Ghost Riders of Saucon (Part 2): Today’s Bikers Aren’t Your Grandaddy’s Bikers
Before getting to Wayne Eisenhart’s story in the past, we need to look at our weird Hellertown present, and the motorcycle culture of the last century.
There was a time when riding a Harley-Davidson motorcycle in and around Hellertown meant something very, very different than what it means in 2022. It wasn’t better, but it was different. And then, before that, it was even more different.
From around 1900 to 1970, motorcycling culture in the Valley and Pennsylvania fell into four main categories:
Early experimentation & exhibitions
Sport racing and hill-climbing
Transportation
Riding clubs
Participations in the four categories intermingled, of course. One powerful catalyst from the mid-1920s onward in the Lehigh Valley was the 400-foot, 70% grade hill in what was then called Freemansburg (today, most people call it Steel City) and the massive hill-climbing and “oil track” race events hosted there by the Bethlehem Motorcycle Association.
These were giant spectacles, drawing thousands of onlookers and competitors from across the whole country. Eventually, by the late 1960s, the Hill Climb was a haunt for motorcycle gangs, and it as was the infamous and still active Cossacks MC, who probably first claimed the area as home turf, with the formidable Pagans and, at the time, more localized Warlocks MCs also more and more on the scene. As you might imagine, that convergence was going to cause problems. That’s an understatement. But more on that in a later installment.
An ad from a 1948 Morning Call promoting the hill climb in what is today known as Steel City (Newspapers.com)
Harley Davidson and Indian ruled the roost in sporting events. It was only after the Second World War when “cycling” and criminal behavior became entangled, and Harleys weren’t so much the biker gang member’s ride of choice—they were everyone’s choice.
Vietnam and late-60s counterculture came after the early Harley-riding biker gangs, not before, but they added a new edge and a romanticism rooted in a truly renegade “free” lifestyle, and sometimes, in lawlessness.
I know it’s an oversimplification in some ways, but these motorcycle gangs of Pennsylvania in the 1960s and 70s were really the closest thing to “ghost riders” of the Old West such as the James-Younger Gang and countless others. They are a profoundly and uniquely American phenomenon.
There were still the old “gentlemen cyclist clubs” in Hellertown (and there still are), and there have always been commuter and sports-competition motorcyclists in Pennsylvania.
But in the 1960s, things did change and begin to resemble the Tombstone, Dodge City and the OK Coral.
For one crazy decade—from about 1967 to 1977—Hellertown was truly as wild as the Wild West. There were warring, gun-slinging gangs, kidnappings, beatings, police and the Feds on the backfoot, and murders. There also came to be some romantic figures, local legends, and heartbroken loved ones caught in the middle as the bullets flew and Harleys roared past.
“For one crazy decade—from about 1967 to 1977—Hellertown was truly as wild as the Wild West. There were warring, gun-slinging gangs, kidnappings, beatings, police and the Feds on the backfoot, and murders. There also came to be some romantic figures, local legends, and heartbroken loved ones caught in the middle as the bullets flew and Harleys roared past.”
The reputation of “cyclists,” which is typically how Lehigh Valley media referred to them in the 60s, hit the first of many potholes in the late Sixties. During the summer that year, the year after the so-called Summer of Love, concern about loosely affiliated motorcycling gangs in Saucon Valley had ramped up.
Morning Call article from August 1968 (Newspapers.com), where writer Bill Kulp decries the Cossacks gang in Steel City.
Harleys weren’t as pricey back then. In 1972, you could buy a new 1200cc Electraglide in the Lehigh Valley for about $2,000—the equivalent in today’s dollars of about $14K.
But the same new Harley model today will set you back about $20,000. Millennials, those killers of so many Boomer sacred cows, would rather buy a much cheaper Japanese bike. They don’t care about “cool.” (They don’t even say “cool,” OK?) They don’t know who Peter Fonda or Dennis Hopper are, or what the Captain America bike was. And they’re struggling to save up housing down-payments and save money for their kids’ college tuition.
No, the average Harley buyer today is fairly well-to-do and older, according to CNBC:
Sorry, folks, but Harleys are dad bikes today. They’re lovely machines—I admire them on so many levels, I don’t even know where start—but even someone as thickheaded as me grasps that they’re about as rebellious as your pastor’s tribal tattoo—you know, the one she got on her thigh after Lollapalooza, eons ago, before seminary? Whoa! That’s so edgy.
What you here see in this stock photograph is a costume, conjuring outlaw biking culture of the late 1960s and 1970s. This guy is probably a software designer. (“Outlaw Biker” by Tinto/CC licensing)
The guys I know who ride Harleys in Hellertown are 1) a retired school teacher; 2) the son of a local judge; 3) a union pipe-fitter and reformed grouch who tries to stay on the straight-and-narrow. 4) Mayor Dave. Not exactly contenders for a local Hells Angels chapter.
Now there ARE all kinds of organized “gentleman’s riding groups” in Hellertown, and while they may sometimes dress the part, and appropriate the goatees or handlebar mustaches of MC gang members, they’re law-abiding citizens. In fact, they’re ultra-conservative, at least the ones I know.
And I’m glad they’re law-abiding, because if you really understand the actual 1%er MC gangs, well, terrifying is an understatement.
But that doesn’t stop people from being drawn to the trappings. I mean, you can buy an outlaw-looking vest from Walmart if you want to masquerade as a “bad boy” on the cheap, and I suppose there are worse ways of spending money.
Screengrab from Walmart.com
But again, that ain’t outlaw. And that’s a good thing. Most citizens today, I’m certain, would not be pleased with where Hellertown was when the biker gangs held sway here. It was … scary.
Oh, you didn’t know that? You didn’t know that there was a time when Hellertown was the equivalent of a Wild West town, and the outlaw bikers were, truly, like the last of the cowboy gunslingers from the Old West?
I wish it were that simple, and that colorful. But then I remember that little boy who grew up to be Wayne “Ike” Eisenhart, a leader of one of the most fearsome motorcycle gangs in the world. I remember the Wordsworth’s line: “The child is father of the man.” And I remember the real, wrenching pain I hear in the voices of those who miss Wayne, and I feel we must not glamorize this story, as incredible and practically made-for-Hollywood it is.
But more on that in the next installment of Riders in a Storm.
