Collecting memorabilia from biker gangs, he earned friends — and death threats

By CHARLES FLEMING
MAY 20, 2021 5 AM PT
Mother Ruthe.

It was a name Bo Bushnell had heard again and again as he sought out memorabilia from the outlaw motorcycle clubs that thrived in Southern California during the 1950s and ‘60s.

Since he’d started collecting, he’d bought photographs, clothing — even a couple of motorcycles. But the bikers he talked to often told him he should try to find out what had happened to Mother Ruthe’s scrapbooks.

She had lived in La Puente, located conveniently halfway between biker clubhouses in Venice and San Bernardino, and acted as sort of a den mother to riders who stopped at her house. She fed them, patched up their wounds, let them crash for the night. And she photographed them and collected news clippings about them.

The problem was, she had died, and no one Bushnell had talked to knew her full name.

In the beginning, back in 2013, Bushnell hadn’t even been interested in motorcycles. He wasn’t looking to collect photos of outlaw biker gangs. And he certainly wasn’t looking for trouble.

Bushnell was working for punk memorabilia collector Bryan Ray Turcotte, who had hired him to work on Turcotte’s “Art of Punk” documentary series for L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art and to help him build his collection.

When Bushnell was first offered a batch of pictures of 1960s Southern California motorcycle riders, he wasn’t interested.

But when he later learned that some street gang photos he knew had recently been purchased for $2,500 were resold a short time later for $45,000, he went back to the seller with the biker photos. With Turcotte’s help, in November 2013 he paid $7,500 to acquire the collection, which had belonged to two Venice members of the Straight Satans.

After acquiring that first cache, Bushnell was hooked. He began tracking down former members of the various clubs, befriending them, asking them to tell their stories and offering to buy their memorabilia from years past.

A man with a file among shelving.
Bo Bushnell has one of the largest collections of motorcycle gang memorabilia locked away in a Los Angeles vault. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Turcotte was impressed with his determination. “He was obsessed in a hyperfocused way, like, one glimmer of light and he’s down the rabbit hole,” the punk collector said. “The dude just doesn’t care.”

But Turcotte also worried. The biker gangs Bushnell was dealing with didn’t shy away from violence, and Turcotte recalls telling his friend, “I don’t know how you do this without pissing people off.” Bushnell was unmoved.

It was the bikers and their stories that Bushnell loved, and he spent enormous energy tracking them down.

Early on, he met a man named Droopy, who was dying of cancer but agreed to talk to Bushnell about the old days, eventually bringing out pictures from his time as a Straight Satan. Later, he agreed to sell Bushnell his patches, which bear the club insignia and logos. Fledgling members must earn their patches, and they are never to be given away or sold under threat of serious reprisal from the club.

In early 2014, when word got out that he had the patches, Bushnell says, he got a call from a man who identified himself only as Doug and told him he was messing with the wrong people and was going to get hurt. Bushnell figured out Doug was a Hells Angel who went by Dougie Poo, so he called the biker back and convinced him to meet. Through Dougie Poo, he began to meet other riders as well, including Buzzard, Raunchy Pat, the Judge and Bill the Shark.

A close-up of a patch.
Among the items collected by Bushnell are patches from a motorcycle gang that existed from 1962 to 1966. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Though he found some of the stories they told him appalling, Bushnell related to the bikers as human beings, recognizing them as fellow outsiders.

The men told him about the early days of motorcycle gangs. Back then, he says, “it wasn’t about being a steroided-out monster looking for a fight.” They saw themselves as “a bunch of 20-somethings who wanted to ride, get loaded and live like 12-year-olds, forever.”

Over time, Bushnell began to record the stories they told him on audio and videotape.

Buzzard told him about the night he got Dougie Poo and a woman he was with high on booze and pills. When they passed out, he handcuffed them together in a compromising position, then called Dougie Poo’s girlfriend and asked her to come take him home.

This was revenge, Buzzard explained, for the night Dougie Poo had urinated on his leg at a bar.

The women who rode with the clubs had their own stories. There was Yum, so named because she danced at the Yum Yum Celebrity Club (“Always Open, Never Clothed”). She ran with Lil Bob, originally a Hells Angel and later a Coffin Cheater. There was Lil Bit, aka Margot, who rode her own chopper and was married to Coffin Cheater co-founder Lil Tom.

As Bushnell heard their personal histories, he grew determined to find Mother Ruthe’s scrapbooks.

In early 2015, a chance introduction from Dougie Poo led him to Harold, a former Hells Angel who’d been married to Ruthe decades earlier.

Harold knew Ruthe’s last name, and he knew she had died. But he had no information about whether she had living children, or where they might be.

Months of painstaking research using online databases led Bushnell to two women living in Florida who turned out to be two of Ruthe’s three daughters. They told Bushnell their mother’s things were in storage somewhere in Los Angeles, under the control of their other sister, from whom they were estranged. It took Bushnell months to locate her and persuade her to meet with him, he says.

An open photo album.
Bushnell also collects photographs of Crips gang members from the 1970s and ‘80s. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
She showed him some of what she had — scrapbooks containing hundreds of candid snapshots of bikers, along with clothing, membership cards and patches. But while she was willing to let him take some things to be photocopied, she said she couldn’t part with the memorabilia without the permission of her sisters — and Bushnell had to promise not tell them that he had found her in L.A.

It took months, but after almost a year on the hunt, Bushnell persuaded all three sisters to let him have the photos. The sister in California didn’t want any money. Bushnell sent the Florida sisters $1,500 each.

Today, Bushnell’s collection has grown to about 35,000 items. And in building his archive, he has rescued a significant chapter of Southern California history from the trash heap and become a respected authority on local bike clubs, the outlaw biker movement and the birth of the Hells Angels..

The soft-spoken, heavily tattooed (partly by L.A. ink artist Dr. Woo) Bushnell, born Robert Addison Bushnell III, was destined to be a collector. His beloved granddad was a successful Boise businessman obsessed with acquiring original Remington statues, Central European copper pots and other collectibles. His father went for Steuben glass and Tiffany lamps.

As a child, Bushnell developed his own obsessions — hot rods, skaters and punk rock. He subscribed to Low Rider magazine when he was 9 and began attending rock concerts before he was a teenager. He struggled with ADD, was prescribed Ritalin in the third grade and found school difficult, said his mother, Laura Bushnell, who described him as “mind-blowingly intelligent” but “not exactly normal.”

After a year of college and a series of jobs developing internet sites and reality TV shows, he met Turcotte and found his calling.

A close-up of photographs.
In addition to his biker memorabilia, Bushnell has started collecting photographs of Crips gang members.(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Early on in his collecting, Bushnell published some of the photographs he’d collected in a series of zines to raise money to acquire more material. In late 2015, after acquiring Mother Ruthe’s collection, he made plans to bring out his first book, “Halfway to Berdoo,” which would feature Mother Ruthe’s snapshots along with stories he had collected from the bikers she photographed.

Not long after, says Bushnell, the pressure mounted. Word reached the Hells Angels organization that Bushnell was intending to publish his book. Two members who had told Bushnell their stories were called into a meeting, Bushnell said, and told that if the book was published and contained details they’d provided, the members and their families would be killed. Bushnell received the same message.

According to former Hells Angels attorney Fritz Clapp, who for 30 years represented the club in trademark cases and became an early Bushnell supporter, the threats were real and credible.

“He had death threats — actual death threats,” Clapp said. “He was afraid for his life.”

The two club members begged him not to publish. Friends advised him to back down. Former club member and Bushnell fan Bill the Shark, who had also been a Galloping Goose, said he was worried. “I grew up in that world,” he said. “I saw some crazy s— go down.”

Bushnell took the threats seriously. His mother says that when she posted a happy birthday message to her son, in her own name, on his Outlaw Archive Instagram page, he called and said, “Mom! Never do that! They’ll find you!”

But despite his fears, he had no intention of backing down. Having spent all his savings and maxed out his credit cards acquiring material, he was living out of his car, showering at his gym and staying occasionally in Airbnb rentals. He needed the money that would come from the book.