The Wheelmen's Gazette, Vol 4, No 8
Articles in this issue
- Gormully and Jeffery's advertisement reports that the Pullman Race in Chicago drew seventy starters and was won by Frank Bodach riding an ordinary American Light Champion, while only two of the firm's wheels competed in the Irvington-Milburn race in New York, taking the time cup and second place against specially built racing machines.
- A humorous dialect letter by Charles Alexander Persons in which club member 'Uncle Kerlumbia,' explaining his cycling origins to the Gazette's editor, recounts how his friend Bill lured him into a moonlit chicken-stealing raid and made off with all the birds himself, and how he later got even by tricking Bill with bags of pine burrs — so he took up the bicycle 'to git eben wid er feller.'
- A page of overheard quips, including two wheelmen remarking on Senator Morgan's tedious conversation at the Colosseum and a boy's excuse for refusing to lend his bicycle, comparing himself unfavorably to the Good Samaritan.
- A travel correspondence describing four young American wheelmen — 'Von' of Austin, 'Gene' of Cleveland, 'Geo.' of Wellsboro, and 'Uncle Fuller' of Mobile — who sailed from New York on the City of Paris to tour Britain and the Continent by bicycle, riding via Coventry, Kenilworth, Stratford-on-Avon, Oxford, Henley and London.
- A column of short cycling jokes and dialogues, including a rider who gained sixty pounds in ten years of riding, a 'wheel of fortune' pun, and newsroom banter about staging a fake race-track accident involving Billy Rowe, Jack Prince and Morgan.
- An essay signed 'Stamson' describing a three-mile night ride home from work up Notch's Hill in near-total darkness, reflecting on the strange pleasure of cycling after dark compared with riding by day.
- The Gazette mourns 'Jack,' the White Cycle Co.'s advertising manager, who drowned from cramps while bathing in Chauncey Pond near Westboro, Massachusetts on August 4, 1889; born at sea off Cape Horn in 1864, he was buried at Westboro on August 6.
- A state-by-state and country-by-country digest of race meets and results held between July 15 and August 15, 1889, including Stockdale's win of the Minneapolis Bicycle Club's 25-mile Minnesota championship road race and Merrihew's victory in the Philadelphia Challenge Cup five-mile road race.
- A list of new American and English bicycle, tricycle and velocipede patents granted in June and July 1889, compiled for the Gazette by patent attorneys C. A. Snow & Co. of Washington, D.C.
- A calendar of race meets, tours and division gatherings scheduled from mid-August through October 1889, including the Buffalo Ramblers' Second Century Run from Erie to Buffalo and the Virginia State Division Meet at Norfolk.
- H. O. Duncan gives American wheelmen practical advice for visiting the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition by bicycle, covering Customs procedure at Dieppe, cheap lodging near the Gare St. Lazare, and cycling routes to the Eiffel Tower, the Bois de Boulogne and the Nouveau Cirque.
- Practical roadside repair advice from a correspondent, with diagrams showing how to splint a broken spoke using copper wire and a stick, and how to mend a broken safety-bicycle frame tube by fitting a shaped wooden plug.
- An opinion piece defending the propriety and grace of women riding low-wheeled safety bicycles, arguing cycling is safer and more dignified than horseback riding and improves the manners of the male companions who ride with them.
- A report of Rev. E. H. Delk's sermon to about seventy-five cyclists at Trinity Lutheran Church in Hagerstown, Maryland on June 30, 1889, urging wheelmen to 'watch,' 'stand fast,' 'quit ye like men' and 'be strong' both on the road and in their moral lives.
- Charles Richards Dodge argues for systematic physical training for girls and women, illustrated by two young ladies he observed playing tennis, and recommends walking, rowing, swimming, gymnasium work and tricycling over horseback riding or football.
- A poem by Chris Wheeler imagining a twilight bicycle ride to the shore, addressed to 'cycle, trusty cycle,' as evening falls over shore, hill and valley.
- A comic tale by 'Shanksey' about a lumber-yard fire at Mayor George Pukins' house in which the water main fails, and two wheelmen, Sam and Ned 'the Athlete,' secretly relay the emergency signal to the Westport Connection valve by hidden telegraph key, with Ned wrecking his bicycle's backbone in the process.
- Thomas Stevens recounts an episode from his round-the-world bicycle travels in which a camp of Koordish women in Persian Koordistan surrounded him and tried to rob him, and were only partly satisfied when he handed over a bag of native silver coins.
- A parody reprint of a college paper, the 'Dude College Echo,' including the mock poem 'The Maiden and the Sophomore' by 'Beetsy,' a 'Pictorial Department' joke about a photography student named Binks, and gossipy one-line campus items.