Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  One British reporter stated that in Taylor’s younger days, “his humiliation was his fuel.” But now there was no going back. “Please thank all my friends who have worked so hard to aid me,” Taylor humbly told a reporter. “I’m in need of rest; wish all my friends a Merry Christmas. I feel all right,” he continued, his voice fading, weakening, then withering down to a whisper, “but I am badly in need of rest and must be quiet at all times. It is a wonderful thing to have friends come to your support in a time of need; I cannot say enough to thank them.”

  The reporter for the Worcester Telegram, a paper that had played an important role in propagating Taylor’s spectacular career, closed his piece with harsh truisms. “The years have a trick of crowding a man . . . what does Christmas hold for Major Taylor but memories which serve but to make today seem an empty thing? The whirlwind has lost its force, illness has left its mark and the years are piling in on him.”

  Behind closed doors, his story got no brighter. The financial strain had taken a toll on his marriage and his relationship with his daughter Sydney who, by 1926, was a bright twenty-two-year-old. To help out, Daisy reluctantly took a job as a seamstress at a drapery store in town. But their problems were not entirely financial. Sometime after Sydney’s birth, Daisy had a miscarriage. From then on, Sydney believed that her father wished he had a son to carry on his racing legacy. As Daisy and Sydney grew closer, Major felt isolated. He had always been pleasant to everyone in town; ninety-five-year-old Worcester resident Francis Jesse Owens remembered shaking hands with Taylor—“the neatest dresser you have ever seen”—when he was a seventeen-year-old janitor. He’d received a gentle pat on the back and heard him say, “Keep up the good work, you’re a good kid.” But at home, Taylor was occasionally aloof and bristling.

  Early in his career, perhaps out of necessity, he had often ignored the differences between him and his white opponents. Outwardly at least, he had developed a thick skin to their insults. Even after he had been nearly choked to death by William Becker in 1897, Taylor remained virtually mute, hoping the racism and all the talk of racism in the press would just go away. “Major Taylor,” a reporter wrote shortly after the incident, “does not appear a critic of anything.”

  But at the turn of the century, there was no way to ignore the harsh realities. Instead of addressing these issues head on—which would have brought on other problems—Taylor had internalized and suppressed them. When those suppressed feelings starting surfacing after his retirement, the results were occasionally dour. Major, Sydney believed, was disappointed that she was born with his dark skin instead of Daisy’s lighter complexion. At times, he even pulled her hat down over her eyes as she walked through town, perhaps not wanting to expose her dark face to the same “monster prejudice” he had endured. “Even though he loved his country and his race, I don’t think he was proud to be a negro,” Sydney told author Andrew Ritchie. “I always resented the fact that he didn’t want me to be dark.”

  The proud family had become further divided in the early twenties when Major began piecing together his self-published autobiography, The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World. Taylor spent hour after hour arched over his typewriter, poring over reams of old newspaper clippings, reliving his glory days. Daisy preferred to focus on the present and the uncertain future. “I don’t think her heart was really in it,” Sydney told Ritchie. “Her whole regime was upset because the dining room was full of papers and the typist, a white woman, was there all day. Her whole house was in disarray and she would say, ‘we’ll never get through.’”

  Nearly every day for six long years came the tapping of typewriter keys and the swishing sound of crumpled, error-filled papers hitting the wastebasket in Taylor’s writing room. In her bedroom, Daisy, who was obsessed with her appearance and would not leave her room until she was meticulously clothed and groomed, had listened to the repetitive sounds as she brushed and braided her long black hair. With each tap, they grew further apart.

  Taylor pressed on without full support of his family or a publishing firm to help with research, marketing, editing, translators, moral support, or money. Considering the monumental task he faced—gathering thousands of articles from dozens of countries in myriad languages spanning decades, then trying to put them all together chronologically—it’s a miracle he ever finished. Even today with modern technology and private companies that help would-be authors, self-publishing is difficult. But in the 1920s, without a computer, writing software, or the Internet for research, cobbling together his life story was an arduous, marathon undertaking. “It is the biggest job I ever tackled,” he told Robert Coquelle in a letter asking for his help.

  But Taylor had been a maverick since early childhood—getting his first job among whites during the Jim Crow era, racing at the highest level against an all-white peloton, refusing to race on Sunday despite substantial monetary inducement, buying a home in an all-white neighborhood, and now writing a book without the blessing of an established publishing firm.

  For better or worse, he finally completed his work late in 1928. How many copies he sold is unknown. “I don’t think he made out good,” said Francis Jesse Owens, “because we really hit hard times when the Depression hit in 1929.” Sydney recalled him traveling tirelessly around New England, New York, and Pittsburgh proudly pedaling his memoirs. One report had him sitting in the stands at a Madison Square Garden six-day race impeccably dressed with a white straw hat and a cane, discussing his book with a pack of awestruck riders. All this suggests that he must have enjoyed at least enough success to cover the cost of traveling, printing, and marketing, and perhaps some profit.

  Those who reached into their pockets for $3.50 to buy his memoir either did so out of kindness, unknowingly, or because of his impassioned sales pitch. Either way, even most die-hard bike-racing fans that endured his 431-page narrative must have been disappointed. The book is long, repetitious, and chronologically jumbled. Despite frequent racism, Taylor’s career had been filled with moments of incredible excitement and levity. Yet his text, for the most part, lacks humor. As well, he had a hard time pacing himself, often announcing the results of a big race before allowing for any dramatic buildup. He also relied heavily on the quoted words of others and overwhelmed the pages with his racing conquests without revealing the true color and personality of those who surrounded him. This is unfortunate because the people who were part of his life, both good and bad, were some of the most colorful of the era. Even Daisy was rarely mentioned. When she was, perhaps because they were already having marital problems, he referred to her as “my wife.”

  But without his dauntless determination and fighting spirit, the dramatic life story of this pioneering black man—and the grip his sport had on the nation and the world—likely would have remained untold. And though he struggled for the right words that would appeal to the masses, the book is loaded with valuable messages about faith, kindness, sportsmanship, and belief in the importance of being a good neighbor. Perhaps the most important attribute Taylor held—and one that sprang forth from the book’s many pages—was one of forgiveness. The book, wrote cycling historian Robert Smith, “is remarkable for the absence of bitterness against the men who treated him so unfairly.”

  The final weeks of the Roaring Twenties rolled in with heavy black clouds. An air of uneasiness hung over Worcester. Change was coming and people could feel it. The city and the nation had enjoyed unprecedented growth and prosperity, but like most extended parties, a biting hangover—this time in the form of the Great Depression—awaited. It’s dark morning would soon rise.

  Inside their modest rented apartment on Blossom Street, Daisy and Major slept in separate beds, foretelling the end. Their initial courtship, the “royal honeymoon” in Australia, the love letters from Paris and Rome, had become faint memories. In recent years, their marriage had been held together by the threads of their strict religious beliefs. But with nothing but fading memories, they each went their own ways. Dejected, Daisy pushed west
to New York, never to be heard from again. Humbled, Major rushed headlong into the unknown, pausing in New York before journeying west to Chicago, taking his books and what few possessions he had with him. For the once-loving couple who had been feted, praised, and admired in countries all over the world, there would be no roads leading back to Worcester.

  EPILOGUE

  The men who had surrounded Taylor during his epic reign had dispersed. On a cool day in 1929, Taylor drove down a New York road, looking up at a canopy of sycamore trees arching overhead. From his room inside the Hotel Dauphin, Birdie Munger looked out his window like an expectant father. A successful inventor and automotive executive, the sixty-six-year-old former bike racer was winding down in his last days of life. Despite his achievements in the fastest-growing industry in history, in his waning days, Munger’s mind often drifted back to another place and time. He had followed Taylor’s career both here and abroad, and though the automobile had provided him a good living, it had also separated him from his good friend.

  He and Taylor had grown up in those enterprising years wedged between the horse and the automobile, a time when the bicycle had become a quintessential part of the great American way of life. Through trial and tribulation, the machine had become a part of them, a bond even old age couldn’t erase. As simple as they may seem today, there was something special about those early days of the bicycle. Nearly all writers spoke of this at length. “Cycle tracks,” wrote H. G. Wells, “will abound in utopia.” And Munger, during his racing and manufacturing days, and later as Taylor’s mentor, manager, prophet, and confidant, had been at the forefront of it all. He had moved into the automotive age because profit dictated he do so, yet it was those days with his protégé and around the sport he loved most that had shaped him and produced his fondest memories. “It was in our blood,” wrote auto executive Charles Sinsabaugh, one of Munger’s friends and former race reporter for the Chicago Daily News.

  With thinning hair and arching back, Munger cinched his front door open and stared out. Taylor hobbled inside. The two old racetrackers embraced, then retreated to Munger’s study.

  Taylor had come west seeking words of wisdom on his book from his former sage advisor. He laid a pile of old newspaper clippings on a large table. As they had atop Munger’s Indianapolis bachelor pad in the early ’90s, the two talked bike racing for hours. A good deal of laughter was followed by silence and obvious moments of reflection.

  As night fell, shortly before departing, Taylor reached for a large bag and spilled its contents on the table. Munger’s face glowed as he ran his eyes over a series of old photos of him and Taylor, and the shops, like Hay & Willits, that once rimmed “bicycle row” in Indianapolis. There were surely photos of the old Newby oval where each of them had won races, near the area now bristling with the cars of the Indianapolis 500. Taylor flipped open his book and handed it to Munger. Munger read Taylor’s dedication page:

  To My True Friend and Advisor, Louis D. Munger:

  Whose confidence in me made possible my youthful opportunities for riding. Mr. Munger prophesized that one day he would make me the fastest bicycle rider in the world and lived to see his prophecy come true.

  Knowing he had played a significant role in one of America’s greatest sport stories, Munger had difficulty containing himself. All the reminiscing stoked emotions that had lain dormant in the aged auto executive. The benevolent white man who saw special qualities in Taylor, when others were calling him a useless little pickaninny, broke down. Taylor joined him. In the adjoining room, Munger’s wife, Harriet, must have felt the heavy air of emotion. Taylor gathered his belongings.

  Late that night, Munger escorted Taylor to his front door and uttered his last good-byes. From his window, he watched the stiff form of his good friend disappear into the night.

  A few short months later, in the waning days of the Roaring Twenties, Louis D. Munger, a man with the heart of a lion and the soul of a saint, passed into history. At some unknown place and time, in the fog that was his last years of life, Taylor read the news with grief.

  After a successful racing career, Floyd MacFarland, Taylor’s chief antagonist, became manager of the Vailsburg’s Track in Newark, New Jersey. Vailsburg became the epicenter of American track racing, continually drawing large crowds throughout the 1910s while many others shuttered down. During winters he ventured overseas, promoting six-day races in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, and Vienna.

  But MacFarland, the man who had tried to knock Taylor out of the sport, remained a controversial and pugnacious figure to the end. On an April morning in 1915, he became agitated with a man named David Lantenberg, who was setting up billboards along the rail of the Vailsburg Track.

  Separated by over a half foot in height, the two men went at it jaw to chest. Realizing he was outmatched physically and orally, Lantenberg turned his willowy frame around and resumed screwing his sign into the wood board. When he felt a long, clawlike hand grasping his arm, Lantenberg spun around rapidly—screwdriver still in hand.

  For Floyd MacFarland, life ended with the sight of Vailsburg’s wood track and the sharp tip of a screwdriver, the loud angry shriek of Lantenberg’s voice, the smell of wood shavings, and the searing pain of metal piercing his neck, sliding through his skull and into his brain. As MacFarland collapsed senseless to the ground and the dreadful cacophony of his large body thumped on the wood surface, some witnesses looked away as blood and matter spewed forth. Others rushed to his aid, including a grief-stricken Lantenberg. At the hospital, MacFarland was pronounced dead and Lantenberg, who never meant to kill him, charged with murder.

  Papers all over the country carried the shocking front-page news. Thousands of people came to say farewell to MacFarland at the home of Frank Kramer, by then a legendary figure at the Vailsburg Track. Eighty-five floral arrangements were received, requiring three horse-drawn wagons to carry them to the cemetery. “He was a villain,” admitted Hugh McIntosh, the man who booted him out of Australia, “but a likeable one.” Nearly every rider past and present was there.

  There were no reports of Taylor being one of them.

  William Brady was lying supine in a hospital bed when someone handed him the phone. With his legs in plaster casts, the longtime “ticker-fiend” learned that the stock market had, as he put it, “laid an egg.” In no time, the fortune he had earned managing boxing, Broadway plays, and bike racing was gone. But having lived through the 1890s depression, he was able to take it all in stride. “I’ve seen too many depressions,” he said, “both Class A and Class B, to get brash about them.”

  Brady had lost his investments but not his knack for spotting successful ventures. One day, a desperate man named Elmer Rice handed him a tired manuscript that had been rejected by every manager in New York. Brady loved it, then somehow scraped together $6,000 to buy the rights to the play and movie. That tragic story called Street Scene won a Pulitzer Prize, cementing his place as America’s most successful Broadway producer. It also reminded Americans of his uncanny knack for uncovering hidden success in a story or a person that others couldn’t see—a talent gleaned from his early sporting days.

  At his wife’s, actress Grace George, urging, Brady had reluctantly quit pugilism and race promoting around the time Taylor gave up the American racing circuit in the early 1900s. He now passed time with celebrities like Milton Berle, Helen Hays, and David Warfield. But Brady was an anachronism who often eschewed modernity. With his doctor’s blessing, he disposed of his automobile, preferring instead to walk or ride down the avenue where Manhattan Beach Track once teemed with howling racing fans. He had been caught up in the turn-of-the-century bike racing era; “A champion streaking round the track hunkered over on his wheel in one of them old-time races,” he wrote in his second autobiography, “was the epitome of human speed.” The two-person version of the six-day race that he created—now universally called “Madison’s”—was still going strong, attracting 150,000 fans in the late '20s, the largest crowds for any event in t
he Garden’s long history.

  But Brady preferred the days of old when men like Taylor rode for six days nearly nonstop in his first professional race. “Major Taylor,” he liked to tell reporters, “is the greatest rider on earth.” He even ripped on his own creation. “Nobody has a better right to run a thing down,” he wrote of the tamer two-person race, “than the fellow who invented it.”

  Whenever he could sneak away from his latest play, Brady would slip into the new Madison Square Garden and bounce around with happy abandon, tossing primes at the new crop of riders. Alongside his friends and fellow bike-racing fans Bing Crosby, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, Brady often reminisced as he sipped his rye. “I remember when cigarette packages carried pictures of bike racers right up along with my musical-comedy stars and baseball heroes.” Though his life had become devoted to the theater, he was proud of his days in the sport. “We left our mark on the business,” he said, as the smoke from his cigar ringed out his window and onto Broadway. On a January day in 1950, the old raconteur would see his last sunset at the age of eighty-six, having indeed left his mark on three of America’s most popular pastimes—and on one of its greatest sports legends.

  The press never allowed Arthur Zimmerman to live down his racing days. Nor did he want them to. A prosperous businessman in retirement, sinking his six-figure racing fortune into successful New Jersey hotels, Zimmerman had a hard time staying away from the racetrack. Though he had retired and then returned to racing many times, his official retirement after a mid-'90s race in Paris was met with universal remorse. “Zimmerman’s retirement,” wrote one East Coast reporter years later, “was regretted just as much as the Babe’s departure from baseball.”

  Whenever Brady or other race promoters needed an attendance boost for an event, he’d gladly show up to fire off the pistol, fine-tailored suit draped over his shoulders, diamonds in his shirt pocket, cigar pinched in his fingers. Fans and reporters would flock to the track and wax nostalgic with “King Arthur,” reminiscing about the early days of bike racing. “Just as Babe Ruth was the idol of the baseball fans and Bobby Jones of the golf followers,” one writer remembered, “Zimmie was the favorite of the racetrack patrons.”