AUGUSTA — Wearing his customary leathers and jeans, and sporting a bushy beard and long hair that fly in the breeze while he’s tooling around on his Harley-Davidson, Paul K. Vestal Jr. is used to getting odd stares wherever he goes.

That’s one reason, says Vestal, why he will bring a sensitive spirit to the five-member Maine Human Rights Commission, where he is Gov. John R. McKernan’s latest and most colorful appointee.

“I’m not a minority, but because of the way I am, I am a minority,” said Vestal, who grew up in the South in the tense days of integration and went on to serve as the warden of prisons in Georgia and Maine.

As the former leader of a law-abiding pack of Maine motorcyclists, who hold as sacred their right not to be forced to wear helmets, Vestal has a keen sense of the importance of individual liberties.

“The easiest way to get us cranked up is to take away our personal rights and freedoms,” he said.

He sees a carryover to others whose religion, race, sex or other perceived differences might lead to discrimination in matters involving employment, housing, credit and public accommodations — the issues that the commission routinely wrestles with.

A former warden at the Maine State Prison in Thomaston, the 43-year-old Vestal now works for the state Corrections Department rehabilitating young offenders whose troubles stem from alcohol.

His avocation now — and since his youth, when he “hung around with a rough crowd” — is motorcycles.

He’s the former leader of the 3,000-member United Bikers of Maine, a band of motorcyclists with so much political pull that both McKernan and his Democratic re-election rival, U.S. Rep. Joseph E. Brennan, have agreed to meet with its leaders in hope of gaining an endorsement.

Vestal also traces his sense of personal freedom to his youth in the South, where “I can still remember crosses being burned on people’s lawns.”

As the civil rights movement began to unfold, “I didn’t totally comprehend” what was happening, said Vestal.

But the message was driven home when he moved to Miami as a 12-year-old. As the son of a Presbyterian minister, Vestal’s family didn’t have much money.

“I wore hand-me-down clothes and hung with a rough crowd,” said Vestal, who recalled being labeled “hayseed” and shunned because of his rural Georgian roots. He recalls “a lot of animosity” as the Miami school system became racially integrated.

While hanging with a “redneck” crowd, Vestal recalls, he only heard one view of integration. But later, working on Florida ranches that primarily employed blacks and Cubans changed that.

“When you live and work with someone as much as I did, it gave me a whole different perspective from what you heard from the other side,” said Vestal.

He attended college in North Carolina, but flunked out after two years and, with the Vietnam War raging, was drafted. “I went to a recruiter and asked what I could do and not have to wear a uniform,” said Vestal.

“Going to war didn’t bother me nearly as much as going to war in a uniform.” Vestal was placed in military intelligence and stationed in Augusta, Maine.

After the service, he finished his undergraduate studies, and earned a graduate degree in criminal counseling at Georgia State University while working as a therapist with drug addicts. Afterward, he spent two years as the warden of the Georgia Women’s Correctional Institution.

Vestal returned to Maine in 1977 to run a private agency that deals with troubled youths, and became warden of the Maine State Prison in 1980. He left that post two years later to take over the Corrections Department’s chemical alternative program for youths, which he runs from an office in Skowhegan. He lives in Solon.

“I made up my mind when I left the prison that someone would have to pay me an awful lot to get me back in a coat and tie,” said Vestal. “I live this way. I think whoever invented the coat and tie was a masochist.”