The Fast Times of Albert Champion

by Peter Joffre Nye

  The final motor-pace team was led by twenty-one-year-old Harry Miles, steering for the first time professionally,43 with stoker Will Stafford of Cam-bridgeport. Miles, a machinist at General Electric,44 was engaged to his high school darling, May Nolan,45 and the couple had set June 13 as their wedding day.46 Miles was racing to earn extra money for their honeymoon. His partner, Stafford, twenty-four, had racing experience—in fact, Stafford had recently recovered from a motor-pace crash in Nashville. Full of bravado, he told John J. Donovan, “I have come through the battle of San Juan Hill, but I’ll get killed at this game yet.”47

  Miles and Stafford were on hand to pace Billy Stinson of Cambridge, an eighteen-year-old with a contract to ride for the Chicago-based Rambler Cycles, predecessor to the Rambler Motor Company. Superstitious reporters noted the team armbands that Stafford, Miles, and Stinson each tied on: unlucky Number 13.48

  More than ten thousand spectators—almost half of Waltham’s population—streamed into Bicycle Park, the largest crowd since opening day in 1892.49 Half of the spectators were women—many from textile mills and a school for nurses. Wearing white dresses with leg-of-mutton sleeves that were all the rage, they had donned broad-brimmed hats trimmed with dried flowers. Most of the men sported new straw boaters for the season; some wore derbies.

  The spectators crammed the cheap bleacher seats around the oval, while those who could afford it took seats in the cavernous grandstand, sheltered from the sun by a high, slanted roof. The stadium and cheap seats burbled with excited voices. Behind the bleachers stood a row of wooden cabins that riders used as their quarters.50 Racers and trainers milled around the cabins on the dirt service road, pungent with rubbing liniment, gasoline fumes, and sour sweaty clothing.

  On the infield, straight above the start-finish line, loomed a wooden tower for officials and timers. Next to it sat the press table for reporters and illustrators. A pack of newshounds from Boston’s eight newspapers and other trade publications lounged on chairs as they traded gossip and shoptalk, smoked, and hoped for world records so their stories would get more attention.

  At 2:30 on the dot, announcer Fletcher Hayvee stepped up to a huge mega-phone supported by a steel stand jammed into the grassy infield near the start/finish line. A portly man, Hayvee dabbed sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. He wore all white—from his boater, linen jacket, shirt, and duck trousers down to his shoes. His handlebar mustache danced in front of the metal rim of the megaphone as he introduced the first race.

  The program’s first act featured a one-lap competition for sixty novices.51 The hopefuls competed in heats of a dozen contenders, with the winners advancing to the next round. In one of the early heats, a rider’s chain broke and set off the day’s first big spill.52 Riders limped away, leaving their hides on the concrete.

  Ultimately, finalists vied in the runoff for a gold watch.53 They set such a hot pace that the audience stood and cheered. Then followed a half-miler and additional events. A handicap tandem contest finished so close that the crowd sprang to its feet again and hollered with excitement.

  During these preliminary races, Champion warmed up outside a training cabin, pedaling on wooden rollers set on the grassy lawn off the service road. He worked up a sweat, listening to the roar of the crowd, while Gately and Marks made a final inspection of their motor-tandem. Marks squatted beside the engine and discovered the spark plug needed replacing. From somewhere in his battered tool chest he dug up a spare. He inserted the replacement plug and later mentioned to Champion that it did not fit well but it was the best he had.54

  Michael wheeled onto the track behind a motor-tandem for his five-mile celebrity exhibition ride, his first public appearance in two years. “As the little fellow entered the stretch riding alone, a cheer went up from the crowd, which fully attested the everlasting popularity of the Welsh midget, the idol of the women and the bleacher fans,” wrote John J. Donovan in the Globe.55 “Lap after lap the little fellow reeled off, following in his old-time manner, head erect and body perfectly immobile, and occasionally displaying the wonderful control he has over a machine by affectionately rubbing his tire against the rear tire of his pacing machine.”

  His stunt of rubbing wheels drew gasps from the audience, sophisticated about the danger he invited. Hayvee boomed out Michael’s lap times. Michael showed he still had the chops—and he entertained.

  Finally, it was time for the main event: the twenty-mile motor-pace race. Champion yearned to control his Waltham debut from start to finish, earn a generous payday in about forty minutes of riding, and grab his fix of la gloire! As he rolled onto the cement oval behind King Gately and Marks, announcer Fletcher Hayvee directed his megaphone at the grandstand and boomed introductions. Champion had a name perfectly suited for Hayvee: Al-bear Champ-eeeon! Champ-eee-on! All the way from Pair-eee, France!

  Cheers and applause greeted Albert. The mill girls and nursing students all shook white linen handkerchiefs at him.56 He acknowledged them with a wave and a broad smile.

  Gately and Marks, togged up in black wool shorts and white jerseys matching Champion’s outfit, pulled alongside their man and accelerated for a few practice laps. Albert caught their draft and increased the speed to 30 mph. After they finished, Gately aimed for the black start-finish line painted across the cement in front of the grandstand. There the Typhoon and the two other motor-tandems waited, engines put-putting. Champion and his rivals dismounted as officials conferred, a scrum in white suits and straw boaters.

  Official starter Lon Peck was scolding Typhoon pacers Hedstrom and Kent for the trousers they wore, claiming they gave more shield for Waltham’s Everett Ryan.57 Champion, in his broken English, took Peck’s side and looked ready to take a swing at Hedstrom as they squabbled. Peck ordered Hedstrom and Kent to leave and come back wearing regulation shorts like the other teams.

  Despite the dustup, when it was time to go to the start line, Peck gave local favorite Ryan the inside lane. Champion, MacEachern, and Stinson sidled up alongside Ryan. Metz and three other men stepped from the infield to grasp the bicycles of their riders, who jammed the fronts of their shoes into the steel toe clips and gripped bare hands around the handlebar drops.

  Behind them, the motor-tandems idled with metronomic put-puts. Peck pointed his pistol to the sky while Hayvee intoned: “Get Ready…Get Set…”

  Then Peck’s pistol boomed.

  Once around the track the motors went, whirring back over the start-finish line. Then the cyclists were pushed on their way, muscling the one-speed bicycles that had been fitted with a gear bigger than regular bicycles so they could ride faster behind the motors.

  Ryan, eager to prove himself, caught his motor-tandem first, on the back straight.58 Next, Champion dove behind his team and urged Marks to fly after Ryan. Down the homestretch after the first lap, Marks opened the throttle; King Gately guided Champion past Ryan and the Typhoon with finesse that evoked applause from an audience well attuned to the nuances of motorpace racing. Ryan and his Typhoon chased, pursued by MacEachern and Stinson. At the end of the first mile, the order stayed the same, with Champion leading by twenty feet.59

  During the second mile, Stinson and his pacers attacked with a sharp acceleration.60 Miles aimed the machine wide, while stoker Stafford gave the engine more gas. Stinson pedaled hard to overtake Champion on the approach to the top of the bank on turn three. Abruptly, however, the engine of Champion’s pacing machine skipped and the tandem of King Gately and Marks slowed.61 Champion’s front wheel, traveling 30 mph, punched the rear wheel of the tandem. Champion fell to the track as his steel bicycle clattered on the concrete.62

  At this point, all four teams had spread out in an echelon across the track. To avoid driving over the fallen Champion, Miles aimed his tandem through a hole between the tandem of Kent and Ruel and the outside perimeter.63

  Then came the unforeseen. As John J. Donovan reported in the Globe:

  Critics say that an expert could have done it, but be that as
it may, Miles steered the tandem straight up to the top of the bank. But he could not have seen that he was steering straight toward a big telegraph pole at the top of the bank. With a crash and a thud that was heard across the oval, tandem and riders were hurled upon the pole. With a roar that was partly a scream, 10,000 persons rose to their feet in time to see the tandem, after recovering from the recoil, leap over the bank and land on the picket fence separating the track from the entrance. After Miles crashed into the pole, his body dropped down, while Stafford was thrown to the right and he shot through the air like a human catapult, his head and shoulders being driven through the fence.64

  Hundreds stumbled down the stands and ran to the disaster.65 Blood poured from the mouths and ears of both Miles and Stafford, their clothing torn to shreds. Miles’s fiancée, May Nolan, who had been watching from the stands, went into shock and fainted.66 Friends gathered around to comfort her.

  Miles and Stafford were carried to the training quarters and placed on cots. The collision had also injured two spectators standing near the telegraph pole. One man had both hips broken; another man’s leg was fractured.67 Long minutes passed before horse-drawn ambulances hauled all four to the Waltham hospital, atop a hill over the track.

  Albert Champion is shown here lying on his stomach after falling from a crash that caused two men to die, the worst accident at the time in American sports. From the Boston Globe, May 31, 1900.

  Miles was dead on arrival.68 Hours later, Stafford was lifeless.69

  Incredibly, the competitors on the track were ignorant of the horrific accident and kept on as usual. Ryan and MacEachern capitalized on Champion’s spill by yelling at their stokers to go faster.70 Ryan stole the lead, MacEachern trailed by thirty feet, and even Stinson kept chasing though his motor-tandem had disappeared into eternity.

  As quickly as he had fallen, Champion had scrambled to his feet.71 He slapped the dirt and grass from scrapes and cuts as a group of onlookers and some reporters ran to offer help. He exclaimed, “What do you think—I know not how to fall, hey?”72 He grabbed his Orient and pedaled away.

  When Gately and Marks swung past on the home straight, Champion caught the draft but threw both arms in the air and bellowed at them to go faster. He did not grip the handlebars again until Marks reached the speed he demanded.

  Champion had lost two laps to Ryan and MacEachern, flying behind their motor-tandems, and the lone Stinson, who would soon be pulled from the race by officials.73 Champion kept up with their speed until the five-mile mark. Then, once again, the engine of his pacing machine popped with one misfire after another.74 Gately slowed down and Albert swung to the side to avoid more trouble while Marks reached down and made adjustments on the fly.75

  Champion lost another half lap before he resumed full flight. By ten miles, he had made up the half lap—although he was still two laps down, two-thirds of a mile behind—and he pushed MacEachern into the back straight’s far turn, forcing the Canadian outside. For a lap they rode neck and neck,76 backs low, legs pumping like pistons.

  On the home straight, the Canadian overtook the Frenchman.77 MacEachern kept up his momentum and by fifteen miles he had gained a lap on Ryan. As MacEachern usurped the lead, Champion, whether suffering trauma from his fall at 30 mph on the cement or pain from abrasions, lost two more laps on MacEachern and Ryan.

  At the end of twenty miles, MacEachern was the winner. Ryan came in second. Champion placed third.

  “Although defeated, Champion must be given credit,” reported John J. Donovan in the Globe.78 “Had he not met with accidents, he would probably have won.” Donovan added that Champion had lost about a square foot of skin from hip and thigh, with more scraped from his knees, elbows, and shoulders.79

  As soon as Champion veered into the infield, reporters engulfed him. They accused him of causing the tragedy by looking around and not paying attention.80 Champion, sweat pouring, his dark-blond hair wild, barely had time to recover his breath and dismount.

  Fortunately, King Gately barged his motor-tandem into the pack of press and defended Champion: “A motorcycle pacer must take every chance and risk his neck. A careful rider will never make any money.”81

  Meanwhile, Marks—coated in grease and oil up to his forearms—told the Boston Post that someone may have tampered with the engine. “If any oil had been put into the gasoline tanks, it could have spread over the surface, thus preventing the gasoline from vaporizing rapidly enough to furnish the required volume of gas. If a little water had been placed in the carburetor, where the gas and air are mixed, the moisture would have kept the mixture from exploding as it should have done.”82

  Stubby pencils scratched across writing pads. Then the news hawks fled to rush their stories into the next edition. Champion had created what Cycle Age called “the most terrible accident ever known in cycling annals.”83

  The accident, which at the time was actually the worst disaster in American sports, not just cycling, dominated page one of all the dailies along Boston’s newspaper row, pushing aside news from Pretoria, South Africa, of the Boer War. The Globe’s headline blared: “Pacemakers Killed,”84 while the Herald roared: “Death Race.”85 Lurid block-print illustrations depicted Miles and Stafford flying headfirst toward the telegraph pole.

  Champion was so upset by the accident that for the first time since he had swung a leg over a bicycle frame as a courier in Paris, he did not care to ride. Over the next couple of weeks, he entered local events but opponents gave him a thrashing. He had never before experienced such failure. Humbled, he declared to John J. Donovan that he had retired from the racing game for the year.86 Marks and Gately proclaimed themselves freelancers and went to work for other riders.

  In Paris, Pierre Tournier read accounts and wrote to Champion. Not long afterward, Tournier sailed to Boston.87 There he paced Champion and got him into a training routine that raised his spirits, even if his former protégé did not want to race again that summer. Tournier intended to restore Champion’s confidence to come back the next season and fulfill his potential. Then Tournier sailed back home. Champion appreciated his friend’s devotion and clipped an account that Donovan had written about their training together and put it in his scrapbook.

  Metz had received more funding from General Electric president Charles A. Coffin and M. P. Clough of the Lynn Gas and Electric Company to encourage him to develop electric-powered tandems and tricycles as a bridge to producing electric cars.88 From the perspective of Coffin and Clough, if the pacing machines had been battery powered, Waltham’s tragic motor-pace accident would have been prevented.

  Metz personally favored gas-powered engines because a gallon of gas would propel them much farther than a charged-up electric battery. But he had to placate stockholders Coffin and Clough. Champion, now retired for the season, was no longer tied to his regimen of twice-daily workouts, and he was still paid $25 a week, enabling him to send money back to Paris for his family. He and Metz conferred about what the racer should do next.

  Going home to France was out of the question—Champion would be arrested by gendarmes at the port of entry and jailed for his failure to report for compulsory military duty. But Metz saw potential for an Orient Motorcycle that the working class could afford. So he put Champion in charge of designing a single-seat gas-combustion Orient Motorcycle.

  And, as fate would have it, the motorcycle, rather than cycling, would redeem Champion and thrust him fully into the auto industry and his place in its nascent history.

  In 1900, individual transportation in America relied on hitching or saddling one of the 18 million horses and mules, pedaling one of the 10 million bicycles in circulation, or driving one of the country’s eight thousand automobiles. Cheap bikes cost as little as $50, and there was the convenience of taking them aboard trains for free, like any other luggage.89 But by 1900 more people seemed ready for mechanical transport. At the same time, prices for autos—running on gasoline, electric, or steam propulsion—were steep, ranging from $280 to
$4,000, compared with annual household incomes averaging $500.

  Metz saw potential for introducing an Orient Motorcycle selling retail for around $250.90 He decided to work on the electric motor designs himself to placate Coffin and Clough. But, at the same time, he put Champion in charge of designing a single-seat gas-combustion Orient Motorcycle.

  In his corner of the Orient factory, Champion dismantled De Dion-Bouton and Aster engines and spread the parts on a table. He measured the diameter of the piston chamber, the length of the piston and its stroke, the flywheel, and other engine components. When he finished, he sat at a desk to sketch plans for a bicycle and the engine parts that would fit on it. Over the following weeks, Champion and general manager Robbins put gas engines and electric motors on tricycles, four-wheeled Runabouts, and one simple box-like four-wheeler called an Autogo. Champion, Metz, sometimes Robbins, too, tested them in intramural races on local streets.

  Soon enough, this personal research and development led them to Harvard College.

  “Probably the Harvard automobilists get more real fun out of their machines than any other set of enthusiasts around Boston,” suggested Automobile Magazine.91 “They go speeding about in them at all hours of the day or night, rain or shine.” The magazine noted, “Only a month or two ago one member nearly smashed himself and carriage into unrecognizable fragments by collision with a tree while racing in the dark on a crooked street.”92

  Champion and Metz kept up with reports of Harvard Automobile Club members, who often timed their jaunts for bragging rights. Some students owned Wintons, made in Cleveland, while others had Locomobiles from nearby Newton. By the time Champion’s abrasions from the Waltham race had healed, club members had agreed that the swiftest machines were Locomobiles. Members ordered an out-and-back race on a five-mile stretch of Newton Boulevard, beginning near the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, to settle the question of whose car was the fastest.93