Hall-of-Fame centre Duke Keats made his mark with the Boston Bruins, Detroit Cougars, and Chicago Black Hawks, but he arrived in the NHL relatively late in his outstanding career. Keats, who died on a Sunday of this date in 1972, played seven seasons for the mighty Edmonton Eskimos in the 1920s before he showed up in the eastern big league.

Keats was 27 in the spring of 1922 when he decided he needed the new (Canadian-made) roadster he’s seen sitting in here. The results of the season he’d just wrapped up were … mixed. While the Eskimos had finished first atop the four-team WCHL that year, they’d fallen in the playoffs to the Regina Capitals. Still, Keats himself was the league’s top scorer, compiling 30 goals and 56 points in 25 regular-season games. He was also named to the league’s First All-Star Team.

Did he treat himself to the McLaughlin as a reward for a stellar season? Maybe so. Contemporary ads put the price of a Master Four around $1275 (about $19,000 today). Maybe he got a celebrity discount. Keats certainly didn’t make a secret of his acquisition: theEdmonton Bulletin ran this photograph in April of ’22 along with a grandiloquent ode celebrating Keats and the superior automobile he’d chosen. It went, in part, like this:

Recently Duke arrived at the McLaughlin headquarters and requested that they wrap up one of their latest models for him and presently he was touring Jasper avenue in a shining Master Four to his considerable satisfaction, be it said. Though in jocular mood, Mr. Keats did not request the wrapping up process to commence until he had satisfied himself that the Master Four filled the bill in preference to machines of other makes than the McLaughlin, and the same keen diagnosis which is used by the popular player on the ice was exhibited in the purchasing of the car.