Riders who struggled to describe the emotions in their own words deferred to those of Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes’ stories. “When the spirits are low,” he wrote at the bottom of the ’90s depression, “when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.”
On an August day in 1890, a crowd had filled the new horsetrack at Monmouth Park in New Jersey. People peered down in awe as a regal chestnut named Salvator blazed down the track. At the tape, timekeepers glanced at their watches. As with bike-track racing, slashing a horse-racing record by one second raises eyebrows. Salvator had destroyed not only the American record but also the world record by four full seconds, finishing the mile in 1:35.5.*
At a different track, a few years after Salvator’s record, another man would throw his legs over his steed and charge out of the gate, breaking Salvator’s record. Only this time he would be piloting a steel steed. Decades worth of technological advances and improved conditioning would finally resolve the issue of speed in favor of the bicycle over the horse.
For a few decades before and after the turn of the century, bike racers were the men of the hour. The eyes of the nation’s press and sporting public were fixed on them. Gracefully riding high atop their saddles, with their lungs wide open and hearts thumping, Taylor, Zimmerman, and the rest of the peloton sped full steam ahead. Their magical moment was upon them. They were Arthur Doyle’s men, “without thought on anything but the ride they were taking.”
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* Salvator’s one-mile record stood for more than twenty-eight years before it was finally eclipsed by another horse named Roamer. Much like bike-racing records, it is difficult to compare the records of horses from different eras because of the varying track conditions. Salvator’s record—and the wheelman’s—were achieved on a straight track, which some historians believe is faster than an oval.
Chapter 5
UTOPIA
If a man manufactured bicycles in 1895, had blindfolds placed over his eyes, and was spun in circles until disoriented, an unexplainable energy field would have tossed him on a train, then dropped him off somewhere in New England. If a black man was employed by a bicycle manufacturer in 1895, had grandiose dreams of racing bicycles as a professional, and was searching for a safer place to live, that energy field would have placed him on the same train.
The gravitational pull that drove Birdie Munger and Major Taylor to Worcester, Massachusetts, that year had already attracted more than two hundred bike manufacturers to the greater New England region. From these industrial masses came every conceivable type and size of bike maker. On one end of the spectrum stood the Irish and European emigrants recently disgorged from the steerage section of myriad ships, working in small groups from cramped work sheds, copies of Horatio Alger’s book by their sides.
The opposite end of the spectrum produced giants like the Pope Manufacturing Company, the largest employer in all of New England. Its founder, Colonel Albert A. Pope, was a colossal figure, with a Burl Ives beard, a bone-crushing handshake, and an insatiable appetite for good food, great wine, and even greater women. Following his exemplar service as a captain in the Civil War, Pope took such a liking to the title of colonel, he went ahead and promoted himself. Having witnessed all the blood, guts, and dead-horse stench one man could possibly endure, Pope had decided he never wanted to see or smell despair again. But when he came crashing into Boston in 1876, it was during an unsightly equine epizootic, “giving the air,” recalled one historian, “a rich equine flavor.” Soon to become the man most responsible for the decline of the horse, he evidently didn’t much like the stench and set out to do something about it.
Only a few short years after barnstorming into Boston, Colonel Pope became the undisputed king of the bicycle world. When he wasn’t lavishly entertaining at his fifty-acre Cohasset estate on Boston’s South Shore, he shuttled via private railcar between his plush four-fireplace Hartford penthouse office and his even plusher Boston office. From the assembly lines of his six-story factory buildings snaking over endless city blocks, more than one million “Columbia” bicycles—some six hundred a day—would roll onto the streets.
Known as a pioneer in labor relations, Pope had 3,800 high-powered sales agents positioned all over the world. And his machines were found everywhere; after President McKinley’s assassination in 1901, Teddy Roosevelt—the first president to ride in an automobile—was escorted in a Pope automobile, flanked by argus-eyed secret servicemen on Pope bicycles.
Pope, a high school dropout, virtually owned the press. He glossed the pages of nearly every paper in America with glitzy ads, hauled in their best scribes via private railcar for tours of his elaborate headquarters, and then dazzled them with his latest models, finest food, and best wine.
He was also the father of the League of American Wheelmen and the 1880 “good roads movement,” the lobby group that began paving America from coast to coast decades before the widespread use of automobiles. From his cavernous factory interior, the first assembly lines were employed. During his reported visits, Henry Ford would have seen the first use of electric welding, cold-drawn steel, case-hardening, pneumatic tires, brakes, refined ball bearings, and hollow metal rims. Ford must have taken mental notes as the Columbia bicycles, made up of eight hundred separate parts, were inspected five hundred times by twenty-four quality control inspectors. “If the Carnegies and Rockefellers were the captains of industry,” wrote Pope’s biographer Stephan Goddard, “Pope would rank as second lieutenant.”
Between the small underfunded emigrant shops and the mammoth Pope Manufacturing Company stood the Worcester Cycle Manufacturing Company, run by Birdie Munger and his bear-faced partner, Charles Boyd. With his recognizable name and experience in the business world, Munger found raising capital easier than most, and he and his partner did just that. They bought loads of expensive machinery, leased seven acres of prime Worcester land from the largest trust in the country, and lined it with spacious factory buildings. There they churned out six models of bicycles with names like The Boyd and the $100 Lady Worcester.
They added another factory in Middletown, Connecticut, where the sleek $125 Birdie Specials were built. Following Pope’s lead, they placed large ads in several papers aggressively touting The Mechanical Wonders of the World, and even opened a “general office” on prestigious 45 Wall Street. “These models bear out all that was promised of them,” raved a New York Times reporter.
Munger’s plants were a beehive of activity as the demand for bicycles, especially women’s models, at times exceeded supply. Hundreds of blue-shirted craftsmen standing in knee-length stockings toiled amid a riot of belts, pulleys, whirring wheels, and grinding machines. In separate rooms were men who specialized in forging, brazing, buffing, polishing, nickel plating, and case hardening. Demand for bicycles was so high, manufacturers like Pope, and probably Munger, had to make extensive use of outsiders. Watch factories made cyclometers, knit-kneading factories made spokes, and rubber hose factories made tires.
With all the activity, Munger had no problem keeping Taylor busy. He had him working as a machinist, accompanying him to bicycle trade shows, and shuffling between Worcester and Middletown as messenger of important company documents. In his duties as a machinist, Taylor was said to be twice as productive as many of his peers, earning him the nickname “Speed Boy.” As a messenger of valuable documents and possible handler of company money, he had also gained his employer’s confidence.
But inside those factory walls where the entrails of myriad bicycles were splayed out around him, Taylor’s mind occasionally drifted as it had in Indianapolis. The itchy feet he’d had since his youth still radiated from him, gnawing at him, making him feel like a caged lion. It is hard to imagine Major Taylor, given the talent he had already shown, plugging away in a noisy factory, grinding down metal tubes and
assembling parts, and not believe that valuable time was being frittered away.
For a short time, he lived with Munger and Munger’s new wife, Harriet, at a Bay State house, probably eating hearty home-cooked meals. At some point, he moved out on his own, sharing a tiny flat at 13 Parker Street with a friend named Ben Walker. Whenever he had a spare moment, he’d pore over his options; there was always the grease and the sweat and the dollar-a-day manual labor inherent in building bicycles. And then there was the challenge, the potential riches, and the notoriety of racing them. On its surface, it seems like it would have been a simple decision. But he was a black man living away from his family in a strange city. And as much as he wanted to race, the fearful memories of the treatment he’d received in Indianapolis had never left his mind. He had already been scarred, and at times, he would say later, he even considered quitting racing. Furthermore, he was no longer in the midsized pond that was Indianapolis. He was living in the East, seat of racing’s influential governing body and home to most of the nation’s top riders. The competition would be much stiffer than anything he had ever experienced.
Shortly after the doors at the Worcester Cycle Manufacturing Company flung open, the firm received a valuable publicity boost. From his office on Wall and Broad, Munger sat down to a cup of coffee, gazing out at the financial district as the Dow reached 45 and Colonel Pope’s stock, recently at $5, rose to $75. He nearly spilled his coffee as he read a letter crossing the wire from Deming, New Mexico. A rider named A. B. Simons had set world records for the one-quarter and one-third mile sprint while riding his Birdie Special. Like winning a stage of the Tour de France today, setting world records was good for business in the 1890s. Simons was elated. “The Birdie Special is the fastest wheel made,” he beamed through a cross-country wire. Simons’s records, proclaimed the New York Times, “set people talking about the Birdie Special, the wheel on which the record was made.”
Surely Munger slipped Simons’s memo into Taylor’s envious hands. And Taylor surely read it and began dreaming big dreams again. He immediately joined the Albion Cycling Club, an all-black local racing team, and started training at every opportunity. He had some honing to do. He had turned seventeen in November 1895, but his body had yet to fill out beyond its slight, jockey-like stature; his skin and muscles still had the soft, pillowy look of youth. From years of bike riding, Taylor had developed decent leg muscles, but his lesser-used upper body lacked girth. In long-distance endurance races, not wanting extra weight of any kind, cyclists often had muscular imbalances. But Taylor’s real interest was in short-distance track racing, a sport in which brute force is essential and a heavier all-around build is warranted. Knowing this, Taylor had tried developing his muscles at the Indianapolis YMCA, but had been thwarted by its rules against blacks.
So after noticing a YMCA in Worcester, he and Munger decided to test the racial waters one autumn day shortly after arriving in town. At the time, only one percent of the town’s population of 100,000 was African American, and neither he nor Munger knew exactly what to expect.
Because he had already pondered giving up racing, the day they walked into the Worcester Y may have been among the most important in Taylor’s life as well as in the hierarchy of African American sports history. When they entered, they were greeted by a gracious man named Edward Wilder, the Y’s athletic director. Wilder sat them down and listened as they spelled out Taylor’s wants and needs. Paying no attention to Taylor’s color, Wilder then devised an intensive training routine consisting of light dumbbells, Indian clubs—two ten-pound wooden baseball bat–like objects used for strength training—and the use of a Whitley exerciser, a pulley and cable device he could use at the Y, on the road, and at home. Wilder also introduced him to deep-breathing exercises, probably something akin to modern yoga—a routine Taylor would use during his career.
From that day forward, partially for his sport and partially perhaps as a form of affirming payback for Wilder’s compassion, Taylor followed his instruction to the letter, taking great pride in his physique and overall appearance. It would become the physical foundation from which he would build his incredible power and stamina in the years to come. The absence of racial tension at the Y, the freedom to finally develop like his rivals, and the extraordinary sensation of social equality meant the world to him. “I was pleased beyond expression,” he later gushed. It was such an emotional event he remembered it vividly when he sat down to write his memoirs three decades later. “I wish to pay my respects at this time to Mr. Edward W. Wilder . . .” he wrote. “I am firmly convinced that I shortly would have dropped riding . . . were it not for the cordial manner in which the people [Wilder and others in Worcester] received me.” That a stranger would spend time with, and care about, a reedy little black kid who had just arrived in town inspired and motivated him. It was time, he and Munger believed, to feed off his motivation, to stick his toe into the local amateur scene.
A spring sun hovered in the Massachusetts sky as Taylor strolled out of the Worcester YMCA early in 1896. At Wilder’s and Munger’s urging, he had trained diligently throughout the winter, including during his travels between factories and trade shows. Munger had watched with keen interest as his protégé morphed from a thin-as-a-rake sixteen-year-old, into a slightly less thin-as-a-rake seventeen-and-a-half-year-old. With the biggest local amateur event of the season, the Worcester Telegram Race, scheduled for May, Munger, surely aware of the publicity value in a good showing, laid out a stiff riding program to supplement Wilder’s routine.
Reconnoitering the race route—a strategy well ahead of its time—Taylor repeatedly rode every inch of the route for weeks in advance. Munger also took him to the now-famous George Street hill climb for hard-core training. While not a lengthy hill, George Street is a veritable goat path that tilts upward at a lung-piercing incline of nearly 20 percent, making it excellent training grounds. Today, even with twenty-speed carbon fiber bikes, thinner tires, and a well-surfaced road, it’s a horrendous ascent. But in 1896, riding up its unpaved outer banks on a single-speed track bicycle was a quad-busting, heart-pounding affair. For years, hubristic locals had gathered at its imposing base with every intention of making it to the peak, only to wind up in oxygen debt halfway up its precipice.
When word spread that the black kid from Indianapolis was about to try his luck on the harrowing climb, a crowd gathered on both sides of the street, eager to watch the inevitable suffering and eventual capitulation. Probably snickering into the collar of his light spring coat, Munger held his watch as Taylor tore up the brutal climb with comparative ease. Taylor then amazed the locals by repeating his conquest seemingly at will. The hill apparently became part of his treacherous all-around training routine and to this day, locals challenge themselves at the annual Major Taylor George Street climb. “Everyone who knew him,” remembered elder Worcester resident Francis Jesse Owens, “knew he was about the only guy who put a bike up the George Street hill and he did that before they blacktopped it.”
After months of intensive conditioning, Munger, with Wilder’s help, believed Taylor was ready to test the local racing scene. Having seen the silver Telegram trophy shining through the window of a local business, Taylor agreed. Collectively, all they could do was hope that the vote against a whites-only racing world by the Massachusetts delegates a few years earlier suggested a more racially open society.
The ten-mile Worcester Telegram race held on May 9, 1896, was for Taylor the greatest example yet of the wild popularity bike racing enjoyed in America. Though it was just an amateur race with no national significance, it was the biggest local race of the season and fans showed up in droves. In the days leading up to it, operators at the Kyle & Woodbury telephone service heard talk of almost nothing but the race. On race day, the trolley car management team was completely overwhelmed. All day long, their cars were loaded down to the gunwales, every inch jammed with bodies hanging over the sides. Overanxious fans jumped out of windows—or climbed over the motormen’s
shoulders—and tumbled onto streets, some forgetting to pay.
Block after block of horse carriages lined both sides of the street, competing for space with thousands of bicycles and the crush of people. One unfortunate reporter, given the thankless job of counting bicycles, finally gave up after reaching 4,200. High-society gents rolled into town in their elegant Brougham or Ivory Surrey carriages, arguing over gear ratios, the best racing models, and who they believed to be the best rider. After thoughtful technical analysis, they tracked down the nearest bookmaker and placed their money on the most logical rider. Their wives, according to one reporter, had a simpler and perhaps more accurate means of picking the winner—“The rider with the prettiest colors,” of course.
By race time, the town’s business district was a virtual ghost town. All told, fifty thousand people—more than had ever turned out for a daytime event in Worcester’s long history—lined the race route. “Everybody was there,” wrote one scribe, “except the men in the accident ward of the county hospital.” Eighty riders competing on ten different teams threw off their sweaters at the start.
Taylor was there, standing inconspicuously alongside his Albion teammates. A ring of reporters stood around looking indifferently at him and his team of black riders. They jotted down a few notes about him, unknowingly the first of hundreds they would write in coming years, and walked away. Perched in the trees above him, Taylor saw flocks of boys and girls as thick as birds. One of Taylor’s heroes, Willie Windle, whom he had met in Indianapolis as an impressionable fourteen-year-old, came to watch the race.
After several unsuccessful attempts, the starter squeezed the gun and the riders piled on the course. Because of the tight thicket of riders, Taylor, according to one report, was repeatedly bashed by another rider. Though he was on a weaker team with a few out-of-condition riders, Taylor stayed with the leaders, seesawing back and forth between second and sixth place.
Major Taylor Page 8
