Bassett's Scrap Book, Vol 8, No 8
Articles in this issue
- Opening editorial musing on October as the year's most typical month for temperature, even as bright sunshine falls from September's 115 hours to October's 75. Notes a fire that destroyed Kimball's Hotel at Skipper's Point, Cohasset—a former overnight stop on the club's 'Wheel About the Hub' tour—and recalls Wm. B. Howland's days editing the Wheelman Magazine as ex-president Roosevelt travels the country in a car furnished by his fellow magazine men.
- Notes the deaths of two early Boston wheelmen: James A. R. Underwood, a once-promising racer sidelined by an accident who later sold English-made bicycles until American makes and high tariffs pushed them out, and Samuel N. Turner of the Boston Bi Club, an inventor whose patents covered features of the modern camera, a surgical microscope-lamp, and a street-sweepers' broom, who died in Brooklyn, N.Y.
- Reports that Fred Atwater, treasurer of the Columbia Nut and Bolt Company and a Bridgeport paving commissioner, was elected L.A.W. president at Boston, recalling the era of P. W. Westlake's old Hartford Wheel Club (later folded into the Bridgeport Club) and Atwater's hope to reunite the city's old wheelmen.
- Account of the Boston Bicycle Club's twentieth annual 'Wheel About the Hub' tour, naming wheelmen such as Capt. W. G. Kendall and motorists including Fred Atwater and Abbot Bassett, and describing stops at the Avery Oak in Dedham, the 1636 Fairbanks homestead, Blue Hill, and banquets at Tudor Farm and Pemberton Inn. The club exchanged a fraternal telegram with the Essex Bicycle Club of Newark, N.J., and voted to move the tour's date back to Sept. 11 after two years' trial of a later date.
- Report on the Third Annual Good Roads Convention at St. Louis, Sept. 28-30, with papers by Prof. A. H. Blanchard on Europe's dustless roads, Chas. W. Ross on road surfacing, F. E. Lott on Missouri highways, and Highway Commissioner Harold Parker, plus an address by L.A.W. secretary-treasurer Abbot Bassett on the good roads movement's origins. Diversions included an Anheuser-Busch Brewery visit and a St. Louis Cycling Club banquet honoring Bassett (writing as 'Esstee') alongside old friends James Randall Dunn and Percy Stone.
- Two items reprinted from British papers: L. R. Smith's tongue-in-cheek call to breed luminous cows or paint them with phosphorus after his car collided with one on the Great North Road, and a Dundee Advertiser piece on military engineer Nicolas Joseph Cugnot (1725-1804), builder of an 1769 steam road carriage preserved in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, soon to be honored with a monument in his birthplace of Void. A short aside notes the Jackson County, Mo., sheriff holding six impounded motor cars whose owners could not pay their bills.