Indian motorcycle star Don Klark, Captain of the Detroit Motordrome team posing with his lovely bride Irene inside the Motor City saucer in the summer of 1913. A veteran of the Indian factory team, the 24 year old Klark was selected to lead the “home” team of racers contracted to ride in Detroit, Jack Prince’s latest board track motordrome. The first of 8 new motordromes built in 1913, the 1/4 mile stadium in Detroit was completed in May with an intense banking of 60 degrees, making it one of the steepest of these tracks ever built. Shortly after the gates opened tragedy struck, as it so often did on these tracks and a young aspiring racer, an Austrian pilot by the name of Emil Haloubek became yet another victim of the sport. Klark had arranged for Haloubek to make a few laps around the new saucer on June 5th so that he could evaluate his abilities for potential placement on the team, but the inexperienced Austrian lost control of the machine. Haloubek’s death, which increased the number of fatalities on American boards to over a dozen inspired a scathing editorial in the Detroit News. The highly critical article featured a now famous cartoon entitled “A Pagan Holiday” in which Death, with his sickle and a shield bearing a dollar sign stands with a rider beneath his foot at the center of a motordrome, the crowd giving a unanimous thumbs down as if spectators in a Roman coliseum. However, despite the growing public distaste the Detroit Motordrome insisted that the accident was a simple abnormality and continued hosting races until ultimately, poor attendance forced it to close its doors the next season. As the gates were closing at the Detroit Motordrome in the fall of 1914 Klark and Irene welcomed a daughter, Ruth into their family. Klark continued racing for a time and was considered to be one of the best in country, but he eventually retired into a cushy and far less perilous position at Packard. Unlike so many of his fellow gentlemen racers, Don Klark enjoyed all of the thrills and triumphs of a racers youth as well as the treasured wisdom of old age, passing away just before his 86th birthday in 1976.