Upscale Harley Owners Reborn to Be Wild
Leather stretches taut across the shoulders of the bikers as they throttle their engines and look dismissively at the car-bound. The signature roar that envelops them is not mere noise, it’s their calling card.
The rest of society can just deal with it. That goes for the kids and grandkids too.
“If the guys at the St. Francis Yacht Club saw me, they wouldn’t believe it,” said Vic Santoro, 54, who lives in Oakland and is a partner at KPMG, a national accounting firm. But tonight he’s smoking a cigar and wearing a shirt, its sleeves raggedly cut off at the shoulder, that declares on the back: “Bad to the Bone.”
“You should see me when I’m wearing my leathers,” he said. His wife, Diane, is wearing tight pants slit to the waist, blending in nicely with the crowd.
They are among thousands of the not-so-young but still restless who’ve come to the annual Laughlin River Run to pay homage to the Harley-Davidson and don jewelry they’d never wear to church. They jaw with decidedly more rough-and-tumble bikers about Fat Boys and Road Kings, about adding a bit more chrome to engines and modifying mufflers so those engines growl even louder.
Motorcycle riders have long had a reputation for freewheeling and hellish behavior, although that last part has been softened in recent years as more and more office-types have made it their hobby to ride. The cultures often coexist, sometimes mesh, sometimes clash. Sometimes there are harsh reminders of the differences. At last year’s Laughlin River Run, a gun and knife fight between feuding outlaw biker gangs left three men dead in a casino.
But evidence abounds at this year’s rally that many bikers, such as medical records supervisor Roberta Adams of La Mirada, come from a place closer to the middle than the edge. During the week, Adams wears nylons, high heels and a business suit; her wheels are the casters of an office chair. On weekends the grandmother dons her leathers and helmet and flaunts her free spirit.
“Getting on my bike is a wonderful feeling of independence and control,” she said. “When kids grow up, they go wild during spring break. This is my spring break.”
Dan Murphy, 57, a manufacturing materials specialist who lives in Redondo Beach, says this is his chance to be a rebel. “I rode when I was in my 20s, and my friends talked me into getting a bike again. When I get on it, all my cares melt away. It’s all about power, excitement and camaraderie with other Harley riders.”
Some have merged the biker spirit with professional life. Victor Bonilla, 48, of Lakewood, Calif., is a mortgage banker and has always had a motorcycle. “I ride for an hour or 90 minutes each morning before I go to the office, just to clean out my head and get ready for the day,” he said Saturday. “When I get back to work [Monday] morning, I’ll be relaxed and energized.”
For many of the riders at Laughlin, taking a Harley down the highway is passage to midlife freedom.
“For years we were busy raising a family. We had obligations,” said Les Bernell, 53, a Woodland Hills, Calif., resident and account executive of a check-processing company. “But now our kids are grown up, and my wife and I are newlyweds again. When we take off to ride, our kids tell us we rock.”
His wife, Stephanye, rhapsodizes on the joy of riding her low-slung Harley -- taking in the smells and sights of travel she was deprived of in the family sedan and dressing like a spicy biker lady. This weekend, she’s wearing a denim number with the Harley-Davidson logo, and an iron-cross pendant hanging from a chain-link choker. “When your daughter borrows your clothes, you know you’re doing something right,” she said.
Motorcycling is nondiscriminatory except when it comes to money. Harleys cost upwards of $20,000, depending on how they are customized, explaining why their owners are, on average, in their mid-30s. Older riders say they are able to resume love affairs with shiny toys that they abandoned in their early 20s, when money was tight.
Steve Sibell, 60, decided that purchasing a Harley was simply a good investment after he and his wife Janet sold their office supply and furniture businesses in Rapid City, S.D., bought a second home in Mesa, Ariz., and wondered what to do with their new time and money.
The couple had grown smitten with Harleys while working at their daughter’s patch-embroidery booth during the biggest of annual Harley rallies, in Sturgis, S.D.
Now retired, “we were sitting on our deck and trying to decide what to do next. We thought about traveling to Europe,” he said. “Then the wife said, ‘Let’s look at bikes!’
“Since we had worked together and play golf together, now we can ride together,” he said. “As an investment, it beat the stock market, and in terms of traveling, it beat pulling a boat.”
The couple spent $18,000 on their Electra Glide, and are now planning to customize it. “We’re looking at painting it, lowering it and getting different mufflers to make it louder. It won’t be obnoxious, but it will be louder,” Sibell bragged.
Carl Holman, 61, who maintains communications technology for a logging company, and his wife, Sue Victory, 52, left rainy Olympia, Wash., in their BMW sedan and shipped their bikes ahead by truck. They’re here in search of a “tavern bike” -- something to park in front of the local bar, rather than ride across the landscape.
“They call us ZIP code bikers because the bikes are so tricked out, you don’t want to drive them too far,” said Victory, a real estate agent who describes the Laughlin weekend as a “RUB” event -- as in Rich Urban Bikers.
But despite the trappings of success, the hearts of rebels still lurk.
“We like the sound. We like the speed. We like toys that go vroom-vroom,” she said. And, perhaps best of all: “Our kids don’t trust us with their children.”
