Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  For young riders like Taylor, Zimmerman was the sun around which all things had revolved. Taylor constantly measured his performances and his sportsmanship to Zimmie’s, as did the press. Zimmerman stood tall as an ideal role model from that moment they first met when Taylor proclaimed himself to be the proudest boy in the world. With each season, a new batch of riders, hoping to emulate him and his friend the Flying Negro, came up through the ranks. With or without an invitation from promoters, Zimmerman—suffering from rheumatism in his declining years—was known to hobble up to track aprons, gazing out at the young riders, and watching as the wheels of his sport rolled on without him. He was, Taylor cooed, “the hero of all boyhood, as well as my own, ever since I was able to read the newspaper.”

  Even the ground he raced on was immortalized. When a Miami, Florida, developer learned that his golf course was set to cut through the very ground where the Great Zimmerman once raced, he wouldn’t allow his workers to destroy the track.

  On a breezy October day in 1936 while visiting friends in Atlanta, Zimmerman died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-seven. In one of the roughs on that Miami golf course, portions of the track rose up, standing as a testament to the one-time popularity of America’s first international superstar.

  Sometime around 1930, a former bike racer named Jim Levy stirred nervously in the sales office of his Chicago Buick dealership. Prophetically, auto sales had begun dropping eight months before the stock market crash, and Levy, like most car dealers at the time, sat wondering where his next sale was going to come from. Just then, a wizened old man wearing clergy-like clothes and thick-rimmed glasses limped up to him. It was Taylor, in one of his only known sightings in Chicago before his death. And he wasn’t there to buy a car. After small talk about the old days—there is no indication they knew each other well—Taylor pulled out a copy of his blue-bound autobiography with a drawing of him inside a globe on the book's jacket. He splayed it open on Levy’s desk. As he had at auto dealerships from Worcester to Chicago, Taylor tried sweet-talking Levy and his salesmen into buying a stack of his books to be given as a gift to car-buying customers. Levy reached for $3.50 and bought a copy or two, probably rare signed copies that, if a person could find one, sell for two hundred times that amount today.

  Much of Taylor’s final movements remain shrouded in mystery—the kind of riddle that frustrates yet intrigues. Someday the gaps may be filled, but then again, perhaps this is the only way his final days could be drawn up.

  What is known is that he descended into the same life of poverty and obscurity from which he had initially risen. Having left Worcester for Chicago in the same state as he entered it in 1895—a few dollars short of flat broke amid a depression and facing an uncertain future—Taylor watched helplessly as history repeated itself.

  Taylor could not have picked a tougher time or place to sell his book, or for that matter, to sell anything. The Great Depression loomed heavy over the city. Thousands slept in parks, at rail stations, and under cardboard boxes. “I do not know how it may have been in other places . . . but in Chicago the city seemed to have died,” one woman recalled. “There was something awful—abnormal—in the very stillness of the streets.” Being the largest manufacturing city in the nation, Chicago was especially hard hit. By 1932, the worst year, 750,000 Chicagoans, nearly half the workforce, were unemployed. One hundred sixty thousand Chicago families received relief from private and public agencies. Soup kitchens dotted the landscape.

  When Taylor took up residence at the YMCA on South Wabash Avenue, which often subsidized rents for those who couldn’t pay in full, he may have been one of those receiving relief. Known as the “colored” Y and standing in a neighborhood called Bronzeville, the five-story brick building trimmed with Bedford limestone became Taylor’s home for two years. It was there a few years before his arrival that Carter G. Woodson, a historian who stayed at that Wabash Y during visits to the city, formed the idea that if whites learned more about blacks, race relations would improve. In 1926, he started black history month. He chose February because it contains the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, plus Valentine’s Day, a day of love and affection. Though he has never been properly recognized for his pioneering role, few men personify the spirit and the original meaning of Woodson’s black history month better than Major Taylor.

  In that respect, the Wabash YMCA may have been a fitting stop for Taylor. In other ways, it had to have been unsettling. For one, it was a far cry from the comforts of the seven-bedroom home, beautiful wife, and admiring neighbors he had enjoyed in his adopted town of Worcester. But more importantly, for a black man so used to mingling with whites—and one who had always judged people by their character, not their color—the segregation had to be disconcerting, even unnatural. During the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the North early in the twentieth century, formal and informal segregation limited them to only certain areas of the city. Taylor must have felt suffocated by this. One can imagine him, as he had throughout his life, testing those rigid racial divides, on occasion drifting across the artificial borders, stepping bravely into the white world, copies of his memoir tucked into his side. “In closing,” wrote Taylor in his last chapter, “I wish to say that while I was sorely beset by a number of white riders in my racing days, I have also enjoyed the friendship of countless thousands of white men whom I class as my closest friends.”

  With the six-day race still going strong—helping to keep viable the new Chicago Stadium that had already teetered on bankruptcy—Taylor likely mixed with the diverse crowd at the endurance test that had launched his professional career. There, with more than 125,000 racegoers twice a year, he would have found the largest base of fans interested in his book. Chicago also still had outdoor racetracks. Taylor probably introduced himself to the new crop of riders, doting on them, filling their eager ears with tales of his races against Jacquelin, Bald, and MacFarland—then gently coaxing $3.50 for a copy of his book, signed by his wavering hand. “All the kids talked about Major Taylor and loved him,” remembered ninety-five-year-old Worcester resident Francis Jesse Owens. “I have a soft spot in my heart for him because when we were kids and we’d be racing bicycles and a guy would say, ‘Who do you think you are, Major Taylor?”’ He had used a common phrase that would later be parodied by speeding motorist; “Who do you think you are, Barney Oldfield,” referring to Taylor’s former rival who became a famous race car driver.

  But except for a few dozen cities, the colorful outdoor racing world that saw Taylor rise to superstardom had sadly atrophied. Many historians point to the automobile to explain the once-grand sport’s demise. But a quick glance at horse racing brings pause to such claims. The popularity of the two sports had run parallel: wildly popular in the 1890s and early 1900s, each boasting hundreds of robust tracks, followed by near extinction, leaving only a few dozen mostly rundown tracks by the late ’20s. Because of aggressive lobbying for relegalized wagering by a handful of wealthy, enterprising men, horse racing experienced tremendous growth in the 1930s and beyond.

  There was mild debate in a handful of cities, including Chicago during Taylor’s stay, about whether the new laws allowing pari-mutuel betting applied to bike racing as well as horse racing. With the same concerted effort, some believe, bike track racing could have remained on par with other sports in the American conscience like it has in much of Europe. At that seminal moment, and each year since, the sport needed a William Brady, James Kennedy, or “Huge Deal” McIntosh to pursue legalized betting. No such figure materialized. Much like Taylor’s own life, the sport therefore withered on the vine, its legacy surviving mainly in the memory of those who lived it, or in a few rider’s postmortems found only in obscure books now collecting dust in libraries or at rare auctions.

  The halcyon days were over. One by one, the vibrant velodromes that had roared with millions of voices became wind-whipped and deserted. Others met with the wrecking ball, to be replaced with the distant din of
baseball bats cracking, horses galloping, or industry churning. Even Madison Square Garden, a magnificent creation of the Gilded Age where Taylor’s career began and Brady courted his wife, fell into disrepair. Before it was torn down and replaced in 1924, the once-grand pleasure palace was nothing but a creaky old place.

  Early in 1932, Taylor weakened. In what is believed to be the last photograph ever taken of him, he looked frail and old. But he maintained his honor. Sporting a well-fitting suit, smart tie, and a handkerchief pressed neatly into his coat pocket, Taylor looked hallow-eyed at what appears to be a Bible, like a man of the cloth preparing to read from the gospel. Taylor had preached in Worcester and Australia, and the photo suggests that when strong enough, he had continued spreading the word of God to the attentive ears of Chicago’s many needy, perhaps at one of the Baptist churches near the YMCA.

  But as the nation sunk to its lowest ebb in the spring of 1932, Taylor faded. The excess weight he carried after his racing career and the shingles he suffered during the ’20s combined to further weaken his heart and kidneys. Eventually his life contracted further, confining him to the Provident Hospital. James Bowler, a longtime Chicago alderman and former pro racer, became Taylor’s white benefactor. Bowler had competed at the 1899 World Championships in Montreal and had raced Taylor to a draw in Chicago that same year. Feeling content to have tied a rider of Taylor’s stature, Bowler then refused a rematch. More than three decades later, Bowler stepped up on Taylor’s behalf, bringing in the city’s best surgeons. But Bowler’s benevolence came too late. For a month, the doctors worked on him, probably until all money and hope was gone.

  Weak, shaky, and virtually alone, Taylor was forced to live out his last days in the sterile internment of the Cook County Charity Ward. Suffering from chronic myocarditis, the resulting fatigue, shortness of breath, and severe chest pains made him a hostage in his own body. But as Taylor lay in that liminal state between life and death, he felt prepared for the afterlife. “And I have always said,” he had told a reporter at the height of his career, “I’m not living for one day or two. I am going to live on and on—I am living for the eternal, and to a man who knows he is living for the eternal, and will one day face the Supreme Being, a day or two now isn’t of much consequence. God has always taken care of me, and I believe he always will.”

  At two-thirty on the afternoon of June 21, 1932, Major Taylor’s fifty-three-year-old heart failed him. In an undignified scene, the body of the world’s fastest man lay in the Cook County Morgue unclaimed. Nine hundred miles south in New Orleans, his daughter Sydney received a copy of the Chicago Defender—the only paper to report his death—from a mysterious source. As is often the case, with age comes understanding and yearning for family reconciliation, sometimes too late. “I feel terrible he died alone in a hospital,” she later said. “I didn’t realize it then, because I was always mad at him. But I sure do wish I would have called him back and said, ‘Daddy, I didn’t understand what it must have been like to be a black man in those days.’”

  Initially, she couldn’t bring herself to tell Daisy. But eventually she found the words and the courage to tell her of his passing. Daisy, who would live in anonymity for another thirty-two years, could peer out her window in wistful silence, her thoughts drifting back to those glory years.

  More than a week passed from the day of Taylor’s death and still no one came forward to claim his remains. The county eventually arranged for his burial in an unmarked pauper’s grave in the welfare section of the Mount Glenwood Cemetery. There, a handful of anonymous men buried the man who once was the world’s most popular athlete, a man who had attracted record crowds in dozens of countries on three continents. Almost no one came. The few who did watched him go under in a plain wooden box clutching a Bible, his last earthly possession, then turned their backs to his grave and walked away. Behind them, deep beneath that hardened Chicago earth, laid the memory of a lost era, and the remains of the gentle man who led it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  If you’re ever near the Library of Congress and have a great deal of time, ask a librarian to escort you to the bicycle history section in the Adams building. After strolling down a vast corridor, passing by a jungle of better known American history, you will be ushered into a cavernous room. On its many shelves, weighed down by a century of gathering dust, rests one of the most remarkable and undertold collections of Americana. There, cycling periodicals like Bearings, Cycle Age, and Bicycle World are so thick, our librarian struggled to carry them to her copier. When you open their oversized pages, you will be transported back to a fascinating era, now largely lost to the world. Amid its countless photos and articles of one-time famous figures, one man’s story stands out above all others. Yet as voluminous as those magazines are, only a portion of the decades-long story of Major Taylor can be found in their pages.

  The rest of his epic saga was strewn in dozens of countries on four continents. It was buried in musty old books written in many languages. It has lingered there in the fading memory of those few living people who’d met him or heard of him. Few life stories, in fact, require cobbling together more information from as many places as Major Taylor’s. For four and a half years, we sifted through a rubric’s cube of data. It was like a three-dimensional puzzle that seemed at times to have no end, a perpetual time warp of information, sometimes lacking exact dates, times, or places. Other times, it came to us in microscopic fonts needing magnifying glasses to decipher.

  We scrawled our narrative’s general outline from Taylor’s autobiography. Yet in line with the usual Victorian reticence about private matters, Taylor hid things from the public in his memoir. Our narrative was enhanced by his extensive scrapbook that, evidenced by his letters to Daisy, revealed his inner sentiments, vulnerabilities, and secrets. But had we stopped there, viewing the world from one man’s eyes and remembrances, the story would still lack the depth and richness provided by the characters surrounding him. It was from Zimmerman’s scrapbook that we learned of Munger’s booming voice and Zimmerman’s propensity to walk off stages, leaving dignitaries scrambling. In a crinkly and coffee-stained seventy-year-old book—and Brady’s ninety-two scrapbooks—we were entertained by his brawl with Virgil Earp and details of his love for and contributions to the sport of track racing.

  Hidden in a friable sixty-year-old book from Asia, we read of Floyd MacFarland’s profanity-laced tirades in front of Australian newsmen. Frank Van Straten’s entertaining biography on Hugh McIntosh helped us better understand this fascinating but complex sportsman. We were able to trace the seeds of anger bubbling inside William Becker from a source that appeared in our mailbox one day. An errant phone call to a former wheelman from that era transported us into the grandstand at an early century bike race as well as any article we ever read. Much to our surprise, he also willingly shared stories that he had heard about the titillating nightlife in France. Francis Jesse Owens, a Worcester resident nearing his centenary birthday, and one of the few living people who had met Taylor, shed light on Taylor’s declining days. When he spoke in his amazingly lucid way about the time Taylor patted him on the back and told him that he (seventeen at the time) was “a fine young boy,” and then tried selling him a copy of his book, we shut our mouths and listened.

  Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, our research led us down some bizarre roads. We will not soon forget our phone call to Bob Lommel at the Stearns County (Minnesota) Historical Society, as part of our research into the strange death of Joseph Griebler. Since Griebler was a little known rider who had raced professionally for only a few months, we expected to be greeted with a puzzled, “Joseph who?” But much to our amazement, the minute the word Griebler sprang out of our mouths, there was a resounding “yes, we know his story well.” It turns out the society had a file with forty-five pages of letters and articles, enlightening everything from his prerace shoe shopping for his kids to his last dying words, “I’m awfully sick.” But the eeriest part came when he told us he had just g
otten off the phone—Griebler died 111 years before our call—with city council members discussing a new bicycle trail named in honor of, you guessed it, obscure Joseph Griebler.

  It was as if the story was waiting to spring forth from people’s lips, to be unburied from auctions, dusted off in libraries. It was begging to be unearthed and then pieced together. To get a better sense of the texture of the era, we bought (or tried to buy) everything we could get our hands on: Major Taylor buttons from an odd auction, rare Taylor trading cards from France, accordion fans and Ogden cigarettes bearing his likeness, Wheelmen magazines that survived the ruinous Pope fire era. Some purchases were flat-out scams—we are still waiting for that “one of a kind” Taylor trading card from someone in Finland. From an aged wheelman, we acquired a hard-to-find copy of Arthur Zimmerman’s book that, among other enlightenments, placed us inside Paris’s famous Café l’Esperance. We eventually amassed so much information the greatest difficulty was deciding what not to use; on one website alone, the phrase Major Taylor produced over two thousands hits. But many newspapers have yet to be scanned in for online searches. So we burrowed our heads under microfilm at libraries at various locations. Some trips added invaluable dimensions to the story. Philadelphia papers detailing the 1897 annual convention that attracted 50,000 fans, reportedly the largest paying crowd in American sports history, come to mind. Other trips were less revealing; one visit to a Midwestern town revealed so little new information, we had no choice but to turn it into a cycling vacation.