Wino Willie’s Crew Motorcycle Club and Fort Bragg Lady Wolves High School Softball are teaming up for the Home Run, an event Aug. 10 to raise funds for new uniforms, equipment, and a home run fence for the FBHS softball field.
Wino Willie’s Crew MC will start the day at McCarty’s Bar in Redwood Valley, head to Willits, then west over Highway 20. At 1 p.m., music, a taco bar, activities and multiple raffles, including a 50/50, will commence at Lion’s Hall, 430 E Redwood Ave in Fort Bragg.
“Everyone is welcome,” stated a Wino Willie’s Crew MC press release,” please bring your family and friends to this great event to help us support these girls. “Donations in the form of money and/or raffle items are being accepted. Anything will help and everything is greatly appreciated. For more information or to give a donation, please contact Craig Rodgers at 707-409-4479.”
Rodgers said this week that the effort has already received generous donations from Mendocino Coast Clinics, Fort Bragg Transmission, Roundman’s Smokehouse, and Carol Millsap State Farm Insurance Agency.
“People are stepping up,” he said.
Rodgers added that Wino Willie’s Crew will be at the grill for the Paul Bunyan Days Labor Day Barbecue at Veterans Hall in Bainbridge Park in Fort Bragg, and will provide security this year at Winesong!, the annual fundraiser for the Mendocino Coast District Hospital Foundation held at the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens each September.
A little history
Wino Willie’s Crew is named for Wino Willie Forkner, a longtime Fort Bragg resident who died in June 1997 after raising three children here with his wife Terrie. Forkner was a legend since the 1930s among motorcycle clubs and enthusiasts in California, then nationwide and even, it is said, in Hollywood.
Forkner founded the Boozefighters Motorcycle Club in 1946 after serving as member of a B-24 Liberator bomber crew in the South Pacific during World War II.
The Boozefighters were the club that took over Hollister, California on July 4, 1947, an event credited with starting the modern-day biker phenomenon and persona. Wino Willie Forkner, according to a June 27, 1997 San Francisco Chronicle article, is said by some to have been the model for Marlon Brando’s character in the 1953 film “The Wild One”.
A much more involved and interesting history exists on WIno Willlie’s Crew’s website, winoscrew.no, which incidentally does not use the name Boozefighters, instead calling it “their ‘antisocial’ name”. But winoscrew.no says that after the motorcycle club scene changed in the mid-1950s, Wino Willie Forkner settled in Fort Bragg. He worked as a truck driver for years before, after a reunion in the mid-1970s, he restarted a club based on his original ideas of racing and adventure. It took off, eventually with chapters all over the United States, and overseas from Germany to Brazil.
Wino Willie Forkner and his wife Terrie raised their family in Fort Bragg. His son Bill Forkner is a commercial fisherman, president of the Fort Bragg Salmon Trollers Marketing Association, and a member of the Noyo Harbor District board of directors.
Source: Fort Bragg Advocate-News