L. A. W. Bulletin and Good Roads, Vol 24, No 26
Articles in this issue
- Reader letters open the number, including a Rushville, Ill. member contesting Hudson, N.Y.'s claim to the highest L.A.W. membership percentage and a Klamath Falls, Ore. rival claim of two percent, a Philadelphia 'A Deserving Man' anecdote from Harper's Round Table, and a New Jersey appeal to coordinate division press bureaus.
- Publisher Sterling Elliott opens his defense against charges, circulated by New York Division secretary-treasurer W. S. Bull, that he has discriminated against the New York Division in publishing official reports.
- Elliott argues that advertising — horse chest-protectors, decalcomanias, rubber stamps, Good Roads buttons, and L.A.W. notices placed in over three million makers' catalogues — is the prime driver of the League's membership growth.
- A short editorial closing Volume XXIV of the L.A.W. Bulletin, noting its contents were prepared at the cost of much midnight oil and trusting the forthcoming volume will be better still.
- The L.A.W. executive committee, having offered a $100 prize for the best poster design, awards a $10 suggestion prize to F. A. Eckman of Philadelphia for a winged-wheel design with a trumpeting female figure on a good road, and invites finished designs by February 1st.
- An editorial argues the bicycle is the horse's best friend, citing Horseshoers' Protective Association figures (19,000 more horses in Ohio, 17,000 in Michigan, 12,500 in New York) and a Memphis Commercial Appeal editorial, since wheels drive the road improvement that makes horses more useful.
- An editorial thanking the country editors who reprint Bulletin paragraphs while chiding those who 'steal' them without credit, with verse on plagiarism and a quoted Kipling defense of borrowing.
- Summarizing replies from about 125 cities, the editor reports wheelmen accept lamp laws applied to all vehicles but oppose those singling out bicycles (lamps passed by wheelmen in Marietta, Hoboken and Winchester), and appends a state-by-state list of towns with lamp ordinances in force.
- The camera department prints H. H. Sutcliffe's note on entering a 'We Want Good Roads' lantern slide in the American Slide Interchange, an account of the Fostoria, Ohio amateur photographic exhibition, and detailed pyro-soda formulas for developing under-exposed plates.
- Sterling Elliott's long defense of his publishing contract with the L.A.W., recounting the failures of the Bicycling World, the Wheel, the American Athlete and the Bearings Co. to sustain the official organ, the terms of his bonus and seven-thousand-dollar rebate, and his dispute with New York secretary W. S. Bull over the July 3d division report.
- The Good Roads department gathers items on Massachusetts trap rock grading higher than French stone, a 'Keep Out of the Ruts' sign campaign between Athol and Orange, calls for convict labor on Illinois roads (Joliet News), and pending good-roads bills in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.
- The L.A.W. official pages list the 1896-97 national officers (President Sterling Elliott, Secretary Abbot Bassett), standing committees including the Racing Board, and the chief consuls and secretary-treasurers of every state and territorial division, with membership application and renewal blanks.
- The Racing Board reports accepted records (including C. R. Coulter's two-thirds-mile paced mark at Denver and Forest H. Wilson's series at Chicago) and lists riders declared professional, suspended or reinstated, mostly from Galveston, Texas, alongside the official New York hotel discount roster.
- Notices from the divisions: Indiana asks members for arguments backing a wide-tire bill, the Pennsylvania Division forwards the Associated Cycling Clubs' invitation for Philadelphia to host the 1897 Meet at Willow Grove Park, plus messages from the Ohio, Maryland and Michigan chief consuls.
- Minutes of the Michigan Division board meeting at Detroit, Dec. 9, with Chief Consul Edward N. Hines's long report on local consuls, league hotels, road books, a racing circuit, a bicycle baggage law, the Escott shortage and a '3,000 members' goal, plus Secretary-Treasurer Leo A. Caro's financial exhibit.
- The consolidated state-by-state list of new membership applications published under Article III (231 names this week, total 73,053), followed by a roster of newly chartered League clubs in Atlantic City, Avon, Norwich, Columbus and Macon.
- The editor answers reader queries (a discussion of the German greeting 'All Heil' and its English equivalent), then prints E. W. Smith of Boston's 'Before Taking and After' before-and-after photographs and verse on a rebuilt State road at Sugarloaf Street, South Deerfield, Mass.