The Wheelmen's Gazette, Vol 2, No 8
Articles in this issue
- Pope Manufacturing Co. again publicises Frank Carmen's October 8th victory in the 25-mile Boston-area road race on an Expert Columbia, noting that all makes of high-grade machines were represented.
- The Springfield Bicycle Mfg. Co. presents its standard advertisement for the Roadster, highlighting the safety clutch system and the machine's hill-climbing advantages for the November readership.
- The Gazette publishes an extensive table of combined subscription rates for dozens of American periodicals, showing special prices when bundled with the Gazette and the Wheelmen's Record.
- A. W. Gump of Dayton, Ohio lists specific second-hand machines at bargain prices, including a 52-inch Premier, Expert Columbia, Harvard, Victor, and English bicycles, plus a job lot of new English bicycles.
- The King Wheel Company maintains its November price list with hollow-rim anti-friction bearing models from $95 and parallel-bearing crescent-rim models starting at $75.
- George W. Rouse and Son of Peoria continues to offer easy payment plans for new cycles and a descriptive price list of second-hand bicycles to interested buyers.
- Simonds Rolling Machine Co. of Fitchburg, Massachusetts advertises best cast steel balls, hardened, ground, and burnished in sizes from 3/16 to 3 inches in diameter for bicycle bearings.
- H. B. Smith Machine Co. cites the Star's world road records from 150 to 305 miles, its safety records from 1 to 20 miles on the track, and its record as the first American machine to exceed 20 miles in the hour.
- A notice of the death of George S. Darrow, editor and co-proprietor of the Gazette, on Sunday, Nov. 20, of typhoid fever, recalling his work in the family printing business and the loss of his wife eighteen months earlier.
- A state-by-state roundup of cycling news from October 15 to November 15, 1887, covering road-law disputes in Illinois, Whittaker's 24-hour road record of 323 miles at Crawfordsville, Hollingsworth's 24-hour and 100-mile races, and record rides in England.
- Thomas Stevens, reprinted from Harper's Young People, recounts outwitting the Greek brigand Mahmoud Pehlivan near Constantinople and fending off attacking Koordish herdsmen and their dogs near Mount Ararat with a Smith & Wesson revolver.
- A comic poem, reprinted from the Ft. Wayne Gazette, about a novice cyclist who enjoys a tailwind out but is defeated riding back into the gale.
- A humor piece about the narrator's decades-long conviction that his boyhood athletic schoolmate, Furgason Syfers, must have become a champion racer, ending in the discovery at a Lynn tournament that Syfers is now a clumsy, crash-prone clergyman who still can't ride a safety.
- The monthly list of U.S. patents granted for cycling devices, compiled by O. E. Duffy, including Pope Manufacturing Company assignments for steering heads and velocipedes, followed by a parallel list of new English cycle patents.
- A humorous account of the Gazette office's new Caligraph typewriter producing garbled, error-riddled copy on its first outing, followed by a note on rising bicycle prices despite reduced patent royalties.
- A satirical mock-dictionary essay describing the bicycle as "the modern substitution for the horse," defining a header, the brake, and the ready supply of "as good as new" second-hand machines.
- Chris Wheeler's serialized novel opens on the English coast near the town of Bardesly, introducing an old-fashioned house on a seaward knoll as the setting for Part I, "England."
- The concluding installment of the comic serial about Ned Oliver's unruly yellow pup Bike, who terrorizes the neighborhood and a captive prairie dog before meeting his end tangled in factory shafting.
- English racer W. Percy Furnivall's paper to London's Society of Cyclists on "Physical Training for High Speed Competitions," analyzing the muscular demands of racing and citing Huxley's body-weight statistics on tissue and fluid loss.
- Short news items: the St. Louis Cycling Club's winter quarters at the Natatorium, the new N.C.U. Review in England, and W. W. Stall's North Shore tricycling tour to be republished as a souvenir book.
- A comic dialogue in which a blustering stranger calling himself a "publication specialist" visits the Gazette office and sparring with the office boy over what he actually wants.
- A comic story about the Rev. John Walters, newly arrived in his parish, and his wife Mary navigating a demanding congregation's Thanksgiving dinner expectations, while a parishioner named William secretly plans to enter a cyclers' road race.
- An Overman Wheel Co. advertisement recalling Stillman G. Whittaker's Crawfordsville world records of a year earlier — 10 miles in 29m 41s, 20 miles in 59m 35 1/2s, and 100 miles in 6h 11m — still unbeaten.
- A comic poem about racing cyclists relaxing their strict training diets for pumpkin pie and fried chicken once the season ends and winter sets in.