by The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer;His Mysterious Disappearance
On the morning of February 4, Allen busily prepared for his departure. To avoid any potential embarrassment, Allen elected to mask his identity. He shaved off his mustache, dyed his eyebrows, and donned an elaborate disguise courtesy of B. G., who had supplied a suit, a high silk hat, spectacles, and a cane. Sachtleben, meanwhile, grabbed his bicycle and dashed over to the American consulate to obtain a form granting Allen power of attorney.
Reaching the office, Sachtleben found Manatt at his desk. The consul promptly produced a form for the cyclist to fill out. After collecting the fee, the bureaucrat dutifully stamped the document. Sachtleben stashed it in his valise and made a move toward the door. Just then, Manatt cordially invited the cyclist to return later that afternoon to join him on a tour of the nearby American School. Sachtleben was little enthused by the proposition but accepted it so as not to offend the dull but sympathetic official.
At the train station, Sachtleben barely recognized his companion, who was standing beside the tracks chatting with B. G. Their Greek friend had come to give his regards to Allen and also to ask Allen to make inquiries in London on his behalf regarding his plans to import British bicycles. Just then, Allen's train steamed in from Piraeus. The Greek vigorously shook Allen's hand. Sachtleben followed suit, fighting back tears. "For the first time in nearly eight months," he recorded that evening, "Allen and I were to be separated for more than a few hours."
As soon as the train pulled away, a somber Sachtleben dashed over to the Manatt residence to keep his appointment. "I was astonished when the door was opened by Manatt's lovely daughter of 19," Sachtleben recorded that evening. "She was dressed in an entirely black dress with low cut neck. I lost my command and could hardly say anything bright or original. I soon rallied, however, and wound up gallantly." Stowing his bicycle in the flowery courtyard, the cyclist learned that Winnie was the name of this petite brunette with sparkling blue eyes. "But I was not granted much time to spoon. Mr. Manatt was quickly prepared and off we went to the American School."
Sachtleben soon found himself in a classroom with half a dozen students who sat in a semicircle, semiconscious. At the head stood an elderly professor who was droning on about ancient Greek battlefields. "The subjects were dull and uninteresting, as well as the manner of delivery," concluded Sachtleben. At the school, he met a number of students of both sexes from all over the United States, but his thoughts were still firmly fixed on winsome Winnie.
The cyclist politely excused himself and headed back to the Manatt residence to retrieve his bicycle. "I wished not to draw any attention," Sachtleben professed in his diary,
but the vigilant eyes of the Consul's lovely daughter were on the alert. Consequently, I had a private interview with her in the back yard. It is impossible for me to recall the many sweet and foolish things I said in her angelic presence. She, and of course I as well, talked of what a fine time we could have making short excursions on a bicycle. I informed her that I should be delighted to teach her how to ride, and that seemed to tickle her very much. But she expressed the deepest regret that it would be impossible for her to obtain a ladies bicycle in Athens. She then hinted how fine it was to be on the Acropolis in the moonlight and how sentimental such a walk would be one fine evening. But I failed to propose a trip up there, for what reason I can hardly say.
As the days passed by, Sachtleben was increasingly tempted to act on Winnie's romantic overtures. He was lonely without Allen, and tiring of wintry Athens. "Surely I would enjoy such a sweet, lively American girl by myself," he confessed in his diary. Still, he hesitated to embrace the opportunity. At best, theirs would be a harmless dalliance, but a blot on his gentlemanly record nonetheless. And what if he really fell for her, or she for him? Soon Allen would return, and the globe girdlers would be off once more to face their destiny. The physical and emotional toll from so long a journey would be onerous enough—he had no need to risk unnecessary heartache.
3. PITTSBURGH
August 9, 1891
FRANK LENZ STOOD beside the trolley tracks at the entrance to the Smithfield Street Bridge, a massive iron structure spanning the Monongahela River and connecting Pittsburgh's downtown to points south. With one hand, he steadied his Columbia Light Roadster, which was loaded with about twenty pounds of gear distributed in two compact packs, one strapped atop the handlebars, the other just below the seat, on the backbone. On his own back he carried a bulging camera case, which, when full, added another twenty pounds to his burden.
Standing beside Lenz that misty morning was his constant companion, Charles H. Petticord, who was holding up a laden high-wheeler of his own. Completing the lineup of wheelmen were the youthful Friesell brothers, H. Edmund ("Ned") and Frederick C. ("Charles"), both clasping hard-tired safeties, and John Ward, another defender of the increasingly obsolete ordinary. On cue, the quintet spun around to face Lenz's mounted camera. They raised their caps and cracked faint smiles while a small crowd of well-wishers looked on and cheered. Moments later, the cycle tourists were rolling across the bridge.
Lenz and Petticord were off on a twelve-hundred-mile excursion to New Orleans, calculated to last the balance of the month. Their entourage would accompany them only as far as Brownsville, thirty-five miles southeast, where the party would retire that evening. The long-distance tourists would then continue east over the Alleghenies on the National Pike, the country's oldest highway. At Hagerstown, Maryland, they would veer southwest and traverse the lush Shenandoah Valley before heading to the Gulf Coast. After a few days touring the Crescent City, they would return home by steamship and train, via New York City.
Lenz had carefully designed this route, which would include some remarkably rugged and scenic terrain, to enhance his growing reputation as a long-distance tourist and roving photographer par excellence. As soon as he returned to Pittsburgh, he planned to fire off a barrage of letters to magazine publishers describing his latest cycling and photographic feats. He would then pitch his long-cherished scheme to girdle the globe with wheel and camera.
Stevens's continued post-tour success only strengthened Lenz's resolve to make a global circuit of his own. In recent years, the original globe girdler had accomplished three more astonishing adventures: a ride across Russia on a mustang, a dash into Africa to rescue the rescuer Henry Morton Stanley, and a recently concluded six-month tour of European rivers. Stevens had published two more books recounting the first two of these adventures, and he was busy writing an account of the third. He had just announced his intention to settle in the United States, where he would offer his services as a lecturer. "I've collected no end of unique and interesting material," he explained to a journalist. His advertisements noted that each of his three "stereopticon entertainments" featured "over sixty graphic scenes of Moving Life."
Yes, Stevens was Lenz's idol. Here was a man who had traveled in twenty-five countries, surviving, by his count, just as many "exceedingly narrow shaves." Boasted Stevens to The Wheel:
I've seen about everything abroad worth seeing. I've about touched the top and bottom and both ends. I've met the Tzar, the Shah of Persia, and drank coffee with the Sultan of Zanzibar. I've run up against all sorts, conditions and races of people. I've stood in the shadow of Masai spears, Afghan bayonets, Russian prisons and the torches of Chinese mobs. I suppose I ought to be glad I'm alive and cry quits. Anyway, civilization will be good enough for me from this time forward.
Lenz could only imagine the rewards awaiting the man who eclipsed Stevens's cycling performance, and he knew that now was the ideal time to enlist a sponsor for a world tour of his own. Cycling had never been more popular, thanks to the safety bicycle. The national population of cyclists was approaching the one million mark. In Pittsburgh alone, some 1,500 practiced the art, about five times as many as when Lenz had taken up the sport four years earlier.
Lenz was certain that an alert editor would recognize the broad appeal of another serialized "round-the-world" tour, especially one profusely illustrated with photographs. O
f course, a sponsor would no doubt demand that Lenz himself ride a safety, to ensure an element of novelty, not to mention relevancy. As a longtime cyclist, he did not favor the diminutive mount. In fact, many of his peers from the early days had quit the sport altogether, so put off were they by its sudden popularity. But Lenz was realistic, and he was not about to sacrifice his shot at a world tour to defend an obsolete pattern. He was fully prepared to transition to the safety whenever the circumstances demanded as much.
In the meantime, if this trip to New Orleans was indeed his last hurrah on his beloved high-wheeler, Lenz was poised, with Charlie at his side, to make the most of it. "No twins were ever closer" was how one journalist described their mutual dependency. They had been utterly inseparable since the spring of 1890, when Charlie lost his brother and cycling partner John to "inflammatory rheumatism." Charlie hardly knew how he could carry on. Lenz immediately showed his sympathy, designing and executing the club's embossed memorial resolutions with a penmanship the Bulletin pronounced "faultless." The sunny Lenz soon filled an enormous void in Charlie's life, and he, in turn, became the brother Lenz had never had.
They made a curious pair. "Long Charlie" towered over his chum by a good six inches. And his rail-thin body had none of Lenz's muscular padding. Petticord, with his closely cropped hair and bushy mustache, looked considerably older than his boyish pal, even though he was in fact the junior partner by a good two years. Charlie acted older too. He had a deliberate, almost sleepy, way about him, in contrast with the impetuous Lenz, who always seemed revved for action, no matter how rash.
They took their first tour together on the weekend of July 4, 1890. Along with another pal, Warren'T. McClarren, they boarded a night train for Cleveland, then spent the holiday riding through the city parks and cruising around Lake Erie on a steamer. The next day they rode forty miles to Akron, where a reporter noted their arrival: "Three dust covered bicyclists wheeled into the city at 2 o'clock and created something of a sensation. They were attired in black tights and gave every indication of having been on a long journey. One of the trio had a square awning erected above his head and a Kodak strapped to his back."
After a hearty lunch at a hotel, the young men rode another twenty-five miles to Canton. To their great surprise, they bumped into three hometown friends also on a cycling holiday. The next day the six Pittsburghers teamed up with eleven members of the Canton Bicycle Club for a fourteen-mile run to Congress Lake, where they all took a refreshing dip. And to think that only one member of the party rode a "jigger" (a derogatory term for the safety)! How times had changed in little more than one year.
The previous August, Lenz and Petticord had cycled to St. Louis, timing their visit to coincide with the largest cycling tournament ever held out west. Although the rains had reduced the National Pike to a shallow, muddy river, their spirits never flagged. The Dayton Ramblers found the chirpy pair "as brisk as spring roosters and as happy as larks." The road gave out entirely in Illinois. Still, they managed to stage a triumphant arrival at the meet, minutes before the opening event.
Later that month, the tanned pair traveled to Niagara Falls to attend the eleventh annual LAW national meet. They witnessed a safety race that marked the American debut of the pneumatic tire. Recently introduced in Ireland by the veterinarian John Dunlop, it promised unprecedented speed and comfort. Indeed, the unheralded winner sailed to an easy victory, amid howls of protest. Lenz, ever the engineer, instantly realized that the ordinary was indeed doomed if these inflatable tubes—ideally suited for a bicycle with two small, equal-sized wheels—proved practical.
The trip to New Orleans promised to be Lenz and Petticord's greatest joint adventure yet. On the second morning out, they climbed the rugged Alleghenies, walking much of the way. Anticipating a wild fourteen-mile plunge into Cumberland, they had equipped their front wheels with "coaster" hubs, which allowed them to keep their feet stationary on the pedals. Reaching the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal, they abandoned the pike for the smooth towpath. At one point, the canal entered a tunnel nearly a mile long. After a few feet, the cyclists found themselves in utter darkness. They wisely dismounted and proceeded on foot. Enjoying clear weather, they spent one night in the open air.
At Hagerstown, the thriving bicycle club gave them a royal reception. The next day they cruised into the Shenandoah Valley. At Martinsburg, West Virginia, they found themselves gleefully leading a circus parade. That night they reached Woodstock, Virginia, having covered an impressive seventy-three miles during the day. Two days later, they had gotten as far as Staunton before a deluge hit. From then on, they struggled to make twenty miles a day over the spongy Virginia red clay. With few towns along the way, they subsisted primarily on their own supply of bacon bits, corn, and stale biscuits. At Lexington, they stopped to admire the newly erected statue of Stonewall Jackson, whose cold stare seemed to symbolize the South's enduring and unapologetic defiance. They swam in a nearby pool two hundred feet below the famous Natural Bridge.
At Wytheville, near the Tennessee border, Lenz's big wheel suddenly collapsed, and he narrowly avoided serious injury. The accident compelled him to order a new wheel by telegraph before he proceeded by train to Chattanooga. Petticord, meanwhile, carried on alone, bumping over the ties spanning the Louisville and Nashville (L&N) Railroad. His tire became loose, forcing him to tie it down with a string. He sought refuge that evening in an abandoned shack. When he heard Lenz's train rumble by around midnight, he deeply regretted his ill-advised decision to go it alone.
Reuniting in Chattanooga, Lenz and Petticord trudged up nearby Lookout Mountain, where they enjoyed a magnificent panorama. After Lenz reclaimed his repaired wheel, the pair continued merrily on their way, heading into territory where the bicycle was as yet an anomaly. As Lenz would later recall, the locals stood by the roadside gaping "with open-mouthed wonder." In Trenton, a tiny town in the northwest corner of Georgia, the entire populace came out to inspect the strangers and their bizarre vehicles. Lenz further startled them when he jumped off his wheel and, rather insensitively, started flashing his camera in their direction.
As the cyclists approached the dense forests of northern Alabama, the locals warned them to go no farther. A notorious moonshiner was supposedly hiding out there with his ruthless band, and the lawmen were about to smoke them out. Undaunted, the pair spent the next five days fighting their way through the thick brush. Fortunately, they emerged unscathed. At Fort Payne, they were astonished to find a ghost town with an impressive assortment of new buildings, including several banks, two mills, and an opera house—all abruptly abandoned when the local iron and coal deposits had failed to live up to expectations.
Perhaps the most memorable moment of their southern swing was their clamorous appearance in Birmingham. As a New Orleans paper recounted: "They arrived in the Magic City shortly after 1 o'clock, and marched right into the crowded dining room of the Florence Hotel dressed in their dusty and dirt-begrimed garments, creating something of a sensation among the swell diners dressed in their Sunday best. But the cyclers were looking for dinner. They had forded three rivers and numerous creeks, and did not stand on style or ceremony." Indeed, as another paper related, "they proceeded to eat a very hearty dinner, attracting a good deal of attention from persons desirous of knowing who the strangers were and whence they came."
One reporter chastised the young men for their bold breach of protocol: "Messrs. Petticord and Lenz should remember while traveling through the South not to leave their manners at home." Deploring their "soiled, dust-covered, skin-tight professional paraphernalia," which he deemed "an insult to every lady and gentleman," the reporter huffed: "It is hard to believe they would have entered any first-class dining room in Pittsburgh in such a costume. The respectability of the South will not stand any such exhibition of boorishness, gall, and lack of respect for respectable people."
Having fallen several days behind schedule, and with their tires worn to the rim, the unrepentant duo decided to take a
train through Mississippi. After crossing the viaduct into New Orleans, they were warmly received by members of the Louisiana Bicycle Club. Their escorts took them through the French Quarter, where they visited the old parish prison. That evening the club held a reception in their honor. "Lenz has quite a number of photos taken in this city and en route," reported the secretary. "He swears by the town, and says it is beautiful, and the climate delightful."
As the Pittsburghers boarded their ship to New York, they were already making plans to cycle to California on their next summer vacation. And if by then Lenz had enlisted a sponsor for his world tour, Charlie promised to continue on with his buddy as he sailed from the West Coast to Asia. Although they would be reversing Stevens's course, Lenz maintained that an east-to-west movement offered distinct "climatic advantages."
Back in Pittsburgh, Lenz began his letter-writing campaign. He proposed a tour studiously designed to eclipse that of Stevens. He anticipated cycling and walking a minimum of twenty thousand miles within two years. Moreover, unlike Stevens, who was turned back at the Afghanistan border for lack of papers, Lenz would at all costs cross the daunting and hostile continent of Asia. Nor would he ever resort to trains, as Stevens was allegedly wont to do. Lenz would take ships only to cross the "briny spots."
If any American was up to this Herculean task, all agreed, it was surely Frank Lenz, the twenty-four-year-old captain of the Allegheny Cyclers. True, he had not raced in nearly three years, but he had lost none of his formidable form. In St. Louis the previous summer, he had astonished the locals when he kept pace with a pack of scorchers while riding a fully loaded wheel. "For strength and endurance," marveled one reporter, "I doubt if Lenz has an equal in America. Just think of carrying a 20-pound camera on your back, over all sorts of roads, from Pittsburgh to St. Louis, in addition to other luggage on the backbone and handle bars."