h
ow does a custom bike builder go from marginalized to the undisputed king of springer front ends? One bike at a time. The story begins in Kansas City, Missouri, where Sugar Bear was born in 1939 and raised until 1953 when he and his family moved to Los Angeles for a better life. “The first thing I noticed was the weather. When we left Kansas City it was 6 degrees,” said Sugar Bear. He got a track scholarship to UCLA, and, after graduating, if there had been money in it, he would have been a professional runner. But there wasn’t money in it, so he hired on with the Los Angeles County probation department, working with troubled teens in forestry camps. One day while working, he noticed all the kids singing a familiar jingle: “Can’t get enough of the Sugar Crisps.” He told them they needed to keep it down, but the kids kept singing the jingle over and over. He pulled a boy aside and asked what it was all about, and the boy said he reminded them of Sugar Bear in the commercial, because he would go into a chaotic situation, deal with it and walk away like nothing had happened. You can Google Sugar Crisps Sugar
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Bear 1970 and get a good sense of what I’m talking about. Later, while driving down a highway, he looked over and saw a woman on the back of a chopper, leaning against the sissy bar, reading a paperback at speed. She noticed him and flashed a peace sign—that was all he needed to get hooked on choppers. He immediately
bought a bike and chopped it—and he didn’t even know how to ride. He experienced the somewhat typical story where he started building his own bikes, and then people he knew
saw them and started asking if he’d do work for them. Sugar Bear’s mentor was none other than Benny Hardy, know as the “King of Bikes.” Hardy, along with Cliff Vaughs and Larry Marcus, built the infamous Captain America and Billy bikes for the movie Easyriders. Benny stressed to Sugar Bear that he would never get credit or notoriety for what he’d done, but that his work would speak for itself. “Do your work, do it well and you will always have work,” was what Benny used to say. Benny never had business cards, didn’t advertise, but was one of the most sought after mechanics. He did a lot of work for 1% clubs, even though many of them had neo-Nazi regalia and sentiments. His work spoke for itself, and Sugar Bear modeled his own after that work ethic. He rarely advertised, kept his shop location virtually a secret and built his business one front end at a time. In 1972, Street Chopper put Sugar Bear on the cover with one of his bikes, which resulted in the influx of the most negative letters they’d ever received. Because an African American was on the cover. He wouldn’t grace another magazine cover until 1996, but he had a thriving custom
