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On Oct. 18, the Calabasas, Calif.-based auction house Profiles In History will auction off what it says is the last authentic motorcycle used in the filming of 1969's Easy Rider, and what some consider the most famous motorcycle in the world.

Peter Fonda, who played Wyatt in the Dennis Hopper-directed film, rode the so-called "Captain America" bike, named for its distinctive American flag color scheme and known for its sharply-angled long front end.

The bike currently for sale was partially destroyed in the film's finale, the auction house says, and then rebuilt by actor Dan Haggerty. (The three other bikes used in the production were stolen prior to the film's release.)

According to Brian Chanes, acquisitions manager for the auction house, the bike's estimated value is between $1 million and $1.2 million.

But despite the bike's fame, the history of the creation of the bikes used in Easy Rider has for many years been largely unknown. And the man who designed and coordinated the building of the motorcycles, Clifford Vaughs, says he and the other bike builders have not received proper credit for their work.

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The Profiles In History auction house in Calabasas, Calif., is auctioning off the supposedly last authentic 'Captain America' chopper used in the film Easy Rider. The proceeds will go in part towards Michael Eisenberg, the current owner of the bike, as well as to the auction house and the American Humane Association. Damian Dovarganes/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Damian Dovarganes/AP

The Profiles In History auction house in Calabasas, Calif., is auctioning off the supposedly last authentic 'Captain America' chopper used in the film Easy Rider. The proceeds will go in part towards Michael Eisenberg, the current owner of the bike, as well as to the auction house and the American Humane Association.

Damian Dovarganes/AP

Choppers: 'Quintessentially American'

The motorcycles used in Easy Rider were not simply rolled out of a showroom and in front of the camera. They were "choppers," crafted by hand.

Choppers are "a type of customized motorcycle usually defined by a stretched out wheel-base, and pulled back handlebars, and a sissy bar, and a wild paint job," says Paul d'Orleans, the author of the upcoming book, The Chopper: The Real Story. "It's a quintessentially American folk art form."

“ They did more to popularize choppers around the world than any other film or any other motorcycle. I mean, suddenly people were building choppers in Czechoslovakia, or Russia, or China, or Japan.

- Paul d'Orleans

The "Captain America" bike is an unmistakable and legendary chopper, and has made an enormous impact on the world of motorcycling.

The bikes in Easy Rider, d'Orleans says, "did more to popularize choppers around the world than any other film or any other motorcycle. I mean, suddenly people were building choppers in Czechoslovakia, or Russia, or China, or Japan."

Whose hands turned the wrenches? Who welded the steel? Most of the time, d'Orleans says, choppers are associated with their builders, "because they are an artistic creation. And curiously, the Easy Rider bikes were never associated with any particular builder."

In fact, two documentaries about the production of Easy Rider — 1995's Born To Be Wild and 1999's Easy Rider: Shaking The Cage — never name the men who designed and built the choppers.

Finding The Builders

In bits and pieces, the story behind the Easy Rider choppers began to emerge publicly, and identified two African-American bike builders: Clifford "Soney" Vaughs, who designed the bikes, and Ben Hardy, a prominent chopper-builder in Los Angeles, who worked on their construction.

Clifford Vaughs, seen in Panama around 1990, believes Easy Rider conspicuously omitted the contributions of African-Americans to motorcycle culture. Courtesy of Clifford Vaughs hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Clifford Vaughs

The Discovery Channel's "History of the Chopper" identified Hardy and Vaughs in 2006, an exhibition at the California African American Museum noted Hardy's contributions in 2008, and Paul d'Orleans wrote about Vaughs on his blog The Vintagent in 2012.

Ben Hardy died in 1994. But in an interview this week, Vaughs, now 77 years old, explained his role in the creation of the "Captain America" bike.

At the time, Vaughs was a motorcyclist and had built bikes himself. He had also worked as a civil rights activist and photographer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and was a member of the newsroom at the Los Angeles radio station KRLA.

Vaughs says he first met Fonda in his role at KRLA. In the summer of 1966, Fonda was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana. Vaughs says he covered Fonda's court appearance for KRLA and, in the process, got to talking with the young actor about motorcycles.

Not long after, Vaughs says, Fonda and Dennis Hopper came by his apartment in West Hollywood, and discussed early plans for a motorcycle movie, and building the bikes they would need.

Before working on Easy Rider, Clifford Vaughs was active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. An Associated Press story in the Los Angeles Times even noted his work in Mississippi in 1964. Los Angeles Times hide caption

itoggle caption Los Angeles Times

"I said, 'Well, I can build whatever we need for the film right here at my place,' " Vaughs remembers.

That film would eventually become Easy Rider.

Conflicting Tales

More than 45 years after the production of Easy Rider, it's difficult to sort out the exact timeline of the film's creation, and the various responsibilities of the people involved. Several of the key figures involved with the film have died, including director Dennis Hopper and credited screenwriter Terry Southern.

The history of the production has also been particularly messy.

"The whole thing has been like a Rashomon experience," producer Bill Hayward, who died in 2008, told the filmmakers who made Easy Rider: Shaking The Cage. "The whole movie, the whole production ... everyone's got an entirely different story."

Clifford Vaughs, for his part, says he acted as an associate producer early on in the film's production. By his account, he designed the bikes himself, and is responsible for the distinctive look of the "Captain America" bike. He says he also worked with Ben Hardy to purchase engines at a Los Angeles Police Department auction, and coordinated the building of the bikes.

Peter Fonda, meanwhile, has said that he himself played a greater role in the design and construction of the bikes.

"I built the motorcycles that I rode and Dennis rode," Fonda told WHYY's Fresh Air in 2007. "I bought four of them from Los Angeles Police Department. I love the political incorrectness of that ... And five black guys from Watts helped me build these."

A publicist for Fonda said that he was unavailable for comment for this story.

But in 2009, Dennis Hopper recorded an audio commentary track for the Criterion Collection release of the film, in which he says Vaughs "built the bikes, built the chopper."

Larry Marcus is a mechanic who lived with Vaughs at the time, and worked on the choppers and the early film production. "Cliff really came up with the design for both motorcycles," Marcus said in a phone interview.

According to the press release announcing the current auction, the Captain America bike "was designed and built by two African-American chopper builders — Cliff Vaughs and Ben Hardy — following design cues provided by Peter Fonda himself."

Raw Feelings

Vaughs says he and others were fired and replaced early on in the film's production, following the chaotic shoot at Mardi Gras in New Orleans. As a result, his name never appears in the credits. And while the film went on to become one of the top-grossing films of 1969 and a cultural touchstone, the name Clifford Vaughs has remained largely unknown.

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Clifford Vaughs, seen here in Colombia circa 2000, says he has never watched Easy Rider, despite the fact that he designed the bikes used in the film. Courtesy of Clifford Vaughs hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Clifford Vaughs

Clifford Vaughs, seen here in Colombia circa 2000, says he has never watched Easy Rider, despite the fact that he designed the bikes used in the film.

Courtesy of Clifford Vaughs

"I'm a little miffed about this, but there's nothing I can do," Vaughs says of the story, though he makes sure to note that he only spent about a month working on Easy Rider, out of a "long and illustrious life."

But he says the absence of black characters in the film is troubling. In the 1960s, Vaughs belonged to an integrated motorcycle club known as The Chosen Few. That multi-ethnic reality was not reflected on screen.

"Why is it that we have a film about America and there are no negroes?" he says.

Vaughs says the omission of his own name and that of other African-Americans in the retelling of the Easy Rider story is conspicuous.

"Those bikes, when we talk about iconic, they are definitely iconic," he says. "But yet, the participation of blacks ... completely suppressed, completely suppressed. And I say suppressed, because no one talks about it."

To this day, Vaughs has never watched Easy Rider. When asked why, he responds simply, "What for?"

A Million-Dollar Icon

Brian Chanes, of Profiles In History, says it's common for the men and women who actually build iconic props to go unrecognized. He handles some of the most famous props ever seen on screen, like Wolverine's claws from X-Men or the whip used in the Indiana Jones films.

"The guys that were back there doing the welding, the guys that are doing the set building, that are really masters of their craft," Chanes says, "they don't get the notoriety, unfortunately."

Now, nearly five decades after the release of Easy Rider, Vaughs says he's unconcerned about whether he's mentioned in connection with the auction.

"I'm really not worried about getting any credit for this, because I know what I did," Vaughs says. "People who were close to me were there in the yard when I was building those bikes."

Tom Dreisbach is an associate producer with weekends on All Things Considered.

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Cliff Vaughs

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The Vintagent

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Flinging birds at pigs and moving jelly beans around a little screen are not human instincts. Game designers create the urge to do those things for hours at a time.

"From the way the games are designed to help us start playing the game, to the way they keep us coming back to the game, to how they involve our friends in the game — all of these things have underpinnings in consumer psychology," says game consultant Nir Eyal.

I wanted to see if game designers could create an addictive game out of anything. So I asked a bunch of people how to make a great game about the most boring thing I could think of: making toast.

You'd want the toast to look "cute," says Roger Dickey, who created the video game Mafia Wars. And you'd want "something twitchy, where you have to tap the toast at the just right time for it to come out of the toaster."

"I could see something like that working," he says.

To keep people playing, there would have to be variety.

"Let's spice it up by saying we have a range of different cooking devices, we have a range of different bread sizes, we might have time pressure added," says game consultant Ramin Shokrizade. "We might have a number of people who are demanding toast, and they all want it cooked a different way."

Of course, the better you do, the more you move up in levels. Maybe a player can move from short order cook to toastmaster general.

Those little challenges stimulate dopamine in your brain, Shokrizade says. The time pressure stimulates adrenaline.

But how can a company make money off a game about toasting bread?

Eyal, Dickey and Shokrizade all say that part is pretty easy: Just wait until a player is in a groove — overcoming challenges — and then put a big fat barrier in front of him. Run out of time, run out of lives, run out of delicious strawberry jam. Then, make the player pay to get a little boost to get over that barrier.

"Once we break through that initial barrier," Dickey says, "once you're the kind of person who's willing to buy an item in a game, which isn't everybody, then you'll do it again."

In the business, this barrier is called "fun pain." Dickey says a smart game will give people choices. They can pay with money or they can pay by inviting their friends on Facebook or Twitter. And if friends are playing a game, that means you'll play it even longer.

Mahatma Gandhi never won the Nobel Peace Prize. A lot of people who have dropped bombs, launched missiles and made war have won the Nobel, but not the man whose very silhouette — bald-headed, wrapped in cloth, and walking in sandals across a perilous world — is taken to be a symbol of peace across the globe.

Historians have suggested Gandhi's selection would have riled too many people while he was alive. Not so much British imperialists, but Muslim nationalists, who saw the Mahatma as a Hindu religious leader, and Hindu nationalists, who thought Gandhi's ecumenical religious ideas would turn India over to the Muslim League.

Before Mahatma Gandhi was a beloved symbol, he rattled the world: India and Pakistan especially.

He thought India's caste system was cruel, especially for those classified as "untouchables," and went on hunger strikes against it. He fought against what he called "communalism," which formed separate Hindu and Muslim political parties and assemblies. He called on Indians to abolish child marriage, and to keep young women in schools.

The small spinning wheel that became his symbol — it was once in the center of the flag of India — was also a sign that Gandhi wanted women to be a part of his movement. They joined him on boycotts, long marches and in the leadership of his Congress Party.

But millions of Hindus considered high-caste didn't want to surrender the benefits of that class system. Many lower-caste Hindus felt Gandhi's professed love for them was a little patronizing.

Gandhi did not celebrate when India gained independence in August 1947, because it divided the country along religious lines, Hindu and Muslim, India and Pakistan. Gandhi called it the "vivisection of the mother," and pointedly spent the day in prayer.

He went on a last hunger strike in January 1948, to convince the new Indian government to pay cash in the national treasury owed to Pakistan. And then he was assassinated by a Hindu extremist who felt the Mahatma had betrayed his faith.

This week Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi won the Nobel Peace Prize: a 17-year-old from Pakistan who survived the shot of an assassin to campaign for the rights of young women in her country, and an old Gandhian from India who has fought against child labor in his.

Mahatma Gandhi never won the Nobel Peace Prize, but in a way, this week he did.

mahatma gandhi

Malala Yousafzai

Hindu

Nobel Peace Prize

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