Hearing the Call of ‘Easy Rider’ : To Victorious Motorcyclists, the Real Issues in Helmet Battle Were Freedom and Personal Choice

To hear motorcyclists tell it, there’s something almost mystical about their sport. They will passionately describe the exhilaration of cruising up a two-lane highway toward Big Sur, of having the wind in their hair and a pine scent on the breeze, of feeling they are a part of every twist and turn in the road. They will talk of the camaraderie of riders, of a bond among strangers passing on the highway. To them, clearly, it is far more than mere transportation.

“Once you get out on the highway, in the country,” waxes motorcyclist Scot Hunter, a Los Angeles writer, “you seem to be taken back 20 or 30 years, when people were friendlier, and more often than not, they wave their hand in a salute.”

The feeling’s not quite the same on a clogged Los Angeles freeway, he concedes, but what counts is that sense of doing what you want, with only the wind between you and nature. “People who ride motorcycles,” he says, “consider themselves free spirits. The motorcycle makes them free, and independent.”

This week, California came as close it ever has, in more than 20 years of arguing about it, to joining 21 other states in limiting that “do-as-I-please” feeling in the interests of safety. A bill that would have required the state’s 760,000 motorcyclists to wear safety helmets squeaked through both houses of the Legislature, only to be vetoed at the last minute by Gov. Deukmejian.

The ‘Vegetable Garden’

Assemblyman Richard Floyd (D-Hawthorne), who thought he had finally convinced lawmakers that too many unprotected motorcyclists were being killed and maimed on state highways (“Every hospital has a ward they call the ‘vegetable garden,’ the people with head injuries,” he says), stood by helplessly as Deukmejian vetoed the measure on Monday, calling for better education and training, as well as helmets for riders under 21.

“He answered to the unbathed, unshaven tattooed people who are apparently his folks,” fumed Floyd, a motorcycle rider himself. Floyd called opposition to the bill “some sort of manhood thing” and warned: “Well, they’ll wear helmets sooner or later.”

But as Floyd discovered, Easy Rider dies hard. And one reason, many bikers contend, is that he and other lawmakers don’t understand what motorcycling in the ‘80s is all about.

For one thing, they note, motorcycling’s supporters are no longer just leather-clad toughs who, as some did in 1967 when the Legislature considered another helmet law, exert their influence by roaring through the streets of the capital.

Men and women who in the 1960s reveled in the freedom of such movies as “Easy Rider” have grown up to be doctors and lawyers, business executives and engineers who still ride for pleasure, and this time around, they hired a Sacramento veteran, James Lombardo, to lead a sophisticated lobbying campaign. “The Hells Angels and the other outlaw groups,” said one rider involved in the effort, “were asked to stay home and keep a low profile.”

For another thing, many motorcyclists insist that they already wear helmets voluntarily and insist that their riders do, too. “I wear a helmet all the time. So does my wife. And I wouldn’t let my kids ride without one,” said one, retired Detroit policeman Don Huey, who rode up to a recent rally in Griffith Park from his home in El Cajon. “But I feel people should have the freedom of choice to do what they want.”

And to many bikers, that, more than accident statistics, is the issue: personal choice and pleasure. “That’s what you ride a bike for,” said Fred Dryer, an actor and former professional football player who has ridden a motorcycle for almost 25 years.

“Motorcycling is a sport like any other one,” he contended. “This (the helmet law) is like telling me if I play golf, I might get hit in the head with a ball, so I have to wear a helmet. Or if I sail, I might get hit by the boom, so I have to have a helmet.”

“We’re stereotyped,” complained Dennis Hoffman, sales manager of a motorcycle shop in Ventura and a member of a group called American Brothers Aimed Toward Education (ABATE). “These politicians feel we don’t count. That we’re sleazeballs and we don’t work and we don’t pay taxes.”

A ‘Basic Freedom’

He called riding without a helmet “just another basic freedom they want to take away from us. I’ve been riding 20 years and safety is one of our big things.

“I’ve got a helmet and if I’m in the snow or up north in the cold, I wear it,” Hoffman admitted. “But a helmet isn’t going to save you; knowing how to ride is. The only difference a helmet will make if you’re going over 30 m.p.h. or more is whether the person has an open casket or a closed one.”

Dryer is a member of the newly renamed California Motorcyclists Assn., a group of 5,000 cyclists who hired Lombardo as its full-time lobbyist. During the legislative fight, he joined comedian Jay Leno and other cyclists in a lobbying assault on Sacramento.

Leno, who hosted the Griffith Park rally as a fund-raiser for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, contends that “education of riders is the way to do it. If we took $1 or $2 and added it to educational safety programs, that would be better. I wear a helmet 95% of the time, and I tell other people to wear one. But it should be a matter of choice.”

(Leno says he quickly ran afoul of Assemblyman Floyd, who swore at him over the telephone and hung up. “He said something about bikers and sexual preference and hung up,” Leno recalled at the Griffith Park rally. “I don’t dislike this guy, but he seems to have made up some sort of Hollywood thing in his mind.”

(Floyd confirmed Leno’s account. “He’s a jerk,” he added, “and I don’t think he’s funny at all.”)

Letter-Writing Campaign

ABATE put together a large-scale petition and letter writing campaign among its 1,200 members, asking legislators to veto the bill as it was moving through the Assembly and Senate, as did the regional Harley Owners’ Group (HOG).

Lobbyist Lombardo said he personally talked with every representative in the Legislature, 120 of them, before they voted.

“Every one of them talked about a personal experience with motorcycle injuries or deaths,” said Lombardo, a longtime motorcycle rider who doesn’t wear a helmet all the time but admits he puts one on to ride on the freeway. “They were all but one of them talking about kids. They knew a kid, Billy, that something happened to, or a nephew or somebody else. Not over 19 or 20.”

(Floyd, on the other hand, said he became adamant that a mandatory helmet law should be enforced in California about three years ago when a woman came to his office and told him about her 18-year-old son, Jimmy, who had just been killed in a motorcycle accident.

“She said he died of head injuries and he had a helmet but he wasn’t wearing it,” Floyd said. “She said if there was a law that said he had to wear it, he would have had it on. She has been working on this bill diligently.”)

The motorcyclists’ campaign moved into high gear after Floyd and Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), co-sponsor of the bill in the Senate, had shepherded AB 36 through both bodies of the Legislature in May.

California ABATE set up a phone-a-thon for its members, and also began another letter and telegram blitz.

Tom Kovari, regional director for the Harley Owners’ Group, put out a call for the 20,000 Harley riders in the regional HOG to begin a telephone campaign to the governor’s office, asking for a veto on AB 36.

And Lombardo began trekking to Deukmejian’s office to talk with his aides.

The motorcyclist groups insisted that in addition to the “freedom of choice” issue, helmets restrict their peripheral vision and impair their ability to hear cars behind or beside them, that they do little good to protect a rider going more than 20 m.p.h. if he or she is in an accident. They advocated prevention of accidents through motorcycle safety education and riding courses.

Tougher Licensing

Last Thursday, Lombardo wrote Deukmejian a letter saying that if the governor would veto AB 36, the motorcyclists’ group would sponsor new legislation concerning rider safety programs and tougher licensing requirements for all persons under the age of 21. By midday Monday, Lombardo had met with the governor’s aides five times.

Lombardo stressed recent figures released by the California Highway Patrol that showed that 60.9% of the 824 motorcycle fatalities in the state in 1986 involved unlicensed or improperly licensed riders.

He also pointed out that the riders in accidents involving motorcycles tended “to be males without formal rider training, in the 16- to 24-year-old age group, who had no license or a revoked or suspended one, and who had high blood alcohol concentrations.”

Deukmejian cited those statistics in his veto message to the legislature.

“If you’re going to get out there on a motorcycle that can go from zero to 60 m.p.h. in 2.6 seconds, then you need the most training you can get,” said Wayne Thomas, a co-director of CMA who runs a Los Angeles restaurant design firm. “California already has a new training law, and it’s working.”

As of January, 1988, any Californian under age 18 who wants to get a motorcycle license must take a motorcycle training course. Although it did not become a law until 6 months ago, the training program actually started last July, on a voluntary basis.

“I think the general public feels somewhat vindictive,” said Kovari of HOG, a credit manager for a Los Angeles wholesale lighting distributor. “They feel if they have to wear seat belts (in cars) then motorcylists should have to wear helmets. But they’re not the same thing. The biggest issue (of the mandatory helmet law) is it is taking away one more freedom.

“I personally am an immigrant from Hungary. I am a naturalized citizen now, but I came from a country where the government eventually eliminated all personal freedoms. With this, I seem to feel a police state growing. This is the first step.”

Kovari, who has been riding a motorcycle for 21 years and only recently bought a car as his second form of transportation, admitted he wears a helmet while riding in inclement weather. “But I wear it at my own choosing, and that’s the way it should be,” he said.

Jim Bensberg, a representative from the American Motorcylist Assn., headquartered in Westerville, Ohio, came to Sacramento to lobby against the mandatory safety helmet bill. Like the Harley manufacturers, the AMA recommends its members wear helmets, but leaves it to their discretion.

“We have found that 6 out of 10 riders wear helmets anyway,” Bensberg said. “That goes in California, too.”

Longtime motorcycle rider and former racer Jerry Greer of Fullerton said that his position on the mandatory helmet law isn’t popular with many motorcyclists, but he is for such a bill.

“It’s 100% true that it takes away the freedom of, the easy rider image, the native son’s right to have sheep in cattle country,” said Greer, who repairs and restores antique Indian motorcycles and manufactures parts for them as well. Greer said that he wears a helmet most of the time, but occasionally rides without it.

“But the statistics can argue the credibility of a helmet law,” he said. “I’m tired of seeing 18-year-old kids buzzing something running 150 m.p.h. and still having a choice to wear a helmet.

“Motorcycling is like anything else, it has an implied risk. . . . But it (the attempt at a mandatory helmet law) is our own fault. We didn’t say anything. We didn’t take the bull by the horns and say ‘We have to police ourselves.’

“Sure, education would help. But I think people are hacked basically because somebody who knows nothing about the sport wants the last word. It’s how they feel emotionally.”