The Wheelmen's Gazette, Vol 4, No 12
Articles in this issue
- Gormully and Jeffery offer their 18-by-23-inch photogravure print of seven cycling champions — Prince, Whittaker, Dingley, Eck, Munger, Knapp, and Crocker — mailed postpaid for 20 cents, or framed free to organised clubs.
- The White Cycle Co. of Westboro, Massachusetts promotes Three Knot Skookum Oil as a lubricant long used by Native Americans and Western hunters for guns and pistols, claiming it has no equal for cycles.
- The publishers announce Volume IV of the Wheelmen's Gazette is now available as a handsome cloth-bound volume of over 350 pages with 188 pages of reading matter and over a hundred illustrations, priced at $1.50 prepaid.
- H. B. Smith Machine Co. challenge competitors to match the Star's 1889 championship tally, listing nine race victories including L.A.W. national titles and state championships across California, Kansas, and Pennsylvania.
- Ben L. Darrow of Indianapolis advertises electrotype printing cuts of all kinds for cycle dealers and manufacturers wanting to illustrate their advertising and promotional material at reasonable prices.
- Indiana Bicycle Mfg. Co. of Indianapolis announces it will take a limited number of ordinary bicycles in trade toward its Diamond safety models.
- John F. Ellis and Co. of Washington D.C. close the year promoting their four cycling songs including the sentimental "Swiftly and Silently" and the comic "Listen to My Tale of Woe" with words by Eugene Field.
- Parallel advertisements for the Vandalia Line to St. Louis and the Monon Route to Chicago detail their Indianapolis departure times, sleeping car services, and connections to north-western and western destinations.
- Clark Cycle Co. of Baltimore advertises its full range for the coming season: Full and Light Roadster safeties with straight wheels, and Quadrant tricycles and tandems for men, women, or either sex.
- The Eagle Bicycle Mfg. Co. urges dealers to secure agencies and order early for the 1890 season, citing the Eagle's records and races won in the past year as proof of its speed and practicality.
- By "Pres. Merg": a club president's tongue-in-cheek account of his bicycle club's ritual moonlight runs to the small town of Bascom, its dances with local farm girls, and the bittersweet memory of a farmer's daughter who married her country beau after a summer of flirtation with the visiting wheelmen.
- By "Trapmonto": an American cyclist visiting England is goaded by a boastful club member, Ridwell, into a five-mile race at the Crystal Palace grounds, and wins on a borrowed Rudge racer in a desperate last-yard sprint against both Ridwell and a dark-horse Stanley Club rider.
- Reports Tom Roe's arrival in Chicago after seventy-two days and 2,777 miles from San Francisco on an ordinary Light Champion, beating Stevens' record by 24 hours and 13 minutes despite bad weather and constant local celebrations along the route.
- A state-by-state and foreign roundup of club news, races and tournaments from November 15 to December 15, 1889, including J. H. Drupier's 205-mile 24-hour ride and a list of coming events.
- A selected list of United States patents on bicycles and velocipedes reported for the Gazette by C. A. Snow and Co., Patent Attorneys of Washington, D.C., for November 1889.
- A list of English cycle patents from October and November 1889, covering saddles, driving chains, ball bearings, and S. Vale's diamond frame for safety bicycles.
- By Charles Richard Dodge: an essay contrasting brisk, exhilarating road dashes with leisurely touring rides taken purely to enjoy the outdoors, and the author's own preference for combining both.
- A rider recalls trading a painful tooth extraction, as a child, for his mother's promise of a two-wheeled velocipede, then being unable to dismount from an oversized 54-inch Sanspareil until helped off, before eventually mastering it and joining a club.
- By "Noble Victory": on Christmas Eve, Jack Hope tells friends huddled by a grate fire the story of his near-fatal fever three years earlier, in which a delirious dream of racing his bicycle from Death itself down into the Valley of the Shadow ended just as his miserly uncle — who had suppressed his father's real will — died in the next room.
- By Charles Alexander Persons: an account of a solo March ride from Macon to Atlanta through Forsyth, Barnesville and Griffin, including a header caused by a hidden road-cut ditch that scattered his lunch, and a comic procession of stray dogs that followed him, fed at every stop, all the way into the city.