Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington
 | |
| Motto | PFFP - FFT |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1945 |
| Type | Outlaw motorcycle club |
| Region | California and Nevada, USA |
| Activities | The outlaw motorcycle and car club |
| Website |
www |
The Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington (POBOB) is a motorcycle club that, in 1947, along with the Boozefighters and the Market Street Commandos, participated in the highly publicized Hollister riot (later immortalized on film as The Wild One[1][2]).
After the Hollister incident, a prominent Pissed Off Bastard named Otto Friedli (28 Jun 1931 - 17 Mar 2008) split with the club and formed his own group on March 17, 1948 in Fontana, just west of San Bernardino. He called it the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. In 1954 Otto's new club merged with the Market Street Commandos to become the Hells Angels San Francisco Chapter.[3]
History
The POBOB were one of the earliest motorcycle and car clubs. A few miles south of San Bernardino, California, in the small town of Bloomington in 1945, a particular group of veterans including Elbert Brinlee and POBOB founder Otto Friedli who was too young to have served in the war, found civilian life to be too slow and set out to get more thrills by riding motorcycles and hot rod cars. Then on July 4, 1947, in Hollister, California where the American Motorcycle Association (AMA) sanctioned the Gypsy Tour Run, the Boozefighters, POBOB and the Market Street Commandos took over the town for nearly three days. The POBOB members played an integral role in the Hollister riot, on which the movie The Wild One was based, starring Marlon Brando.
Two months later, the same clubs went to Riverside, California for the Labor Day weekend, another AMA-sanctioned event. The same thing happened again as it did in Hollister. Over four thousand people, bikers and citizens, took over the town's main street. A Riverside sheriff, Carl Rayburn, blamed a bunch of punk kids for disrupting his town, saying "They're rebels, they're outlaws."
Six months later, Otto Friedli and some disgruntled POBOB members formed the first Hells Angels charter on March 17, 1948, in San Bernardino, also known as "Berdoo". That same year, the AMA made a statement that ninety-nine percent of the motorcyclists are good people enjoying a clean sport and it is the one percent that are anti-social barbarians. The term "one percenter" is born.
Three years later the P.O.B.O.B. MC came back as a motorcycle club (minus the car club), in the city of Fontana known as Felony Flats. The club still exists today with a group of members known as the Pissed Off Bastards of Berdoo, throughout California and Nevada.[4]
References
- ↑ Hell's Angels, The History Channel, 1998
- ↑ Hell's Angel: the Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club, by Ralph "Sonny" Barger, with Keith and Kent Zimmerman, 2000, HarperCollins, pages 25-47
- ↑ Fallen Angel: The Unlikely Rise of Walter Stadnick in the Canadian Hells Angels, by Jerry Langton, John Wiley & Sons Canada Ltd, 2006, pp 180-184
- ↑ The official POBOB MC website