A Livelihood Built on a Wing and a Prayer

A love of Harley-Davidson motorcycles, wanderlust and solid contacts with the Hells Angels are qualifications that might stump a career counselor. But Guillermo Alegria knows how to combine them to make a living.

For the last 33 years, he has driven a 1957 panel truck sporting the Harley-Davidson logo through Central America and Mexico buying junked antique motorcycles. He sells them for parts in the United States and to customers who visit his home in this mountain village.

“Thanks to God and Harley-Davidson I have had happiness in my life,” Alegria says, looking from his terrace onto a panoramic view of El Salvador’s volcanoes.

Bikers from as far away as Spain, Norway and New Zealand have browsed through his small warehouse--neatly organized into racks of fuel tanks, clutches and other retrieved pieces--to replace parts of old Harley knuckleheads and even Indian motorcycles, made by a long-defunct company.

From the panel truck parked next to the warehouse, a spider monkey named Marimba sounds a bone-chilling screech when possible intruders approach. Two barking German shepherds respond to the alarm.

“Now girls, girls,” Alegria, a 66-year-old with wavy silver hair and a handlebar mustache, chides as he skips down the stairs toward them as spryly as his nickname, “Cricket,” suggests.

Alegria got into the motorcycle parts business, he says, when he had no job or skills except the ability to drink a prodigious amount of whiskey for a 130-pound man. His father sent him to San Francisco in 1956 with instructions to shape up.

He washed dishes, then repaired tires, a job that exposed him to the Bay Area’s biker culture. On a visit home to El Salvador, he got an idea.

Friends showed him a wrecked motorcycle that he recognized as an old Triumph, a British-made bike. He traded his watch for it. Impressed with the exchange, they told him where other old motorcycle carcasses could be found.

Alegria sold the Triumph in San Francisco for $800 and came back to El Salvador to buy up more old bikes. He scoured the country for scrapped cycles to sell to Hells Angels in the Eureka area, who became his best customers. “They may have beards and tattoos,” he says, “but they are honorable people. They always pay up.”

He bought the panel truck, had the winged Harley-Davidson logo painted on it and drove back to El Salvador to haul more motorcycles.

“I found an Indian thrown down a hillside in Guatemala,” he recalls. “They charged me $50 to haul it up and wash it--nothing for the bike.” The engine alone was worth $200, he says.

Then, 20 years ago, he fell in love with a Salvadoran woman. They bought a hillside farm on the village outskirts and built a home entirely of secondhand materials: beams from a church that collapsed in an earthquake, tile floors from destroyed houses.

The rambling, multilevel compound is a mix of the biker farmhouses that Alegria admired in Eureka and a traditional hacienda with its central patio. The rain gutters all drain into a cistern to provide water for washing.

Alegria shares his dream house with his wife and their two teenagers, Marimba and two other spider monkeys, the dogs, a parrot and an undetermined number of chickens.

The bike-buying excursions paid for the house, he says. At first, Alegria had trouble crossing from Mexico into the United States: Customs officers were accustomed to seeing old cars and trucks moving south, but they didn’t know what to make of someone hauling wrecked motorcycles northward.

After they got used to the idea, he remembers that one officer explained to a new colleague, “He’s the only one I know who hauls junk out of our country.”

Lately, Alegria has slowed down a bit. His last big buy was six years ago, when the police force here switched from military to civilian control and got a new fleet of internationally financed motorcycles.

He bought the old bikes as scrap metal, for $182. Broken down into parts, they brought him $20,000. He sold the last parts earlier this year to Bud Reveile, who owns Bud’s Bike Shop in Austin, Texas.

“It would have taken quite a while to put that amount of parts together,” Reveile says of his purchase. So now, after more than 40 years, Cricket is out of the motorcycle business. But maybe not for long.

“Any day now,” he predicts, “I’m going to fix that old truck up and make another buying trip.”