By Michael Bushnell
Northeast News
July 22, 2015

Aug. 3, 2015, marks the beginning of the 75th annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in the Black Hills of South Dakota. This week, we’ll offer this lovely linen postcard showing the State Game Lodge in Custer State Park located in the Southern Black Hills.

Built between 1919 and 1922, by Cecil C. “C.C.” Gideon, the lodge served as the summer White House of President Calvin Coolidge in 1927. It was from these front steps of the lodge that Coolidge uttered those famous words, “I do not choose to run.”

Gideon was a noted Black Hills architect and builder and was responsible for a number of prominent structures in the Black Hills, including the famous pigtail bridges on Iron Mountain Road. Truly, one who has ever driven the Iron Mountain Road can attest to the spectacular beauty of the Black Hills.

The actual Sturgis Rally was started in 1938 by Pappy Hoell and the Jackpine Gypsies, a local motorcycle club that received its charter from the American Motorcyclist Association in 1937. That weekend, celebration in 1938, had a lineup of only nine racers and a small audience watching the races on blankets on a hillside. The rally remained small throughout the 1940s, 50s, 60s and part of the 1970s with Hoell and his wife making sandwiches for Rally attendees camping in Sturgis’ City Park. After an outlaw Motorcycle Club blew up an outhouse in 1979, the Sturgis Rally, according to some, has never been the same. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the rally grew in size and commercialism with over 750,000 people attending the rally in 2000. This year celebrates the 75th anniversary of what the Jack Pine Gypsies started with a few flat track motorcycle racers and some loyal local fans.