Ritzy Riders : <i> Rubs,</i> or Rich Urban Bikers, Mount Their Harleys Dressed in Designer Jeans Instead of Black Leather
The veteran bikers, wearing their trademark black leather and sporting full beards, sipped beer at Cook’s Corner while their brightly chromed Harley-Davidsons, the heavyweight champs of motorcycles, sat nearby.
Suddenly a new group of bikers roared into the popular roadhouse at the entrance of scenic Trabuco Canyon, but this crew was different.
These were the Rich Urban Bikers-- Rubs or Rubbys as they are derisively known by the more rough-hewn Harley devotees--a group that is likely to know more about stocks and financial planning than V-twin engines.
They are people such as Frank Chirico, co-owner of a chain of beauty salons who rode into Cook’s Corner perched atop a $13,000 Harley that he spent another $8,000 customizing.
Wearing a white French antique jacket with red lining, Chirico opened his coat and pulled a cellular phone from the inside pocket--the perfect tool, he said, for the biker who just happens to want to make brunch reservations.
Chirico belongs to the fastest growing segment of Harley-Davidson bikers: business owners and professionals in their mid-30s and older who spend their weekends wheeling about the back roads of Orange County on motorcycles that are more often associated with a different breed of rider.
They are certainly a different sort from the blue-collar workers with mechanical aptitude who once dominated the sport, or the outlaw Harley bikers glorified by Hollywood in such movies as “The Wild One” and “Easy Rider.”
And perhaps to no one’s surprise, the new bikers are not warmly welcomed by many of the longtime Harley riders who view them as just so many spoiled dilettantes who are soiling the rich tradition of their beloved road machines. Designer jeans, French jackets and cellular phones just don’t belong on Harleys, they say.
But the new upper crust of Harley bikers is also credited with pumping much-needed new money into the corporation that makes the celebrated motorcycles.
The management of Harley-Davidson Inc. acquired the Milwaukee company in 1981 in a highly leveraged buyout. At the time, a combination of the national recession, product-quality problems and competition from Japanese motorcycle makers had nearly forced the company to shut down.
But Harley-Davidson’s financial picture brightened in the mid-’80s, after the company introduced a new engine that was lighter in weight and more dependable than previous models.
Ray Malzo, owner of Orange County Harley in Santa Ana and the largest of Orange County’s three Harley dealerships, said the greater dependability of the newer models attracted a more professional, albeit less mechanically gifted, clientele. Moreover, he said the bike recently has benefited from a wave of 1950s nostalgia with the baby-boom generation.
In response, Malzo said, Harley “came out with bikes that look older, what the white-collar workers today remember when they were kids and wanted one. Now that they make the money and have the time they are buying them as expensive toys.”
Malzo said the typical new buyer of a Harley in Orange County--the bikes range in price from $4,359 to $14,000--has an annual income “pushing $80,000 on the average.” More women also are getting into the sport, giving up the passenger seat to take up riding.
Due in large part to the new clientele, Harley sales are booming. The company now controls 60% of the national market for heavyweight motorcycles, up from 24% a decade ago.
Malzo said that since buying the Santa Ana dealership a year ago, he has spent $100,000 revamping the interior to give it the “Nordstrom look,” in part to appeal to the new generation of Harley riders.
The new riders say that, in common with Harley bikers of the past, they love the sound and feel of a Harley and the freedom of driving down a country road with the wind in their faces. Many of them joined with the old-timers in opposing legislation pending in Sacramento that would require motorcyclists to wear helmets.
Jim Anderson, president of Commercial Bankers Life Insurance Co. in Irvine, said he rides his Harley as an escape from “getting hammered all day by customers or regulators. When it is time to clear your head there is nothing better than to get on that V-twin engine and go into the desert or mountains for a ride. Frankly, it is cheaper than spending $180 an hour for a psychiatrist.”
Anderson, 47, said that when he drove a Harley 18 years ago, “Harley riders had a terrible image. They generally wore long, greasy hair and a bandanna and their income was of questionable origins.”
After he married, Anderson said, he gave up motorcycling but now that his children are grown, he has taken up biking once more and finds it has become more respectable.
The new breed of customers at Orange County Harley include a dentist and his fiancee, developers, a neurosurgeon and even a Catholic priest. Father Fabian Richards was surprised two months ago when a group of his parishioners at St. Catherine’s of Siena in Laguna Beach bought him a Harley, something he had always yearned for.
“They had heard me give a homily in which I talked about things we go out of our way to do or get. I said in my case it would be a Harley-Davidson,” said Richards. Some Laguna residents now call him “Biker Padre.”
The prospect of cashing in on the greater affluence of Harley-Davidson owners has not been overlooked by other enterprising business people, ranging from motorcycle customizers to managers of eating establishments.
Harley-Davidson dealers offer flashier-colored motorcycles and a much broader array of clothing with the Harley-Davidson logo, from lambskin jackets to jewelry, for the more fashion-conscious biker. There are even even paste-on tattoos for the man, or woman, who dresses for success during the week but wants to take on a rougher image on the weekend.
Acknowledging the tastes of the Rubs , even Cook’s Corner, one of the oldest weekend biker hangouts in Southern California, has cleaned up its act.
Frank deLuna, who bought the tavern in November, 1988, said he has spent about $90,000 remodeling the place. And while it is still decidedly rustic, it now sports a compact disc jukebox, a big-screen TV and a mixed-drink bar for customers who aren’t beer drinkers.
In December, another establishment, Buck’s Bar and Grill, opened on Laguna Canyon Road in Laguna Beach with the intent of catering to the Harley crowd, many of whom now make Sunday afternoon pilgrimages there after stopping at Cook’s.
On Sundays the restaurant provides live rock ‘n’ roll music along with classic biker movies.
Harley riders are also showing up at swankier establishments such as Las Brisas in Laguna Beach and the Red Onion restaurants, some of which have promoted Harley nights during the week.
“We get 15 to 100 bikes a night on Tuesdays,” said Tim Rouch, a promotions director at the Red Onion in Santa Ana, which for the last four months has welcomed Harley riders with special entertainment.
But all this commotion over the revival of the Harley has had its downside. Around Las Brisas, for example, homeowners and renters complain about the deafening roar of motorcycles as they cruise up to the popular restaurant on weekends.
One recent Sunday at Buck’s Bar and Grill, Tony McGuy, a large burly man with heavily tattooed arms and his head swathed in a black bandanna, mused about how biker society had changed over the last decade.
“Ten years ago we weren’t allowed in bars,” he said. Looking around at the fashionably outfitted bikers around him, he said he felt “real out of place. I’d say 80% of these people started (biking) in the last two to three years.”
Nonetheless, many people still find Harley bikers intimidating, especially when a large swarm of them pulls into a restaurant or gasoline station, said Ken Caplan, a financial planner in Orange who often rides with such groups.
Caplan, a short man with thick glasses who hardly fits the traditional Harley biker image, recalled with amusement an incident last year when he was on a group ride from Glendale to a ranch in Malibu to raise funds for the Muscular Dystrophy Assn.
Caplan said a group of about 7,500 bikers was nearing Malibu when some of them turned into a gas station. He said a man who was filling the tank of his BMW nervously asked what was going on, after his wife inside the car had pushed down the door locks.
Caplan explained that the motorcyclists were raising money to fight muscular dystrophy and hoped to break last year’s record of $550,000. The man’s attitude changed from one of annoyance to admiration.
Caplan later sent a news story about the fund-raiser and a request for a donation to the man, who was an attorney from Woodland Hills.
He must have been favorably impressed, Caplan said, because “he promised a donation and said that in the future, if he could get approval from his wife, he would buy a Harley.”
