The Bicycling World, Vol 1, No 26
Articles in this issue
- Short editorial notes touching on club voting, upcoming rides, and satirical verse about a bold wheelmen from Salem who outpaced the Hawthornes on three wheels.
- New York cycling gossip covering the Mercury and Manhattan club colors, an injured racer laid up in bed, a proposed election-day run to Yonkers, and the question of indoor riding halls for winter training.
- Commentary on how the mainstream press was beginning to cover cycling more consistently, with observations on accuracy and fairness in reporting.
- A report on the Beacon Park cycling track in Boston, describing its condition, recent improvements, and the races held there during the season.
- Foreign racing notes: Frederick De Civry's twenty-mile record at Montdidier on a 56-inch Humber, beating Charles Terront, and H. L. Cortis's attempts to ride twenty miles inside the hour at Surbiton; Lacy Hillier's English Notes add news of the new Crystal Palace cinder track at Sydenham.
- Race results from Philadelphia's Keystone Amateur Athletic games (won by D. Lees), the Scottish American Athletic Club games in Jersey City (P. E. Bruner first), Michigan county fairs dominated by C. E. Allen of Grand Rapids, Wilkes-Barre, New Britain, the Boston Bi. C. twenty-mile at Beacon Park won by J. S. Dean, and the national fair races in Washington taken by Capt. H. S. Owen of the Capital Bi. C.
- Over seventy-five wheelmen from the Massachusetts, Boston, Crescent, Worcester, Attleboro' and Waltham clubs answer the Providence Bi. Club's invitation on 23 October; with the new track unready, races are hastily moved to a driveway in Roger Williams Park, and H. S. Owen of Washington's Capital Bi. C. closes the day with an exhibition of graceful fancy riding.
- Nearly seventy-five wheelmen answer the Middlesex Bi. Club's invitation to a moonlight parade through Malden on 19 October, with the Boston, Massachusetts, Crescent, Chelsea, Star of Lynn, Menotomy and Waltham clubs represented; a passing buggy shears too close and smashes a machine, though nobody is hurt.
- Regional correspondence reporting on club activities, road rides, and cycling developments in the Baltimore and Washington DC area.
- A letter signed "Champagne" protesting the World's praise of the Boston & Albany railroad's courtesy at the Worcester meet, arguing that self-respecting wheelmen should ride to race meetings on their own wheels rather than take the cars, with an eye to the coming races at Providence.
- Arthur J. Eddy settles the coasting debate by experiment, showing with platform scales that a 145-pound rider puts 55 to 60 pounds on the rear wheel with legs over the handles, making it both the safer and the more controllable position for descending hills compared with feet on rests.
- A comic poem in praise of the wheel, inspired by fifteen years' contemplation of George Arnold's "Beer" from the New York Saturday Press, reprinted over the signature Kol Kron in Puck.
- Personal items: Charles E. Pratt elected an honorary member of the Massachusetts Bicycle Club, W. E. Parmenter of Lima, Ohio arrives in Boston by wheel, and James Revell of the Manhattan Bi. C. plans to ride from New York to Boston in three days on a Standard Columbia.
- Four Haverhill wheelmen set out at four in the morning on 5 July for a jaunt of about forty-five miles through Danvers, Salem, Swampscott, Lynn, Malden and Somerville, finding the devotees of the wheel among the most gentlemanly and kindly of men.
- "The Parson" and his friend Boots train from Haverhill to Exeter and ride to Portsmouth via Hampton and Rye, surviving a header taken while racing two Exeter youths in a buggy, dining at Little Boars Head, and being forced to express their wheels home when the Portsmouth & Concord baggage-car refuses them.
- Letters from New Bedford, Mass., where cobblestones and sand make riding hopeless for the city's bicycle "pioneer"; "A Missing Link" crediting C. J. Wall, C. Howard McDonald and B. P. Browne as early Boston bicycle builders between the velocipede and the modern wheel; and a figure-eight quarter-mile track at the Kentucky Military Institute near Frankfort.
- The Archery Field leader chides clubs for hiding their practice and matches from public view, arguing that open competitions where spectators can see the beauty and skill of the sport would swell the number and membership of archery organizations.
- Walter Burnham of Chicago, hearing of a 612 single York Round, encloses fifty cents to head a subscription for a badge to honor whoever makes the best single York Round before 1 July 1881, and the editor adds fifty cents more and invites further contributions.
- President Frank H. Walworth reports the club's first-season handicap matches, celebrating two lady archers whose scores have advanced remarkably since adopting Ford's method of aiming after the Grand National at Buffalo, including his own defeat by "Artemis" at forty yards.
- A letter from the Highland Park Archers of Illinois on the club's bows and arrows — Aldred yew bows, arrow lengths from 27 to 29 inches, and made-to-order arrows from Walter N. Granger of Buffalo — with scores of the 2 October mail match against the Oakland Bow Club of California, won by Highland Park 340-1596 to 295-1377.
- A member of Chicago's North Side Archery Club makes a 122-612 single York Round at a practice shoot on 8 October, one of the finest scores yet recorded.
- Full scores of the 13 October match at Prospect Park between four ladies and four gentlemen of the Brooklyn Archery Club and the Toxophilites of Newark, N.J., shot at Columbia and American rounds, with Mr. Peddinghaus top-scoring for Brooklyn.
- The New York Archery Club's first autumn prize meeting at the Archery Lawn in Central Park on 15 October, with visiting clubs from Brooklyn, Newark, Elizabeth, Hackensack, Poughkeepsie and Nyack; Mrs. Gibbs of the Toxophilites and Mr. Nash of Brooklyn take the top visitors' prizes, and Miss Morton wins the club's Columbia badge with 337.
- Scores of the second 96-arrow, 60-yard mail match between the Oakland Bow Club of California and the Highland Park Archers, won again by Highland Park with Dr. E. B. Weston leading the winners.
- The last of the three 96-arrow matches between the Wabash Merry Bowmen and the Highland Park Archers, in which W. H. Thompson and Maurice Thompson star for Wabash but Highland Park wins by 13-5 to take the series two matches to one.
- "Oritani" contrasts the smoothly managed Waverly, N.J. meeting with the Eastern Archery Association's shambolic Boston meeting — moved twenty miles away, without targets, tents or water — and Eastern Archery Association president A. S. Brownell departs for California.
- Literary notices of a forthcoming book of cycling sketches and poems by a Massachusetts wheelman, the household monthly The Growing World, Prof. Isaac Sharpless's new education journal The Student, Charles Barnard's paper on lacrosse in St. Nicholas, and the November Scribner's Monthly.
- Corresponding Secretary Albert S. Parsons publishes the names proposed for League of American Wheelmen membership, including nearly forty men of the Waltham Bi. C., the Marlboro' and Haverhill clubs, and David Dalziel of Glasgow, Scotland.
- Club news: the new Atlantic Bi. C. of Salem votes a monthly handicap Club Cup race; the Hermes Bi. C. organizes in Providence under captain William T. Nicholson; the Nail City Bi. C. forms in Wheeling, West Virginia, and the Nutmeg Bi. C. in Hartford; and the Princeton College Bi. C. reports over twenty members and a ninety-mile run to Philadelphia.