Tag: motorcycle

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Riding on Air

By John Andrews

Jesse Jurrens leads Legend Suspensions, a Sturgis business specializing in smooth rides.

You could say that Legend Suspensions got its start on the dirt bike trails of Codington County. Jesse Jurrens grew up outside of Watertown, riding and modifying bikes. He continued tinkering after he got his first Harley, but when it came to the suspension system, he looked far and wide for an air spring system similar to what was being used on hot rods.”When I couldn’t find it, I decided to make my own,” Jurrens says.”That sent me down the path of fabricating prototypes, thinking in the back of my mind that maybe there was a market for it.”

The ultimate result was an air suspension system that has become the bedrock product for Legend Suspensions. Made using state-of-the-art rubber, the system provides a smoother ride, increased load capacity and adjustability mid-ride. The systems are now in use around the world, but it took a lot of time, testing and patience.

Jurrens began in the basement of his parents’ house in Watertown in the mid-1990s. He soon met Dan Dolan, now a professor emeritus of mechanical engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, who specialized in vehicle dynamics.”I wasn’t a student but he was intrigued by what I was trying to accomplish,” Jurrens says.”He helped me to emulate a million miles of testing on that first product, which took quite a bit of time, but it was important to build that safety if I thought I was going to sell these in the future.”

The key came when the Gates Rubber Company agreed to share its Aramid fiber rubber air spring technology.”Aramid fiber is almost like a bulletproof vest,” he says.”When we run a lot of air pressure into these air springs, they can only grow about a millimeter at most, because it’s such a tight compact area underneath these bikes. The rubber has to stay its size and be able to handle extreme use. This is the only material that holds up. It makes our product work.”

Legend Suspensions now employs around 35 people at its headquarters in Sturgis. Parts are machined at a plant in Watertown and other components come from smaller companies in South Dakota and around the Midwest. In addition to air suspensions, they also produce high-end coil and front-end suspensions.”No matter what the customer is looking to do with that motorcycle, we’ve got an option,” Jurrens says.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Rally Ritual

By Debora Dragseth

Each year, when motorcycle enthusiasts gather in Sturgis, the town’s population swells from 6,500 to 500,000. Photo by Ron Linton

The outrageous phenomenon known as the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally has evolved into a week-long, $987 million party for nearly half a million people. Every August, the city of Sturgis in the northern Black Hills hosts biking enthusiasts in a combination carnival, racing event, party, music festival and shopping mall.

It’s the oldest, biggest, loudest, most authentic and out-of-control motorcycle rally in the world. Sturgis’ small population, 6,500, skyrockets to become the largest city in the state by a factor of three. That equates to each household in town hosting 183″guests.” Consider this for comparison: New York City: 26,402 persons per square mile. South Dakota: 9.9 persons per square mile. Sturgis (projected): 160,427 persons per square mile.

If past rallies are any indication, nearly 500 festivalgoers will land in jail. Hundreds more will receive tickets for violations such as indecent exposure, open container or driving on the sidewalk. Some 350 will require emergency room visits, two or three will die of heart attacks and a half-dozen or more will die in traffic accidents. Keeping its guests safe costs the city of Sturgis over $1 million in insurance, increased law enforcement, attorney costs and fire and ambulance services. Nobody has tabulated the costs to the state’s judicial and state prison systems.

The town’s temporary denizens come clad in skullcaps, sunglasses, boots, sleeveless shirts and black leather. Tattoos are standard, piercings optional. Body paint, thongs and pasties will do for women. For men, cleanliness is not a virtue; grimy grubbiness is fine and chest hair encouraged. Don’t come to Sturgis looking for metrosexuals — they’re as rare as pedal bicycles.

The streets are thick with beautiful, scantily dressed women, but the real beauties are the motorcycles, their chrome sparkling in the sun as though they had just left a showroom floor. Even visitors who don’t live the motorcycle culture will marvel at the thousands of custom-painted Harley Davidsons parked four rows deep and lined up for blocks. Many are true works of visual art, and they make beautiful music. Few noises compare to the undulating river of 700-pound motorcycles. Hunter S. Thompson described it as”a burst of dirty thunder.”

Author Debora Dragseth may live in Sturgis, but during the rally she looks like an outsider next to the thousands of tattooed and bearded bikers.

But strip away all the aesthetics and the Sturgis Rally is an economic engine that drives state tourism and represents capitalism at its finest. According to a survey funded by the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, $987 million comes into South Dakota annually from the event. Rally-goers pay an inflated $5.50 for a beer at the world’s largest biker bar. Fortunately, a free pancake breakfast is served daily by the Son of Light Ministry, whose sign proclaims,”Flapjacks along with the word of God. And the best part — they’re both free!” In the same vein, the Christian Motorcycle Association will bless your bike while offering you a free bike wash, coffee and pancakes.

Tens of thousands of people get”inked” at the rally.”A decision that will last a lifetime,” warns the tattoo artist who works in a small concrete building that just last week was a beauty parlor. Many local businesses are”repurposed,” in other words, closed down and rented out to vendors for handsome sums. Grocery stores, gas stations and a local department store remain open for business; high demand items include sunscreen, pillows and energy drinks. The only liquor store in town is city-owned, a smart move on the part of Sturgis’ founding fathers given that rally-goers drink an estimated 3 million gallons of beer. On average, visitors stay 5.5 days and spend $180 per day.”It’s like a really loud relative comes to your house, stuffs your pockets full of money and leaves a week later,” quipped one Sturgis citizen.

Demand exceeds the supply of hotel rooms, camping spots and bathrooms. Hotel rates double and triple, climbing as high as $300 a night for a room — and most lodgings within 50 miles are full. It seems as though every square foot in town is rented to someone: locals rent their homes for $3,000 to $10,000 a week; some even rent their yards to campers who pitch tents or park bikes. City law limits homeowners to 19 renters per property.

Three types of people come to the Sturgis Rally. First, the casual observers who ride occasionally or not at all. They’re easy to spot — they point a lot and look awestruck, like kindergarteners on the first day of school. They carry shopping bags filled with T-shirts as proof to the folks back home that they risked the mayhem and rubbed shoulders with the black leather crowd.

Next are the recreational riders. Mostly in their late 40s and 50s, they own bikes but don’t belong to biker clubs. They ride their Harleys only on sunny and mild weekends. They trailer their $35,000 bikes to the rally behind big pickups with heated leather captain’s seats. This group offers the best opportunity for vendors. They look like walking billboards for the Harley-Davidson brand, and buying the fantasy of the biker subculture does not come cheap.

Finally, there are the bikers whose leather jackets have a cracked”been there, done that” patina that matches their sunburned faces. (You don’t get that look by hauling your bike on a trailer or riding on weekends.) Their bikes have never seen a trailer, they do their own tune-ups, they sport socially offensive tattoos and they don’t own rain gear.

Although it’s impossible to determine the exact number of people at the rally, city officials use several metrics, including traffic counts and taxable receipts. Over 700 temporary vendors set up in the city, hawking everything from $2 rubber bracelets to $125,000 custom-made motorcycles. For a more ingenious method of estimating crowd size, the locals measure the quantity of what’s left behind. Over 500 tons of”rally garbage” was hauled away in 2011, and the town doesn’t expect this year’s guests to leave any less.

The rally has been held annually in Sturgis since 1938 with the exception of two years during World War II when gas rationing prevented recreational travel. Nine racers participated in the first rally, competing for $750 in prize money in front of a small crowd of racing enthusiasts who paid 50 cents admission. Attendance hit 800 in 1960 and 2,000 by 1970. This year, the city expects 500,000.

Campgrounds (empty fields during the rest of the year) pulsate with rock bands from high noon to early morning. The largest, the infamous 600-acre Buffalo Chip, has been estimated to host 25,000 rowdy revelers, transforming overnight into the third largest city in the state. Like several local campgrounds, it doubles as a concert venue. The Buffalo Chip also offers less conventional entertainment — topless beauty contests, redneck games and a shooting arcade for grownups billed as the ultimate Second Amendment experience. Participants can choose from World War I, World War II, Korean and Vietnam War era weapons and receive the training required for a 35-state concealed carry permit.

All the entertainment provides for some unusual entrepreneurial activity in South Dakota. Zackiary Crouch, a third-generation hair stylist, has the enviable job of making female bartenders look pretty. During the rally he works 14-hour days beginning at 5:30 a.m.”The rally isn’t as glamorous as it sounds,” he insists.”Girls who have been living at a campground and haven’t showered for a week are like a Monet, pretty from far away, but close up — a bit nasty.” During the 2011 rally, Crouch saw a heart attack and a stabbing both on the same day. At One-Eyed Jacks Saloon, where he has headquartered for the past five years, the self-described”gay kid of Sturgis” defines his job as a combination of hostess, hairdresser and psychologist.

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally seems like an anomaly to South Dakotans, but such events hearken back to ancient times. The Romans celebrated what anthropologists call rituals of reversal, times in the yearly calendar that allowed patricians, plebeians, and slaves to abandon the constraints of an ordered culture. The society enjoyed a”time out” during these festivals when people could break the rules without fear of recrimination. Reversal rituals included a strong sexual focus, anonymity, costumes, feasting to excess and some form of intoxicant to reduce inhibitions.

Tony Bender, an avid biker and former news director and publisher of Sturgis’ local newspaper, The Meade County Times-Tribune, spoke to what the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally really means.”I think it is one of the great expressions of American freedom. The open road, the sense of rebellion, the pulse of the V-twin motors … and yet, a real sense of brotherhood.”

Want to unleash your id? Come to Sturgis. My 6,500 neighbors and I are happy to see you, but to be honest, we’ll be kind of happy to see you safely leave as well. Go home, shower and shave, put on your khaki Dockers and your loafers, and squeeze back into your cubicle. In other words, get back to work — you will need to pay off your August credit card bill.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Spinoffs from Sturgis

By Paul Higbee

The rumble of motorcyclists attracted by the Sturgis Rally fades with the pages of the calendar. But listen carefully and you may hear another motorcycling sound across South Dakota: the year-around hum of manufacturing, engineering research, and bike adaptations.

No one says the motorcycle industry is recession proof. A motorcycle is a luxury purchase for most buyers, but good bikes generally hold their value over time and are smart investments. Also there are high-end bike collectors, both in the United States and abroad, for whom the current recession is mostly rumor, and whose latest two-wheel purchase exceeded what most of us spent for our homes. Some South Dakota manufacturers have grown about as fast as companies could ever hope in recent years, and if sales slowed during the economic downturn of 2008 and 2009, it felt like a mere bump in the track.

Company leaders say there’s an advantage in basing a motorcycle company in South Dakota. It’s a place bikers warmly associate with spectacular rides, freedom, annual reunions, and residents who are anything but buttoned-down. Plenty of industry leaders are transplants that seem to understand South Dakota’s mystique better than its natives do. Something else — base your company in South Dakota and lots of customers will stop every August for face-to-face hellos and consultations.

So get your motor running, head out on the highway, and meet some people who make biking a 12-month enterprise in South Dakota.

Brian Klock spent 15 years building a Mitchell bike business called Klock Werks. His bikes began to set records at Bonneville after he designed a new windshield during a Discovery Channel Build-Off contest.

Mitchell

How do you set a world’s speed record on Utah’s Bonneville salt flats? You need the right engine, the right rider, and as Brian Klock learned to his great benefit, you need the right windshield.

Over the past 17 years, Klock built up Klock Werks, a company that earned a great reputation producing parts for customizing bikes. Fenders, handlebars, gauges, exhaust systems — about 350 parts in all — are shipped everywhere, mostly with pre-drilled holes so buyers can build or rebuild their bikes themselves. Klock Werks won a loyal customer base, especially among Harley-Davidson owners who ride baggers. Baggers are long distance bikes with compartments, or bags, for stowing travel gear. Klock Werks products told the biker world that baggers could be stylish.

But could a bagger go fast?

Brian and Laura Klock

When the Discovery Channel invited Klock to participate in a biker build-off a few years ago, he decided to create the WFB (Way Fast Bagger). Part of his design was a new windshield. The standard issue windshield on this Harley bike, he discovered, moved air so that the bike’s front end actually rose a bit at high speeds. The lift slowed the bike and resulted in less stability and even a wobble. Klock’s new windshield, now sold as the Flare, directed the wind downward — a plus for rider comfort, safety, and speed. Klock won the build-off and took the bike to Bonneville in 2006.

He recruited a highly trusted rider, Laura Ellifson, for the salt flats time trials. A year later she and Klock were married.

Laura hit 147 miles per hour, a record for her type of machine, in land speed racing at Bonneville in 2006. The WFB name stuck, only now the initials stood for World’s Fastest Bagger. Laura broke her own record at Bonneville in 2007 and again in 2008 when she was clocked at 153.593 mph. She believes that unofficially she has reached 160 mph.

What’s it like to fly like that across the salt on two wheels?

“You learn to challenge yourself and your machine, and you learn to handle your fears,” Laura says.”You look straight ahead, pick a spot and keep focused on it, and you don’t look down at the track because that can be intimidating. In this kind of racing you hold your speed over the course of a measured mile, so it’s different than drag racing where you hit your speed and then back off.”

She attracted lots of admirers, some of whom have her posters tacked to their garage walls, and she’s in demand as a speaker. But Laura is not the hard-driven competitor some of her fans might guess. What she loves about salt flats racing is the comradery and the chance to showcase Klock Werks innovations (however, Laura does take great pride in the fact that she and her bike racing teenage daughters, Erika and Karlee, were the first mother and daughters trio to simultaneously hold records at Bonneville).

Brian and Laura Klock first met at Bonneville, where Laura’s daughters Erika and Karlee also hold records.

Showcasing the Flare windshield’s attributes at Bonneville was a big step for Klock Werks. The windshield was perfected at the A2 Wind Tunnel in North Carolina and is now the company’s best selling product. It deserves much of the credit for the way Klock Werks grew in recent years from five employees to 20.

“It costs under $200, takes just a few minutes to install, and it really improves a ride,” says Makel Juarez on the sales floor in Mitchell.

Sturgis

If you own a pre-1930 Harley Davidson, there are two things you should know. First your source for parts is Competition Distributing of Sturgis, because no one else in the world builds such an extensive line of Harley components for 1905 through 1929 models. There are 1,620 parts available, most for Harleys, and some for other vintage bikes as well.

Second you should know there are more people like you than you might guess. Competition Distributing has a customer base of 14,000. Seventy-five percent of those buyers are European. Some days 150 parts shipments leave the shop on Lazelle Street in Sturgis. That’s where”seven workers do the work of 14,” says Lonnie Isam, company owner.

Isam notes a key difference between motorcycle collectors and people who collect cars.”Motorcyclists love their engines, just the opposite of lots of car collectors who tend to love the car’s body,” he says.”So with these bikes we start out with lots of motors and not so many chassis.”

If there’s a look that distinguishes pioneer bikes, it’s the box-shaped flat gas tanks. The very first, not surprisingly, resembled bicycles with motors attached, because that’s exactly what they were. But the machines soon acquired identities completely separate from bicycles.

“The engineering is so obvious on these early bikes, and I’ve learned to respect the way the engineering evolved quickly, especially from 1905 to 1920,” Isam says.”We rebuild complete bikes here a few times each year, and we go through the exact process that the first bike builders did.”

He never forgets the historical significance of his work.”These motorcycles,” he says,”are our thoroughbreds, our roots.”

Isam grew up riding motorcycles in and around Seattle, then owned a Harley-Davidson dealership in Houston. In the 1970s, he says,”Harley-Davidson wasn’t cool, was having some labor problems, and you could pick up a dealership for just about nothing.” Isam and his wife, Marianne, ran the Houston shop for 34 years and at the same time were buying up struggling tool and dye companies there.”So I had equipment to make bike parts,” Isam recalls. If he made one part, he discovered, it made sense to make additional pieces as well. Sooner or later someone would need them.

Like so many others in the bike industry, Isam came to know the Black Hills through the rally and eventually bought property there. After the Isams sold their Houston dealership in 1999, they began thinking of a life in South Dakota. It was the right move.”In Sturgis,” Isam says,”I’ve forgotten what stress is.” He’s a new South Dakotan loyal to his adopted state–when he subcontracts work, he looks to Black Hills manufacturers and estimates that 80 percent of his company’s revenue remains in South Dakota.

It’s somehow appropriate that Carl Herman Lang’s 1905 Harley Davidson sits in this shop that’s dedicated to the integrity of vintage Harleys. Lang was an early Harley-Davidson investor, patent holder, and the very first dealer. It’s believed the company turned out five bikes in 1905–this one and only four others. If there’s a Rosetta Stone in the Harley world, this is it.

Spearfish

Ken Hines relocated from South Carolina to Spearfish to become president and CEO of Lehman Trikes, which bills itself as”leader of the three world.” A former Blue Angels pilot, Hines now enjoys more leisurely motorcycle rides.

“I only rode 900 miles this past weekend,” he laughs.”If you’re in the motorcycle industry and you find yourself in the northern Black Hills, what could be better?”

His company originated in Canada in 1985 and named Spearfish its United States assembly and distribution center in 2004. Initially there were four Spearfish employees, but seven years later more than 130 workers are spread throughout four buildings.

“We take a partially assembled two-wheel motorcycle, add a wider differential that will accept two rear wheels, and then we add those wheels,” explains Paul Pankonin, operations manager.”And the framework gets a new body and paint.”

Ken Hines moved to Spearfish to become President and CEO of Lehman Trikes, but soon fell in love with the Northern Hills and the great biking routes. Lehman Trikes were designed for safety in the 1980s.

The Lehman story began in the early 1980s. Linda Lehman told her husband, John, that she wasn’t comfortable with their child riding on the back of a two-wheel bike. So for safety John created a three-wheel motorcycle. The customized machine won Linda’s appreciation and lots of attention wherever the family traveled. The Lehmans had struck gold and decided to mass-produce trikes, originally at Westlock, Alberta.

Today in Spearfish there are two assembly lines in a thoroughly modern, beautifully lit, and well-ventilated plant. Product demand keeps day and night shifts busy. One line culminates in a trike built for Harley-Davidson as a Harley product, and the other line turns out Lehman’s own products. About 130 dealers handle Lehman Trikes, across North America and Europe, and in Japan. Dealers who want Lehman kits for assembly in their own shops are invited to Spearfish for a four-day training session. Dealers are also invited to Spearfish for the rally each year, and can use the Lehman parking lot adjacent to Interstate 90 for demo rides and sales.”We open the factory for tours during rally week, too, but we never sell directly to the public,” Hines says.”Only through our dealers.”

It’s not only rally traffic and great Black Hills rides that have Hines singing South Dakota’s praises.”We love our workforce here,” he says,”and this is a state where the governor will come and visit for half an hour, and he knows your name and all about your business.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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First Lady of Sturgis

Editor’s Note: Carl Edeburn, a retired SDSU professor, is the author of Sturgis: The Story of the Rally, published in 2003. While researching the book, he spent time with Pearl Hoel, the woman many consider the matriarch of the rally. He wrote this story about Hoel for our March/April 2004 issue. Hoel died in February 2005 at age 99, but she is on the minds of many of the nearly 500,000 bikers descending upon the Meade County town for the annual rally, which runs Aug. 4-10.

By Carl Edeburn

Many of the thousands of bikers who make the annual pilgrimage to Sturgis would be surprised to learn that the much-heralded event now dominated by Harley Davidson was hatched at the workbench of an Indian motorcycle shop in Sturgis. They might be even more surprised that a steadying hand behind the rally for nearly six decades was a 98-year-old woman in a spiffy white pantsuit.

Pearl Hoel is a South Dakota living treasure. Closing in on a century, she is chipper, gracious and excited by life, an interesting person to visit, if you can catch her at home on Baldwin Street.”Any day but Wednesday is good,” she said.”On Wednesday I play bridge with my friends.” Of nine women in her bridge group, four are over 90, including Lillian Lushbough, who is 100.

Pearl and her husband, Clarence”Pappy” Hoel (pronounced”Hoyle”), were instrumental in initiating the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in 1937. She and Clarence were married 61 years before he passed away in 1989. Before they met, Pearl taught school in Mystic and Piedmont. She and Clarence met at a dance in Piedmont, and married in 1928. Their only child, Jack, was born seven years later.

When electrical refrigeration arrived in Sturgis and Ft. Meade in 1936, the Hoel’s ice business began to wane. That’s when Clarence decided to open a shop in their garage, specializing in Indian motorcycles. To enhance the new business, Clarence organized a riding club similar to a larger club in Rapid City supported by the Harley Davidson dealer. One Sunday the club was picnicking in the Black Hills when an automobile tourist said they looked like a bunch of Gypsies, and the Jack Pine Gypsies was born.

During the Depression of the 1930s, Pearl assisted needy rural families with the WPA. She drove the countryside in an old car, delivering clothing and food. One night she was driving a lonely country road with the backseat and trunk filled with fresh beef when she had a flat tire. By the time she had dragged a couple of hind quarters out of the trunk to get at the spare tire and jack, a pack of coyotes had surrounded the car and begun to howl. That was more exciting than riding two-up with Pappy, Pearl said.

After the WPA era, Pearl went to work as deputy to the Meade County clerk of courts, and when the boss retired, she was appointed to the job. Later she was elected register of deeds, and still later, county auditor. In the lean years of the motorcycle business, during World War II and in the 1950s when the Indian motorcycle was fading, the Hoel family stayed well fed through Pearl’s jobs at the courthouse.

Pearl still lives in the Hoel home on Baldwin Street. Her son Jack checks in with her every morning after he stops at the post office.”Last year she asked me to get her a bigger snow shovel,” he chuckled as he introduced himself to me on my first visit.

I was writing a book about the Sturgis Rally, and knew Pearl could provide a wealth of information about its history. When she discovered that I was staying in a motel, she insisted that I stay with her”to save money.” Great hospitality and hot breakfasts.

After my book, Sturgis: The Story of the Rally, was published last summer, my wife Cleo and I stopped by Pearl’s house to deliver a copy. Pearl was excited about the book, but more excited about the pending 63rd Rally.”I’m going to have 24 people here this year,” she said.”Last year it was down — only 18 showed up.”

For years, people have arrived on Pearl’s doorstep on the Thursday and Friday before the motorcycle rally. Eight to 10 people roll sleeping bags out on the beds and on the floors of her two spare rooms. Another group sleep in the garage, two couples park motor homes in the yard, and others sleep in tents on the front lawn. Needless to say, Pearl’s one bathroom is well used that week. Another dozen bikers stay next door at Pearl’s neighbor’s house, and mingle with her two dozen guests.

For Pearl Hoel, Rally Week retains its excitement. Monday evening she attends the short track races, and on Tuesday the half-mile races at the Meade County Fairgrounds. Last summer she took an honorary lap around the track in Neil Hultman’s sidecar. Everyone stood and clapped, while Pearl smiled and waved to the crowd.

Wednesday is long and busy for Pearl. It begins with the Sturgis Hall of Fame breakfast, held in Spearfish last summer because Homeland Security closed Fort Meade’s Assembly Hall for the week. The breakfast honors motorcycle journalists, engineers, politicians, and racers who have made significant contributions to the sport. For this event, Pearl generally buys a new outfit and gets her hair done. This year was no exception; she dazzled the crowd in an exquisite white pantsuit.”I want to look good for this party,” she chuckled. First-time attendees who know little of the history and legacy of dirt track racing at Sturgis are suitably impressed when nationally-significant motorcyclists stand to honor the grand dame of the motorcycling world.

On Thursday, with help from local ladies and visitors, Pearl hosts her backyard breakfast for The Retreads, a national organization of motorcyclists over the age of 40. In 2002, former Sturgis racing champions from Ohio, New Mexico and California showed up, a delight to Pearl, who hadn’t seen them for years. Then the party was crashed by a television crew from the Travel Channel, who were taping a show on Sturgis.

In 2003 the surprise visitors were authors Jean Davidson and Marian Hersrud. Davidson, the granddaughter of motorcycle manufacturer Walter Davidson, was signing her book, Growing Up Harley Davidson, and Hersrud her novel, Sweet Thunder. Ms. Davidson’s book was in such demand that she ran out of copies. I even got to sign my book.

Friday begins with the White Plate Flat Trackers Association Breakfast in the Gypsy Club room at the J. C. Hoel Short Track. The WPFTA, conceived and organized by Pappy Hoel and Al Burke in 1979, is dedicated to the memory of early racers. Fearing that these legends would be forgotten by contemporary riders, Burke and Hoel organized an annual reunion for White Plate (Expert) Riders at the 1980 Rally. Pioneer dirt track racers who are able, ride a lap at the half-mile race. Pearl helps plan and cook for the event.

By Saturday, the downtown rally crowd is pulling up stakes and roaring out of Sturgis. But Lady Pearl and other true dirt track fans are attending the last short races at the Jackpine Gypsy Club grounds.

On Sunday, Sturgis feels like a ghost town. The crowd is gone, and Pearl and other club members and locals start talking about next year’s rally.

In the early rally days, Pearl and Clarence Hoel pitched a circus tent in their back yard to provide a place for visiting riders to meet, visit and sleep. The Hoels and the Jackpine Gypsies provided coffee and donuts in the evening, after riders returned from daytime tours.

The Gypsy Tours were initiated by the motorcycle club in 1938 to add an extra day to what was then a weekend rally, and to introduce visiting riders to the exquisite scenery of the Hills. On Friday, bikers rode to Sylvan Lake, Mount Rushmore and the State Game Lodge. Later, a northern tour to Wyoming and Devil’s Tower was introduced. At the end of the day, bikers returned to Sturgis for the Friday Night Feed. The Gypsy Tours were so popular that by the early 1970s the train of motorcycles reached eight miles long. It became necessary to break riders into six, and then 12 separate tours.

When the touring groups were smaller, Pearl and a couple of other Gypsy wives provided a midday picnic for the riders. To plan for the event, they went downtown Thursday evening and counted bikes, guessing that two-thirds of the riders would take the tour. They bought the makings for baked beans, potato salad, wieners, coffee, iced tea and watermelon. They packed the food in an old pickup truck, and Friday morning led the bikers south toward the designated picnic site. Lunch was 65 cents, Pearl said,”all you could eat.” The truck followed the riders back to Sturgis and picked up motorcycles that broke down along the way.

Once Pearl helped an automobile tourist whose old Ford was stopped in the middle of the Needles Highway, its radiator”steaming like Old Faithful.” Pearl offered the man her remaining iced tea, assuring him that it contained no sugar.

By the late 1950s, crowds had grown so large that Pearl had to give up providing lunch. But at 98, she still hosts breakfast for the Retreads and the Flat Trackers. When somebody asked what her favorite downtown rally food was, Pearl replied that she had been so busy cooking and providing for her company that she hadn’t had time to visit the Main Street vendors.

Pearl Hoel is the unsung hero in the birth, growth and long-term success of the Black Hills Motor Classic. It’s hard to imagine Sturgis without her.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2004 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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Hot Harley Nights

The 16th annual Hot Harley Nights took place July 8-10, 2011, raising money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation of South Dakota. With temps in the 90s, the event certainly lived up to its name. But the heat didn’t keep people away – approximately 4,000 people rode in the police escorted motorcycle parade into downtown Sioux Falls. AC/DC tribute band Rock N Roll Damnation wrapped up the festivities. Photos by Rebecca Johnson.