According to the 2021 census, Chambers, a small village in Nebraska’s Holt County, has a population of 268.
The general area – some 200 miles northwest of Omaha – became a destination for Irish immigrants after the Civil War, and George Echley and his son-in-law John M. Alderson were purported to be the first to settle on the south fork of the Elkhorn River.
This was the world Cleo and Mary Alderson knew well. In 1945, the couple’s son Mark was born in nearby O’Neill, but the family eventually called Chambers home. Cleo Anderson graduated from the University of Nebraska with a degree in journalism and owned the local newspaper, while his wife, Mary Anderson, worked as a teacher. When it became clear the newspaper would not sustain them, the Andersons decided to farm the original family plot.
Looking for a brighter future, the Aldersons traveled to Oregon and then spent a longer spell in Timber Lake, S.D.
For years, race fans heard this place uttered over the public address by men like Bill Donella, Gary Lee and Jim Childers. Combining that hometown with a professional race car driver produced visions of gold, cowboys and desperados. It led many to ask the most basic question: “How in the world did this man get from there to here?”
It is an interesting proposition because to know Mark Alderson is to understand that he might consider the question through the lens of an engineer and complete the puzzle by employing three-dimensional modeling. Alderson was never your run-of-the-mill racer.
Our ability to understand and respond to the challenges youth face in their formative years has advanced greatly since the time Alderson first entered a classroom. He knows now that he deals with dyslexia and one might throw in other maladies. Today, he laughs when he recalls his mother admitting if he had been her first born, her childbearing days would have come to a screeching halt. He was bright and entered the highly ranked South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. Some courses presented problems, while he mastered others in short order.
Perhaps he was hardwired to seek thrills, but early on it was clear Alderson was destined to pursue unusual hobbies. A perfect example came between his freshman and sophomore years of college. He ventured to a South Dakota fairgrounds where he was amazed by the Joie Chitwood Thrill Show.
As soon as the performance ended, Alderson grabbed the first performer he saw and asked how one could get involved. The answer he received caught him totally off guard.
“The guy said we are leaving in 30 minutes,” he recalled with a chuckle, “be here.”
He called his mother and after a long pause she offered one piece of advice.
“She told me to wear a seat belt and I did 27 shows in 25 days,” he recalled.
He rolled cars, he drove a motorcycle through a wall of fire and amassed memories to last a lifetime.
Rolling cars was not new territory for this young daredevil. When he was a teenager, he built a car of his own design from body parts scavenged from a 1952 Ford. It was truly an ingenious effort. While taking his mount through its paces on a gravel road, a miscalculation landed Alderson in a deep ditch.
By the time he reached college, he owned a flashy MGB sports car and others in his circle had similar equipment. For fun the group would test their limits on the Needles Highway, which snaked through the Black Hills.
Racing was nowhere on his personal radar and Alderson moved to Detroit where he put his engineering mind to work at Fisher Body, a division of General Motors.
By 1971, Alderson found a new way to occupy his free time. He got a chance to climb in an outmoded Lotus 61m and later raced a Caldwell D9 Formula Ford at Waterford Hills Race Car Course, a 1.5-mile road circuit northwest of Detroit.
On one memorable afternoon he swept his two heats and the feature, but things got dicey at the end of the race.
“I had worn my tires bald,” Alderson recalled. “So at the end, I was sliding all over the place. A guy caught me in the feature and he may have been faster but there was no way he could get around me.”