Spin

by Peter Zheutlin

  My destination that first night was Providence, about forty-five miles south, ambitious considering I had only taken a few short rides on the streets outside the cycling academy where I’d learned to balance myself on two wheels. At first I was encouraged, for the weather was mild, the smooth roads made riding a breeze, and I was able to cover the first eight miles or so in about an hour, relying on my road book for directions. At Dedham the macadam ran out, and I was soon traveling on packed gravel, a bit harder riding, but still quite passable. These gravel roads took me through Norwood, Walpole, and Wrentham. Susie had given me two apples and a piece of cheese, which I ate at midday. Between Attleboro and Providence the roads were again paved with macadam, and nine hours after leaving Boston I arrived in the Rhode Island capital.

  The one hundred dollars I had earned from the water company I had left with Dr. Reeder, who had come to the statehouse, for I had arranged to send my earnings, less what I was spending, back to him periodically. He would be responsible for tallying those earnings to ensure I met the requirement that I earn five thousand dollars above my expenses en route. It was also agreed that once accounted for he would periodically deliver the money to Grandpa, for I was the primary breadwinner in our household and he would need it.

  Thus, when I arrived at the Providence Hotel late that afternoon, I had no money to pay for my lodging. So I bartered with the hotel manager to allow me to earn my stay by working the candy counter at the hotel store for several hours and to give a short lecture in the lobby on what we called then “physical culture” (exercise and physical fitness) to a few curious guests who saw me standing there with my wheel. I would often have to improvise such arrangements, but a woman’s charm went a long way with men in those days. I told the hotel manager I had studied medicine for two years, hence my expertise on physical culture. It wasn’t true, of course, and it would not be the last time on my journey I would claim medical expertise.

  By late evening I was exhausted. I’d been up since before dawn, ridden more than forty miles, and fulfilled the promises I’d made in exchange for my night’s lodging. I was asleep within minutes of getting into bed. But I awoke in the middle of the night in excruciating pain. The muscles in my thighs and calves were cramping so badly I thought I might pass out. It was nearly an hour before they released themselves. I paid dearly that night for my lack of physical preparation. So much for my expertise in physical culture!

  When my muscles had finally relaxed, I fell back into a deep sleep until morning.

  * * *

  The roads leading south out of Providence were an unwelcome change from the good roads the day before. Gravel gradually gave way to sand, sometimes several inches deep, for miles, which made wheeling impossible. I had no choice but to push that forty-two-pound machine through the sand until, at last, it yielded to packed dirt firm enough for riding.

  In southwest Rhode Island there were many modest hills, and the glide on the downhills was positively exhilarating! It felt as though I was defying gravity itself. I was untethered and free, and with each passing mile the burdens of marriage, motherhood, and work seemed to recede. I was on a freedom ride on a bicycle built for one!

  Over the next three days I made my away along the coast of Connecticut from Stonington to Darien, sleeping one night in an inn and two in fields under the stars with only my clothing to cover me. The weather was fair, luckily, and I was able to average about forty miles each day. Though my clothes had begun to smell, and I had no bath, the occasional stream allowed me to wash my hands and face and refill the small flask I carried for water.

  At Darien I picked up the Boston Post Road, the old historic mail route that linked Boston and New York in Revolutionary days. From Greenwich I crossed the Byram River Bridge into Port Chester, New York, and on July 2 I reached New York City, and none too soon, for the weather had turned hot and humid that day and riding in my formal attire was a misery. I knew then that this uniform was not at all suited to long-distance riding and that while in New York I would have to adjust my costume and make it suitable for distance wheeling.

  It was my first time in New York since passing through as a young child when we arrived in this country, and I had only a few hazy memories of the place. Boston, compact and provincial, seemed tiny by comparison. The roadways were clogged with carts, carriages, horses, and electrified trolley cars. Newsboys in knickers and caps on every corner hawked their wares, wearing aprons adorned with the name of the newspaper they were selling. The city was alive with incessant activity, and tall buildings cast shadows across the streets.

  The tallest in the city, indeed the world, was the New York World Building, also called the Pulitzer Building, the home of Pulitzer’s famous newspaper. Some eighteen stories, it dominated Park Row, home to nearly all of the city’s many newspapers, just as the World dominated its competition. Completed just a few years earlier, Joseph Pulitzer, then nearly blind, had spent two million dollars of his own money to have the elegant building constructed. It was topped with a gold dome that reflected sunlight so that the glow could be seen, some said, forty miles out to sea.

  Publicity was very important if I were to succeed in this endeavor; it would be a kind of fuel I would need if I were to earn the large sum of five thousand dollars, and Colonel Pope certainly expected me to make as big a splash as I could wherever I went. I thus early got into the habit of sending telegrams or telegraph messages whenever I could to newspapers in cities and towns in which I expected to arrive and to the many bicycle clubs that had formed all over the United States in the two decades that cycling had grown into a popular pastime. News of my venture, and of my departure from Boston, had made it into newspapers not just in Boston but even in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other places, too, for news in those days could travel rapidly by telegraph. I was a novelty to be sure, but I knew I would have to find ways to make myself a good story along the way, for with fame would, I hoped, come fortune.

  I had sent wires to all the big New York City newspapers from New Haven—the Herald, the Times, and, of course, the biggest of them all, Joseph Pulitzer’s World.

  My first day in New York, I rode directly to the offices of the World and presented myself at the front desk. As I stood in the high vaulted lobby, I looked up to see four bronze female torchbearers adorning the space, representing literature, science, art, and invention. I imagined that when my journey was over a fifth might be added to represent equality.

  Sketch from the New York World.

  A young reporter came to the lobby from the newsroom many stories up to talk with me. To my surprise he had already done some digging into my story, for he knew my real name and that I was married with children. I was delighted to see the story in the paper the next morning with the headline WHEELING ’ROUND THE WORLD: MISS LONDONDERRY MUST EARN $5,000 BEFORE BOSTON SEES HER AGAIN. But I was less thrilled that he felt it fit to mention that “her maiden name was Annie Cohen and she is married to a man named Kapchowsky,” which he misspelled. I did not want my cover blown, and it was, thankfully, one of the last times anyone dug deep enough to discover what I had hoped to conceal. I don’t know how he learned I also had three children, something else I was eager not to discuss, for it would not reflect well on me and would raise all kinds of questions about my character, but I have to admit he was clever in writing about it. “It was suggested to mademoiselle that she might carry her children on a bicycle built for four,” he wrote, “but she answered that she had enough troubles of her own.”

  I also realized that I would have to get used to nearly every reporter, all men of course, commenting on my physical appearance, often in flattering tones, but too often in unflattering ones. “The bicyclist’s features are of the Slav cast, but her face is lit up by beautiful brown eyes,” reported the World.

  That first day I also called at the offices of the Herald and gave an interview to a reporter there. I early fell into the habit of impulsively making up bits that I thought would be notewort
hy even if there was nothing to them but hot air. I told the Herald man that I would be riding in a few days to Washington, D.C., hoping for an audience with President Cleveland, and would then be bound for Honolulu and China.

  I had no intention of wheeling to Washington—I was heading for Chicago—but it made for an interesting story! To quiet the skeptics I also avowed no doubt of my ultimate success.

  “In her opinion there is no reason in the world she should not go around the world in fifteen months, support herself and bring back $5,000 besides,” wrote the Herald. And to make sure everyone knew I was a tough cookie not to be trifled with, when asked if I was afraid of being accosted by tramps I replied, “No, but I carry a revolver to protect myself,” and displayed the pistol. Bit by bit I was building the edifice of my new persona—this worldly, audacious woman on wheels.

  * * *

  In New York I stayed with friends, the Swids, at 208 East Broadway. You never met them, but they had moved to New York from Boston around the time your aunt Libbie was born. Now, you might think that with only fifteen months to make the circuit I would be eager to get back on the road as soon as possible, but I remained in the city for more than three weeks. I loved New York and the pulsating energy of the place.

  For several days I worked on devising my new riding costume, experimenting with different combinations and deciding finally on a short skirt (well, shorter than the one I left Boston in, but one that still reached nearly to my shoe tops) and a pair of bloomers underneath so that I could, when needed, lift my skirts up out of the way of the spinning pedals and still be dressed in something other than my underwear!

  I also decided to return to the offices of the World to see if they might provide me with a letter credentialing me as a correspondent of the paper. It took several days but I was finally able to arrange a meeting with the Sunday editor, a famous newspaperman named Morrill Goddard, one of Pulitzer’s top lieutenants.

  Morrill Goddard was about thirty years old in 1894. He had a full, bushy beard, dark hair parted in the middle, and sported pince-nez with a silver chain from which he could hang them around his neck when he removed them, which he often did when he spoke to you, the better to stare you straight in the eye, which he also often did. As editor of the Sunday World he was something of a cross between a serious newsman and a sideshow carnival barker, presiding as he did over a special section packed each week with sensational, often unbelievable stories intended not to inform but to titillate or entertain. People loved it.

  To get to Goddard’s office on the twelfth floor I rode, for the first time in my life, an elevator, a rarity since few buildings at the time needed them. The sensation of being whisked upward quickly in such a fashion was thrilling! As I entered Goddard’s office he stood to greet me. He was brusque and businesslike but not unkind. He knew who I was from the reporting in his own newspaper. I told him a letter of credentials would greatly ease my passage in far-off parts of the world, and that in return I would, at the end of my journey, write an exclusive first-person account for him to publish in his Sunday pages, which, as you will see, I eventually did.

  “I admire your confidence, Mrs. Kopchovksy,” he said before I interjected.

  “I am Londonderry now, Mr. Goddard.”

  “Yes, yes, Miss Londonderry, then,” he said, a little irritated. “But I have doubts that you will ever finish the task you have set for yourself.”

  “Then you have nothing to lose,” I proffered. “Only the cost of a sheet of stationery. But if I should succeed, you will have quite an exclusive.”

  “Come back tomorrow. I will have my secretary type a letter for you. It will be at the front desk. In an envelope for”—and then he leaned forward and said with emphasis and a note of sarcasm—“Miss Lon-don-derry.”

  * * *

  There was another reason I lingered so long in New York even as the wager clock was ticking. A couple of days after I arrived I started to receive letters addressed to me in care of the Swids from my brother Bennett, from Grandpa, and even one in her child’s awkward hand from Mollie. Bennett and Grandpa urged me to reconsider. They thought I had taken the joke far enough already. It was folly. It was farce. It was a betrayal of my marriage and my children. Mollie’s note simply said, “Please come home, Mama. I miss you.”

  As emotionally distant as I could be, only the hardest heart could fail to be touched by such pleas. For a few days I was torn. Surrender to the pleas of my family or steel myself and forge ahead? It would have been embarrassing to say the least, especially having made such a spectacle in Boston, and having wrangled credentials from the World, to give up the venture having ridden only to New York. Colonel Pope would no doubt be furious that I had embarrassed him, too, and it would surely be a source of much laughter among the chauvinists and dismay among the women seeking a more equal footing with men. As much as I was hurting the family, I simply could not imagine retreating into my old life after only a paltry effort to separate myself from it.

  Still, I dithered, uncharacteristically for me, troubled by the price I was asking others to pay. What ultimately tipped the balance was a letter I received a few days later, in mid-July, from Susie. I saved it and have it still.

  Dearest Annie,

  I hope this letter reaches you before you depart from New York. It’s taken me a few days to sort out my feelings of the past few weeks, and the early days of your absence, which have been lonely and filled with longing for your physical presence. But my heart is full knowing we belong to each other and I want you to make a big success of your adventure, to fulfill yourself, and, by and by, to send a message to the world that women should take their rightful place alongside men, not as their inferiors but as their equals. In my conversations of recent days, many of which have revolved around your extraordinary undertaking, it has become clear to me that you carry with you not just your change of underwear and your pistol (what a hoot!), but the hopes and expectations of our sex. As word of your exploits grows and spreads across the country and the world, women by the thousands will be cheering you on in the hope that you will strike a blow for the greater cause. Go, Annie, and go as though we were riding a tandem together for I am with you, if not in body, then fully in spirit.

  Love,

  Susie

  Whatever second thoughts had clouded my thinking were dispelled by Susie’s letter. I wrote letters home to Grandpa and Bennett and enclosed in Grandpa’s a short note for Mollie, on which I had made a little sketch of a woman on a bicycle. The essence was that I understood their pain, that I missed them, but that having begun, I could not turn back so easily. Perhaps there were obstacles ahead, obstacles unforeseen, that would force a premature conclusion to the effort, but for now I would press forward. I told Bennett and Grandpa that I would, as much as possible, wire them about my intended itinerary and would welcome letters or wires with news of home, but that I wished they would henceforth refrain from writing anything intended to induce me to feel guilty. I was learning in these early days that the physical demands of the journey would be one test, but that mental fortitude would be equally important. I could not allow myself to be burdened with doubt and that required that I wear a coat of armor around my emotions, never that close to the surface anyway. I would not wallow in homesickness, or second thoughts about leaving Grandpa and the children. It sounds ruthless and it was. I can’t say I am proud of it, but it had to be done.

  Committing myself to continue on was one thing; a relatively easy thing. The actual going, as I was about to learn, well, that was another story.

  Five

  My advanced planning was sadly lacking. In the weeks before I left I was focused solely on the leaving and not the actual going. I had no route of travel plotted other than a general conception that I would ride first to New York, where, I thought, I could secure more publicity, and then west. No other city within a few days’ travel, indeed no city in the world, offered the opportunities for self-promotion as New York did, and as you have seen, I t
ook advantage of that. Leaving as I did in late June, I calculated that I could, if I averaged forty miles a day across the country, reach the West Coast before winter gripped the plains and mountain west. Because the L.A.W. road book for New York included detailed directions to Chicago and the route was well traveled by cyclists, I decided Chicago would be my next destination.

  I alerted the New York newspapers that I would be leaving the city on July 28 promptly at noon from the entrance to City Hall. July had been miserably hot in New York, and July 28 turned out to be the hottest day the city had seen in thirteen years. By midday the temperature had reached ninety-five degrees and the humidity was suffocating. Yet several hundred people assembled at City Hall to see me off, still in my long blue skirt, slightly shortened, but with the bloomers underneath to allow me to lift the skirts when needed without exposing myself. Just before I left, I quietly took the revolver from my saddle kit and tucked it into the waist of my skirt.

  As I glided away I heard a huge roar go up from the crowd, and without turning around to look I lifted my right hand, waved the pistol, and headed up and through Central Park. From Yonkers I went north toward West Point and encountered the largest hills I had yet experienced. Trying to propel a forty-two-pound bicycle up those hills wearing a skirt and long-sleeved blouse in the scorching heat tested both my muscles and my fortitude, and I often had to dismount and push the machine up the inclines. But what a thrill it was on the way down! With safety pins I tacked my skirts up and out of the way of the spinning pedals and careered down the hills hoping for the best. I am proud to say that while I came close to losing control several times, not once did I fall. Because of the hills, though, progress was slow, and it took me nearly a week to make my way to Albany.