Column One: Collecting memorabilia from biker gangs, he earned friends and death threats
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Mother Ruthe.
It was a name Bo Bushnell had heard again and again as he sought out memorabilia from the outlaw motorcycle clubs that thrived in Southern California during the 1950s and 60s.
Since he’d started collecting, he’d bought photographs, clothing even a couple of motorcycles. But the bikers he talked to often told him he should try to find out what had happened to Mother Ruthe’s scrapbooks.
She had lived in La Puente, located conveniently halfway between biker clubhouses in Venice and San Bernardino, and acted as sort of a den mother to riders who stopped at her house. She fed them, patched up their wounds, let them crash for the night. And she photographed them and collected news clippings about them.