The Bicycling World, Vol 4, No 18
Articles in this issue
- Leader weighing whether two club members who teach bicycle riding for a living at a machine-dealer's riding school have forfeited amateur status under the vague L.A.W. Rules 24 and 25, calling on League officers to issue an intelligent construction of the rules. Follow-on editorial paragraphs report Col. Pope's interview on agencies and the supply of first-class machines, predicting 20,000 to 25,000 riders by season's end, and note the growing volume of correspondence reaching the paper.
- Reports from Kentucky, Seneca, Roxbury, Marblehead, Columbia, and Kings County Wheelmen clubs, including an account of a club that holds meetings in a converted old church with a 100-by-70-foot Georgia-pine floor illuminated by electric light. One item warns members about an impostor posing as a wheelman who has been exploiting club hospitality.
- Reports on tournaments in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and New Orleans: at Rollinson's Cincinnati tournament, Charles H. Jenkins showed excellent trick riding before W.E. Galway won the ten-mile local championship in 36:47, followed by a closely contested twenty-versus-eighteen-mile race between Rollinson and Mlle. Armaindo, the bicyclienne pushing her opponent hard throughout. The St. Louis 25-mile race won by Young, Chicago Bicycle Club championship rules, and Elsa Von Blumen's New Orleans heats against trotting mares are also covered.
- Letters on the League Meet from Chicago supporters and Albany, plus a humorous letter about a wheelman who spent a fortnight whistling for a breeze to go skate-sailing, only to find that when Zephyrus finally answered, snow buried his ice. Other letters give a rider's 7,348-mile three-year record, the Pope Manufacturing Company's defence of its wheel-size table of measures, and 'Kanuck's' recollections of English wheeling in 1874, including an informal club excursion to the Polehill Arms on the Sevenoaks road.
- Welcomes La Revue Velocipedique, a new bicycling paper launched 15 January in Troyes, France, whose first number begins a serial 'Le Tour du Monde en Velocipede' by Richard Lesclide, secretary to Victor Hugo. Also notes that the 'Bygoshispeed' article and illustration reprinted by the World has appeared in La Velocipedie Belge with an added astonished onlooker.
- Comic verses from a wheelman-benedict whose wife, 'my sweetest Nell,' has taken up the craze for painting daisies, birds, and butterflies on china, silk, and satin — and now eyes his necktie and meerschaum pipe as canvases.
- Short paragraphs: spring riding opens in New York and Louisville cyclers run to Middletown; Director Hazlett will show his marine bicycle at the Institute Fair Building exhibit; readers are pointed to the Boston Bicycle Club's Fast Day race meeting and C.R. Percival's stock of English makes. Also Frank Eagan's $75 watch crushed after a dog tripped him, the death of A. Lincoln Burgess of Lynn from a bicycle fall, W.W. Stall handing reckless drivers over to the Mill Dam mounted police, and temperance lecturers Mrs. M. McClellan Brown and Miss M. Florence Mosher.
- Poem by Ira Joyce of Philadelphia celebrating the bicycle as a fearless steed of cold steel — a 'fountain of youth' that never needs feed nor suffers staggers, glanders, or heaves — ending with a pun on two 'tired' cranks giving up the race for the spring leather medal.
- Two responses to the paper's request for 1881 century records: Geo. D. Gideon of Philadelphia rode 108 miles in fifteen hours and A.G. Powell of Philadelphia 110 miles in thirteen hours, both rides from Philadelphia to New York.
- League of American Wheelmen notice inviting amateur bicyclers to join at $1.00 for individuals, with fees payable to Dillwyn Wistar of Philadelphia and applications addressed to Kingman N. Putnam, 54 Wall Street, New York, followed by the list of applications.
- Reader questions including how trick riders who travel the country manage to keep their tires fastened without giving a thought to unfastening, and a response to a previous query recommending an extra step on the right side as very convenient. A Worcester correspondent disowns 'Jones' in answer to Ellsworth of Newburyport, and 'G.M.' of Boston asks for opinions of the Shadow as a light-weight roadster.
- Reviews of Our Little Ones for March (Russell Publishing Company, Boston), W.D. Welford's Wheelman's Year Book from Newcastle-on-Tyne with its almanac, club lists, and 1881 racing calendar, and Charles Cordingley's Tricyclists' Vade Mecum describing about 150 English tricycle makes in nearly 200 pages.