Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  Once he and the rest of the peloton had pushed out of sight, the crowd hovered around a gold-trimmed race bulletin board that was updated every few minutes—or as fast as the phone operators could take down notes. Those who were unable to attend the race jammed phone lines with one subject on their mind. “Any news from the race?” “Who’s winning the race?” “Who won?” “How did the clubs show in the race?” Toward the end, Taylor’s teammates faded. One rider, believed to be hopped up on drugs, fell three times. Taylor was able to stay with most front-runners, but ahead of him, a rider named James Casey of the well-trained Vernon team had built an insurmountable lead. Lacking a strong team to pace him, Taylor rallied in vain to catch Casey, his grit carrying him to a respectable sixth place.

  Though he hadn’t won, it was an important day for Taylor and Munger. While the newsmen with their front-page coverage couldn’t get enough of the bike race, they were surprisingly silent on the other race—the usually volatile issue of blacks competing opposite whites. In their coverage, which included a few mentions of Taylor, the word “black” hardly came up. New England, with its abolitionist history, was proving to be more than just a haven for bicycle manufacturing. For the time being at least, Taylor had found his personal utopia. “I was in Worcester only a very short time,” he later beamed, “before I realized that there was no such race prejudice existing among the bicycle riders there as I had experienced in Indianapolis. When I realized I would have a fair chance to compete against them in races, I took on a new lease of life.”

  Taylor spread his new life-lease around the Eastern amateur racing scene. From Worcester, he trained to New Jersey to compete in the popular twenty-five-mile Irvington-Millburn race, or Derby of the East. It was a gamble on his part; the race had a history of racial strife. In the preceding years, a black rider named Simmons had been tossed in and out of the race like a hot potato. The race organizers had fought bitterly among themselves and with local cycling teams over whether to allow Simmons, or any blacks, into their decade-old event. Endless meetings in front of packed houses were held, but they had difficulty reaching a consensus. Some men got fired over the flack, several threatened to leave, and others actually left.

  Taylor somehow snuck in among the 153 white riders without incident. Escaping his notice among the crowd of twenty thousand, the Great Arthur Zimmerman attended, watching Taylor’s progression with keen interest. Fortunately, Taylor had lively legs that day. He found himself in a vicious head-to-head dual with Monte Scott, the race leader, and one of the best amateur road racers in the East. Everything went well until the last half mile when someone materialized, seemingly from nowhere, with a large pail of ice water. He dumped it in Taylor’s face. Temporarily startled, Taylor lost Scott’s wheel and his wide draft, finishing twenty-third. With his focus shifting to track racing, it would be one of the last road races in which Taylor competed.

  His amateur days rolled on. At a one-mile open track meet in New Haven, Connecticut, Taylor took first place and a shiny gold watch, which he promptly gave to Munger in appreciation, he said, “for some of the many kindnesses he had extended to me.” In Meridian, Connecticut, he took second place, earning a beautiful dinner set, which he packaged and sent to his mother for her birthday.

  Shortly after the Connecticut races, Munger and Taylor received an invitation to a special event in Indianapolis. They wasted no time packing their bags. The former high-wheel racer and his black protégé were coming back, and they had something to prove.

  The train carrying Major Taylor and Birdie Munger clattered into Indianapolis in August of 1896. George Catterson, the real estate mogul who had sponsored the muddy Indianapolis-Matthews road race that Taylor had won, had recently opened a velodrome called the Capital City Racetrack. The fifteen thousand–person track, erected on Catterson’s land near today’s Indianapolis 500, was large and modern enough to attract big names. At its grand opening a professional rider named Walter Sanger had set the one-mile track record, charging around the surprisingly slow track in 2:19 2/5. Sanger wasn’t in the same league as American heavyweight Eddie Bald, soon to be named 1896 American sprint champion, or Tom Cooper, Bald’s chief rival, but he was a seasoned pro.

  Munger knew Taylor had improved rapidly, placing top ten in nearly every one of his amateur races, but he wasn’t sure if he was ready to go up against a professional. He was dying to find out. Unfortunately, either because of Taylor’s color or his amateur status, Munger wouldn’t get to see Taylor compete against Sanger, the doyen of the peloton. But Catterson, a kindly man who had been friendly to Taylor in years past, did allow him to use the track for an unofficial race against time. After the treatment he’d received in Indianapolis, including being barred from some of their tracks, Taylor wanted to show his hometown fans how much he had progressed.

  He would get his chance.

  A curious crowd arrived to see if the native lad could come anywhere near the speed of Sanger, the wily veteran. It would take them just 2:11 to find out. Munger stood on the track apron watching Taylor’s body flatten out, his pace building, his Birdie Special humming over the track. Munger, and several other clockers, held a watch by his side, the seconds ticking off in his hand. At the half-mile marker, Munger knew something special was happening. Taylor was on a tear! In over a decade spent around countless cyclists, Munger had never seen a seventeen-year-old display that kind of speed on a slow track. Not in an open race, not in an exhibition.

  Taylor kept steamrolling ahead, quicker and quicker, flying over huge swaths of track in a blaze. Taylor careened around the oval for the third and final lap before ripping into the homestretch. There was a remarkable grace to his form, not unlike a manta ray slicing through the ocean floor. When the teenager, still three months shy of eighteen, passed under the one-mile marker, Munger looked down at his hand in disbelief. At the slow Capital City track, Taylor had worked a mile in 2:11!

  It was an unofficial record on a new track, but he had trounced Sanger’s mark by eight-plus seconds. The crowd couldn’t fathom what they were seeing.

  This extraordinary performance was no fluke. Later that evening, buoyed by his success and the animated crowd, Taylor made a run at the one-fifth-mile track record. Flanked by a few pacesetting friends, he powered around the track with everything he had left. At the finish line, the timekeepers clicked their watches and looked up in stunned silence again: he had lowered the record by two-fifths of a second.

  On hearing the news from the race announcer, the crowd let out a roar. The white riders milling about in the locker room made a beeline for the track to see what all the commotion was about. Just then, Taylor walked past an earful of racial slurs and outright threats of violence if he dare show his black face at the track again. Though he hadn’t even raced opposite a white rider, they also cussed out race director Catterson for allowing a black man on the track.

  Old wounds had been reopened, but Taylor had his track records, though unofficial. He clopped off to Indy’s Union Station, reliving memories of his youth and anguishing over the harsh realities of his coming adulthood. With mixed emotions, he and Munger boarded a red-eye train pointed toward Worcester. In a move of curious prescience, Taylor placed another newspaper article describing his achievements in his growing scrapbook, as though he knew where his life was headed. Stretching out in his wide berth, Munger could peer over at his protégé and smile.

  But back at Munger’s factory headquarters, the bicycling industry was beginning to shake at its core. In the coming days, he and his promising black prodigy would have tough decisions to make.

  The bicycle manufacturing world tilted on its axis in 1896, less than a year after Munger had opened his New England factories. At Colonel Pope’s “fireproof” Boston headquarters one chilly day, William Ashton, Pope’s head janitor, walked over to a fifth-story windowsill and saw smoke rising. Six stories beneath him, down in the bowels of the basement, wood crates near the boiler had somehow ignited. For the next few hours, a fiery
chain reaction took place, treating Bostonians to a spectacular pyrotechnic display the likes of which they hadn’t seen since the Great Fire of ’72. What began as a tiny spark became a flame, percolated, rolled up through the woodpile, morphed, took a right turn out of the boiler room, licked at the backs of retreating mechanics, then jetted straight for the stairwell.

  Startled, janitor Ashton stormed past bloomer-clad Back Bay ladies taking lessons in the fifth-floor riding academy, then began a death-defying descent down the steps, smoke piercing his lungs. The blaze continued up the elevator wells and stairwells, ripped through the pine-wood ceiling of the first few floors, taking out 1,700 bicycles and 20,000 pieces of machinery in its destructive wake. Thirty-five terrified employees working overtime scattered in all directions, some smashing windows, others stampeding toward stairs in hopes of beating the inferno to the exits, their bloomers crackling down the steps. In the hallway, a black-suited elevator conductor stood doggedly at his post like a loyal captain on a sinking ship.

  Then, on the fourth floor, the inexorable force of angry red flames met the highly flammable tire room filled with five thousand tires as well as the grease-filled ball bearing room. The advancing flame won. In the middle of it all, an electric power plant sang out a booming chorus heard throughout Boston. Meanwhile, thousands of lights popped under the heat, shooting beams of light like lightning bolts in all directions. Outside, walls of snarling flames melted the elaborate terra-cotta trimming and, because no one had turned off the power, a thicket of downed power lines danced on the sodden streets, zapping onlookers below.

  Within a half hour, the one-alarm fire became two, three, four, and then a full-scale, citywide general alarm. Nearly every fireman in town circled the place, hooking up hoses, setting up ladders, and dousing the building in water, one fireman snapping his leg in the confusion. Like sweating bodies trying to cool themselves, hotel buildings across the street began smoking from the scorching heat. Panicked guests scalded their hands when they touched their windows.

  Meanwhile, Ashton clawed his way to the second floor before succumbing to smoke inhalation. Somehow, he slid into the second-floor sanctum of Pope’s personal secretary, R. W. Winkley, where the two of them, half delirious, were helped down a ladder by Boston’s finest.

  The mammoth conflagration shuddered along in an unbridled push toward total annihilation. It crackled up to the fifth and final floor, taking out the riding academy and all freshly used bicycles, their rubber tires and leather saddles vaporized, steel wheels still gyrating in eerie suspense. Finally, it made a frenzied beeline for Pope’s sacred penthouse suite filled with reams of Civil War memorabilia, priceless oil paintings, and a vast library of Wheelmen and various other cycling periodicals. Like the Great Fire of London, it hovered there, lapping and licking its blistering, one-thousand-degree flames at decades of colorful volumes of American literature and rare artifacts.

  At 11:30 p.m., the all-out siren finally sounded. Miraculously, no one died in the fire—it could have been a mini-holocaust. In the weeks before the fire, as many as six thousand people a day had attended banner exhibitions inside its doors—but within eight hours the massive “fireproof” factory was no more. POPE BICYCLE BUILDING IN RUINS, headlined the next morning’s Boston Post.

  The colonel, who was in Manhattan designing a nationwide swath of bicycle ads, received a pithy telegram from his round-faced, playboy son: Burned to the Ground. Wire Instructions. Only partially insured and fully angry, Pope sped home. Arriving in Boston, the bicycle giant stood under the smoldering hulk of his former headquarters, picking through the skeletal remains—scorched bicycles with icicles dangling from them, charred machinery, unrecognizable furnishings. Losing his precious, fortune-building bicycles was bad enough, but losing his Civil War memorabilia clearly irked the bicycle magnate.

  His anger had actually surfaced a few months before, but the fire really heated him up. Many of the small manufacturers and some midsized firms had been hawking bikes at prices that didn’t fit into his business model, and he didn’t much like it. “Colonel Pope,” warned one reporter, “is tired of the small dealers and makers.” He had talked a handful of them into folding their firms into his, but many refused.

  However, after the fire, all bets seemed to be off. Knowing he wielded enough power to move markets, Pope issued a dictum that would achieve just that. Much like the auto industry in the early 1900s, he and his larger manufacturing friends like A. G. Spaulding and A. H. Overman began slashing prices from $100 down to $75. Their competition-pruning strategy sent shock waves throughout the industry. And it worked. Almost overnight, scores of small, lightly funded shops, which had survived by offering bikes cheaper than his Columbias, went out of business. A few midsized firms survived.

  Others shivered in their expensive factory offices.

  Thirty-eight miles to the west, in Worcester, Birdie Munger must have read the news and blanched. Niche models like his Birdie Special could command higher prices, but the big sellers like the family-oriented Boyd and the Lady Worcester could not. Before long, he placed the first of several pay-cut notices on his factory bulletin board. Hundreds of employees were suddenly faced with a wrenching dilemma. They could accept a pay cut—an unappealing alternative considering many were earning only a dollar a day to begin with. They could take their noble bike-making skills and try rapping on other employers’ doors in the depths of America’s financial crisis. Or they could train like mad six or seven days a week, muddle through the amateur leagues, qualify for a professional racing license, and throw in their hats with thousands of starry-eyed wannabe Zimmermans.

  If he hadn’t already, surely Taylor began reading the tea leaves when those first notices arrived. In the fall of 1896, he turned eighteen. As a young man living far away from his family, he had taken comfort inside his good friend’s factory walls. But he must have feared giants like Pope pushing midsized bike makers like Munger’s over the brink, leaving him out on the streets or back at the dreaded farm.

  If not a machinist, he could always be a racer. But unlike the hundreds of bike-builders-turned-racers about to join more than a thousand existing pros, Taylor, if he chose that route, faced an added challenge that would pale in comparison to all others. He was, after all, black, while almost all of them were white. This fact became an even greater defiance when the U.S. Supreme Court codified race segregation with the landmark Plessey v. Ferguson case that same year. From a race relations standpoint, with the nebulous new doctrine of “separate but equal,” the nation, according to many, was regressing.

  In this increasingly hostile environment, there was no guarantee Taylor would be granted a professional license, no matter how prodigious his talents appeared to be. Even if he were able to turn pro, would he be guaranteed access to every track, including those in important Southern states? The odds could not have been more against him in the cold, lonely days that lay ahead.

  As evening neared one fall day in 1896, Taylor could peer out his factory window and watch flaky, black soot rise from the chimney stacks. He felt a sense of unease in the metallic whir of Munger’s factory floors. So did the hundreds of blue-shirted workers engaging in their specialties—wheel assembly, framing, enameling, and brazing. Outside, the public lamplighter, all dressed in black, raised a long pole to the streetlights, igniting them with the spark generated from the pole’s tip.

  Somewhere along the line, perhaps from Munger’s many contacts in the industry, Taylor was given the names and numbers of a few men who could, they believed, help him turn professional. Taylor sauntered into Munger’s office, walked by the pay-cut notices hanging on the wall, and picked up a phone, an old rectangular oak box with a crank handle on the side. He rotated the handle one full turn. At Kyle & Woodbury’s central office, a switchboard operator would have picked up the line and asked to whom he wished to be connected. He told her. She scanned the list of subscribers tacked up on the wall, probably let out a hearty laugh, and then dialed. The phone ran
g somewhere in New York, startling, among others, a wiry, high-strung man speed-puffing a cigar in his office suite. He picked the phone up. Taylor’s voice crackled over the noisy line . . .

  Some historians believe that the 1890s produced the greatest number of truly eccentric characters. In addition to Colonel Albert A. Pope, there was also Diamond Jim Brady, the colossal railroad baron, and, of course, the stern-faced Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Morgans. But on the other end of Taylor’s phone line sat perhaps the greatest character of them all—someone working his name into the zeitgeist of 1890s America. His name was William A. Brady, a man the likes of which this country may never see again.

  Chapter 6

  THE FIGHTING SHOWMAN FROM THE WEST

  William A. Brady was the E. F. Hutton of the 1890s: When he spoke, people leaned forward and listened. And they usually did exactly what he asked. With his persuasive oratory skills, Brady could sail through a room full of prominent businessmen, flicking the ashes from his cigar, and if he wished, have them dumping their entire fortunes into snake oil. People seemed to sway willingly to his commands. But it wasn’t so much what he said that attracted people to him; it was how he said it. His booming voice filled the room while an air of confidence radiated around him. Though he was a scrawny, 130-pound man of average height, people paid heed to the strength of his words.

  Only thirty-three years old in 1896, Brady could already look back at a life filled with remarkable adventures. A flamboyant, inflammable Celt with a bottomless capacity for liquor, Brady would have felt smothered in today’s more politically correct environment. He was a classic 1890s man, unfettered and recalcitrant. He lived large, said exactly what was on his mind, was obsessed with gambling, and could care less about money so long as he had piles of it.

  Decades before he was lured by the glamour and bright lights of Broadway—and all the cash—Brady’s childhood was, itself, like an old-time melodrama. Born in San Francisco to a mother named O’Keefe and a father named Brady, perhaps trouble was inevitable. On an afternoon in 1869, his quick-tongued father—who emigrated from Dublin to find gold—was released from Alcatraz prison just in time to get into more trouble. His first act as a free man was to kidnap six-year-old William from his ex-wife, then stuff him on the first boat headed for New York. Once there, young William found himself living atop a dingy bowery saloon and joining an Irish gang that habitually shut down city blocks while clashing with the natives. “We fought all the time on the bowery,” he wrote in one of his autobiographies, “not only rough-and-tumble impromptu brawls, but formal stand-up matches too, with seconds and water buckets and regular rules—the old, grueling, London Prize Ring rules in my time.”