Spin

by Peter Zheutlin

  That was just part of the spectacle. The other lay in spinning tall tales, and I often surprised myself with what came out of my mouth without any forethought at all. In time, the tales would become taller and taller, but for now they began somewhat modestly when I met with the man from the Morning Express in his cramped office.

  Photo from the Buffalo Morning Express.

  “I arrived in Ashtabula dead broke,” I told him, “and had to spend the night sleeping in a cemetery.” I also told him I had completed three years of study at Harvard Medical School and would finish my degree when I returned to Boston, though I knew, and one could have easily checked, that admission to Harvard Medical School was not permitted for women and would not be for decades yet to come. I claimed to be of German descent and to speak German and Swedish, though this was nonsense. When asked about the dangers of the road, I drew my revolver from the pocket of my bloomers and waved it in the air. Newspapermen can be so easily gulled, and I would exploit their credulity often. Perhaps you will think your dear grandmother to be a liar, but I prefer to think of myself as the writer of a play in which I was the star, a production that would unfold in stages, and often on stages, across many continents!

  It was in Buffalo that I really felt I had ceased to be Annie Kopchovsky, the Boston housewife and mother, and emerged as if from a chrysalis as the daring heroine of the wheel, the globe-trotter Annie Londonderry. I had shed one skin and put on another, and I was intoxicated by the freedom of it all. And that, I think, is why I now felt no qualms about inventing a new, ever-changing history about myself, one limited only by the bounds of my imagination, to go along with my new persona.

  Thus liberated, I began speaking in ever more dramatic terms about myself and my journey, seeking as I went to top myself, to see how far I could go in testing the gullibility of people and the press.

  I persuaded a man from another Buffalo newspaper that mine was “one of the most perilous and remarkable trips ever undertaken by a woman,” as he put it down. When asked if I wasn’t “taking a big risk in traversing portions of savage lands,” I laid it on thick. “Well, $10,000 is a large amount, and I know that I am taking a big risk, and may never again see my native land, but the grim shadow of death is ever at one’s elbow.” Oh, it makes me smile even now to think what cheek I had in those days.

  In Buffalo I made yet another modification to my riding costume, one of many in the evolution of my attire, which had me wearing long skirts at the outset and by the end a man’s riding suit. (Did that ever cause a stir, as you will see!) Bloomers had been a big improvement, but their billowy legs often caught the wind, so I purchased a pair of trim pants, cut several inches off the legs and secured the bottoms, knickerbocker style, with elastics. I wore black stockings below, and a tweed coat, vest, and blue yachting cap, all purchased in Buffalo. The outfit was rather outlandish—I was dressed as a man—but that was the whole point!

  My lodgings in Buffalo were provided by the Ramblers Bicycle Club; there were now wheel clubs in almost every city and town of any size in America, and some, such as the Ramblers, were large enough, and flush enough, to have their own clubhouse with meeting rooms and even accommodations for cyclists passing through. I attended their Halloween ball on a rainy night, hoping for better weather the next day when I was to say farewell to Mr. Bliss and leave for Rochester.

  The skies did clear overnight, and as I rode east out of Buffalo the temperatures were in the mid-fifties, quite comfortable for cycling, but the previous day’s rains had made a muddy mess of the unpaved roadways outside the city. As incredible as it may seem, when roads were impassable, cyclists often sought out railroad beds for riding as they were typically elevated a few feet above grade so the rainwater would run off. Such riding was hard on the wheel and bone-shaking as you had to move the wheel over the endless stretches of railroad ties, but at least it was passable. The two-day slog to Rochester was an ordeal and, even on the railroad beds, a messy affair.

  I was splattered with mud when I arrived in Rochester, my new, manly riding outfit still adorned with the advertisements I had collected in Buffalo. I was quite a sight, which is why I went directly to the offices of the Post Express before finding a place where I could wash and clean my clothes. I wanted to present myself in all my glory.

  When asked there about my unconventional appearance, I replied, “I am going around the world and with that object in view cannot afford to let conventionalities impede my progress. I have grown accustomed to this costume and do not mind the stares of people.” Indeed, the stares of people were exactly what I wanted. Asked what I expected to do when the trip was over I answered, “Why, I’ll marry some good man and settle down in life.” Fortunately, Grandpa didn’t read the papers from Rochester!

  At receptions for me hosted by the Century Cycling Club and the Lake View Wheelman’s Club, an escort was arranged for the ninety-mile ride to Syracuse. On the morning of the fourth of November, three gentlemen riders and I departed with the ambitious goal of making the trip in one day, which would mean covering about twice the distance I normally rode. But the weather had turned cold and windy, and we fell fifteen miles short of our goal, spending the night in the small town of Jordan. It was about nine thirty the next morning when we arrived at the Globe Hotel in Syracuse.

  Thanks to my telegrams, the newspapers had been writing of my impending arrival for several days. My efforts to ramp up the press I was getting were beginning to bear fruit.

  I reached Utica a couple of days later where the Sunday Journal announced the arrival of “a dead broke girl,” a reference to H. H. “Dead Broke” Wylie, who the year before had set the record for cycling from Chicago to New York (on a Sterling), a distance he covered in just over ten days. As he traveled without money on what was popularly known as the “dead broke plan,” he was bestowed with his unusual nickname.

  By now I was being portrayed as a representative of my sex, something I welcomed wholeheartedly for it would do nothing but add to public interest in my endeavor, as wherever one stood on the question of women’s equality, pro or con, my success or failure would provide ammunition for the debate. The Sunday Journal put it this way:

  The latest phase of women’s development and women’s enterprise along a unique line struck this city at 3:45 P.M. yesterday in the form of a charming and striking young lady attired in men’s bicycling costume and “treading” a twenty-pound Sterling wheel in gallant style in very ungallant weather. Miss Annie Londonderry is the name of the daring young woman who is undertaking a bicycle trip around the world. She believes she can do it, and with the grit and enterprise of modern femininity has determined to do it, or die in the attempt.

  (Utica Sunday Journal, November 11, 1894)

  I was glad for their choice of words—“grit and enterprise”—for I was growing weary of being referred to, as most papers did, as “plucky,” a word that was only applied to a woman in an effort to feminize traits otherwise seen as masculine. “Plucky” seemed to soften the edges of a bold and brazen woman somehow.

  Keeping up with my determination to make as big a sensation of myself as possible, in Utica I had some new stories to tell, including one of a tramp who tossed a railroad tie on the tracks that upended my bicycle and dumped me into ashes piled along the railroad bed. Such white lies were never challenged; I found more resistance in my bicycle pedals than in the minds of eager newspapermen, though later in the trip that started to change. But for now my ability to project myself with great confidence and to spin entertaining if fanciful tales were enough to distract from careful scrutiny of the details of my travels.

  * * *

  As the weather had been wet and cold for several days, with some of the money I had earned I allowed myself the luxury of taking the train to Albany on the evening of the eleventh of November. I had a little less than two weeks to reach New York, where I had booked passage to Le Havre aboard the French liner La Touraine on the 24th, ample time to cover the modest mileage from Alban
y to New York City.

  In Albany it crossed my mind to send a telegram to Grandpa and to arrange for him to bring the children for a reunion in New York. But it was a fleeting impulse. I had, mile by mile, day by day, morphed into a new woman, growing into my new persona, and finding new resolve to make a success of the entire venture. I was concerned that a brief reunion might only be confusing for the children and open new wounds. But I was equally concerned that such a reunion might weaken my resolve, tug at me to return home where nearly everyone thought I belonged, and puncture the inflated character I had become. To succeed, to overcome the challenges that lay ahead, especially in far-off lands, I could no longer in any measure be Annie Kopchovksy, Boston housewife and mother; I had to fully inhabit the character of Annie Londonderry, the daring, indefatigable globe-trotter with a pistol in her pocket and quicksilver in her shoes. There was no room to be both; Annie Kopchovsky had to be put aside.

  Nine

  What a glorious sight she was. La Touraine was more than five hundred feet long, handsome, and imposing. She could carry more than a thousand passengers and had a staff of expertly trained French chefs who worked in a world-class kitchen. The French Line boasted that she was “a piece of France itself.” The crossing to the north coast of France would take but nine days.

  The date was now November 24, 1894. I had arrived in the city a few days before and again stayed with the Swids, and it was they who came to the docks along the Hudson River to see me off that morning.

  As I rolled the Sterling up the gangplank I was exhilarated about beginning this new stage of the journey. When I had last passed through New York Harbor by boat, I was just a little girl of five, arriving in this strange new land with my parents and my brother and sister. I recall only the long lines at Ellis Island as we were processed by the immigration authorities, and little else. In the years since, the Statue of Liberty had taken her place at the entrance to the harbor, and she was a majestic thing to see as La Touraine slipped through the Verrazano Narrows and out into the Atlantic.

  I have never been, especially as a younger woman, given to sentimentality. You know that. But as we passed the great statue I couldn’t help but feel a surge of pride and gratitude for the country that had been our home for the past not-quite-twenty years. We were not rich by any means, not materially, but our opportunities, if we cared to seize them, were virtually limitless. I was living proof of that.

  Though it was now late November, the air was unseasonably mild as I stood at the ship’s railing breathing in the salt air. I knew not what lay ahead, but my spirits were high. As Manhattan slipped over the horizon, it was time to start putting into action the plan for the Atlantic crossing I had conjured in the two weeks before sailing. For the next nine days I would have a captive audience of a thousand passengers, many of them people of means and distinction from all corners of the globe, and hundreds of crew, and I was determined to leave an impression on every last one of them. When they disembarked in Le Havre, whether they were on the Grand Tour, returning home to wherever they came from, or on a brief holiday from the States, they would know of Annie Londonderry, the cheeky woman going ’round the world on a wheel. Rarely would I have in one place an audience of this size who would spread word of my mission to friends and family and business associates, thus amplifying my fame, my press, and my means of making money as I went, for word of mouth, as anyone in the advertising business knows, is the most effective publicity of all. And while on board, people would be hungry for diversion and entertainment. In the middle of the ocean there is little to pass the time but books, meals, games, conversation, and gazing at the vast horizon.

  Getting attention could not have been easier, dressed as I was in a man’s riding attire and coasting slowly along the ship’s massive decks on a handsome cream-and-gold-colored Sterling. From my first little spin around La Touraine’s top deck to the last—and I made probably hundreds of such circuits—people gathered in twos and threes and then by the tens and twenties to admire my wheel, gawk at my costume, and question me about my purpose and my background. About the former I was direct; about the latter I had great fun. I was, again, a student of medicine at Harvard, where I earned extra money dissecting cadavers, having left my job as a stenographer, where I invented a new form of stenography. I had been orphaned at a young age but was left a large fortune that allowed me to pursue whatever whims and adventures struck my fancy. I was the cousin of a United States congressman and the niece of a United States senator. Each of these I stated with such conviction that not once was I challenged by anyone about any of it!

  The ship’s captain, Captain Frangeul, quickly learned that he had a celebrity on board and invited me on several occasions to take my dinner at his table in the ship’s ornate dining room. By the way, you will be interested to know that nearly two decades later, on April 12, 1912, La Touraine was in contact with the Titanic and messaged the doomed ship about the presence of icebergs in the shipping lanes of the North Atlantic. The crew of the Titanic messaged back its thanks. Less than forty-eight hours later the Titanic hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank, with terrible loss of life.

  It was clear that Captain Frangeul was smitten with me and charmed by my effortless and animated conversation, but he was a very proper gentleman and limited himself to compliments that, delivered in his heavily French-accented English, drifted around me like softly falling snow. So taken with me and by my story, the captain proposed that I give a series of lectures during the passage about my journey thus far from Boston to Chicago and back to New York and my intended route once we reached Le Havre. To this, of course, I readily agreed, for it was an opportunity to be sure no one left that ship without knowing who I was. Eager for diversion, hundreds of passengers showed up at a time in the dining room, whose seats had been rearranged theater-style to listen to me hold forth on the perilous journey thus far, one filled with near-death escapes, mean-spirited tramps, and violent weather. I had refined a story about crossing a railway bridge in New York State in which I found myself face-to-face with an oncoming train and insufficient time to turn and outrun it. Facing certain death, I had no choice but to dismount, take the wheel in one hand, and dangle from the edge of the bridge by the other as the train, just inches away, sped across the trestle. To fend off tramps and highwaymen I often had to fire my pistol, surprising them with the accuracy of my warning shots that whizzed just inches from their heads. Dodging mighty bolts of lightning as if thrown by Zeus from the heavens also featured prominently in my stories. Whether people took every word literally was irrelevant; what mattered was the entertainment and leaving an unforgettable impression.

  There was no shortage of important personages aboard who, courtesy of the captain, were given front-row seats to these improvised lectures during which I would perform small tricks on the wheel in an area that had been cleared of seats, tricks that I had practiced, such as coasting on the machine backward or balancing astride the wheel without moving, tricks that delighted everyone. Among the dignitaries was Dr. Chancellor, the U.S. consul at Le Havre, whose signature, coincidentally, was one of those I was required to collect to prove my passage around the world. Also aboard were the Baron and Baroness de Sellieres of Burgundy, the Prince and Princess Ruspoli di Poggio Suasa of Italy, and an attractive middle-aged couple, Mr. and Mrs. Potter Palmer, socialites from Chicago who told me they had read of my visit to their city a few weeks before.

  On the last night of the transatlantic crossing I left my quarters well belowdecks where those of the lower classes could afford passage and went up to stroll along the main deck. It was a cold night, but clear, and it seemed a billion stars twinkled above the inky black ocean. I had two blankets from my bed wrapped around me for warmth. As it was frigid, I didn’t expect to find anyone else outside in the freezing air, especially not at such a late hour, for it was approaching midnight. But near the bow I saw a lone figure staring out across the water. I couldn’t tell in the darkness—only the lights from br
idge dimly lit the scene—if it was a man or a woman, but in any event I decided to pass quietly behind them so as not to disturb what seemed to be a deep contemplation. As I walked past as discreetly as I could, a woman’s voice, a refined, tempered voice, broke the silence.

  “Miss Londonderry, is that you?”

  I turned and recognized the face beneath the scarf as that of Mrs. Palmer, whom I had met several times over the past week in the ship’s dining room, once taking dinner with her and her husband at the captain’s table.

  “It is, Mrs. Palmer. It is. And why are you out here on this frigid night? Are you unable to sleep?”

  “I’m just thinking, Miss Londonderry, just thinking. By the way, you have made quite an impression on everyone aboard this ship in the past week, and certainly a profound one on me.”

  “How so, Mrs. Palmer?” She was a handsome woman of about forty, tall, with a fine, feminine figure, and sharp but elegant features. Her clothes were of the finest quality. Everything about her spoke of great wealth; she and her husband had procured a two-bedroom suite for the passage, no doubt at a princely sum.

  “What do you see when you look at me, Miss Londonderry?” Her tone suggested this was a rhetorical question, so I did not answer. She did not mince words and came quickly to her point.

  “You probably see a woman who appears to have everything, and indeed, there is hardly a thing in the world, not a luxury or a bauble, that I could not purchase. Mr. Palmer and I spend more than half of every year traveling the world like this and we spare no expense. We have a beautiful home on the lakefront in Chicago with a full-time staff of six, including a French-trained chef. Mr. Palmer sees to it that I want for nothing, and yet I want for everything.”