The Bicycling World, Vol 2, No 21
Articles in this issue
- The leader welcomes the growing fondness for athletic sports among the better class of Americans, pointing to the Union Athletic Games at Music Hall under Mr. Ferris, where a roller-skate polo match and a bicycle drill by the business men of the Providence Club roused the greatest enthusiasm.
- A Detroit correspondent, "B.", approves the choice of Boston and 31 May for the L.A.W. Meet and urges manufacturers and importers to mount a three-day bicycle and tricycle exhibition alongside it, predicting the tricycle will become more popular than the bicycle once introduced.
- Charles E. Pratt, president of the L.A.W., notes the lack of intercourse among American members of the Bicycle Touring Club and proposes a meeting of B.T.C. members called together about the time of the May Meet.
- A lengthy illustrated feature on the Pope Manufacturing Company traces Col. Albert A. Pope's founding of American bicycle manufacture in 1877-78 and tours the Weed Sewing Machine Company works at Hartford, Conn., where the Standard and Special Columbia are built at up to twelve hundred machines a month.
- "Ixion" of New York argues against "C. E. P.'s" praise of the Excelsior or "Harvard" tricycle of Bayliss, Thomas & Co., faulting its trailing steering wheel and spoon brake, and commends front-steerers like the Devon, Salvo and Centaur fitted with a strap brake.
- "Augusta" humorously recounts her husband Henry's three years of learning the bicycle, from ruined suits and 5 a.m. mishaps to his near-decapitation by a steel clothes-line while riding onto the croquet lawn before her sisters and the professor.
- A light verse in which a bicycler brave courts a tricycler fair as they ride together, reading his romantic prospects in her unclouded blue eyes under cover of talk about the weather.
- "H." reports on the Wilkesbarre club in the Wyoming Valley, whose abandoned market house makes a club-house with a floor nearly 200 feet square, and proposes the club ride to the Boston Meet, picking up wheelmen from Scranton, Binghamton, Utica and Albany on the way.
- Club reports: the Cincinnati Bi. Club's winter track in Power Hall, the Star Bi. Club's first annual dancing party at Infantry Hall, the Milwaukee Bi. Club's new dark-green-and-gray uniform and planned Waukesha County run, the Chelsea Bi. Club's season opening, and the newly organized Falls City Bi. Club of Louisville.
- "Phil." offers a spoof translation of a Hebrew manuscript dated 34 B.C. in which the patriarch Jonadab attempts the two-wheeled chariot with the centurion's help, strikes a stone half a cubit square, and vows never to ride again.
- "Spinner" of Portland, Me., backs the proposal for the Boston clubs to hold an exhibition of bicycles, tricycles and cycling sundries at the League Meet, citing the success of the Stanley show in England as proof it could be self-supporting.
- Official League of American Wheelmen notices on membership fees payable to treasurer Hugh L. Willoughby, followed by applications published by Cor. Sec. Albert S. Parsons from the Plainfield, Omaha, Mercury, New Haven, Brooklyn, Crescent, Roxbury, Arlington and Pittsfield clubs, plus the L.A.W. consuls appointed for Massachusetts.