching behind me and turned to find out what it was, when a Panhead went sliding past me sideways on the pavement on its side. The terrified rider and passenger must have been reeling from the same drugs. We stopped to pick up the pieces, clean up the member, and console his ol’ lady, before taking off again. We met up with another group and headed into the hills.

That was my first run, and an intense education. Oh, by the way, my battery quit and I had to blast back into L.A. without ever turning the bike off. The member who invited me on the ride was in a shootout in a Yuma bar. The 85-mile tear-drop tank taught me that no matter how fast you ride, if you’re forced to stop every 70 miles for gas, you end up passing every tourist you screamed by before the last stop. I passed the same station wagon three times returning to L.A.

Bandit