It's a warm Wednesday evening at Glenside and Broad, and the parking lot outside of Mission BBQ is filling fast with leather jackets, helmets and hot bikes.
During the summer, when the weather is good, motorcyclists converge on this commercial area nearly every Wednesday night, transforming it into a watering hole for kindred spirits.
“You can find these types of gatherings all around the country on any given night,” says Matt Danielson, a Richmond attorney, peeling himself off a big Harley-Davidson motorcycle. “It gives motorcyclists the chance to get together, look at each other’s bikes and swap war stories. It gives you an excuse to ride somewhere.”
Danielson is a lobbyist for the Virginia Coalition of Motorcyclists, which represents the interests of bikers at the General Assembly.
Motorcycle culture in the Richmond area defies stereotypes, he says. “I think the mistake that a lot of people make is that they try to pin that a biker is this or a biker is that. He might be a banker, a mechanic, a lawyer, a doctor, black, white, straight, gay ... Bikers are as diverse as people are.”
Over the past decade, the number of Virginians who hold endorsements required to ride a motorcycle has soared 37 percent, from 304,916 in 2007 to 419,229 in 2017, according to Department of Motor Vehicles statistics. During the same period, the number of registered motorcycles has climbed by nearly 45,000, from 166,806 to 211,620. The trend contrasts with a drop in bike sales nationally. Motorcycles are not the rage that they once were — not by a long shot — when baby boomers were among the biggest customers. U.S. sales declined about 2.1 percent in 2016, after five years of increases. In 2015, more than 500,000 motorcycles were sold, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council and other sources. Compare that with the boom years of 2004 and 2005, when more than 1 million motorcycles were sold.
Despite the decline, at least one segment of the country’s riding population is on the rise. According to the online magazine Women Riders Now, the number of motorcycles owned by women increased 50 percent during the past decade, making up 14 percent of the total.
Laurie “Jazze” Alston, president of the Buffalo Soldiers Motorcycle Club of Richmond, VA, likes to watch people’s faces when she parks her 800-pound Harley-Davidson, takes off her helmet and they realize she’s a woman. Most people, she says, immediately give her a “thumbs up,” to express their approval.
“A woman can handle a motorcycle as well as a man,” says Alston, a 52-year-old business systems specialist at Dominion Energy who has been riding for more than a decade. “I ride a motorcycle because I love to be outdoors,” she says. “I love how the wind feels against my skin.”
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Joe Clark (left) shares a laugh with William Hembrick at Mission BBQ.
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Outside Mission BBQ, Greg Castleberry (right) a rider for 48 years, talks with Butch Vaughan beside his 23rd bike.
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Scott Takahashi (right), who started the Wednesday meetups at Mission BBQ, talks with Phillip Moo (left) and Paul Nolte.
The Outlaw Image
For many older Americans, the image of hard-drinking, hard-living motorcycle riders was planted in their memory by actor Marlon Brando in the 1953 movie, “The Wild One,” in which two rival motorcycle gangs terrorize a small town. Modern motorcycle riders say that even now, the image is hard to shake.
Alston says she had a lot of explaining to do to her parents when she started riding with the Buffalo Soldiers, named after African-American troops that served in the post-Civil War U.S. Army, largely in the Western states.
“They said, ‘You’re in a gang,’” Alston recalls with a laugh.
“I think a lot of people don’t understand it,” says Luther Atkinson of Richmond, a 58-year-old network administrator for a local firm who started riding in 2006. “When they think motorcycles, they think Hell’s Angels and hell raising ... That’s not the way it is, once you get to know us.”
Sometimes, even the police are riders.
Sgt. Chuck Kain, 39, a motorcycle officer with the Virginia State Police, surveyed the growing crowd of bikers at Mission BBQ recently as an interested observer and a participant.
“I’ve wanted to ride my whole life,” Kain says.
Besides keeping the law on byways and interstates, Kain says motorcycle officers, whether they’re state troopers or local police, also do a lot of community service.
“You’re more approachable. People want to come and talk to you about the motorcycle,” Kain says. “They have an understanding of what we have to go through.”
He acknowledges that riding a motorcycle adds another element of danger to police work, but Kain says it is a voluntary assignment that has its own perks: freedom of the road, being part of a close-knit team and having an impressive motorcycle — a high-performance Harley-Davidson Electra Glide — as standard equipment.
“From an enforcement standpoint, you can see more on a motorcycle,” Kain adds.
Community Spirit
Eric Bertram, a member of the local iron workers union, says when bikers assemble, it’s mainly for the camaraderie and the eye candy of flashy bikes.
“You look around and admire each other’s bikes. It’s about hanging out and coming together,” Bertram says. “Every once in a while you’ll have the random jerk. It’s going to happen.”
Besides Mission BBQ, Bertram says another favorite meeting spot is the Exxon station in Shockoe Bottom.
Roy Fisher, co-founder of the Richmond Riders, one of the area’s longest-running motorcycle clubs, says the bike scene was more fragmented 25 years ago than it is today.
“There were the sport riders and the Harley riders and the BMW riders,” says Fisher, a 56-year-old design engineer. “It was segmented and there weren’t a lot of get-togethers with all the different riders. I think that’s a more recent phenomenon.”
He said social media has made it easier to connect.
Members of Richmond Riders say that they, like many motorcycle clubs, are focused on charitable causes in their fundraising. Most of the money the club raises, through rallies and other events, goes to the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation.
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Laurie “Jazze” Alston, president of the Buffalo Soldiers Motorcycle Club of Richmond, VA and Harold “Honeycutt” Cobb
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E. Bruce Heilman, chancellor and former president of the University of Richmond
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Jeana Green, instructor at the Motorcycle Safety Center of Virginia near Ashland
A Sense of Independence
Jeana Green — wearing a baseball cap with a long pigtail down her back — stands at the front of her classroom at the Motorcycle Safety Center of Virginia near Ashland in Hanover County.
The sold-out class of nine men and two women is entering the second day of a two-day training session.
To receive the necessary endorsement to ride a motorcycle from the DMV, which contracts with the safety center as part of the Virginia Rider Training Program, the students will have to pass both a written exam and a motorcycle skills test.
Green brings the class to attention with a word of warning about what they should do, if they encounter a board or other object on the road that they can’t avoid while they’re riding,
“Raise [yourself] off the seat, use your knees and legs as shock absorbers. If you don’t do that, it will damage your back,” says Green, who is in her early 50s and says she has been riding since she was a child.
Delis Bediako, a 26-year-old registered nurse in Chesterfield County, studies her notes as Green speaks.
“I’ve ridden with my brother. I enjoy it I. want to do it myself,” she says, explaining why she’s in the class. But Bediako knows that motorcycle riding, like driving any motorized vehicle, has its dangers. She has seen the consequences of road accidents all too often.
“It’s made me cautious,” she says.
Bediako also knows that her decision to take up motorcycling likely will not sit well with everyone in her family. “I’m pretty sure my mother won’t be too happy when she hears about it.”
Her classmate Chantal Henry, a 32-year-old Richmond resident who is taking college classes and works for T-Mobile, can’t wait to get her license.
“It’s empowering,” she says of motorcycle riding. “Even though a lot of women do ride, it is still a man’s sport. Riding increases my sense of confidence and my independence.”
As the training session winds down, Green says that even after her students pass the required tests and get their licenses, there’s no rush to ride. She says some people take longer than others to reach their comfort level.
Her advice to the students: “Don’t let anyone tell you when you are ready to ride a motorcycle.”
Life on Two Wheels
For E. Bruce Heilman, chancellor and former president of the University of Richmond, a car crash led him to the joys of motorcycle riding. It happened when a large, out-of-control truck loaded with feed rear-ended the car he and an Army buddy were riding in just after World War II, forcing the car down the side of a steep mountain in West Virginia.
“We rolled and tumbled, and every time we rolled again, I realized I was still alive. Finally, a tree stopped us,” Heilman recalls. “Then I looked up and here was the truck tumbling down after us. A body fell out of the truck onto our car, and then the truck fell onto the body.”
All four doors of his friend’s Nash automobile were pinned shut, but Heilman was able to pull his unconscious comrade through the car’s trunk, which had sprung open. The occupants of the truck were killed; Heilman’s buddy required hospitalization, but Heilman was able to walk away, largely uninjured but shaken up.
Afterward, his friend used the insurance money from the accident to purchase two motorcycles, and gave one of them to Heilman.
As two footloose soldiers, the pair had a blast traveling on U.S. 1, at a time when it was the prime artery along the East Coast. But Heilman soon entered college on the GI Bill and then got married after a whirlwind 10-day courtship, while he was still a college freshman. Then the children began coming, five of them before he was out of graduate school.
“A motorcycle had no place for somebody with a wife and kids who was just barely able to get enough food to eat, so I got rid of it,” Heilman says.
Fifty years later, his wife, Betty, gave him a new Harley-Davidson motorcycle as a gift (she died in 2013).
“So, I was 71 and I had a brand new motorcycle, and I’ve been riding ever since,” says Heilman, who at age 91 still travels on his Harley to support veterans’ causes.
“I have learned so much about the country riding a motorcycle, more than I could any other way,” he says.
Although Heilman knows his five children, 10 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren would like him to park his motorcycle permanently, he says it’s not going to happen.
“I’m totally comfortable on the interstate at 70 miles per hour,” Heilman says, adjusting his necktie.
