Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

  Campbell was handy with his fists on the schoolyard, but he never considered himself a bully. “Bullies are cowards and weak. I was never a bully. Not me. I would hate if I was ever thought of in that context.… I hate cowards. I despise cowards. You don’t have to be a tough guy and go out and kill somebody to not be a coward.” During one schoolyard scuffle he was caught totally by surprise when another boy booted him quick and hard and deep between the legs. When he told his father about it, Lorne Sr. sloughed it off. “He said, ‘If you can’t fight with your dukes, you’re not a man.’ ” Still, the sudden nausea was real and the kick was undeniably effective. Campbell began practising kicks on his own, when his father wasn’t watching. By the time he was a young man, he was able to leap up and boot the top of a door frame, although he wouldn’t brag about it to his dad. “Everybody loves their father when they are growing up. So did I. I was his only son. He wanted me to grow up being a fighter. His heart was in the right place. I think that I’m a lot like him.”

  Campbell got his first bicycle when he was about six from his uncle Bob Chaten, who worked at the General Motors plant in Oshawa. The bike was so big he had to ride with one leg under the crossbar, but it brought a sense of freedom he would never forget. “My dad never had a car. Most of my uncles never had a car.” Campbell would put empty cigarette packages in the spokes to make motorcycle sounds. For longer excursions he would take a second empty cigarette pack for when the first one wore out. Sometimes he rode with other kids and often he rode alone. “I rode everywhere on it.”

  As he grew older, Campbell developed a pronounced sentimentality about birthdays and anniversaries, but as a boy such markers of time didn’t seem to matter much to those around him. It wasn’t until he was about ten that anyone actually celebrated his birthday, when his aunts and uncles pulled something together. “There were no other kids there, but I did get a present or two. I can’t remember what they were—I think it was a sweater or some piece of clothing. But I got ginger ale. The main thing that sticks in my mind is a glass of ginger ale with a trick ice cube with a fly in the cube. I drank the whole glass without even noticing it. They told me when I was done. That was fine with me. I didn’t get ginger ale very often.”

  Campbell’s mother told him little about her side of the family. She was born Eileen Chaten, a dour combination of Pennsylvania Dutch and English, and looked quite a bit like the young Queen Elizabeth, although any comparison between herself and royalty stops there. Perhaps the proudest, most vibrant time of her life was during the Second World War, when she was single and worked at General Motors. The Oshawa factory had been temporarily converted into an aircraft plant, and towards the end of the war, workers like Lorne Campbell’s mother proudly built a fighter aircraft there every day.

  Years later, when American war veterans from California started up a biker club, they named it the Hells Angels after World War II fighter pilots. Years after that, police called the Hells Angels urban terrorists and Campbell couldn’t understand how the term could be applied to him, even if he broke his fair share of laws. He considered himself and his family patriots, in their own fashion, and never saw any disconnect between his parents’ service for their country and his years as an outlaw biker.

  Lorne Sr. could be a charmer and fill a room with laughter and the air with a promise of better times ahead. “He wasn’t big, but his presence was. Everywhere he went, he was liked.” He certainly charmed women out of their inhibitions overseas, and later bragged that he had fathered children in France, Germany and England while serving in the Lorne Scots Infantry, a proud old Canadian regiment whose motto Air-Son-Ar-Duthchais translates to “For Our Heritage.” Campbell’s mother learned of these wartime escapades from her brothers- and sisters-in-law, which made it all the more embarrassing and painful for her. What Lorne’s mother also didn’t know when she met his father was that he’d been married to a woman named Rose when he went off to war. While still married to Rose, Lorne Sr. fathered a daughter, who was born in England in 1944, by a woman named Doris. He promised to bring Doris home when the war ended, telling her they would marry in Canada.

  When the war was over, Lorne’s father didn’t bother to tell an army counsellor the extent of his romantic complications. The counsellor was duly impressed by what he was told, writing: “A neat responsive young man clean cut in appearance and sturdy in build, Campbell is wisely returning to his father’s construction co. Experienced in most phases of the business, he intends to learn blue-print reading and then will be able to take over from his father whose health is poor. Thus it would appear that this man is well on the way to a satisfactory re-establishment in civilian life.”

  Lorne Sr. returned to Canada alone and promptly divorced Rose. It was around this time that he met Eileen and married her. All the while, he was still writing Doris and receiving love letters from her, which he hid in a secret cache.

  Lorne Jr. grew up in a string of small rental homes in downtown Oshawa, on streets around Centre, Bloor, Albert, Celina, Simcoe, and a number of others whose names he can no longer recall. He does recall sticking up on the schoolyard for his first cousin Sanford [Sandy Hawley], who was six months younger and considerably smaller. “Nobody ever picked on Sandy.” Sandy was so small that when he tried out for the football team, some of the larger kids suggested using him as the ball. Even back then, Sandy was tough and focused and dreamed of life as a jockey, while Lorne always wanted to be a cowboy.

  The allure of cowboy life certainly had little to do with riding horses. Once, when he was about five, he was taken to a farm and plunked down on the back of a towering animal. “I remember my uncle slapping it and me falling off. It was a big horse.” The draw of cowboy life was the notion of living at a time when the law was made according to what men felt was right in their guts and when agreements were sealed by handshakes, not indecipherable contracts. Perhaps that age never really existed, but going to the movies every Saturday encouraged him to think that it did. “Do I ever wish I had been a cowboy? I’ve often said that. There was more freedom back then. There weren’t as many luxuries, but you wouldn’t have known that if you were alive back then—that would just be the way things were. I’m a romantic.” In adult life he took to wearing cowboy boots, even though their soles scrape down quickly on asphalt when you’re riding a motorcycle. He learned to wear them for a month or so and then attach an extra sole so they could handle the wear and tear of riding a bike. But it’s not a cowboy thing, Campbell insists. “They’re just comfortable.”

  Campbell’s parents split up when he was eight. Certainly the beatings at the hands of his father were a factor in Eileen’s decision to finally leave. Her eventual discovery of the secret stash of love letters from Doris in England likely didn’t help either.

  A single man again, Lorne Sr. phoned overseas to Doris. She had since married a Scotsman and was now leading what appeared to be a secure, if bloodless, life in England. Doris and her husband slept in separate beds and she dressed formally, even for breakfast.

  Her sister answered the phone when he called.

  “You know who this is?” he asked.

  “Yeah, it’s Lorne,” the sister replied.

  Within days, Doris flew to Canada, abandoning her life in England. Not long after that, she and Lorne Sr. were married. Maybe he had once been as much of a romantic as his son, but it didn’t last. Romance was soon replaced by anger and abuse, just as it had been for Lorne’s mother. “Doris took a lot of abuse from my dad. The same abuse as my mom. But [she] loved him to death.”

  After the breakup of his parents’ marriage, Campbell wanted to live with his father, but a court ordered him to stay at his mother’s home. It would be years before he was reunited with his father. Whatever respect for the law Campbell may have felt up to this point now disappeared. The law kept him under a different roof from his dad, and he loved his dad, beatings and all. His father hit him, but at least he didn’t ignore him. Years later he would try to explain why he wa
nted so badly to live with his father, despite the violence: “In a child’s mind, you think that’s the way it is. That every family is like that. My dad wasn’t a good dad, but I thought he was. He’d take me to the boxing club and box with me. I would always hear, ‘You’re going to be a fighter when you grow up.’ My mother never had much to do with me in that way.… I was just devastated when my parents split up and it was decided I had to go with my mother. Just devastated.”

  Campbell was a smart if often angry student at South Simcoe Elementary School. “I fought every day at that school.” Getting the strap was just another part of school life, like recess and homework, and on one particularly hard day when he was eleven years old, he and the principal set what must have been a school record. Fellow students counted to thirty-two as the strap slammed down on Campbell’s hands. The principal had taken off his jacket and tie and leapt into the air to give his blows extra force. “He was trying to make me cry. He didn’t. ‘My dad can hurt me more than this,’ I was thinking. The kids were counting. He felt so bad, he told me to wash my hands in cold water when he was finally done. And I got a beating from my mother when I got home.”

  During those years, Campbell lost contact with his father, even though they lived in the same city. He often thought of how his life would be better if the courts would only allow them to live together. He didn’t reflect on his father’s failure to pay child support even though he had well-paying factory jobs. “He had a beautiful personality. He was really funny.” Campbell was intelligent enough to realize in later years that he had romanticized his dad in a way that didn’t quite line up with reality. “In truth, my dad wouldn’t have wanted me anyways and the beatings would have continued.… Everybody overlooked the idea he was beating my mother and he’d fuck anything that moved.”

  Campbell couldn’t get comfortable at his mother’s home, especially after a new stepfather moved in. The stepfather wasn’t a bad man, but his arrival made a small house even more crowded and Campbell preferred to wander by himself at night. “I wasn’t into anything, I would just stay out and walk the streets.”

  Two weeks before Campbell’s fourteenth birthday, Eileen told authorities she couldn’t handle him anymore. He hadn’t been charged with any crime, but was classified as “unmanageable” by a judge. He spent that night in a steel-meshed cell. “I felt like a caged animal. A woman came down and sat with me. She talked to me for the longest time. I don’t remember what she said, but she was a nice lady.” He was stunned that he was about to be sent to a training school on the site of a Second World War prisoner-of-war camp in nearby Bowmanville, about twenty-five kilometres east of Oshawa.

  “It was scary. It was two cops that drove me to Bowmanville. One of the cops said, ‘You think you’re tough? There’s guys down there who can take you apart and put you back together again.’ I didn’t believe it. I said, ‘Oh yeah?’ ”

  Two weeks later, officials realized they had made a mistake, since Campbell was only thirteen and Bowmanville was for boys fourteen to eighteen. He was transferred to nearby Cobourg, where the youngest detainee was just five years old. The little boy was nicknamed “Cookie” and all the others rallied around and protected him because of his age. Campbell himself had no problems in Cobourg because he was one of the older, tougher kids. Some of the cabins there were named after British military leaders such as Cornwallis and Nelson, and Cobourg boys were expected to march everywhere, their arms swinging like little soldiers heading into battle. Shortly after his arrival, an older boy named Mailans told him he could expect a beating soon. There were no gangs in the training school, but there was a pronounced tribalism. Campbell was housed in Ramsay House and was quickly known as “the Rock of Ramsay,” the toughest kid there. As such, he was expected to defend the house against taunts and attacks from boys in the other houses.

  Campbell declared his personal war on bullies. “You’ve got to stop it before it starts. I’d stare at them knowing they’d eventually have to go, ‘What the fuck are you staring at?’ I’d go, ‘You.’ I’d know they were bullies just by watching them.”

  One afternoon, Campbell was holding some cleaning supplies when Mailans bumped into him on purpose. “I turned around and smacked him in the head.” A supervisor named Montgomery jumped in the middle and then encouraged Campbell and Mailans to continue the fight in a washroom. What stood out about the supervisor was that he wore large, cheap rings on almost all of his fingers. He routinely organized fights between the young inmates. No weapons were allowed and combatants were forbidden from kicking an opponent who was down. Other than that, it was pretty much anything goes.

  Surrounded by a circle of spectators, Campbell pummelled Mailans while the supervisor watched. “I beat the shit out of him.” When Mailans could take no more blows and the fight was no longer entertaining, the supervisor ordered the other boys to leave the washroom and pulled Campbell aside.

  His first shot caught Campbell totally by surprise. His rings raked across Campbell’s face as he smashed him with an open hand. The supervisor backhanded him again and again. Decades later, Campbell could vividly recall the sensation of the rings tearing his face and the feeling of abject powerlessness in his gut. But the supervisor couldn’t drive Campbell to despair. “All the time I was being beaten, I thought, ‘I’m not going to be fourteen forever. I’m going to grow up.’ ”

  What did get to him were arbitrary, impersonal, smothering rules, like when he was ordered to sit with his knees together and his hands crossed for hours on end. Sometimes this would stretch on for weeks, with breaks only for food and sleep. “That’s when I started crying.”

  Another supervisor told Campbell that he was going to be placed in a foster home. Campbell advised him to give up on that idea. “I told him, ‘If you send me to a foster home, I’ll run away in an hour. Best just leave me here. I’m going home.’ ”

  Academically, he scored an 84 percent average, the highest of all the boys, and it felt satisfying even though there was no parent around to congratulate him and no award to put on his wall. His father did come once for a visit. It took an hour for him to get the necessary clearance from Eileen since a court order barred him from meeting Lorne without her permission. That day, Campbell was playing football with the other boys and Supervisor Montgomery. It was just a touch game, but Montgomery wore cleats anyways, and in one violent collision he knocked Lorne out cold. They played on as Campbell lay by the side of the field. “I woke up and they were still playing football.”

  Not long after that, Campbell was enjoying his father’s visit. He didn’t bother mentioning the football game and how he had just been knocked unconscious. “I would never have complained to him because it wouldn’t have done any good.” Besides, it was a good day now and he didn’t want to wreck what was left of it with whining. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me in there, because my mother never visited me. Never.” The father and son talked that afternoon of how much they missed each other, but Campbell’s father never visited him again.

  After ten months in Cobourg, Campbell was returned to his mother. His father had given him his wartime France and Germany Star, Defence Medal, Canadian Volunteer Service Medal and clasp, War Medal 1939–45 and puttees, but when Campbell got home they were all gone. He kept asking his mother where she’d put them, but he never found out. “She would never answer me.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Simcoe Street Parade

  He told me to call him the Supreme Commander. I wouldn’t do that. I called him John.

  Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club president BERNIE GUINDON

  describing tensions with a rival biker

  Campbell’s mother was living in a second-storey walk-up apartment at 38½ Simcoe Street North, above Berg’s Men’s Wear in the city’s core, when her son returned from training school at age fourteen. Across the street were the Colonel R.S. McLaughlin Armoury and the Queen’s Hotel, where just by walking past the doors you could pollute your nostrils with the sta
le odour of spilt beer. Campbell’s father was years behind in child support and his mother didn’t have much money for food or anything else. Dinner at Eileen’s apartment often consisted of near-meatless spaghetti and tomato soup and cream peas on toast, or other plain things at the low end of the comfort-food scale. The only time they had steak, it was round steak, the kind she had to pound repeatedly to get soft. She struggled to keep the place tidy, but that didn’t take the slant out of the stairs or the wobble out of the furniture, and it certainly didn’t make the apartment anywhere near good enough for Lorne to bring friends around. “I was embarrassed to bring a girl—or anyone else—to our apartment. I would never take anyone there, except close friends.”

  At nights, however, it offered a great view out onto Simcoe, as members of the old Phantom Riders Motorcycle Club took over the city’s main street with a strange and seductive nighttime parade. “I’d sit at the window and watch the bikers go by. Bikers rode together back then. They don’t so much anymore. That’s the thing I’ve always enjoyed: riding in a pack.”

  The bikers outside his bedroom window oozed an aura of freedom and power, and of rich lives lived outside society’s rules, which had done nothing to benefit the teenaged Campbell. Something about the bikers cruising past his window seemed all-powerful, as if they could tell death itself to fuck off, like old-time circus performers who could stick their heads into the mouths of lions and pull them out again, smiling, without a trace of fear.

  Often he looked out at Bernie Guindon, a bootlegger’s son who would soon help guide Campbell’s life. Guindon was just six years older than Campbell, but he already seemed to have arrived somewhere special as he cruised past the Conqueror, a World War II tank stationed for posterity on the armoury front lawn. Guindon was easy to spot at the front of the pack, with his little black beanie helmet and gold chopper, the Wild Thing, its handlebars so high that it would tire a weak man to ride it a block. His odd headwear was far more than his own personal fashion statement. In a brawl, Guindon could slip his fist inside it and make his punches even harder. Once, during a particularly spirited brawl, he punched his way right through his own helmet. Campbell didn’t know Guindon but yearned to ride with him and his club and feel for himself that kind of power. “I thought, ‘Holy fuck! That’s my life!’ ”