4th Annual Gypsy Pickle Poker Run

About this event

The pickle is not a joke about the route. Gypsy MC was put together in March 1968 in Corpus Christi by a rider called Papa Jack Simerly, on his second attempt — the first, two years earlier, had not held — and the name he was working from went back further than that. His father Lee and his uncle Chuck had been riding in Tennessee since 1932 with a group of friends who called themselves the sour pickles of society. When Jack needed a centre patch he took a decal off an industrial supplier's sheet because the rider on it, as he put it, was green and looked kind of like a pickle. The club trademarked the thing in 1978 and has worn it ever since. The Wichita chapter opened in 2005 and runs this poker run as its own day rather than a national fixture. The riding is flat south-central Kansas backroad, the sort of day where the interest is the company rather than the corners. Anyone turning up expecting a pickle-themed event will be disappointed. It is a club run, and the patch is the story.