Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  In races involving multiple riders, the borrowed horseracing tactic of “pocketing” was often employed to “smoke out” the race favorite. An example of this scheme would find the race favorite trapped behind one rider while a second man rode up on the outside and pinned him in a box. For further effect, a third man would ride up from the back tightening the pocket all the more. A fourth man would then come streaking from the back, slipping by the boxed group and in for the money. While perhaps unfair, this tactic was not then illegal. When race favorites began adjusting to the tactics, the offending jockeys would occasionally pay a third-class rider—usually someone who had no chance of winning—to “dump” the competition. As the number one target of these tactics during his career, Taylor had to be vastly superior to his competitors to overcome them.

  Some of the most horrific spills were the mass pileups. During one six-day race at the Mutual Street Indoor Arena in Toronto, Reggie McNamara and Charlie Winter were in the final sprint for the finish. The two men were in the lead riding side by side when suddenly their handlebars jammed, meshing them together like two deer locking horns. As though they were piloting what looked like a sideways bicycle built for two, they veered together toward the rail, then sailed in unison up the steep bank and over the fence, sending them to the hospital with serious wounds. But the real horror took place behind them. In their wake, their accident triggered an avalanche of carnage, with bodies and twisted steel strewn all over the track. In tending to the riders, track doctors disposed of two hundred yards of adhesive tape, ten gallons of witch hazel, five gallons of olive oil, and three dozen bottles of iodine and petrogen.

  Perhaps the most bizarre pileup came at an indoor race before a packed house in Montreal. While a full field of riders circled the track at top speed, the lights in the arena suddenly went out. For the first time all day, the crowd went completely silent. The only noise permeating the smoky auditorium was first the Doppler drone of the racers’ tires, followed by the clanging of metal on metal, wooden fences snapping, bones breaking, and the distinctive echo of men discharging their agony through a series of earsplitting profanities. After gathering their senses, people noticed something unusual about the black out. It had lasted exactly one minute. The lights had flickered on sixty seconds later, revealing thousands of horrified fans as well as a mangled pile of wheels, frames, and broken bodies. The only man left intact was Peter Van Kempen, a rider who somehow found his way to the top rail, which he clung to for dear life. It turns out it was Thomas Edison Day. And in those days before widespread electricity and communications, instead of honoring this invention by flying a flag or scheduling a national holiday, unbeknownst to racing officials, the power was shut off in the city for exactly one minute.

  Extreme soreness resulting from overtraining or malnutrition was also a problem. Riders trained for hours every day and usually hurt all over. They habitually had sore necks, knees, hamstrings, rumps, calves, and backs stemming from spills or from riding in a fixed position for long periods. The most painful injuries came from road or track rash—injuries that often knocked them out for days, weeks, or even months. Most riders were battle-hardened men who could easily get over minor scrapes and bruises. “Sometimes,” wrote the Washington Post, “riders appeared on the track, done up in bandages almost from head to foot.”

  Nearly every rider left chunks of their hide ensconced in tracks throughout the country. Or, large chunks of the track wound up inside the rider. Flying along at a race in Providence, Rhode Island, a rider named Dan Pisceone was slammed into the boards on the outside railing. While his rim and frame fell to the ground twisting like a pretzel, Pisceone skidded face down on the track, leaving a long, lurid trail of blood behind. One of the wooden slats on the track had loosened and lodged in his abdomen. When he failed to get up, his horrified trainer ran to him, then proceeded to turn over a dead man.

  Wherever there were accidents, there were doctors—or those who hung out a shingle to that effect. One man affectionately referred to as “Spills” prowled around the tracks during major races, always ready to comfort a fallen rider. Whenever a racer who looked seriously injured asked if he should go to the hospital, Spills assured the rider he would take good care of him. His methods were decidedly unorthodox, but somehow he kept riders going while orthopedic surgeons would have had them bedside, all trussed up with casts, pulleys, and weights. “Get ’em back on the bikes as quick as you can,” Spills often said. “That stops congestion and swelling.” Race managers loved him as well. “He’d kid ’em into thinking they aren’t hurt, tired or highly strung,” raved one manager. “Keep ’em working.”

  Bike racers were a very tough breed in those days—they had to be. “If you didn’t ride,” remembered one former rider, “you didn’t eat.” And there was no such thing as an injured reserve list. Bad strains and fractures of the wrist, collar bone, and ribs were quickly assuaged with yards of tape, laxatives, liver pills, a bottle of Payne’s celery tonic, a few quick prayers, and for some, a side of whiskey. Then it was back in the saddle. In fact, the only time “Iron Man” McNamara left his bike was when a “regular” doctor taped his shoulder the “right” way. “If Fred [Spills] had done it,” he told a reporter, “I’d been back riding in thirty minutes instead of the six months recommended by the doctor.”

  Since meaningful insurance was nonexistent at the time, riders either paid for their medical care out of their own pockets or received financial help from sympathetic cycling fans, including famous celebrities. In the 1890s, it was men like Diamond Jim Brady, his actress girlfriend Lillian Russell, and Broadway producer William Brady. In later years, it was two of bike racing’s most avid fans, Bing Crosby and Ernest Hemingway. Both men traveled extensively throughout the United States and Europe to see the races. Crosby enjoyed the races so much he often picked up the hospital tab for injured riders, hoping to see them back on the track as soon as possible.

  Hemingway helped out as well. He was known to linger all night in his box at the races with his wife Hadley passed out on his lap. “I’ll never forget the time I set up operations in a box at the finish line of the six-day bike races to work on the proofs of A Farewell to Arms. There was good, inexpensive champagne,” he wrote, “and when I got hungry, they sent over Crab Mexicaine from Prunier. I had rewritten the ending thirty-nine times in manuscript and now I worked it over thirty times in proof, trying to get it right. There [at the racetrack], I finally got it right.”

  In their never-ending quest for more speed, riders occasionally employed pacers to block the wind in front of them. At first the pacers rode tandem bikes, or bicycles built for two. When their speed no longer sufficed, they moved up to quads, sextuplets, even octuplets. Six to eight men on one long, unwieldy bike dashing along at more than forty miles per hour bred the potential for serious carnage. A pace rider on one of these machines had to be strong and absolutely fearless. At one race in Cleveland, a sextuplet clipped along at a record-breaking pace when the front tire buckled under the strain of nearly a half-ton of riders. Choosing the lesser of several evils, the riders simply “abandoned ship,” all six of them catapulting into a complicated pile of humanity that even Spills couldn’t cure.

  When the hell-for-leather pace set by octuplets no longer satisfied America’s appetite for speed, a new contraption called the motorcycle entered the scene in the late 1890s. Early motorpace riding (bicycle racers riding behind a speeding motorcycle) was not for the faint of heart. Charles Walthour set twenty-six motorpace world records, but only after enduring twenty-eight fractures of his right collarbone, eighteen of the left, thirty-two broken ribs, and sixty stitches to his face and head. Bike racing, concluded the Washington Post, “is the most dangerous sport in the entire catalogue . . . by the side of it, football appears a game fit for juveniles only.”

  Walthour’s brushes with serious injury, even death, had no bounds. Once, according to his family, he was given up for dead after a spill in Paris and abruptly whisked off to the
county morgue. There, a man wearing black sepulchral clothing and a shiny silver cross hovered over his remains while reading from the Scriptures. Whatever he said, Walthour apparently didn’t care for it. He opened his eyes, got up off the slat, walked out of his premature eulogy, and went on to live another thirty-three years.

  George Leander, Walthour’s good friend and rival, wasn’t so fortunate. In 1903, while zinging along behind motorpace at ninety kilometers per hour, an inexplicable encounter between bicycle and motorcycle occurred. To this day, no one knows exactly how Leander’s long frame wound up airborne, hovering some sixteen feet above the track. What is known is that his body belly flopped on the top of the steep wooden track and teetered there for thousands of horrified fans to see before finally rolling back to the center of the track, lifeless. His decidedly dead body wound up in the same morgue where his good friend had decided not to die.

  The fate of Harry Elkes and Will Stinson, friends of dead Leander and almost-dead Walthour, capped off the particularly gruesome motorpace year of 1903. At the Charles River Track in Boston, a motorpace driver named E. A. Gateley slowed to pace Stinson while Elkes sped ahead. Tragically Elkes, whose doctor told him “he will someday drop from his wheel a corpse,” blew a tire. He then fell off his bike right in front of the motorcycle, causing all hell to break loose on top of him. In addition to bicycle and motorcycle parts strewn everywhere, a horror-stricken crowd of ten thousand people saw Stinson wind up on top of the heap, Gateley in the middle, Elkes on the bottom. From the scrum’s apex came a noisy trio of crashing bodies and squalid ululations. By the time it was all sorted out, Elkes, by then a friend of Taylor’s, was hauled to the morgue, his head crushed. The motorpace driver was stammering around the track with an amputated foot. And Stinson lay in a hospital bed suffering from internal injuries and loss of an eye—all while the remaining races continued unabated. Miraculously, from what some believed was his deathbed, Stinson was somehow able to push out a few words. “I want to ride again,” said the cycling matador, his remaining eye twitching uncontrollably, “tonight.”

  Through it all, riders kept riding and people kept attending races—“it is the danger in the sport that makes it thrilling,” wrote the Washington Post, “and it’s the thrilling feature that makes it attractive.” In the ’90s, thousands would join the pro ranks looking for fame and fortune. And for good reason: the financial rewards for elite riders were substantial. But many riders, clinging to the hope that they would someday be the next Zimmerman, struggled just to meet expenses or afford their next meals. The bigger the sport became, the more it was necessary for a racer to have a good handler and a well-designed program of individual training. But this did not come cheaply. A personal trainer cost between eighteen and thirty dollars a week, plus his expenses and a share of any winnings. Then there was the extensive train travel, cost of hotels, and the huge nutritional intake needed by the riders. And if a racer was a real “flash,” he had to factor in the cost of a valet.

  But few were so fortunate. Some of the low-level riders took to sleeping on cots at the track or train stations to save on hotel costs. For most riders, this day-to-day grind formed a brutal, hardscrabble existence. In the end, only a small fraction of them became affluent, a few lived well, and the rest—the bulk of the men like “Poor Joe” Griebler—were flat broke. “Let us be content to applaud these few cycle stars,” wrote Bearings, “because there exist a large number of ciphers who have a hard time to keep body and soul together.”

  This itinerant way of life strained personal relationships, forcing most riders, including Munger and Zimmerman, to be bachelors, marry later in life, or scatter their passions from one city to the next. For those few riders who had them, it could also be hell on their families. In their private moments together before his tragic racing death, Joseph Griebler shared his darkest fears with his young wife, Delia. But he didn’t have to say too much to convince her of the hazards and hardships of his chosen profession. “Poor Joe,” touted as another “promising” future Zimmerman, had been away from home and injured enough times to make her dread the next race—or the telegram telling her of another injury.

  She may in fact have been the only one who knew of the grim eye injury he had received during a pileup; had he told League officials, he may have had his racing license stripped from him. His doctor had told him he needed to see an eye specialist or face losing all sight in his bum eye. But without meaningful insurance and no money, he continued competing while his eye went uncared for—“going after a few more dollars for the kids,” he would often say.

  Before boarding a train from Minneapolis to Lima, Ohio, days before that fatal July day, he had just recovered from another injury that had sidelined him for months, bringing him near bankruptcy. He seemed to be too proud to tell anyone of his circumstances besides Delia, the love of his life and the pretty woman whose pictures he showed to everybody he met. “He was doubtless thinking of how the prize money would gladden the hearts of the little ones at home,” wrote one reporter after his death.

  During his life, Delia was seized with fear, thinking of the moment she and her two infants would be left alone with nothing but memories of his short life and a future wrought with emptiness and poverty. “Well,” he had strangely augured as he hugged and kissed her for the last time, “I expect that you will see me brought back dead before two weeks are gone.”

  At the moment doctors stood sentinel over Joe’s dying body under that stand of weeping willow trees and hearing his last grieving words—“I’m awfully sick”—Delia was visiting family and friends in the backyard of a home in Granite Falls. She was rolling a ball to Walter William with one arm, holding Pearl in her other arm, when Joe’s mother, who had just buried another son in a similar tragedy, handed her the telegram: Joe Griebler is dead, killed in a race in Lima, Ohio. You notify his wife.

  None of Joe’s extraordinary premonitions could have adequately prepared her for that frightful message. His coffin soon arrived, along with the two tiny pair of shoes that he had carefully picked out—probably his only material possessions that passed on through the years. While her kids continued to play on in the lazy summer sun, oblivious to it all, Delia stood there speechless, rivulets of sweat and tears dripping down her face. Described as being on the brink of collapse and possibly suicidal, Delia likely heard Joe’s recent words ring in her head. “If I don’t get killed before the season closes,” he had confided, “I am going to quit.”

  Sometime in the early 1900s, a man took his daily ride around the grounds of his school, the Munich University in Germany, atop a fat-tired bicycle. As the sun dropped below the horizon, he reached down and flipped on the headlamp. On those regular evening rides, he began observing a few important things that would eventually change the world. One was that the bobbing beam cast from his headlamp always traveled at the same speed whether he was cruising at a quick pace or coasting to a stop. A theory—that light from a moving source has the same speed as light from a stationary source—was born on those rides. The man, perhaps the greatest genius who ever lived, was Albert Einstein; his discovery, Einstein’s theory of relativity, laid the foundation for an explosion of scientific theory.

  As significant and well-known as that discovery was to the world, Einstein’s other discoveries were as important to him personally as any of his later inventions. There were two items that he—and more than one billion people since—noticed about the bicycle while riding. The first was how it made him feel—the sensations of youth, how freely discovery came to him, the intoxicating adrenaline rush.

  Einstein’s second discovery was that, despite its apparent simplicity, the bicycle itself was nothing short of a scientific, mechanical, and technological wonder. In the nearly two hundred years since the first crude velocipede was wheeled out of an anonymous shed somewhere in Europe, man had yet to duplicate its efficiency. “The machine appears uncomplicated but the theories governing its motion are nightmarish,” explained bicycle physicist
Chester Kyle. “Some things can’t be easily defined by physics and mathematics. The interactions of the body, mind, muscles, terrain, gravity, air, and bicycle are so complex that they defy exact mathematical solutions. The feel and handling of a bike borders on art,” Kyle continued. “Like the violin, it’s been largely designed by touch, inspiration, and experimentation.” The bicycle is indeed a remarkable feet of engineering. It can carry ten times its own weight and uses energy more efficiently than a soaring eagle. Yet a six-year-old child can master its mechanics.

  In those early years, even hardened pros with thousands of miles on their machines still harbored fresh memories of their first childhood rides down their neighborhood roads. Before the bicycle, children experienced similar emotions when they were first hoisted atop the family horse. But the horse had a mind of its own and a large stomach to feed. The bicycle was under their control, free from the bucking, kicking, and neighing they had become accustomed to. Despite the many machines professional cyclists burned out over their careers, fond memories of each one clung to them like old friends throughout their lives. “No sport,” remembered one pro rider, “has a greater connection between man and machine than bike racing.”

  Major Taylor, Arthur Zimmerman, and Birdie Munger had become bewitched by the world of bike track racing, a sport that could chew men up and spit them out. When man and bicycle whirled over the finish line with thousands cheering him on, his mind and body became overwhelmed with a sense of liberation and supreme personal empowerment. “Hearing that bell on the last lap,” explained one rider, “is a lot like being on some powerful drug . . .”