The Bicycling World, Vol 2, No 5
Articles in this issue
- Winter notes as wheels take a rest: skating, tobogganing and curling season squibs, a correction of the Crescent Bi. C. membership to nineteen, and support from the Philadelphia North American and a Public Ledger correspondent ('Justice') for bicyclers' right to Fairmount Park, citing the English Taylor v. Goodwin ruling that a bicycle is a carriage.
- Leader on the bicycle clubs of America, now one hundred in number with about 2,000 members across twenty-eight states, the District of Columbia and Canada; forty-eight clubs have joined the League of American Wheelmen entire, up from just five clubs two years earlier.
- A Detroit rider's opinions on what makes 'a practical road machine': the want of a portable liquid tire cement, unbreakable backbones and forks, improved springs and saddles (praising the 'Club' spring), painted rather than nickelled finish, and interchangeable five- to seven-inch cranks for touring over sandy and hilly roads.
- Prompted by a Boston Post article on massing electric lights on towers to give cities 'broad daylight' at night, a Pittsburgh correspondent ('B. R.') pictures how such lighting would double the bicycle's usefulness by freeing evening riders from feeble hub and head lanterns.
- A letter from 'Rox' of Boston protesting the editor's 'wholesale slaughter' of the polo cap in favor of the 'bean-pot' helmet, arguing that over four fifths of the clubs have adopted the polo cap and that it ventilates as well with sweat bands and air spaces.
- A letter from Heidelberg, 19 March 1880: an American bicycler, his repaired backbone just back from England, packs a multum in parvo and a Baedeker's Rhine and rides hilly, wind-swept roads through Sulz toward the Strassburg road and the ancient town of Weissenburg.
- Correspondent 'Steno' reports that Chicago wheelmen have secured the Exposition Building, with a gallery of about four laps to the mile, for winter riding, and boasts of a club captain who has already ridden a mile in 2.55 after only six months' experience.
- 'IoTau' reports on bicycling in the Monumental City, where riders' use of the park roads is restricted to the large lake drive between 6 and 8 a.m., though the fifteen miles of foot-paths are open and hopes for fuller privileges are bright.
- The first tournament of the San Francisco and Oakland Bicycle Clubs at the Half-mile Track on the Cliff-House Road, 25 November, with W. R. Dunn as referee: Aldrich beat Leonard for the gold medal and H. C. Eggers won the two-mile race; also the Brooklyn Bi. C.'s five-and-a-half-mile Coney Island Boulevard road race, won by Harry G. Cortis in twenty-eight minutes, and the debut of Stirk's troupe of trick bicyclers at Tony Pastor's Opera House.
- Fred Jenkins, editor of The Wheel, elected an honorary member of the Lenox Bi. C.; Samuel T. Clarke visits Boston with news of Baltimore wheelmen; Carl Vossler opens a 'Hotel Garni' at 1200 Washington street that entertains wheelmen and their wheels; praise for Hill and Tolman's automatic bells; and several ladies now ride the tricycle in Boston.
- Archery Field leader on the mission of recreations: archery, bicycle, tennis, lacrosse, snow-shoe and canoe clubs are 'mission schools' and health associations, quoting the Pacific Life on how sickly young men could 'starve the doctors and cheat the grave' with a season or two of active field sports.
- A. N. Drew describes the Pequossette archers' picnic outing to a sandy woodland glade, ideal for long and short range shooting, roving and flighting, with the ladies spreading a lunch of lobster salad under the pines.
- Two weeks after the archery club's last regular meet of the 1880 season at a chill New England home, the writer swings in a hammock aboard the steamship Colima, steaming north along the mountain-bound coast of Central America and Mexico in 90-to-100-degree heat.
- The Oritani Archers report about thirty-five members with Wakeman Holberton as president, and the New York Archery Club takes winter quarters in the 8th Regiment Armory with a forty-yard gaslight range, opening the indoor season on 4 December with the ladies' 'Columbia Badge' championship match.
- Archery paragraphs: 'Scrub Shot' teases Pacific Coast modesty about the good shots east of the Rockies, veteran archer Will H. Thompson promises articles from his pen, and A. S. Brownell is welcomed by San Francisco archers with a Thanksgiving dinner at Frank C. Havens's residence.
- Explains roving archery, in which parties shoot across the fields at 'rovers' — stumps and clods at 50 to 120 yards — as distinct from lawn or target archery, and notes the first roving archery club in the vicinity, organized in Oakland with three ladies and five gentlemen; credited to the San Francisco Bulletin.
- Club reports including the Amherst Bi. C., now twenty-five strong in seal-brown flannel uniforms under President E. G. Rand and Captain Paul Blatchford, and the Ariel Bi. C. of Chicago, organized 10 September 1880 with fourteen members and Capt. Jno. B. Lyon, Jr.
- The New York Club is carpentering, papering and carpeting its quarters; the Lenox Bi. Club unanimously votes to join the L. A. W. and elects A. Hilton, son of Judge Hilton; and a stray dog adopted at 791 Fifth avenue is christened Treadles — with Knick O'Bocker closing on a Central Park cop in verse.
- Encouraging letters from subscribers in Chicago, Philadelphia, Germantown and Pittsburgh welcoming the Bicycling World's change to weekly publication, one reader feeling as exhilarated after reading it 'as I would have felt after spinning over a mile of asphalt.'
- The annual meeting of the Athletic Department of the Boston Driving and Athletic Association at the Tremont House, 6 December: J. Malcolm Forbes generously assumes the department's debt, E. C. Hodges of the Boston Bi. C. is elected a director to represent bicycling, and the track is to be put in first-class condition for bicycling if enough names are secured.
- Notice of Dr. Herbert C. Clapp's 178-page volume 'Is Consumption Contagious, and Can It Be Transmitted by Means of Food?', published by Otis Clapp & Son, urging ventilation and inspection of meat and milk; also a note on the 'Fan Brigade' parlor exercise for children.
- Reprinted from the Germantown Telegraph: after a fatal Brooklyn carriage accident caused by horses frightened at a boy on a bicycle, the writer rebuts calls to ban bicycles from public places, observing that horses also shy at railroad cars, kites, sky-rockets and brass bands and can be trained out of all such frights.