John Hall’s Long Road

By: BY D.K. HIGGINS | Photography by Shelly Myers

The Journey of a Renaissance Man

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As soon as I enter John Hall’s aesthetically weathered home—a two-story colonial located in the rural outskirts of State College—I notice an old, sepia tone photo portrait on the dining room wall. The man in the photo looks familiar. “Is that Edgar Allan Poe?” I ask. “John Wilkes Booth,” Hall replies. “Of course,” I say, quickly recalling what I had read about Booth in Hall’s just-published memoir.

After assassinating President Lincoln, Booth escaped to the five-county region located on the peninsula between the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River that’s called Southern Maryland by the locals. Booth felt that this vicinity, because of its political climate, would be an ideal place to hide out, and indeed was captured only after crossing the border into Virginia. Southern Maryland—specifically Prince George’s County—would also become, a century later, the birthplace of the Pagans, the outlaw motorcycle club that Hall joined in 1967.  
“Maryland was a border state,” Hall says. “I think they had 16 people who voted for Abraham Lincoln in six counties and one of them was lynched. That’s where the Civil War started. They shot civilians for stoning Union soldiers.” Hall explains that back then, people couldn’t take a direct train from New York to Washington. There was a stop in Baltimore where rail passengers were required to walk from one end of the city to the other. When the troops from Connecticut marched between railroad stations, citizens began stoning them and they responded with musket fire. A riot broke out and over a dozen people were killed. “Those were the first casualties of the Civil War,” Hall says. “What H.L. Mencken always said about Baltimore was that it was a southern city. He had no use for the backwoods snake-handlers—ignoramuses he called them—and he saw in the Virginia gentry everything that was noble about the old south. Mencken said that a lot of them had moved into Baltimore at the end of the century, and that one-quarter of them were born in Germany. Baltimore, 100 years ago, was like New Orleans. A southern city with a European flavor—not French but German.”
Hall’s lineage, he’s proud to admit, is German. Although born in Brooklyn, N.Y. in 1947, he was raised in a somewhat volatile section of Maspeth, Queens, known as “Polack Alley.” His grandparents lived in German Ridgewood, which straddles the border between Brooklyn and Queens, and it is that neighborhood—a plethora of German bakeries, delis, bars and restaurants—that Hall most fondly recalls from the 1950s. “The German butchers, when they retired in the 80s, told me that they could run a shop in Ridgewood without speaking English for a week.” While on the subject of ethnicity, I tell Hall that I’m Irish, but because I was born in Tennessee, my cultural heritage is southern, not European. I also confess that, until recently, I was fairly ignorant about my Celtic roots. He laughs and says, “That’s like the Pennsylvania Dutch thinkin’ their heritage is not German. They don’t know anything about Germany. They consider themselves American. I mean, every guard at the Berks County Prison couldn’t speak English properly. They were from rural Berks County and everybody’s name was Joe. It was, ‘Hey Cho, hey Cho!’ They sound like they just got off the boat from Stuttgart last week. They’ve been here 200 years!”
As it turns out, Hall knows more about the American South, and Ireland, than I ever will, and he touts Grady McWhiney’s book, Cracker Culture, as an excellent source on the subject of the Dixie Irish. “McWhiney said the same cultural differences that had led to animosity between England and Ireland is what led to the Civil War,” Hall explains before recalling a story from the book. “A New England Yankee had to go down south on business and brings somebody from England with him. They pull up to this big house and [the Yankee] says, ‘Watch out for these people. Watch out for the dogs. Every one of these southerners has a dozen dogs that don’t do anything except sleep under the porch and bark like hell when you come up in a wagon.’ And the English guy turns around and says, ‘Yeah, it’s just like Ireland.’” The Englishman went on to explain that the Irish had a canine for every purpose—hunting dogs, guard dogs, and terriers to kill rats.
Anyway, it goes on like this for two hours. Hall is, to say the least, a gifted historian, able to instantly download information from his cerebral hard drive and elaborate on subjects ranging from the architecture of Protestant churches to the significance of American outlaw culture, and he  does so without a hint of intellectual snobbery. His interest in history, he says, dates back to his childhood, where he developed a passion for Classics Illustrated comic books. “They were a dime, and for 25 cents they sometimes had a super comic book on a special subject. And one of them was about the French Revolution. I read that over and over, and then I’d tell people about the Reign of Terror—how they’d just drag people out of their homes, into kangaroo court, and then took ‘em out and executed them. I was always fascinated by history, but barely got out of high school. They had to give me a bunch of art courses so I’d just sit in the classroom and draw. But history classes, I always aced them. Whatever the teacher said, I retained, and I could feed it back on tests.”
After graduating from high school in 1965, Hall began to train as a boxer, working out regularly at O’Rourke’s Gym on Long Island. He became skilled enough to work as a sparring partner for Bob Stallings, a ranked heavyweight who defeated two top contenders, Ernie Shavers and Chuck Wepner. In the fall of 1966, Hall’s father got him a union card with the Amalgamated Lithographers of America, Local 1, and he went to work as a print tender. Using his earnings to buy a 1963 Triumph motorcycle, Hall drove it the entire winter—no small feat in the northeast. He became friendly with two other bikers, Richie Gavin and Billy Koharet. Gavin was a member of the (dwindling) Nassau chapter of an outlaw motorcycle club called the Aliens and he quickly deemed Hall as Aliens-worthy, but Koharet was thinking about starting a club of his own. However, he changed his plans when he heard that the Pagans—then an upstart hillbilly club from Maryland and Virginia—had begun to expand into New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The Pagans, he believed, might be a better fit for them. Hall soon learned that another acquaintance, “Sweet William” Parker, was already a Pagan and would soon run the Long Island chapter. Parker, a huge former Marine with an Irish and American Indian bloodline, was aptly described by Hall as a “one-man wrecking crew.” Before the end of 1967 Gavin and Parker were killed, two months apart, in motorcycle accidents, which meant the demise of the Nassau Aliens, of whom Gavin was the only remaining member. John “Stoop” Hall, who was barely 20 years old, took over as president of the Long Island Pagans, a position he would hold until he was sent to prison in 1969. The two and a half years he spent with the club is essentially the timeframe for Riding on the Edge: A Motorcycle Outlaw’s Tale, a savagely entertaining memoir that can also serve as a primer on Norse mythology and the Pennsylvania Dutch. Plus, it features a love story worthy of Shakespeare and a cast of characters that even Tolkien could not have imagined.
Picture, if you can, a Pagan funeral during which a eulogy is delivered by a rabbi standing over a coffin draped with a swastika flag, added to which the speaker, quoting from the Torah, happened to be a Pagan—Leslie Hollander, AKA “Les the Rabbi.” The club also boasted a member called “Peanut Butter” whose father was half-black and half-Puerto Rican. “Imagine how that went over in Virginia,” Hall says with a laugh. But, as he explains in his book, “We were more concerned with who you are, not what you are. Racial prejudice tends to be a luxury of the law-abiding middle class.” In any event, bigotry wasn’t on the agenda for the Pagans, at least not in Long Island or Reading, Pa., where Hall commuted during his 30-month stint with the club. He became enamored with Reading, and southeastern Pennsylvania in general, for the same reason that many people ridicule the region—redneck appeal. Hall understands the adage—often credited to political pundit James Carville—that the Keystone State is Pittsburgh on one end, Philly on the other, and Alabama in the middle. “But the difference is, the rednecks here are all Catholic and Lutheran,” he explains. “They’re German, they’re Polish, they’re hunkies*. They’re not Methodists and Baptists. That’s the big difference in the rednecks. They grew up drinking beer. They grew up eating well and drinking well.”
Ironically, it was a brawl in a redneck bar—the Pleasantville Hotel in Oley Township—that landed Hall and seven of his Pagan brothers in the Wilkes-Barre State Correctional Institution. Their sentences were one and a half to five years. “I’m one of the people that can brag about being in jail, because I went there for something I don’t have to be ashamed of,” he says. “Some hillbillies started a fight with us and we finished it. So it’s quite nice, being able to have the experience of saying, ‘Yeah, I did penitentiary time, but I wasn’t dealing drugs, I wasn’t molesting children, I didn’t rob a bank.’”
Some of the prison officials at Wilkes-Barre were stunned when they learned why Hall and his cohorts were incarcerated. “When we got there the cameras were broke and they couldn’t take our mug shots,” he recalls. “So they took us down the next day, and the official who was doing the photograph said, ‘Yesterday when you said you were in here for a barroom fight, I thought you were all lying to me. But I did some research, and it really was just a barroom fight. You guys don’t belong in jail.’ So we got a lot of sympathy in Wilkes-Barre.” Hall soon learned that there was a college program at Rockview State Prison in Centre County where instructors came from Penn State to teach classes. He applied for the program, which was part of Project Newgat (pronounced “new-gate”), named in honor of an 18th century English prison. “It was one of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, and it was handled by the Penn State College of Human Development,” Hall explains. A transfer was approved for Hall and another Pagan named Roger “Blackie” Smith. Soon they were both taking courses at Rockview.
When he was released from prison a year later, Hall continued at Penn State as a full-time student, working toward a degree in comparative literature. He had, by that time, become a voracious reader and was particularly keen on the triumvirate of great German-American writers—H.L. Mencken, Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski—as well as southern authors like Carson McCullers (Ballad of the Sad Café) and Erskine Caldwell (Tobacco Road). “I just thought it was fascinating, the way they would write about white trash people,” he says of the southerners. “Real people, warts and everything.”  
While at Penn State, Hall hung out with another student, Steve Corbett, who would go on to become an editor/columnist at The Wilkes-Barre Times Leader and a popular radio talk show host at WILK. “Both of us wanted to become writers and didn’t quite know how,” Hall recalls. “So we just began by reading the Daily News and mimicking the style of Jimmy Breslin. He had a column three days a week, and we read Pete Hamill on the other days. We liked the way they were constructing sentences, the way they were building images, writing about the old neighborhoods, writing about regular people. There was nothing academic about their style at all.” Hall eventually became a columnist himself, between 1980 and 1989, with a syndicated byline in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Houston Post and The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He had also earned, by 1980, two degrees in comparative literature. “I never was an English major, fortunately,” he admits with a smile. “I had the good sense to apply for the comp-lit program, and I was schooled in French, Russian, German, a little bit of Italian literature, and European attitudes. Europeans see the struggle between good and evil as something going on in the individual’s soul, not something going on in society between good and evil forces.”
Hall devoted two years toward a Ph.D. in European history but decided to postpone that degree and become an instructor at Penn State’s College of Liberal Arts. He taught history, American studies and rhetoric at both the University Park and Altoona campuses until 1993, and also taught night classes for two years at Rockview. “The students at Rockview graduated in 1990 with an associate degree and they selected me as faculty marshal,” he says proudly. “Then I became an instructor of mathematics for 12 years.” A professor at PSU’s Eberly College of Science hired him to teach a course on the history of mathematics for students who had a math requirement but couldn’t pass any of the courses. “They needed a guy who had a background in western civilization and a rudimentary working knowledge of mathematical concepts,” Hall explains. “Because [this professor] taught about the trial of Galileo, its implications on western civilization, and how mathematics enabled him to…I don’t know, prove something that was obvious to the Greeks two thousand years earlier.” Hall laughs and adds, “It was fun while it lasted. I used to tease people and say that I was the last Renaissance man. But how many faculty members taught at both the college of science and the college of liberal arts? So in 2005 I retired. I went to a dinner and got a free meal and a speech from Graham Spanier.”
The idea for Riding on the Edge was hatched, eight years prior to the retirement dinner, in a Lancaster bar where Hall and an old friend who would be featured in the book—the former Jane Rayel—were reminiscing over drinks. Jane’s first husband, Robert Rayel, was a Reading Pagan who died in 1968 of a brain tumor, and she lamented the current image of outlaw motorcycle clubs whose members are too often dismissed as thieving, dope-dealing vermin. “She said, ‘These guys went to work and took care of their families.’ And she’s remembering stuff and I’m remembering stuff, and I got the bright idea that someone’s gotta tell the story like it really was. I guess I decided, with my background in history and literature combined, that I was gonna try to get it down on paper without an eye for style—sort of like a medieval chronicle—and just try to remember my whole life in the club. From the time I got a motorcycle to the time I went to jail. And all of the stuff starts coming back to me. At the end of two months I had 400 pages.” He then wrote a series of sidebars, mostly about Pennsylvania Dutch folklore and Nordic legend, and weaved them into the text. Hall was playing a hunch that, as entertaining as this material was, it would enhance rather than overwhelm his story. He was right. “I was fortunate to have an editor [Darwin Holmstrom] who didn’t touch it,” he says. “He didn’t red-pencil it and say, ‘This is supposed to be about motorcycles. Nobody wants to read this s**t about the Pennsylvania Dutch.’ So we left it all in and it worked!”
Riding on the Edge was released last September by MBI, a publishing house in Minnesota that wisely supported the “hands-off” editorial approach. Prior to their involvement, however, Hall and Jim Fitzgerald, a sharp, no-nonsense literary agent from El Paso, Texas, shepherded the manuscript through the New York publishing gauntlet where a multitude of editors, publishers and agents all tried to soften the raw, seamy qualities of the book. Hall and Fitzgerald were advised to clean up the language and remove the use of “the n-word.” After Fitzgerald said that it would be “inauthentic” to censor any of the racial epithets, Hall added his own explanation: “I’m trying to re-create the 1960s. That is the way these guys talked. They didn’t give a damn about what people thought about them. If I try to make it politically correct, the book’s gonna be a failure.”
When another New York editor said, “Can you do something about the swastikas? That’s going to offend some people,” Hall, incredulous, replied, “We didn’t give a s**t! That was the point! What I’m writing is not a self-help book. It’s for people in Bakersfield, California, and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.” Still, the suggestions continued, each one more annoying than the last. There was even a recommendation that, rather than ending the story with Hall’s incarceration, he should opt for a more redemptive, satisfying conclusion and resolve the story with Hall going to college and denouncing the sordid lifestyle that placed him behind bars. Hall roars with laughter as he recalls his response. “I said, ‘No, no! It’s not a Horatio Alger novel. I didn’t become born again and say, praise the Lord, I saw the light! That’s not what happened! They carted us off to jail and we laughed like hell!’”  • SCM