But now, nearly two decades after I first started chasing Annie, seemed a good time to reimagine the story, to take the literary license I was reluctant to take when I was working on Around the World on Two Wheels. This retelling is how I imagine Annie’s remarkable odyssey may have unfolded, with some flourishes that, true to Annie’s spirit, are purely fanciful. It’s impossible to know how it all went down. But it’s been great fun to put myself in her shoes and tell the story as I imagine she might have told it had she sat down in the days before she died in 1947 and written a long, long letter to her then sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Mary, perhaps Annie’s way of atoning for the distant relationships, emotionally and physically, she had with her own children.
For those wondering which parts of the story as told here are true, that I leave to your imagination, as Annie does at the end of her letter to Mary, with two exceptions. First, Annie really did cross paths with the infamous outlaw John Wesley Hardin. He was at her lecture that night in El Paso when he had Martin Mrose murdered. And, second, the letter from Annie’s son Simon to her daughter, Mollie, is genuine, though slightly edited and abridged. It was in a slim file about Sister Thaddea that I located in the archives of the Nostra Signora di Sion at the Vatican. Ironically, when I told my mother, who had never even heard of Annie or her bicycle trip, that my research had led to a Catholic nun in the family, she said simply, “Oh, I knew Grandpa [my grandfather Harry] had a cousin who had become a nun.” This was the deep, dark family secret no one spoke of but everyone knew. The bicycle trip was hardly a secret, it was a global sensation in the mid-1890s, but no one in my immediate family knew anything about it!
On that day when we first met in 2004, I asked Mary about Mollie and told her that after visiting the cemetery in New Jersey where Annie, Max, and their three youngest children were buried, I had assumed Mollie predeceased them, the only reason I could think of that would explain why she alone was not buried with the family. Mary teared up as she told me the story of Mollie’s conversion and banishment.
Mary never knew she had an aunt Mollie until Mary’s thirtieth birthday in 1961. She learned of Mollie not in a letter written by Annie, but from her mother, Annie’s youngest child, Frieda. On that day, Frieda told Mary for the first time about her aunt Mollie and arranged for them to speak by telephone for the first and only time. Sister Thaddea was attending a conference in Montreal when they spoke. Mary was stunned to learn of her. “Her voice was my grandmother’s voice,” Mary told me, “and I started to cry.”
When Sister Thaddea died in 1961, just a few months after the phone call with Mary, Mary and Frieda received warm letters from Reverend Mother Edeltrude at St. Mary’s Convent in Saskatoon, where Sister Thaddea had lived most of her life.
“You just can’t imagine how we miss her,” she wrote. “She was so outlandish in her ideas at times… She was a great entertainer.” From Mother Edeltrude’s description, Sister Thaddea sounded a lot like the mother she never really had.
Acknowledgments
In the early 2000s, when I was trying to resurrect Annie from obscurity, many dozens of people helped me in ways large and small. Four years of research led to the publication in 2007 of Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride (Citadel Press/Kensington), a non-fiction account of Annie’s journey. Because Spin stands on the shoulders of that research I thank again everyone mentioned in the acknowledgements in Around the World on Two Wheels.
In November 2019, an obituary of Annie appeared in the New York Times, some seventy-two years after her death. That obit was part of an ongoing series in the Times recognizing the many women and people of color who were overlooked by the Times in their day when the obituary pages were dominated by obits of white men. Annie’s obituary was written by Bruce Weber, long-time obituarist at the Times and a legend in his field. In 2015, Bruce published Life is a Wheel: Memoirs of a Bike-Riding Obituarist (Scribner), an account of a cross-country bicycle trip he made several years earlier, in which he mentioned Annie. I didn’t know Annie’s obit was in the works so it was a delightful surprise and Bruce made good use of Around the World on Two Wheels in crafting it. That obituary was the spark for Spin so I am very grateful to Bruce for igniting it. I can’t resist mentioning, in the small world department, that by and by I learned that Bruce and I went to day camp in New Jersey together six decades ago, though we had no contact since that time and I didn’t even know his name. Life is funny that way.
My wife Judy is deeply immersed in the book club world nationally. Among other things she has an online newsletter focusing on food and literature that reaches more than ten thousand avid readers. Knowing that historical fiction is very popular among book clubs, when Bruce’s obit appeared in the Times she threw down the gantlet. “If you don’t write Annie’s story as historical fiction,” she said to me, “someone else will, and you’ve already done the research.” And so it was that Judy fanned the spark Bruce had lit. Never having written fiction I never thought I’d get very far, but there you have it. So, my thanks to Judy for the kick in the pants. Some people, not many, think I have some good ideas, but when I do they are mostly Judy’s.
This is the eighth book I have worked on with my agent Joelle Delbourgo. When I’d written about forty pages or so I sent them to Joelle thinking she’d tell me I’d be well-served to stick to non-fiction (or maybe even find another career) and I’d be done with Annie. But she liked what she read and encouraged me to keep going. So, like Annie, I forged ahead. Thanks to Joelle for that second kick in the pants and guidance along the way.
Prior to Spin, my most recent book was The Dog Went Over the Mountain: Travels with Albie—An American Journey, published by Pegasus Books in 2019. That was my first book with Pegasus and I am happy that Jessica Case, my publisher and editor, took a fancy to Spin, as well. Jessica wears many hats at Pegasus and is a delight to work with. So, many thanks to Jessica and the Pegasus crew that worked on Spin and created the beautiful book you hold in your hands: Maria Fernandez who did the interior design, Kathleen Cook for her careful and astute copyediting, and Drew Wheeler for his eagle-eyed proofreading. The striking cover was designed by Molly von Borstel at Faceout Studio in Bend, Oregon where, coincidentally, there is now a street named for Annie.
As I have said in the acknowledgments in previous books, it takes a village.
About the Author
PETER ZHEUTLIN is the author of the New York Times bestseller Rescue Road: One Man, Thirty Thousand Dogs, and a Million Miles on the Last Hope Highway; Rescued: What Second-Chance Dogs Teach Us About Living with Purpose, Loving with Abandon, and Finding Joy in the Little Things; Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride, a nonfiction book about Annie, and The Dog Went Over the Mountain: Travels With Albie—An American Journey (also available from Pegasus Books), which was a Lowell Thomas/Society of American Travel Writers Award winner. Peter lives in Massachusetts with his wife, author Judy Gelman, and their two rescue dogs.
SPIN
Pegasus Books, Ltd.
148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2021 by Peter Zheutlin
First Pegasus Books edition June 2021
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
Cover design by Faceout Studio, Jeff Miller
Author photo credit © Ceci Ogden
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-64313-752-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64313-753-7
&nb
sp; Distributed by Simon & Schuster
www.pegasusbooks.com
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