The Fast Times of Albert Champion

by Peter Joffre Nye

  Wanting in, Champion and Metz visited the club and pleaded to be allowed to join the race. In the spirit of automobile camaraderie, members agreed to include them. They set the start time for 6 a.m. Monday, June 16. They hoped the early hour would help them elude the Newton police.

  The auto enthusiasts congregated before dawn by the reservoir. Competing against the Locomobiles of Warwick Greene and Charles Boyden were Champion and Metz on motor-tricycles and Robbins on a Runabout. Francis Edgar Stanley, who made steam-powered cars in Newton, volunteered as starter. A Cambridge doctor held the stopwatch.94

  At first light, Francis Edgar Stanley gave the start command. Little did they know that about a mile away, around a sharp bend, a squad of uniformed police waited, concealed behind trees beside the road. When the cops heard the engines coming, they fanned out across Newton Boulevard. The motorists rounded the bend and were confronted with a line of blue uniforms and nightsticks.95

  Metz was the fastest away and in the lead when the police came into view. He swerved off the road into a vacant field to evade the officers before regaining the road and escaping.96 Greene and Robbins careened to the opposite side of the road and executed a similar dodge.97 But Champion and Boyden were caught.98

  Police packed their scofflaws into a horse-drawn paddy wagon and took them straightaway to the Newton police station. Champion and Boyden waited two hours behind bars in a jail cell before a bailiff led them before a Suffolk County judge.99 Metz and a classmate of Boyden’s paid the fines of $5 each for speeding.100

  The arrests quashed the urge to race at Harvard, at least temporarily. But Metz and Champion remained as determined as ever to keep driving fast.

  After the Harvard bust, Champion’s solo test drives subjected him to a succession of arrests in Boston, Waltham, and Cambridge.101 It got so bad that one morning, as he drove a motor-tricycle from his Cambridge boarding house to Waltham, policemen held him up at every corner.102 Each officer told him in the same rehearsed speech to go slowly. His usual seventeen-minute commute stretched to ninety minutes. He arrived to work tardy and furious about being harassed.

  The Globe’s John J. Donovan spent evenings with Champion and Marks, tavern-crawling for pints of Boston Club Lager or Van Nostrand’s Ale. Champion and the reporter were twenty-one, Catholic, and shared the same work dedication. Donovan, a second-generation Irishman, shaved his face clean every day and put on a freshly starched collar before fastening his necktie with a four-in-hand knot. He was a native of South Boston.103 After graduation from Boston English High School,104 Donovan had worked as a compositor—setting type by hand in wooden composing sticks—for Donahue’s Magazine on Newspaper Row. After a couple years, he moved to the Globe as compositor.105 Devoted to the new leisure-time activity of candlepin bowling, he landed a job on the sports staff, a promotion that enabled him to marry his fiancée, Mary McCarry.106

  Donovan turned Champion’s speeding arrests into copy for the Globe. Each time Champion was apprehended, Marks represented him as counsel and interpreter.107 Marks was not an attorney, but that did not stop him from preparing a mock brief, which he carried in blank and pulled from the inside pocket of his jacket to fill out at the first sign of trouble.108 The brief cited that Champion spoke only French, a stranger in a strange land, unaccustomed to the ways of the country.109

  “Marks says that he will shortly apply for admission to the bar,” Donovan informed Globe readers in a light-hearted manner.110 “His eloquence has won the judges over to the small fines and also for taking a ride with Champion at times, after which they have sworn that no more will they fine men for going only as fast as the electric [trolley] car. Champion gauges his speed by the electric cars and gets arrested.” One officer testified he had timed Champion for a 300-yard block. “He swore that Champion was going twenty miles an hour, which was, of course, out of the question,” Donovan wrote. “At the time, Champion was merely keeping up with the car.”111

  In the meantime, Metz was busy importing Aster engines, which generated 12 hp—four times more powerful than either he or Champion had ever seen. Champion and Robbins fitted a pair of Aster engines on a tricycle. It weighed 385 pounds.112 One evening during a program of bicycle races on the dirt track of the Readville Trotting Park, in what is now the city’s Hyde Park neighborhood, Champion gave a demonstration ride. His upper body was pulled by centrifugal force and he dangled his torso off the side. He clocked 1 minute 14 seconds for the mile—closing in on 50 mph, a speed that made some in the audience take in a sudden deep breath.

  “As he lay over when approaching the turns like an accomplished horseman stooping to pick up a handkerchief on the fly, he was greeted with cheers from the crowd,” Donovan reported. “The trick made Champion a favorite again.”113

  Champion was in full flight when a rear wheel clipped the fence and the vehicle threw him to the ground.114 He broke both bones of his left forearm—surprisingly it was his first fracture. He was treated at City Hospital and his arm was immobilized in a plaster cast. His bicycle racing season was officially over.

  When he recovered enough to return to work in Metz’s factory, Champion groused that on a bigger track he could ride a mile under a minute, long considered a major benchmark. Metz suggested the Empire City Race Track, a horse track two-thirds of a mile around in Yonkers, outside New York City. It also happened to be one of William Brady’s enterprises. Brady liked the idea and hired Champion to perform a motor-tricycle exhibition for a Sunday bicycle-race program.

  So it was that on Saturday morning, July 14, 1900, Champion loaded his motor-tricycle on a train bound for Yonkers.115 To Champion, July 14 meant Bastille Day, a national day of celebration in France. After Champion arrived in Yonkers and checked into a hotel, he decided to commemorate the French holiday by taking his motor-tricycle out for a trial run on the road to Mount Vernon.

  “I was speeding along the road [back] toward Yonkers at a pace which must have been at least 70 mph when the left axle of my tricycle broke,” he told John J. Donovan, who published Champion’s account in the Globe.116 “The break happened just as I was about to ‘lie over’ in order to make a slight turn in the road. Naturally enough, I was leaning toward the right side, and found myself going on at the frightful pace on two wheels. I closed my eyes as I found the machine racing into a telegraph pole, feeling that I must be dashed to death.”

  He missed the pole, but he crashed into a pile of rocks beside the road. When he finally extracted himself from his mangled machine, he walked, bleeding from head to foot, to the first house he saw.117 A physician made a house call there and closed Albert’s gashes from eye to chin with sutures made of silk thread, each stitch tied in a square knot. The dark lines of thread resembled tiny railroad ties.

  That crash broke Champion’s right hand.118 He was forced to visit a hospital to have the broken bone treated, and he left wearing another plaster cast.

  When Champion returned from his ill-fated trip, he was at last greeted with some good news after months of troubles. The Men of Metz had installed a one-cylinder Aster engine that produced 3-1/4 hp, equivalent to a dozen men pedaling together. It was fitted onto a modified Orient bicycle frame. Starting with the standard diamond-shaped steel bicycle frame, Metz and Robbins had designed a down-tube that curved like a swayback horse, which set the motorcycle standard for decades to come.119 The engine, exhaust pipe, battery, and other components were fitted on the down-tube.

  With the gas tank filled, the prototype Orient Motorcycle weighed 105 pounds.120 A speed lever was fastened on the front of the top tube for Champion’s easy reach. He started it by pedaling. After the motor engaged, a coaster clutch allowed him to rest his feet on the pedals and the engine took over.

  It was a stunning achievement, and it marked an enormous advancement in motor-powered individual transportation. Now Metz and Champion had to introduce this archetype Orient Motorcycle to the public and the press. The manager of the Charles River Track offered a time slot for an exhibition
during a race program.

  On Tuesday evening, July 31, Champion dressed in his bedroom for the newspaper photographers who would attend his pioneering ride. He stepped into creased plus-fours and knotted a silk tie around an Eaton collar. Then he pulled a jacket over his cast and donned a cap. He strode outside to his one-off Orient Motorcycle and drove to the Charles River Track.

  “Eighteen thousand packed themselves like sardines into the grandstand and bleachers, and 2,000 more stood inside the oval,” reported the Boston Post.121 They had come to attend a program of races that culminated in a twenty-mile paced match between two world champion pros: Jimmy Michael and the younger Johnny Nelson, a Swedish immigrant even shorter than Michael.

  First prize paid $4,000 ($114,000 in 2014), sufficient to buy a three-bedroom house. Michael was so favored that bets of five-to-four on Nelson went begging. Nevertheless, once the race began, from start to finish Nelson ruled the track. Then Champion piloted his Orient Motorcycle onto the track boards.

  After a few practice laps, he pulled up by the start-finish line. Announcer Fletcher Hayvee informed the crowd through his megaphone that Champion would give a five-mile demonstration of his original motorcycle made in Waltham.

  The audience gave him a thunderous applause. Lon Peck fired the starting pistol.

  “When Champion turned his machine loose,” observed the Post, “one pretty girl behind the press box swore as she said, ‘Look at him go!’ She did not know she used profanity, and the recording angel, looking on, probably did not score it up against her, but she simply gave way to lack of language to express her feelings.”122

  Hayvee boomed through his megaphone that Champion clicked off his first mile in 1 minute, 26-3/5 seconds—topping 35 mph.123 By the end, Champion had covered five miles in 7 minutes, 16-1/4 seconds. Jerry Hatfield, in American Racing Motorcycles, his 1989 book on motorcycle history, cites Champion’s ride as the first-ever United States motorcycle record.124

  All of the Newspaper Row dailies covered the Michael-Nelson match and mentioned Champion’s exhibition ride as well, listing each mile time. The Post published a photo of Albert looking sedate on the prototype motorcycle and reported that he drove five miles without moving his feet. Some accounts claimed that Champion had driven the first American-built motorcycle, though purists later pointed out that the engine, spark plug, spark coil, and battery all were imported from France.

  Nevertheless, Champion’s motorcycle ride became the talk of the town. On Sunday, the Globe committed greater coverage to the motorcycle’s introduction, including an illustration of Champion on his ride.

  Accordingly, Metz ordered Robbins to prepare his factory for motorcycle production. Metz planned to have Orient Motorcycles available for purchase in time for the New York Automobile Show in November in Madison Square Garden.

  As for Champion, the acclaim and attention inspired him to vow he could drive a motorcycle under a minute for the mile. Better yet, his motorcycle exhibition stirred him to get back on a bicycle and start training again for the next year.

  THE DIFFICULTY LIES NOT IN THE NEW IDEAS, BUT IN ESCAPING FROM THE OLD ONES.

  —JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES, THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST, AND MONEY1

  In the late summer of 1900, Champion swayed in a train rumbling west to Chicago. He had packed an Orient motor-tricycle and a spare engine to compete in the Windy City’s first auto exhibition and race meet, organized by the Chicago Automobile Club.2 The four-day affair in Washington Park,3 on the south side, featured one of America’s foremost automakers, Alexander Winton.4 The event attracted the postmasters of Chicago, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis, who served on the US Post Master General’s national committee studying companies for the one best suited to the federal government’s move away from horses pulling mail wagons.5

  Washington Park offered a one-mile dirt horse track rolled firm, a sanctuary from the city’s deplorable streets, a troubling condition nationwide. In all forty-five states combined, America had some two hundred miles of hard-surfaced roads beyond urban areas.6 Chicago property owners and the business community were angry about sinkholes,7 which opened up without warning and then swallowed load after load of broken bricks dumped in to fill the holes,8 only for the bricks to disappear later under sludge as traffic rolled over. Everyone was incensed by ruts from wheel tracks left after rain. Motorists cursed tire-slashing rocks.9 Yet citizens kept tight-lipped for fear of repercussions from city bureaucrats protecting their jobs.10

  The Chicago Tribune took up the public’s cause. On September 1, the Tribune hawked a front-page story: “Michigan Street, Near Rush, Where Trucks Sink To Hubs In Mud.”11 A photo, among the paper’s earliest, showed a driver holding the reins of a brace of horses on one of the main commuter arteries, the wheel bottoms lost in muck.

  On September 19 the Tribune reported, perhaps with relief, that on the previous day the drivers and the thousand people attending the Chicago Automobile Club races had found the track to their liking.12 “To those accustomed to see gasoline, electric, and steam vehicles on the streets of the city, the sight of untrammeled action was a revelation. Around and around the broad stretch of track sped the little machines with a whirring sound that acted as a warning to all to stand clear.”13

  Spectator turnout was light despite Chicago being the country’s second-largest city, with nearly 1.7 million residents.14 Motor Vehicle Review observed that “the program of track events did not arouse a great deal of enthusiasm.” Yet the Chicago Automobile Club was determined to show the magnificence of the machines. Steam-propelled autos puffed and snorted like horses. An electric omnibus made by the local Hewitt-Lindstrom Motor Company took the gold medal for carrying the greatest number of seated passengers—twenty-two persons.15 A women’s two-mile electric-car race was won by thirteen-year-old Jeanette Lindstrom.16 She had an operator’s license after having two weeks earlier passed an examination administered by the Chicago city electrician.17

  Tuesday’s opening day main event was an international ten miler pitting Albert Champion against Alexander Winton and another rival. Winton, a forty-year-old immigrant from Scotland, retained an athlete’s slimness and was clean-shaven except for a neat mustache, flecked with white. He had given up making bicycles in Cleveland for early internal-combustion engines.18 Winton was convinced that autos were more than a passing fad.19 In 1898 he had taken the unprecedented step of advertising his Winton Motor Carriage Company in Scientific American: “Dispense with a horse and save the expense and anxiety of keeping it.”20 He scored the first commercial sale of a US car,21 and he went on to sell twenty-two, priced at $1,000 to $1,250.22 They were equipped with B. F. Goodrich pneumatic tires made in Akron. In 1899, auto sales had passed one hundred, catapulting Winton to the status of America’s biggest seller of gasoline-powered cars,23 commanding more than ten percent of that market.

  One customer, James Ward Packard, scoffed that he could make one better.24 Winton dared him to try—a retort that altered Packard’s career and would later endanger Champion.25

  Champion piloted his Orient motor-tricycle to the start line next to Winton’s car, which had no windshield or top. Joining them was Kenneth A. Skinner of Boston on his motor-tricycle. John J. Donovan of the Boston Globe reported that Skinner had recently returned from France with the latest De Dion-Bouton engine, ballyhooed as the most powerful in America: “He had brought it from Europe expressly to defeat Champion with it.”26

  The drivers wore ties and suits with plus-four trousers, snugged up by buttons running up the sides below the knee. To protect their eyes from flying dirt, they donned green goggles.

  Champion on an Orient tricycle holding a French engine that was state of the art in 1900. Photo courtesy of Buck Peacock.

  When the start pistol boomed, Champion flew ahead. Skinner had boasted that his engine was bigger than Champion’s Aster 4-hp. Yet Champion had departed Waltham with a second engine.27 After he’d unpacked in Chicago, he had fitted the second engine to his O
rient frame below the saddle, which doubled his horsepower. In the first race, Champion appeared to have victory locked up at the mid-point, five miles, when an engine conked out.28 He was passed by Winton and Skinner, who then dueled until Winton won.

  For an extra attraction, Winton competed in a five-eighths-mile contest against a jockey on a horse named In Debt.29 Winton’s vehicle was given a mile lap to build speed for a flying start. The horse won by two hundred yards.30

  The next day rain converted Washington Park into an expanse of glistening mud. Chilly downpours cancelled the races, but some fifteen hundred hardy fans trudged through the elements to visit the exhibit booths assembled under the grandstand. They checked out modern motor-transport styles. Champion, aided by a French expat to translate, spent the day explaining how the new-fangled machines worked.31 Champion promised the Tribune’s correspondent he would drive a mile in one minute,32 a blazing benchmark around a circular track. Humans could ride 50 mph on turf on a quarter horse bred for speed.33 But driving a mile faster than a minute in the early twentieth century represented an epic challenge for man and machine.

  On Thursday, September 20, the sun shined bright and wind gusted from Lake Michigan. Some two thousand folks converged on Washington Park by the afternoon. The dirt oval had dried enough to hold competitions, although the Chicago Daily News observed, “The track was bad at the pole and all hell to the center.”34

  The crowd cheered the international fifty-mile motor-tricycle race with Champion against Skinner and Charles G. Wridgeway, a New Yorker on a motor-tricycle made in England. Champion dashed to the front, his engines running in sync. He edged wider each lap until he was hugging the outside rim by the time he won, with a quarter-mile margin over Skinner, who was in turn ahead of Wridgeway. “Seated on the small, rakish looking trikes, this trio made a hard bunch when speed was required,” reported the Boston Globe’s John J. Donovan.35