HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO SONNY BARGER!!!

“Clubless and bored, I rode around the Oakland streets with a new wild bunch.  We talked about starting up another club.  One of the riders, Boots, Don Reeves, wore a modified Air Force-like patch he’d found in Sacramento– a small skull wearing an aviator set inside a set of wings.  I thought it was cool as hell.  The bottom rocker read ‘Sacto.’  We later found out that Boots’s patch came from a defunct motorcycle club in North Sacramento.  Boots’s idea was to name our new club after the patch, the Hell’s Angels.  We all liked the name, so we hit a local trophy shop in Hayward and made up a set of patches based on the design (later called the death head) in April of 1957, not really knowing that there were other Hell’s Angels motorcycle clubs around the state of California.  For almost the first year of our existence we didn’t even use “Oakland” as a bottom rocker.  Instead, we were “Nomad” Hell’s Angels.  Yeah, that sounded like us.”