Vic Socotra

24 January 2009

Pagans

(How is it in Saigon?)

The 2008 edition of the Arlington Historical Magazine hit my box yesterday. The society issues it once a year, and it is a formal-looking journal on pale ivory stock. Dignified. That is what distinguishes us here in blue Arlington, with our 1930s houses and prim liberal attitude. We have a buffoon Democrat Congressman, vote predictably left on everything, and fund all the initiatives that increase the County budget for the public good.

I’m as bad the next. I vote for them, too, even if they wind up in massive projects like the four-story monstrosity across the parking lot. The County officials say it is to provide affordable housing for the cops and the teachers, and they may even believe it.

The cops will live way out west, where they can have a little space. The people that will live there are the 8a residents who are being pushed out of the rest of Arlington in the great metamorphosis gentrification. The County is concentrating a population that was spread out in lower-density across the traditional minority neighborhoods south of Route 50.

I think the big building is going to bring noise and congestion and crime, but of course no one talked about what they were really up to. There is a greater good, and they know best.

Oh well, change is what this place is about. It was the first part of the South to be seized by Federal troops at the beginning of the civil war, and the great earthwork forts to protect the approaches to Washington moldered for a century afterward, constant reminders of who was the Boss.

Arlington has done well in times of fiscal chaos and uncertainty. We have a contrarian economy, up or at least steady when the rest of the country is slumping. The Buckingham neighborhood was the Depression response to the need for affordable housing for the boom in bureaucrats. The eighteen-hundred rental units were sought after by FDR’s legion of New Dealers who came to town in the mid-1930s.

The war brought thousands and thousands more, and the Cold War even more. The Code-breakers across the street at the Girl’s school were major employers here, and the Pentagon down the road, and the backbone demographic was that of the solid government worker with plenty of military.

There is plenty of history here, and that is one of the reasons I like the place. When I turned to the first article in the ivory journal, it came back, big time. It was not a scholarly treatment of post-Civil War plantation economics. It was an account of the Big Shoot Out by a local guy named Charles Clark.

The article slapped me right into the dark transition, when there were still Rebels here, those with A Cause, and those without.

I’ve mentioned the dark underbelly here before. I have described a trip to the parking lot of the strip mall at Dominion Hills, across from the former location of the white frame Fuhrer-bunker of George Lincoln Rockwell at Upton Hill.

The American Nazis had their headquarters at what is now the Java Shack in Clarendon, and they used to protest here in the neighborhood with white-robed KKK members. In the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights act, they were angry that African-Americans had been permitted to rent units in the Buckingham neighborhood, and worse, were swimming in public at the community pool at Glebe and Pershing.

There was a practical answer to the controversy; Francis Freed, Queen of Buckingham, was building Big Pink on the southern flank of her empire, and contemplated another giant apartment insula to the northwest, on the south side of Glebe Road. The pool complex was closed, and the County extended Pershing Drive right through the middle of it.

There were malcontents across the little County. On June 14, 1966, there was a motorcycle gang shootout between the Maryland-based Pagans and the local Avengers. The latter may have been a motorcycle group, but mostly it was local kids from Arlington who resented the encroachment by the aggressive Pagans.

The Pagans were founded in 1959 in Prince George’s County, Maryland, by a former Navy medic named Lou Dobkins, who was a biochemist at the National Institute of Health. Lou was interested in custom bikes and races. They rode British Triumph bikes originally, but by the mid-sixties the leadership had changed. Lou’s presidency of the Mother Chapter of Pagans was followed by that of “Dutch” Fred Burhans, who was later killed in a gunfight out in Fairfax City, not far from the house I gave the Ex.

Under his leadership, the club adopted a mission-statement that included domination of the entire East Coast as an OMG- a Harley-riding outlaw motorcycle gang.

The business model was to be along the lines of Sonny Barger’s California-based Hells Angels.

The Pagans colors worn on the back of their denim vests depicts the Norse fire-giant Surt wielding a flaming sword, plus the word "Pagans" in red, white and blue. The Avengers had their colors made at the ABC Lettering Shop, thirty or forty of them, featuring a big Maltese cross and a skull.

It was sort of Mom n’ Pop versus the big corporation, but Arlington was Avenger turf, regardless of what the Pagans thought.

There was a bad weekend at the beginning of June, 1966. It is good riding weather in DELMARVA at that time of the year, and some Avengers traveled to North Beach, where a friend of mine now has a place on the Chesapeake. There was an altercation, and later a Pagan named Sam Frederick who was involved in it rammed a truck and was killed.

That is what got the Pagans all riled up, and they swore a blood oath.

On the weekend of 14 June, they decided to have it out. Some 100 shots were fired at the Safeway Supermarket parking lot at Lee Highway and Harrison. Count them off in your mind, one, two, three…

These were not AK’s, after all, mostly bolt-action single shot-weapons and pistols. A very respectable friend of mine still shops at that Safeway on occasion. The siege lines ran from where the Blockbuster Video store is on the north side of Lee.

A local cop at the time called it “the worst violence in the County since the Civil War.” The State Troopers were here, too, and there was little love lost between the County Mounties and the Staties.

It is hard to remember just how crazy that decade was, and why people wanted to get away from the city. This place was down at the heels, and the flight to the suburbs was in full rout. I won’t try to give you the blow-by-blow. Charles Clark does it much better, and as a real local, he paints the proud young white men who hung around the Tops Drive-In and the Blue-Gray Market in stark lines. Much better than a tourist like me.

It is a place that doesn’t exist any more, though there are plenty of people still here who remember. Old times here are not forgotten, after all.

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