The Wheelmen's Gazette, Vol 4, No 5
Articles in this issue
- Club Making; How It Is Successfully Accomplished, as Instanced by the Lincoln Cycle Club, of ChicagoWriting under the pen name Verax, the author traces how the Lincoln Cycling Club of Chicago grew from a September 1887 organizing meeting called by Frank E. Spooner into a clubhouse at 235 La Salle Avenue with room for 400 members, reprinting its full constitution and by-laws and crediting officers including President F. W. Gerould and Secretary J. M. Erwin.
- An unsigned training column advises amateur racers who lack time for systematic preparation to train on the actual course they will race over, building up distance gradually and saving a finishing spurt of about 100 yards for the end.
- An unsigned editorial urges wheelmen to tour at a sensible, moderate pace rather than forcing an exhausting century run, arguing that only seasoned 'old campaigners' can attempt long daily distances without ill effects.
- A state-by-state roundup of club and race news from April 15 to May 15, 1889, noting a team road race between the Social Wheel Club and Denver Ramblers, the Aeolus Cycling Club's May Party in Chicago, and functions of the Harvard, Cambridge, Roxbury and Manhattan Bicycle Clubs.
- A forward diary of race meets and tours running from mid-May through October 1889, headlined by the League of American Wheelmen's national meet at Hagerstown, Maryland, on July 2-4 and the Stone-Lumsden match-race series at Chicago, St. Louis and Crawfordsville, Indiana.
- A monthly digest of newly issued American and English cycling patents reported by C. A. Snow & Co. of Washington, D.C., listing a Chicopee Falls, Mass. spring fork, a velocipede saddle patented by Jno. C. Brooks of Birmingham, England, and luggage-carrier patents held by John Boultbee Brooks and Walter John Lloyd.
- Short human-interest items profile Elder Bobea Snaggs of Salt Lake City, said to be 121 years old and crediting his health to athletics, and Pomp Cadwallader of Tennessee, jokingly called 'an accomplished liar' for claiming to recall the first bicycle brought to America.
- A tongue-in-cheek illustrated letter signed 'James Crank' proposes propelling a bicycle with a horseshoe magnet dangled on a rod ahead of the machine, modeled on the Russian trick of luring tired horses with hay on a spear, and offers the idea for sale for 75 cents.
- A touring correspondent signing 'Amatehe' recommends putting up at cheap country inns rather than League of American Wheelmen hotels, recounting a three-day tour where a small-village inn charged only 25 cents each for bed and breakfast, and suggests 45 miles a day as an ideal touring pace.
- A column of brief club notes, jokes and verse reports that the Louisiana Division adopted a new constitution, that the Aeolus Cycling Club of Chicago adopted a gray cadet uniform, and previews the League's National Meet at Hagerstown, Maryland, set for July 2-4.
- A comic mock-medieval ballad by Will Wagtale has cyclist Launcelot de Jones rescue tricyclist Ermyngarde de Green from a butcher's cart on the road, best the butcher in a wheel-to-wheel duel, and win her hand along with a promised tandem tricycle.
- A brief notice welcomes the continued success of the Denver sporting paper Sports Afield, while suggesting its 'Cycling Comments' column, edited by Velox, could be improved and made more readable.
- Two reader contributions to this recurring series recount how their authors took up cycling: one, signed 'Pres. Merg.,' credits early Wheelman magazine articles and Ohio's pioneering Tour Meet, while Reuben A. Punnett of the old Rochester Club recalls building homemade wooden and gas-pipe bicycles in the late 1870s before his family owned six ball-bearing machines by 1881.
- A Tacoma, Washington correspondent signing 'Q. Q. Q.' reports about sixty local riders ahead of the May 11 twenty-mile road race for the championship of Washington, spotlighting unicycle champion Prince Wells and long-distance rider E. Irving Halsted, and recounts Wells's dunking while trying to cross a narrow plank bridge over a brook near American Lake.
- A descriptive piece details aeronaut Prof. Carl Meyers of Mohawk, N.Y.'s newly patented 'air bicycle,' a pedal- and hand-cranked propeller rig slung beneath a spindle-shaped balloon, estimated to weigh under 180 pounds with the rider and cost about $130.
- Reprinted from Texas Siftings, a comic first-person account tells of a doctor-prescribed bicycle that ends in a single disastrous fall, with the narrator, 'U No Hoo,' advising novices to hire an experienced friend to break the machine in and offering his own barely-used wheel for sale.
- In this dialect comic tale by Charles Alexander Persons, the elderly 'Uncle Kerlumbia' recounts to young Charlie Bland how, decades earlier as president of a bicycle club, he disguised himself as 'Jack the Ripper' to frighten a rival lieutenant during a moonlight club run.
- A supernatural touring tale follows the narrator and his friend Tom Cassilis as they take refuge for the night in a remote Swiss Alpine village beset by uncanny tremors and moving furniture, escaping by bicycle moments before a landslide destroys the hamlet.