Around the World on Two Wheels

by Peter Zheutlin

  At almost exactly the time the Sloans were complaining to her about their financial hardships and pleading for her affection and attention, Annie was being besieged by the needs, emotional and financial, of her younger sister, Rosa. On October 28, 1895, a little more than a month after her trip ended in Chicago, Rosa wrote Annie from her home in New Jersey. Oddly, while Annie saved very little of her correspondence (or little of it was saved by her children), she saved this letter, one that hints at a very troubled family dynamic. Rosa was ill, for she tells Annie straight away that “the nurse went away.” Then abruptly, and with anger at a slight, real or perceived, she, too, turns to the issue of money.

  “I have that money already which you loaned me and thought I would write to you for the rest. I would not ask you for it if I had it, but as you promised to give it to me and did what you have done I thought I would write. I expected you over Sunday but you failed to come and would like to know the reason why. [sic] If you do not come yourself, send it.”

  Like the letters from the Sloans in Paris, Rosa’s letter is self-pitying. “I must say that I am not feeling very well my leg is [so] sore that I can not stand on it long. [Rosa was a morbidly obese woman.] When night comes I can hardly walk on it,” Rosa wrote. “I hope you will come at once. Come over. Be sure and come over.” The letter is signed, somewhat incongruously, “Your loving sister Rosa.”

  On October 24, 1895, a few days before Rosa’s letter to her, Annie had written a note, probably a draft of a telegram to Rosa’s husband. “Dear Brother,” said the message, “Telegram received. Over stacked with work. Get another woman in the house or else get a servant. Don’t leave her alone. Answer at once.”

  Just back from fifteen months of unfettered freedom on the road, Annie was facing multiple demands, emotional and financial, from friends and family on both sides of the Atlantic and she once again had a husband and children who needed her attention, too.

  It is, therefore, not surprising that Annie ended her communication with the Sloans. In a brief note dated February 28, 1896, Mrs. Sloan bemoans the lack of further word from Annie and seems almost desperate to keep the relationship going. But, this third letter also makes clear that the Sloans probably didn’t even know Annie’s real name, despite the intimate time they spent together. Annie saved this third letter and the envelope: it was addressed to “Miss Annie Londonderry.” Annie knew how to draw people close, but she also knew how to keep her distance and leave them abruptly.

  In 1897, almost two years to the day after the end of her bicycle trip, Annie and Max had a fourth child, Frieda. By 1900, however, Annie was living alone in a boarding house in Ukiah, California, and working as a saleslady. Why she went west and left her family yet again isn’t known. Her three eldest children were off at boarding schools, and Frieda, only a toddler, was living with an unrelated family in Bristol, Maine. How long Annie was in Ukiah is also unknown. But shortly after 1900 she returned to Max once again in New York, where they built a small garment business, Kay & Company, adjacent to a home they purchased on East 214th Street in the Bronx. Annie employed about two dozen workers there. When that business was destroyed by fire in the 1920s, she used the insurance proceeds to start another business, Grace Strap & Novelty on 27th Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan, with a man named Feldman whom she met at a Horn and Hardart Automat in New York. (She was still very good at chatting up strangers.)

  If Annie ever rode a bicycle again, it was purely incidental, but throughout her life she regaled friends and family with stories of her around-the-world bicycle trip and it remained a source of great pride for her. Annie and her husband remained together until Max’s death in 1946, and Annie worked up until a few days before she died, of a stroke, on November 11, 1947.

  In Annie’s scrapbook is a torn piece of brown lined paper with a handwritten note from her to Arthur Brisbane, the legendary editor of the New York World. The note is undated and it is unclear whether the note relates to her bicycle trip or one of her other assignments for the World. Despite its few words, the note speaks volumes about Annie. Indeed, it is as if she wrote her own, very fitting epitaph on that piece of paper: “Mr. Brisbane, I am not afraid. I’ll take the risk myself, Resp. Yours, Mrs. Kopchovsky.”

  Afterword

  I first learned about my great-grandaunt, Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, in the early 1990s from a complete stranger, a researcher named Michael Wells. I had never heard of her, or about her remarkable around-the-world journey, even though she was my great-grandfather’s sister. Though she made headlines throughout the United States and Europe, appeared in advertisements for bicycles and spring water, and had been celebrated the world around, no one in my immediate family, and, as it turns out, almost no one in my extended family had ever heard of Annie, either. At some point many years ago, it’s not clear when or why, the two branches of the family, Annie’s, and my great-grandfather Bennett’s, lost touch with one another.

  In the late 1990s, I started cycling regularly, but had given little thought to Annie since first hearing about her several years before. Then, in 2003, Mr. Wells contacted me again to see if I had learned anything about Annie since we had last corresponded a decade before. I had not but my interest was piqued, in part because I was now cycling myself, and I decided to poke around a bit to see what I could learn. I knew from an old newspaper article Mr. Wells provided that Annie had started her odyssey at the Massachusetts State House, so I called the State House library to see if there was any record of the event there. I was surprised when librarian Eva Murphy told me without hesitation that she knew there was nothing at the State House because she had looked about two years before when a gentleman named Dennis McCown, from Austin, Texas, had inquired about Annie. I was astonished. Annie’s story was obscure at best. Who else, I wondered, was on her trail? Ms. Murphy put me in touch with Dennis and he told me he had stumbled upon Annie while researching the murder of Martin Mrose in El Paso on the night of Annie’s lecture there. Dennis told me that as John Wesley Hardin’s men were dispatching Mrose at the El Paso city dump, Hardin, with Mrose’s wife, Helen, by his side, was at Annie’s lecture. The rest, as they say, is history.

  That an ancestor of mine—my Jewish great-grandaunt from Boston—had crossed paths with such a notorious character of the Old West seemed utterly implausible, and I was hooked. I chased Annie through snow-covered cemeteries in icy rain, across cyberspace, and over miles and miles of microfilm of newspapers published from Chicago to Shanghai and dozens of cities in between. I phoned libraries, historical associations, funeral homes, academics, and newspapers all over the country. I located the descendants of people Annie had met during her travels and wrote them looking for long-lost remnants of her journey. And, after months of searching, I found her only direct, living descendant, her granddaughter, Mary, who had all of the artifacts that remain of Annie’s journey (at least those I have been able to find), including her lantern-slide show. The slides are made of glass and, remarkably, they had survived shipment around the world in the 1890s and many moves in the years since.

  During the chase, Annie’s story became, in some respects, my story, too. As I struggled up the modest hills west of Boston on my superlight, carbon-fiber Trek bicycle, dressed in neon green breathable fabrics, cell phone in my saddle bag and a Gatorade in my bottle cage, I soon found myself thinking of Annie dressed in long skirts going over the Hudson Highlands on her forty-two-pound ladies’ Columbia bicycle, or, later, in bloomers, crossing the Arizona desert on her men’s Sterling, a hundred miles from nowhere with nothing but the hope of a passing freight in case of misfortune. She was, and is, my cycling muse. But that, alone, hardly explains the thousands of hours and the small fortune I’ve spent trying to recover this story of one Victorian woman’s quest.

  A few weeks after I started my research, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I was nearing fifty, and although this disease is generally treatable, my deepening obsession with Annie and my cancer diagnosis were more closely linked than I
understood at the time. As we face our own mortality we yearn, I think, to see ourselves as more than the sum of our years. If we look forward through the windshield, and have children or grandchildren, we gain a measure of reassurance in the knowledge that we will live on, in some way, through our children and their progeny. And if we look back, at our parents, grandparents, and other ancestors, we see the road in the rear-view mirror, too. Through family history we seek our connection to the past and the future and an appreciation of our place in the long human chain.

  After my cancer surgery and treatment, the bicycle was my path back to health and a sense of well-being. During those days in the saddle, I felt as if my bike was tethered to Annie’s; that she was pulling me up and over the hills west of Boston. She kept me company, provided inspiration, and occupied my imagination as the miles went by. Getting back on my bike as soon and as often as I could made me feel very much alive. That I was finding my solace, and my strength, on two wheels, as Annie had, connected me to her in ways that I could not have imagined before. I found myself sympathizing with her for taking control of her life, even though others, especially her children, paid a heavy price for her independence. In different ways, Annie and I each found freedom on two wheels and used the bicycle to exercise control over our own destinies. For both of us, the bicycle became an implement of power.

  WHEN I FIRST began the search that eventually led to her granddaughter, Mary, I quickly learned that Annie was going to be an elusive quarry for an amateur historian such as myself. The official records—her marriage registration, the birth registrations for her children, and various census records—gave wildly conflicting information about two basic facts: Annie’s place of birth and her age. She was either born in Russia, Poland, Massachusetts, New York, or Pennsylvania; and her age was all over the map, too. I was completely perplexed. Even if Annie’s date and place of birth didn’t promise to shed any light on her bicycle trip, trying to reconcile the conflicts and omissions provided valuable insight into Annie’s character. It was clear that, when it came to giving information to various officials, she was hardly a slave to the truth, and I began to suspect that she was going to prove to be a rather roguish and impish personality (more than one person hearing this story has suggested she was pathological).

  After seven months of searching, it was two small death notices in the New York Times, one for Max and another for Annie, that led me to the New Jersey cemetery where they are buried and, through the cemetery, to Mary. (Coincidentally, the cemetery is just minutes from the house where I grew up and my paternal grandparents are buried there, as well. Annie is on my mother’s side.) I didn’t know if Mary was still alive when I learned her name (she was listed as the contact person in the cemetery records, but those records were thirteen years old) and I wasn’t sure how she would respond to a letter from a complete stranger poking around in her grandmother’s life. But I wrote, and feeling this was either going to be the end of the road or the beginning of a new one, I waited. Then, one evening, about ten days later, the phone rang.

  “Peter,” said a woman’s voice, “this is your long-lost cousin, Mary.” With those words my entire body quivered with emotion.

  Mary told me that my interest in Annie, and in recovering her history, had lifted a burden. For decades Mary felt she was supposed to do something with Annie’s legacy, but didn’t know what. Now, I had come along out of the blue, a blood relation no less, to provide the solution. Mary wondered aloud whether our ancestors “up there” had colluded to bring us together. “If you write my grandmother’s story,” Mary said when we first spoke, “it will be the fulfillment of my dreams!” With those words, I was truly on a mission.

  Mary was seventy-two when we first spoke in late October 2003, and she is Annie’s only grandchild, the only child of Annie’s youngest daughter, Frieda, and thus Annie’s only living lineal, biological descendant. Mary knew Annie well. She was sixteen when her grandmother died on November 11, 1947, and during the final year and a half of Annie’s life, after Max died, Annie and Mary shared a bedroom in the latter’s home.

  I asked Mary if she had the diary Annie reportedly kept. Alas, she did not, and its whereabouts, if indeed it ever existed, remain a mystery. Mary has her doubts. “If my grandmother kept a diary,” she told me, “she almost surely would have shown it to me.” Annie spoke often and with pride about her bicycle trip to friends and family throughout her long life, and Mary believes she would have brandished the diary if she had kept one, though it could have been lost or destroyed at some point.

  “She loved the drama of telling a story,” Mary explained, “more than she did the living of ordinary life, and when she spoke of her bicycle trip it was if she was again very far from her later life as a business woman and a Jewish housewife. Even in business she thrived on the drama and the manipulation, being somewhat less moved by the results. Even the idea of motherhood, at least in the early years, probably outweighed the actual living out of the experience of being a mother.”

  “And,” in a comment that seemed especially apropos, Mary said, “my grandmother had to be moving all the time. She was very persuasive, too. She could tell a story and you would just believe. If she wanted to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, you would buy it.”

  When Mary and I first met in early November 2003, shortly after that first telephone conversation, I asked her about the two simple facts that had so bedeviled my early research, Annie’s date and place of birth. It didn’t surprise Mary in the least that her grandmother might have been the source for much of the conflicting information, for Annie, she suggested, had a casual relationship with the truth and was an inveterate storyteller.

  One family story Mary related was especially strange and fueled my growing suspicion that the ghost I was chasing was a wily and imaginative one, and that the story of her bicycle trip would not be a straightforward one.

  Annie had always spoken of a twin brother, Jake, who had died when she was young. And Mary’s mother, Frieda, no doubt repeating a story told to her by Annie, had said that Jake had frozen to death on Boston Common as a young man, after a fight with his father. The suggestion was that Jake had gotten drunk after the fight and passed out in the cold. Annie did, in fact, have a brother Jacob; he was the younger brother who died of a lung infection at age seventeen in May 1894, just before she left on her bike trip. But a twin who froze to death on Boston Common?

  First, Jacob was born at least five or six years after Annie. They weren’t twins. Second, Jacob died on May 12, 1894, and while snow has been known to cover the tulips in Boston in spring, it would have been quite a feat to freeze to death in May. Finally, Annie and Jacob’s father, my great-great grandfather Levi, died in 1887, seven years before Jacob’s birth. Jacob didn’t die after a fight with his father. The whole story struck me as an especially peculiar family legend to pass down, particularly because it clearly wasn’t true. Annie really knew how to spin a yarn, that much was becoming clear, and I now had a clear sense of what an outrageous character she was.

  After showing me articles Annie had written for the New York World, including her story about the wild man, Mary and I leafed through a scrapbook, fragile with age, in which Annie kept various mementos of her bicycle trip, and several family photograph albums. I asked Mary why Max agreed to his wife’s leaving. She replied that he was a passive man and adored the ground Annie walked (or rode) on. Though Annie told the World in July 1894 she would not have taken the trip without her husband’s consent, Max had little choice; she called the shots. “She was pretty good at disappearing,” said Mary. But, Mary also described her grandparents as having a very caring relationship, one devoid of acrimony. However, whenever Annie talked about her bike trip later in her life, as she often did, it was never in front of Max and he never, ever discussed it.

  As I dug deeper into Annie’s life, I was especially curious to know about her eldest daughter, Mollie, who had been five when her mother had disappeared from her life for fifteen months. Mol
lie was not mentioned as a survivor, as her siblings were, in Annie and Max’s death notices, nor was she buried in the family plot in New Jersey where her parents and siblings are buried. I was sure, based on this information, that Mollie predeceased them. When I asked about Mollie, Mary, to my surprise, looked shaken and wept softly. The story she was about to tell me left me practically speechless.

  As noted earlier, when Annie returned home from her bicycle trip, she was no more enamored of motherhood and domestic life than when she had left. As soon as her children were old enough, five or six years old, she and her Orthodox Jewish husband sent them to boarding schools—Catholic boarding schools! Though Annie kept a kosher home, she was not as devout as Max and was even, perhaps, agnostic, but she had a strong cultural identity as a Jew. Nevertheless, they first sent Mollie and Libbie to a French-speaking school run by the Dominican Sisters in Lewiston, Maine. Simon, Jr. was dispatched to a Catholic school in Arthabaskaville, Quebec. Annie visited them infrequently. Eventually, however, all the girls, Mollie, Libbie, and Mary’s mother, Frieda, attended Mount Saint Mary’s in Newburgh, New York, ostensibly so they would be closer to home.

  Why Catholic schools? As my own Jewish mother might say, “Don’t ask.” It was, no matter how you look at it, a bizarre decision, though Mary suggested Annie believed the children would receive a superior education and be well cared for there.

  All of Annie’s children had suffered profoundly, “been damaged,” in Mary’s words, by their mother’s inability or lack of interest in mothering them, as evidenced by both her bicycle trip, during which she left them for fifteen months, and her dispatching them to boarding schools when they were very young. Mary told me my letter had unleashed a flood of conflicting emotions because the ripple effects of Annie’s choice to leave her young children to bicycle the world—and of subsequent decisions borne of the same fierce independence—are still felt today. Mary believes that many of the emotional struggles Annie’s children faced in their lives, and that she faced in hers, can be traced to her grandmother’s virtual abandonment of her children when they were very young. Annie’s son, Simon, was deeply embittered, never married despite several engagements, and always lived in a perfectly neat, rented room. He spent most of his life in a rage, mostly directed at the Catholic Church. Libbie had an unsuccessful marriage and another romance that ended tragically. Frieda, Mary’s mother, constructed a fantasy in which no better parents than Annie and Max had ever walked the earth, a fantasy she held tightly into old age. But no one responded to Annie’s mothering—and to being sent away to Catholic boarding school—more dramatically than had Mollie.