COJUTEPEQUE, El Salvador — A love of Harley-Davidson motorcycles, wanderlust and solid contacts with the Hells Angels are qualifications that might stump a career counselor. But Guillermo Alegria knows how to combine them to make a living.
For the last 33 years, he has driven a 1957 panel truck sporting the Harley-Davidson logo through Central America and Mexico buying junked antique motorcycles. He sells them for parts in the United States and to customers who visit his home in this mountain village.
"Thanks to God and Harley-Davidson I have had happiness in my life," Alegria says, looking from his terrace onto a panoramic view of El Salvador's volcanoes.
Bikers from as far away as Spain, Norway and New Zealand have browsed through his small warehouse--neatly organized into racks of fuel tanks, clutches and other retrieved pieces--to replace parts of old Harley knuckleheads and even Indian motorcycles, made by a long-defunct company.
From the panel truck parked next to the warehouse, a spider monkey named Marimba sounds a bone-chilling screech when possible intruders approach. Two barking German shepherds respond to the alarm.
"Now girls, girls," Alegria, a 66-year-old with wavy silver hair and a handlebar mustache, chides as he skips down the stairs toward them as spryly as his nickname, "Cricket," suggests.
Alegria got into the motorcycle parts business, he says, when he had no job or skills except the ability to drink a prodigious amount of whiskey for a 130-pound man. His father sent him to San Francisco in 1956 with instructions to shape up.
He washed dishes, then repaired tires, a job that exposed him to the Bay Area's biker culture. On a visit home to El Salvador, he got an idea.
Friends showed him a wrecked motorcycle that he recognized as an old Triumph, a British-made bike. He traded his watch for it. Impressed with the exchange, they told him where other old motorcycle carcasses could be found.
Alegria sold the Triumph in San Francisco for $800 and came back to El Salvador to buy up more old bikes. He scoured the country for scrapped cycles to sell to Hells Angels in the Eureka area, who became his best customers. "They may have beards and tattoos," he says, "but they are honorable people. They always pay up."
He bought the panel truck, had the winged Harley-Davidson logo painted on it and drove back to El Salvador to haul more motorcycles.
