Spin

by Peter Zheutlin

  September 30, 1894

  Dear Sister,

  Your occasional wires reach me, and while I am gratified to have some idea of your whereabouts, they contain little that helps me understand how and why you persist in this unorthodox quest of yours. You ask me to be sure to convey your love to the children, but by virtue of their tender years it would really pass over their heads. And I am struck that you ask no questions about their welfare other than to express the wish that they are faring well. They have, not surprisingly, grown very attached to Baila, with whom they spend most of every day. I suppose from their point of view (and would they be wrong?) Baila is their mother now. Libbie and Simon are too young, of course, to understand this at all. Mollie is full of questions about where you are and why you have gone and when you are coming back, questions for which neither Baila nor I nor their father has anything close to a satisfactory explanation.

  Caring for five young children takes a toll; Baila looks to have aged several years in three short months, and yet, as exhausted as she is, she is uncomplaining. Her love for your children is as the love for her own. I hope you can appreciate the magnitude of the burden you have placed on her. I say this not to make you feel guilty, I suspect you may be beyond that, but because you should know.

  Sister Rosa has grown quite solemn since your departure. Since the deaths of Mother and Father and Jacob, she grew to depend quite deeply on you. I think this explains why she has decided to marry in a few days’ time a young man named Simon Newman. She is just sixteen, still a child, but she desperately needs someone to look after her. I have counseled against it, she is too young and immature, but her mind is made up. She looks up to you and I hope you will spare a few minutes from time to time to pen letters to her. I think it would lift her spirits to hear from you.

  As for Max, it is hard to tell. He has never been a man of many words, and whatever he suffers, he suffers in silence. When he retrieves the children in the evening, or after he has joined us for dinner, which he does often, he seems weary, and Baila goes upstairs with them to help with the bedtime routine while I attend to little Harry and Bessie. Having their three young cousins about every day is fun for them, but five children not yet of school age in the apartment makes for long days.

  I am long past thinking anything I can say will alter your trajectory at all, but I will close by asking you to again consider the costs your adventure are imposing on your husband, your children, and on Baila and me.

  Your loving brother,

  Bennett

  * * *

  October 1, 1894

  Dearest Annie,

  I do hope you are well! I confess to being disappointed that I have had only one letter from you these past three months; I hope you have been receiving mine. I have written you at least twice a week since you left in June. Perhaps it is hard to find the time to write when you must be exerting all your energies on the wheel. But I also suspect that it is easier for you to exist in the new world you have entered and to inhabit whatever new persona you have adopted for the journey without too many reminders of the world you left behind. I did receive your telegram with your address in Chicago and I trust you are still there as it sounded as if you might lay over for some days.

  When my eyes open in the morning—that is the hardest time of day for me for it is only when I am sleeping that I am not missing you, your company, your lively mind and crackling wit, and, not least, your touch. Ours has always been an impossible situation in so many ways; you, married, and a mother three times over. Even if you were not so engaged, we would still be hiding behind the curtains. I sometimes imagine the day when people could simply be free to be who they are, to come out of hiding and live as they were meant to live. I am well aware of the whispers that follow me wherever I go—my neighbors, the catty ladies of Beacon Hill, even my own family. Why, they ask, is she not yet married? Surely she needs a husband and at her age the opportunities are dwindling. But I don’t want to live a lie. I am perfectly prepared to be a spinster. You, Annie, are the love of my life, and though I am under no illusions about the future, I am also prepared to accept all the limitations that accompany our love for each other. It is enough for me.

  Please do write more often. I am missing you so.

  Love,

  Susie

  Eight

  A few days before my departure from Chicago I collected my new bicycle from Jerry Higgins at the Sterling shop, and as I no longer had any use for the Columbia, I left it with him to do as he saw fit. He said he would try to sell it and wire the proceeds to me, but I never did receive anything for it. The Sterling people, eager to capitalize on the fact that the now modestly famous Annie Londonderry would henceforth be astride a Sterling, arranged for a professional drawing to be made of me, now attired in bloomers, sitting on the wheel, a drawing that appeared in advertisements in various cycling magazines. I found a copy while looking through my scrapbooks a few days ago and am enclosing it here. Don’t I look fine?

  Jerry Higgins also gave me a list of Sterling dealers in the United States and France and assured me all would be notified of my journey, that I was promoting the Sterling brand, and that they should extend to me any courtesy I might require, and I did on several occasions avail myself of their hospitality as you will see.

  I took a few days to acquaint myself with the Sterling. It lacked a brake, but the spoon brake on the Columbia had proved virtually useless anyway, so I would still be relying on back pressure on the pedals to slow the machine. But the most important difference, other than the fact that it was a bicycle built for a man, was its weight. As I rode through the streets and parks in Chicago I felt as though I were gliding on a slipstream. Moving half the weight I was used to, not to mention the pounds I had dropped during the journey thus far, I felt as though I could ride forever. The discouraged state I was in on my arrival in Chicago disappeared. The combination of the lighter-weight bicycle and my new attire, which gave me complete freedom of movement, contributed to my confidence. Perhaps I had declared defeat too soon when I had announced that the ’round-the-world quest was over in favor of a speed record between Chicago and New York. But there was another factor that led me to change my mind yet again and to declare that I would, after all, girdle the globe if I possibly could.

  Throughout my stay in Chicago I had many women callers and met countless others during my rides through the streets and parks. It seemed all knew who I was and my purpose; they had been following the stories in the papers. It had, until now, only partially dawned on me that I was not just riding for myself, but for my sex; that my success would be theirs and my failure would be theirs, too. To a woman, they implored me not to give up the quest, no matter how unrealistic it was now that less than one year remained on the wager clock. “If it takes two years, so be it,” said one. “Better you should fail in the wager but succeed in the larger purpose and prove that a woman can do what any man can do!”

  At night these entreaties tumbled around in my head. A new bike, a new riding outfit, and all these “New Women” got my gumption up, and I resolved not to throw in the towel so easily. Annie Londonderry got the better of Annie Kopchovsky. I would fight on, for myself, for the prize money, for my sex, and for my pride.

  The only question was whether to continue west or reverse course, ride back to New York, and from there sail for France. To go to the West Coast at this time of the year would, as I said, require that I take a long route south, perhaps to New Orleans, and then across the southwest to avoid the coming winter weather. If I made haste, I could reach New York in about two weeks’ time, but that would mean the entire ride from Boston to Chicago would be for naught and that I had wasted four precious months of the fifteen stipulated in the colonel’s wager. If I chose the latter route, to make a complete circuit of the earth I would now need to return to Chicago, not Boston, and do so in just eleven months. Either way, the prospect of winning the colonel’s wager was slim indeed, if not impossible.

  So how did
I decide which way to go? Simple. I flipped a coin, and on October 14, 1894, at precisely 10 A.M., having alerted the local press, I stood with my Sterling at the Drake Fountain in front of Chicago’s city hall and began retracing my steps to New York.

  * * *

  The send-off from Chicago was a huge lift to my spirits. Dozens of members of a local ladies’ cycling club joined me for the ride down Michigan Avenue and all the way to Pullman on the city’s South Side, where the pungent aroma of the city’s slaughterhouses was especially strong. As the procession made its way, more and more cyclists joined the parade until we numbered in the hundreds. But by the time I reached the Indiana line, only a few riders remained, and then they, too, gave up the chase and turned back for the city.

  There was an important lesson for me here. Publicity was like oxygen. People had started to pay attention, especially women. Their spirits lifted mine, and frankly, I loved being at the center of a spectacle. Were it not for the ink the newspapers gave me in Chicago I probably would have pedaled out of the city alone. I might not win the colonel’s wager, and the prize money, but celebrity, and the rewards that come with it, was still within my grasp. I resolved on the way back to New York to redouble my efforts to draw the interest of the newspapermen, and that meant making as big a spectacle of myself as I could, even if I had to stretch the truth from time to time or, as you will see, invent it from whole cloth. The goal was to create a larger-than-life character, a bold and daring woman on a wheel, impervious to danger, who would overcome every obstacle in her path through sheer force of will. With the country mired in a depression, people thirsted for inspirational stories, for heroes, and I was determined to give them one. The newspapers were only too happy to oblige and were always filled with sensational stories whose truth or falsity was beside the point. It’s different now, but in those days newspapers were entertainment, not just news, and the competition for the sensational and the outlandish was quite keen. I saw the chance to slake the thirst of newspapers and their readers for just that.

  But there were private sensations, too. As you now know, I was very much in love with Susie and I missed her terribly. But there was no oath of fidelity between us, and after four months on the road I longed for the intimate company of a woman and found it for a few short but thrilling days in Indiana. I do hope I am not embarrassing you, dear. I wonder what you will think of your dear old grandma when you read this!

  After spending the first night out of Chicago in Michigan City, I arrived in South Bend in the state of Indiana. There, an admirer, a lady cyclist who also rode a Sterling, called on me at my hotel in the city. Her name was Jessie Padman, and the attraction was immediate. She was a woman of about my age, lithe and fine featured, with long auburn hair. And, like me, married. We had much to talk about and fell into easy conversation for much of the afternoon and into the evening. Her husband, she said, was away on business to St. Louis and Memphis, and as she had no children she had no obligation to be home. By morning we resolved to ride together until we reached the outskirts of Toledo nearly one hundred and fifty miles away, a distance that would take us four days. The companionship was most welcome, as was the intimacy we shared, for on our wheels we were truly kindred spirits.

  Calling on newspaper offices in every town through which we passed, we found a receptive if sometimes skeptical audience. The Elkhart Daily Truth called me “unusually vivacious,” but the Goshen Daily News was skeptical of my claim to be circling the world, speculating, not without reason, that I was really scheming with Sterling to advertise its wheel.

  As we crossed Indiana, the list of Sterling dealers given me by Jerry Higgins in Chicago began to pay dividends. In Ligonier the local Sterling agent, Edward Sisterhen, hosted us for dinner, and later that evening we found lodging in Kendallville with the town pharmacist and Sterling agent Paul Klinkenberg and his lovely family who reveled in the stories of my adventure thus far.

  The next day, Mr. Klinkenberg arranged for an interview with the local newspaper. Given the whirlwind romance of the past few days, I could not help but be amused when the newspaperman asked me if there was any danger of my falling in love with a handsome cyclist and abandoning my venture, to which I replied, “I am too intent on gaining the distinction of being the only lady rider who has ever encircled the earth to entertain any marriage propositions!”

  It would hardly be the first time I would be asked questions like these, and I bristled at the condescension implicit in them. It was as if men thought that every woman’s goal in life was to find a man to serve! But I tried to be good humored about it, for I didn’t want to jeopardize any opportunity I had to get my name in print. These questions also revealed something else about where we women stood in those days. It was simply unimaginable to most, male or female, that any woman, least of all a married woman, would undertake such a journey, for what husband would permit it? I may have had serious shortcomings as a mother, but it crossed my mind that maybe the day would come when the two little girls I’d left behind wouldn’t be asked such questions, and if it did, it might be because of the combined weight of small acts of rebellion like mine.

  Near the Ohio line, in the town of Butler, Indiana, I said goodbye to Jessie Padman. It had been an exciting whirlwind of a few days, but we both knew from the outset that ours would be but a fleeting infatuation, a little oasis of desire that would dissipate as quickly as it had appeared, like a dust devil in summer.

  * * *

  Though it was well into October as I crossed northern Ohio toward Cleveland, the weather was mild and, save for a few rain showers, mostly dry. I reached Cleveland on October 25 and again relied on the hospitality of the local Sterling agent, Grover Wright. With his help I arranged to make appearances and give short talks about my trip to the local clubs, where I tried out another of the moneymaking schemes I employed to support myself on the road and, hopefully, realize a little extra I could send back to Dr. Reeder by postal money order. I got in the habit of buying up little souvenir pins of places I’d been for a few cents apiece and reselling them for a quarter to people charmed by my little talks who wanted a remembrance of our meeting. But profits were small, and I knew I would need more ambitious business plans in the weeks to come.

  Being joined for parts of the ride by other cyclists, either singly or in groups, also soon became part of my regular routine. There was no shortage of riders, mostly men, eager to be part of the journey and, no doubt, to spend some time with an attractive woman they assumed to be available. One such companion was a man named Thomas Bliss, a Cleveland wheelman who attended one of my evening talks in the city. We spoke afterward, and he inquired if I would welcome his company for the two hundred miles to Buffalo. He seemed affable enough, a bit shy even, and I told him I would be happy for his company. It was always safer to travel in a pair and to have help in the event of a mechanical failure or flat tire. Though many would try, Mr. Bliss not among them, with varying degrees of assertiveness, I rebuffed all their romantic advances save one, a man I would meet in California many months hence, but we will come to that. I was quite capable of handling myself in these situations, and I never feared for my safety in the company of any of the men who, eager for the distinction of having shared in Miss Londonderry’s ’round-the-world adventure, passed some of the miles with me.

  By now I was finding the riding—arduous and exhausting on my way to Chicago—pleasurable and liberating as I rode away from Chicago. It wasn’t just the lighter weight of both my bicycle and myself. I had, willy-nilly, ridden myself into strong physical condition over those early months. I was more muscular and more capable of sustained exertion. My confidence, at a low ebb when I reached the city, now soared, and I felt as though I could, literally and figuratively, conquer the world.

  Though I had earned a modest amount of attention from the newspapers since I’d left Boston, it was going to require a more determined effort on my part to turn myself into the sensation I hoped to be if I was to succeed in earning the d
aunting sum of five thousand dollars. I would not only have to be more systematic and regular in heralding my arrival in every town, large or small, through which I would pass, but I needed to ensure that there was drama, real or imagined, that would make irresistible copy for reporters hungry for a good scoop. The more outlandish I appeared, and the more sensational the stories I had to tell, the more ink that would be spilled about me, and I took to the challenge with gusto.

  In Buffalo I used my skills as an advertising solicitor to sell space on my bicycle and my body to local businesses and turn myself into what the Buffalo Morning Express would call “a riding advertising agency.” Just as I had earned my first one hundred dollars by carrying the Londonderry placard on the Columbia, I could earn substantially more by renting space on my person and riding through the city streets adorned with adverts for local merchants. Covered in ribbons and patches and banners of all sizes for all sorts of goods—dairy, hardware, clothing concerns, bicycle shops, you name it—everyone stared at the woman in bloomers covered head to toe in advertisements. It was not a hard sell; merchants immediately saw the potential in this novel approach.

  “She wears ribbons advertising various goods and will receive $400 for one firm’s ad that graces her left breast,” wrote the Morning Express. “On her right bloomer leg she carries $100 worth of advertisements and she has just closed a contract to cover her left arm. She says her back is for rent and she hopes to get $300 for it.” Thus did I spend a few days in Buffalo earning a substantial sum in a short time.