Bassett's Scrap Book, Vol 9, No 4
Articles in this issue
- The editor announces that League of American Wheelmen headquarters have moved from Boston to "The Maples," 105 Central Ave., Newtonville, Mass., with an office of call kept at 178 Columbus Ave. (A. D. Peck's); tracing past homes in Philadelphia (1887), Boston (1887, 1895) and Chicago (1894), he insists the L.A.W. is 'a long ways from dead.'
- The Century Wheelmen of Philadelphia celebrated their 25th anniversary on Friday, May 5 at their North Broad Street club house, with 125 members sitting down to dinner, J. Frederick Hartman as toastmaster, Thomas Hare recalling the dozen founders, and Kirk Brown of Orange, N.J. and Alden H. Weed of New York among those present (Louis Guyler of Chicago sent regrets); the evening closed with Auld Lang Syne.
- Obituary of Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who died at Cambridge, Mass., May 9, 1911, aged 87; a former President of the Massachusetts Bicycle Club and L.A.W. member, he rode a Coventry-Rotary tricycle in 1885-6, wrote cycling stories praising the wheel, and marched at the League's Boston Meet. A stray follow-up note on p.6 adds Wordsworth's line that a man 'of cheerful yesterdays and confident tomorrows' fit his life and outlook exactly.
- A poem by Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, printed directly beneath his obituary, on old soldiers in a cold night bivouac who will find their lost youth again 'when the bugle is blown.'
- Four short items: a push (echoing Mrs. J. B. Dood of Spokane, Wash.) for a Father's Day red rose in June; a Minnesota-built auto-plough trialed in Kansas that turns 15 acres a day on 10 gallons of gasoline; Dr. E. A. Walker of Boston warning office workers against exercise after a day's headwork; and a Luggiebank Sheriff's Court case (via the C.T.C. Gazette) where Sheriff Glegg fined a cyclist £2 10s. damages plus costs for colliding with a pedestrian.
- J. C. Percy, ex-President of London's Pickwick Bicycle Club (the world's oldest, antedating even the Boston Bicycle Club) and editor of the Irish Cyclist of Dublin, was guest of honor at a banquet given by the Boston Bicycle Club at the Boston Yacht Club rooms on Saturday, June 3, 1911.
- Obituary of portrait painter Frederick P. Vinton, who recently died in Boston, remembered as an enthusiastic cycler and loyal L.A.W. member of wide intellectual range whose later portrait work ranked among the best done in America.
- [Reprinted note on the awkwardness of after-dinner speaking at bicycle and motorcycle club banquets]Credited to Bicycling World ('Bi-World'), the piece observes that club dinners are typically a period of embarrassment for the audience once the toastmaster begins, since few riders can speak smoothly in public, and closes wryly that reporters always turn even an 'execrable' speech into a 'grand oration' for the press.
- A column of aphorisms ('Stick to your subject — also to your object'; 'The race is not always to the swift, but that's no argument against getting a move on') followed by a comic dialogue in which Mrs. Subbubs' servant Mary quits because she can't bear the country's dead silence at night.
- The L.A.W. nominating committee's slate for the ensuing year: Fred Atwater of Bridgeport, Conn. (President), Quincy Kilby of Boston (1st Vice President), W. H. Hale of New York (2d Vice President), Abbot Bassett of Newtonville (Sec'y-Treasurer) and George W. Nash of Abington (Auditor), submitted by C. J. Obermayer, Alonzo D. Peck and Geo. L. Cooke.
- A roster, by old-series membership number, name and city, of L.A.W. members who joined between July 1 and December 31, 1896 and remain in good standing — from E. Carroll Taber of Keokuk, Ia. through G. DeSilver Getz of Philadelphia, continuing onto the next page.
- Advertises the L.A.W.'s free 45-page catalogue of magazine club-subscription discounts — e.g. Bicycling World at $1.75 (list $2.00), Century Magazine at $3.85 and Life at $4.50 — while noting that Scribner's, Ladies' Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post and Youth's Companion allow no discount; the price lists continue onto the next page.