We took the Spider-Man Bike to a show, and people absolutely raved about it.
After that, I decided to build a bike, now known as the Jet Bike, around a fighter jet theme as a tribute to my grandfather Paul Leonardo, who was a gunner in World War II. I integrated various elements from a fighter jet, like bullets on the down tube, missiles on the tank, and a bomb oil tank under the seat. There is a fine line between going overboard with props and making a Wow! bike. I was able to find the perfect balance on that one, and as a result, the bike flowed out really well.
CREATING THE LOGOS
I didn’t like the name Orange County Choppers when my father came up with it because with Orange County Ironworks already established, the new name didn’t feel original. OCC did, however, wind up lending itself to a great logo.
After my father told me he had selected the name, I went home that night and worked on a new logo. I had not previously designed a logo, but I knew this was an opportunity to make a big statement about our new company.
I started sketching on a piece of paper, and it didn’t take long to create a design that incorporated OCC into a motorcycle. Each letter represented a section of the bike, with the O for the rear, a C for the middle that curved out to a headlight, and the other C for a front end similar to the back but just different enough to look like a C. I brought the handlebars back over the middle letter and made a little swoosh for the seat.
The sketch came out in only one shot, and I thought the letters flowed really well into the design.
The next day at the shop, I used soapstone to draw a ten-foot version of the logo on the floor. Everybody liked it, and we took the design to a graphic designer, whom I worked with to develop a three-dimensional effect.
When my wife, Rachael, and I started Paul Jr. Designs (PJD), we knew we needed an attention-grabbing logo because of how established OCC was in the custom-design business. As we brainstormed, I mentioned that I wanted some type of crown design. Rachael came up with the idea to make a crown out of the letters J and lowercase r. As soon as I saw Rachael’s idea on paper, I said, “That’s our logo!” I want my bikes to have a double read when people look at them, and we created that same effect with the crown consisting of the two letters.
I don’t have a good reason for why I wanted a crown other than I’ve always liked the look of crowns. I didn’t plan this at the time, but one of the cool things about our crown is that it has three points—and to me that has a Trinity feel to it.
Later, we added a winged shield around the crown with “Paul Jr. Designs” underneath in elegant script.
Square and mostly square logos are usually best because even dimensions create more possibilities than logos that are decidedly horizontal or vertical. A square logo looks well balanced regardless of how it is applied.
Because PJD was created for much more than designing motorcycles, we wanted a logo that could go on a Ferrari or a children’s toy. I think we accomplished that, because our logo has looked good on pretty much everything we’ve put it on.
Although my hope is that people will recognize my bikes because of their style, we usually place the PJD logo somewhere on our builds for branding purposes, whether it be part of the seat, painted on the bike, or on a piece like the primary drive cover. We did the same during my days at OCC.
As I kept evaluating the bikes, I realized I had a gift for creative thinking and creative application that could be expressed through theme bikes. Little did I know what that potential would mean for my father’s company and for me personally.
The odd thing is that no one recognized the creative gift within me and pointed me down that path. I never read anything that helped bring out my creativity—not a book, not even an article. The discovery was organic. I received an opportunity to build bikes, and that creative gift emerged. If not for that chance, I don’t know that I ever would have realized my creative potential.
LIVING IN THE “MIDDLE RANGE”
Even as that process of discovering my creativity unfolded, the daily pot usage continued. I stayed away from alcohol, but I did not feel right when not high. In fact, I would almost freak out when I wasn’t high. It was so difficult for me to stay sober that if pot was not easily available, I would scrounge to find some. Money was not a problem because of how much I was working. Functioning properly at work was not an issue for me, either. I worked a lot, and I smoked a lot. When I was high, I didn’t have to deal with my emotions. That’s probably why I stayed high.
When I was twenty-four—about ten years after I’d started smoking pot—I was working at the steel shop one day and experienced a sudden anxiety that almost knocked me to my knees. I felt like I was having a heart attack, so I rushed to the emergency room. The doctors checked me out and said they could not find anything wrong. After I came home from the ER, the anxiety did not go away. It was like my entire body was vibrating.
I dealt with that type of anxiety for about a year. I couldn’t determine the cause, and when I would try to explain what I was experiencing to a friend, nobody seemed to understand how I felt. My mouth would dry up. I would go for a run hoping to get whatever it was out of my system, but I never felt any different afterward. It was really weird. I recall going to a job with my father, and I had to ask him to take me home because I was going through a supersensory overload. Bright lights and noises seemed to go right through me.
Based on what I had learned early on about addiction and how it works, I decided that my anxiety was the culmination of all the years of suppressing my feelings. Anxiety runs in our family across the board. My father suffered from anxiety, and I think most of my family has had to deal with anxiety at some level. I was dead set against taking any medicine. I was stubborn about pills because I worried about becoming stuck on antidepressants or anti-anxiety medicine for the rest of my life. I’m not opposed to prescription medicine, and I know it helps a lot of people. But I feel like we can become overly dependent on medicine, and it frightened me to think about getting on a medicine and not knowing what normal was anymore.
So I determined to defeat anxiety on my own. I stopped the pot because I was scared to death and it didn’t help with the anxiety. From that point forward, I stayed off marijuana except for one brief period. I felt weird when I used it again and I realized, This isn’t me. That experience broke the pattern of addiction. Even though my anxious condition improved when I stopped smoking, it still took years to return to what I considered a normal feeling.
Actually, it is more accurate to say that I leaned on my faith like never before to defeat anxiety. I can say from the perspective I have now that during all those years of smoking marijuana, I was running from God. I was not living as I should, and I knew it. I would have these little emotional breakdowns when I thought of how my lifestyle should be.
I like to describe that period as trying to exist in a middle range. I was doing my own thing and trapped in a habitual situation, but I also knew who God was and had a reasonable amount of Bible knowledge. Living between what I wanted to do and what I knew I needed to do was not working out well. I made the decision to turn to God and to trust Him. I took two steps in particular: I got involved in our church, and I dedicated myself to studying the Bible.
Before that I had been going to church but wasn’t involved. I was a spectator, showing up, taking my seat, listening to the sermon, and then going back home to my way of living. Getting involved was simple: I asked where help was needed. I became an usher who—wearing a suit—greeted people at the door. The men’s group was good about serving others, and I became involved with them through working on projects like clearing woods for a parking lot, retiling a bathroom, and things of that nature to help where needed.
Those activities in themselves did not have any special impact on what I was trying to overcome, but they did give me responsibilities within the church and camaraderie with a group of men. Along with that camaraderie came accountability. Granted, sometimes we cringe at the word accountability. The
wrong image we can conjure up regarding accountability is a person walking around with a clipboard and a pencil and constantly asking us deeply personal questions to make sure we’re not screwing up our lives.
Instead, I found accountability within the men’s group meant sharing our individual journeys, which turned out to be more similar than I had realized. Loneliness is one of our biggest enemies in trying to live the life that God has designed for us. Life is tough, and the difficulty increases when we try to go it alone. It helps to have a group whose members not only care about you but also either have experienced or are experiencing the same difficulties you face.
I love the words found in Proverbs 27:17: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” The idea is that we exist to help one another. Being left to our own devices can be dangerous, but being in a fellowship with others enables us to be helped and, in turn, help others. Learning that we are not alone in our struggles can go a long way toward resolving our problems. Men tend to internalize. I know I can easily take the attitude, It’s my problem and I’ll deal with it until I work it out. But that approach goes against how God designed us. And, trust me, His way works better. Being accountable helps keep us on the proper path.
As far as dedicating myself to studying the Bible, I want to say this: the Word of God has made an invaluable impact on my life. The Bible is life’s instruction manual. It has shaped me as a person. It tells me who I am, and that is significant because as someone who was featured on a reality television show for a decade, I found that many people think they know who I am or have expectations of me. But I know my true identity, and that is someone who is saved by grace through God’s unconditional love.
Unconditional love is a heavy concept for me, as it is for anyone who has struggled through difficult relationships.
We cannot obtain God’s love. Instead, we must receive it. For me—and many others, I have found out—it was natural to see God, our heavenly Father, through the lens I viewed my earthly father. There was a process I had to go through to unlearn that in my relationship with God. I was able to do so by studying God’s Word. Through reading the Bible, I began to understand who God truly is, and that is how I separated my perception of my heavenly Father from that of my earthly father.
Life offers challenges, and when things aren’t going like I hope, I go directly to the Word of God to find the answers to my questions. Those challenges are a part of my continuously being refined—made into the man God desires for me to become. The only way to be refined is to go through difficult trials. Unfortunately, sometimes it is necessary for us to hurt to move forward.
Consistency is key. I won’t ever arrive; this is a never-ending process. But I will keep growing through this process. That is why it is okay to have struggles. Life will not always be easy. The most helpful response for me has been to press on in my relationship with God.
For my age, I feel like I have encountered many difficult situations in my life. That year after the trip to the ER was the most difficult. When people talk about anxiety and depression, I feel so bad for them. I understand what it’s like to talk to people who have no idea how you feel, and that has made me more compassionate toward people fighting that battle.
God has enabled me to walk through my difficult circumstances, and there was purpose behind the pain. American Chopper has given me a platform from which I can talk about these things for God’s glory. By being open in discussing my life, by being real, I can help people who have suffered pain similar to mine. I can point to myself as proof that there is hope.
My father and me, boring? I actually thought that in 2000 when I watched a one-hour documentary on the Discovery Channel titled Motorcycle Mania. The show was about a custom motorcycle builder in California named Jesse James.
Jesse had been building high-end custom bikes in his West Coast Choppers shop since the early nineties and had become the rock star of the custom bike-building business. Jesse’s bikes were one reason for his huge following. His outlaw image was another. Less than half an hour into the show, Jesse showed off his pit bulls trying to attack one another and his fish tank with small sharks inside. West Coast Choppers wasn’t the typical bike shop.
I remember watching Motorcycle Mania and thinking that no one would ever want to watch my father and me build bikes, because we would be dull compared to sharks and pit bulls.
At that time I had been building bikes full time with my father for a year or two. He built bikes in the basement of his house, and as he needed my fabrication help more and more, I progressed from working half days and weekends with him to spending most of my time at his place instead of building railings at the steel shop.
We built a handful of bikes, including one for a friend. Rather quickly, we realized we enjoyed building bikes. My father then put a shop behind the steel shop, basically creating a work space underneath a cantilever that had been added on to make more storage room for the steel. My dad’s first bike shop was small—about forty feet by forty feet—and primitive, and enclosing that overhang made the shop feel like a cave. I don’t think any of the construction in building the shop was legitimate, but we put some lifts in there and had space to operate.
We cranked out bikes from our little shop, and sales started improving. But it was expensive. The operation was a break-even deal in those days.
We traveled to bikers’ events all over the map, going anywhere and doing anything necessary to get our bikes where people could see them. We made one appearance at a crazy event at some guy’s bike shop in Florida. The event was supposed to get our name out there, and we were optimistic about selling some bikes. We hauled our trailer down there and set up, but…crickets. Fortunately, not all opportunities turned out like that one.
In the end, we received attention because our bikes were different from the rest and we were coming onto the scene as a new market emerged. That led to Hot Bike and other trade publications putting our early bikes in their magazines—some were even featured on covers.
The themes of our bikes varied from what other customizers were turning out. There was no idea then of theme building based on corporations or brands. Themes then were more of a builder’s style than the present definition. Bike enthusiasts could usually look at a custom bike and identify the builder because builders produced bikes with consistent looks or styles.
My early themes centered on shapes and were a little more rudimentary when compared to my later theme bikes. The goal then was that someone could look at one of our bikes and see a shape theme throughout the bike. For instance, one of our early bikes featured matching fenders coming to a point. Another theme bike had long trail-dragger fenders. Another had mesh long-pointed fenders and a pointed tank that connected the front of the bike to the back.
My builds had a modern style, while my father’s were more old school. I had nothing against old-school bikes; I loved them and could have built them. But people were already building those, and the modern look was carrying us aesthetically. My father and I clashed constantly over our differing styles. Objectively, I thought my father had creative ideas that weren’t the best and that I had a better knack for that aspect of the business than he did. My father, though, wanted to have his input, even if it didn’t make sense to me. Those were fights that we had in the early days of bike building that later would take place in front of the cameras.
The details in our bikes compared with our competitors’ led to the accolades, which were really cool for us at a time when my father was trying to make a go of it with his business.
For about two years, the business part was up and down. We were selling bikes: a dealer in New Jersey would buy six at a time from us, which allowed us to hold our own. But we certainly weren’t making money. Every time we sold bikes, the bank account balance would go up, but then we needed to buy materials for our next round of builds and the balance would go down.
We did sell base bikes with their own styles, like our Super Stretch with a really long ta
nk and the T-Rex Softail with the rear suspension hidden. But I wanted to create bikes with more than a repeatable style. I wanted our look to be adaptive, with a different inspiration each time. I wanted to be challenged as a builder instead of building the same bike all the time. I wanted to create bikes that were special.
I don’t know why the idea of theme bikes came to me. It wasn’t like I was thinking, Let’s see if I can develop my own unique style. Instead, I would say my style worked its way to the surface as we built bikes.
We were getting enough of a name in the business that we were invited to a big event in California, and we included the Spider-Man Bike among our bikes to show. The whole place almost shut down to watch when we unloaded the Spider-Man Bike. The bike was the talk of the show, and it boosted Orange County Choppers into the conversations about the country’s top builders. In all the road shows that followed, the Spider-Man Bike was the big draw.
Meanwhile, the Motorcycle Mania documentary had fared well for Discovery, and that led to a series for Jesse called Monster Garage, in which he and his crew modified vehicles on tight deadlines. That series debuted in the summer of 2002 and was a big hit.
ONE SHOT AT TV
Sean Gallagher, Discovery’s director of development at the time, and Craig Piligian, founder of Pilgrim Films & Television (now Pilgrim Studios), immediately started discussing how to follow up Monster Garage’s success. Craig had been one of the early producers of the hugely popular Survivor reality series, and Sean said he would like Craig to find an East Coast bike builder for a potential pilot. This is where we benefited from the attention we had received at bike shows and in trade publications. Craig researched bike builders along the East Coast, and then he and his staff made preliminary phone calls to screen those builders.
The Build Page 4