Port Dover roars for 50th time

DAVID PENHALE/FOR THE TORONTO STAR

It's important to make a proper entrance when rolling into Port Dover on Friday the 13th and these two women seem to have figured out how to do it.

Philip Marchand

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

In Port Dover, for one glorious summer day, the motorcycle was king. Endless rows of motorcycles sat angled on Main Street. A band cranked out heavy metal music. Bikers rode through the crowds, their metal beasts emitting angry snorts. Pedestrians made way. Cops stood watchfully on the sidelines.

Since 1981, Friday the thirteenth, rain or shine, winter or summer, has been a red letter day for Ontario bikers. Some of Port Dover’s 8,000 residents might have found the 50th such rally, held last week, hard on the nerves. Since the small town of Hollister, California was allegedly “terrorized” by a motorcycle club in 1947 — an incident that inspired the 1953 Marlon Brando movie, The Wild One — fears of barbarian revels haunt good citizens when bikers ride into town.

Most of the locals seemed to take the invasion in stride. The Knights of Columbus set up a trailer to sell hot dogs. The Kinsmen operated a parking lot. Local artists donned black t-shirts and stood behind card tables, hawking their wares. After all, the town won’t see another such influx of cash until Friday the 13th rolls around again next May.

Not that all merchants benefited, as several stores remained closed. Still, Elaina Pring, owner of On the Fringe, a year-round biker apparel store, was happy. She started out in the early ’70s, making and selling clothes for hippies and Yonge Street boulevardiers — jackets with lots of beads and fringes.

“I had a shop in Toronto for 28 years,” she said as we talked inside her noisy, jam-packed store. “This is my client base. These are my clients who have followed us here.” Her specialty item on this day was a 50th anniversary T-shirt with a “Support Our Troops” message.

We walked outside to see if we could find Chris Simon, the man often credited with starting the event. One Friday the 13th almost thirty years ago, he and some friends spent the night roaring up and down Main Street on their motorcycles. The idea caught on and, by the 1990s, thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts were making the pilgrimage to this little town on the shore of Lake Erie. This year he was signing his 50th anniversary “Chris Simons Signature T-shirt,” but by the time we arrived he had left his post, apparently overcome by the heat and crowds.

The event is more than a little overwhelming. Pring and others estimated that there were 150,000 visitors in town, with 50,000 motorcycles. This was the same estimate for the last summer-time Friday the 13th Port Dover rally, in June, 2008.

The carnival of sight and sound was also a huge bazaar, with booths offering T-shirts, beanies, hats, pins, badges, buttons, “Ladies’ Tanks,” sheepskin solo pads, belts, buckles, even leather vests in kiddie sizes — an endless array of biker apparel and accessories.

The Twisted Motorcycle Clothing had on display a black T-shirt with a skeletal hand giving the finger. TOO F***ING LOUD? the caption read. TOO F***ING BAD. Another vendor was doing a brisk business with a vibrant orange T-shirt bearing the message, “CAN YOU SEE ME NOW, ASSHOLE?” The in-your-face rhetoric seemed unrelated to behaviour. There may have been bikers with anger management issues in attendance, but the crowd was good natured, and everyone I spoke to was polite.

The skeletal T-shirt sold out early, Troy Henry, a.k.a. Mr. Twisted, told me. “We’re from Oshawa,” he said. “I come here every year. This event is how I started doing my own clothing line. All of it is biker.” He showed me his leather jacket with the initials S. T. T. W. C. “We read something in high school that said, ‘Something wicked this way comes,’” he explained.

“The witches from Macbeth?”

“Yeah. That’s what those initials stand for. Something twisted this way comes.”

He hastened to add that his idea of biker was not that of a “one-percenter,” or outlaw biker. “I like the crowd, I like the lifestyle — up to a point,” he said. “You know what I mean? I don’t want to bury somebody.”

He also happened to be one of the few black people I saw at the event. “I’ve had people mention to me that they love the fact that behind all of it is a black person,” Henry said. “I have had people tell me that. Now in the States, it’s another world. There are a lot of black people. Up here, though, I’ve never met any other black people who are doing this. I hope years later maybe I will be seen as one of the pioneers, but I don’t do the colour thing. My thing is racial and gender blind.” He introduced me to his girlfriend Sarah. I asked her if she rides. “No, I’m a bitch,” she said. “I ride bitch.”

The motorcycles at the rally spanned a wide variety of styles — outlaw high riders, Gold Wing-style tourers, battered dirt bikes, the fat-tired, high-powered racers known as crotch rockets. A local dealership for Motor Trikes — a brand of three wheel motorcycles — sold vehicles that would dismay the Wild One. “A lot of guys are getting older,” a sales representative said. “You take this model here — that’s nine hundred pounds. That’s a big bike to move around. You trike it and your grandmother can move it around.”

Definitely not for your grannie was Andy Forrest’s Suzuki Hayabusa. “They call it the world’s fastest production motorcycle,” Forrest said. He had lovingly worked on this vehicle that lights up at night, and that dazzles the eye in the day with its blue and silver colouring and its chrome accessories. Its foot pegs resemble the nasty blades the evil Messala attached to his chariot wheels in Ben Hur.

“I put everything on except for the tires and rims, because I didn’t have a machine to check for the tires and rims. Everything else I’ve changed or taken off or wired myself. I had it sit in my kitchen over the winter, tools on one hand and parts on the other.”

His next move will be to have it painted with details from the 2004 movie AVP: Alien vs. Predator, about two warring species living in Antarctica. “I want to keep the blue and silver, but have another side as alien versus predator,” he said. This he will not be able to do himself. “You have to get all the parts and take them to an airbrush artist, and make up a theme together, how you want it to look, and negotiate a price,” Forrest commented. “It would have to be a professional.”

It would certainly be a crowning touch for a machine worthy of an art gallery. “It’s basically a bike for show,” Forrest said. “I’m not going to risk it on a race track. All it takes is one slip on oil or grass. I’m not going to do that. I’ve been asked to take it on the track, but no.”

He was even nervous about people touching it. “I go to Niagara Falls, and tourists ask me if they can take a picture of it,” Forrest said. “I say okay, and then they start climbing on it. I go, no, no, no.”

The thought of someone knocking the motorcycle over filled him with horror — these are delicate mechanisms and shining surfaces. Forrest related an incident earlier in the day. “Someone was trying to park a bike by squeezing it between two other bikes,” Forrest recalled. “He knocked the mirror off of one of them. Fortunately, they got it clipped back on.”

If that was the worst mishap of the day, then the police, very much in evidence on Main Street, faced fairly easy duty. I asked an OPP officer, whose name tag read D. Gray, about law enforcement on Friday the 13th.

“Generally, it’s been pretty good for the last few years,” he commented. Ride to live, live to ride is a biker mantra, and it helped that these cops were bikers as well, with their neat black, white and tan O.P.P. motorcycles. “We enjoy coming down, being part of it,” Gray commented. “We get a lot of positive comments. People are really happy to see police out on motorcycles. They realize we understand the enjoyment that comes from riding.”

Further up the street, a brouhaha developed, however. A crowd gathered around half a dozen police officers and an incensed biker from Quebec. “Calm down, sir,” said a police officer with a warning note in his voice. “Calm down.” But the biker didn’t seem overcome with violent emotion. It was merely his Gallic vivacity on display. Because of the noise of motorcycles and members of the crowd it was impossible to hear what he was saying, but he appeared to be appealing to the motorcycle gods. A cop had handed him a ticket for revving his machine! A hundred dollar fine! Quelle injustice! The crowd took his side, showering him with money to pay the fine. When he gathered up his cash and prepared to ride off, someone in the crowd hollered, “Do a wheelie!” The Quebec biker, however, kept his cool and left quietly with his girl friend. Nobody wanted to spoil Port Dover’s big day.

An engineer named Rick Viggiano who had ridden on his fancy Gold Wing from his home in Hamburg, New York, told me, “They are labelling (the Port Dover rally) as the Sturgis of the north.” The motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota might be more famous, but Port Dover is definitely on the map. “It’s one of the biggest one-day events that we know as motorcycle riders.”

I asked him if there had ever been, in his experience, any trouble with the Friday the 13th rally. “You know what?” he replied. “No trouble whatsoever. There’s no drinking on the sites. I love it. I absolutely love it. It’s a good, clean event.”

Our attention was distracted by whooping and hollering. A woman with breasts the size of ten-pin bowling balls had removed her top and came walking along, tossing high fives to her admirers. Out came the cell phones, snapping pictures of what appeared to be a triumph of science and nature. The woman posed for the outstretched cell phones on Viggiano’s motorcycle, to the amusement of its owner.

Despite the exhibitionism, and the rude T-shirts, and the racket and the fumes, the rally did seem to be a “good, clean event.” The gathering shows signs of morphing into a week-long event, however – a development that might worry locals. One day of biker bliss is quite enough for a small town to handle.

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