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CHAPTER 1
Six-Day Bike Race for Women
A six-day women's bicycle race is on the card to take place at the Second Regiment Lake-Front Armory shortly. A number of the women that took part in the late Minneapolis race have already entered the coming event. Among the most prominent of these is Dottie Farnsworth, who has a record of 319 1/5 miles in eighteen hours. Entries can be made to Ed Moulton, Columbia Hotel, Thirty-first and State streets.
— "Six-Day Bike Race for Women," Chicago Daily Tribune, January 12, 1896
It was a small item, less than a column inch in the newspaper, but Tillie Anderson must have seen it — or maybe it was her boyfriend, Phil, or one of the other riders she knew from the Monitors, Chicago's only Swedish cycling club. Like so many other American women, Tillie had taken up cycling shortly after the introduction of the diamond-frame safety bicycle in the early 1890s. "I didn't take to the wheel for my health, particularly," she explained later. "I suppose it was more for the reason that bicycles were being used by women and I wanted to try the fad."
Tillie was a twenty-year-old immigrant living with her family in the Swedetown neighborhood of Chicago's Near North Side. After her father died in the village of Engelsback, the family had by turns immigrated to their new home. First was Tillie's older sister, Hannah, in 1889, followed by sixteen-year-old Tillie and her younger brother, August, in 1891. Then two years later her mother and two remaining sisters joined them. August worked as a repairman in the city's streetcar barns; in the evenings he ran a small grocery out of the family's basement. The sisters worked as seamstresses.
As a teenager, Tillie would stop along the streets of her adopted hometown and watch those lucky enough to own and ride one of the new "steel steeds." The fastest street riders were popularly known as scorchers, and while some in the press complained of their heedless sprinting, Tillie saw only the joy of their freedom and speed. From the very start, she said, she was in love with wheeling.
In the Swedish newspapers, Tillie followed the career of fellow countryman John S. Johnson, who in 1892 became the first to break the two-minute mark for the mile, paced by a horse in Independence, Iowa. Then in August 1893, at the national championships in Chicago, Tillie saw Johnson beat the great Arthur Zimmerman in the five-mile event at the South Side Ball Park. She decided then and there that she wanted to break cycling records too.
Tillie worked at a local laundry and continued sewing at night for extra cash. Besides helping the family, her goal was to save enough money to buy a bike of her own. That finally happened in the summer of 1894, when she was nineteen. She purchased the cheapest model she could find, a bulky thing that even without brakes still weighed over forty pounds, and became a devoted rider. Many mornings she'd rise before five and ride twenty to forty miles before breakfast and a full day's work, and then in the late afternoon she'd again mount her wheel and ride some more, exploring the streets of Chicago and surrounding country roads.
The next summer, Tillie made a local name for herself as a "century" rider on the Elgin–Aurora road course — a hundred-mile circuit from downtown west over to Elgin, down through Geneva to Aurora, and then east past Naperville and back into the city. She was good enough to earn a sponsorship from the Excelsior Supply Company, maker of the Thistle — one of the new breed of bicycles then setting sales records all across America. It might have been Excelsior's sales representative, M. C. Watson, who saw the notice in the Tribune that January morning. One way or another, the news eventually got to Tillie.
Between her two jobs, Tillie earned just three dollars a week. The six-day race at the Second Regiment Armory would pay out a total purse of $600 — the first-place prize was $200. Even the sixth-place prize of twenty-five dollars would be more money than she or anyone in her family had ever earned in an entire month.
But was she good enough to compete in such a race? If she wavered at all, Tillie's decision to apply was likely settled two days later, when another notice in the Tribune listed some late entries, including one from Lizzie Glaw. Tillie knew that name well. Lizzie was a German immigrant, also twenty years old, who'd also run the Elgin–Aurora road course the previous summer. Tillie had ridden the hundred-mile circuit eight times between June and October; Lizzie, showing the stubborn persistence that in the coming years would become her hallmark, had completed the circuit an astonishing thirty-six times. Finally, in October, Lizzie appeared to break the women's record, going against a strong southerly wind and completing the hundred miles in six hours and forty-eight minutes, averaging almost fifteen miles an hour on those wretchedly rutted washboard roads. Some questioned, however, whether Lizzie had registered as required at the Aurora station, and the holder of the former record of 6:56 refused to acknowledge the new time. The very next day, the record was broken again, this time by Tillie. Fighting hills, wind, mud, and poor roads, she completed the course in 6:52.
Tillie knew she was at least as good as Lizzie, and that was good enough for her.
Chicago Riders Showing Speed
The two Chicago rivals showed up at the armory, along with another local, Margaret Sevier, a week before the scheduled start of the race. The promoter and manager, a Frenchman from Minneapolis named H. O. Messier (first name Henri), had his reasons for wanting the trio to compete. Locals would have someone to root for against the more seasoned professionals, names familiar to those who followed women's racing in the high-wheel era. Tillie, Lizzie, and Margaret also represented three different European countries — Sweden, Germany, and France — so they'd appeal to those sectors of Chicago's sizeable immigrant population. And Lizzie and Margaret, who belonged to the city's largest all-women cycling club, the Knickerbockers, would surely draw in those members, too. The safety era of women's bicycle racing was still new to America, and Messier needed every gate-drawing trick he could marshal.
But first the three locals had to master the track. Designed and built by Messier himself, the steeply banked oval was unlike anything anyone in Chicago had ever seen. There'd been indoor bicycle races in town back in the high-wheel days, mostly men's races, but those tracks had been about a tenth of a mile around and fairly flat, with gentle banking only on the turns. Messier's track was seventeen laps to the mile and banked all the way around, like a bathtub — barely 125 feet long and 90 feet wide along the raised outer edges. The whole thing would fit inside the base paths of a regulation baseball diamond.
To hold the boards, riders had to maintain velocity and dive into the curves with abandon. Right away Lizzie seemed to have a head for the track, the mathematics of it, and she worked with grim determination until she mastered the deep curves and sloped straightaways. In practice runs, she was soon pushing the veterans — former high-wheelers Helen Baldwin, May Allen, and Lillie Williams — and young Dottie Farnsworth, the record-setting speedster mentioned in the Tribune ad. Dottie had won Messier's first indoor race just a few weeks earlier, over Christmas up in Minneapolis. That had been an "amateur" race, with none of the old high-wheelers participating, but word was that the veterans were plenty nervous about the amazing speed she'd shown there.
Margaret and Tillie had difficulty riding the track, so Messier asked "Dad" Moulton, his friend from Minneapolis and an experienced athletic trainer at the university there, to work with them. Even with Moulton's coaching, Sevier never managed to hold the track and withdrew by midweek. Tillie proved to be more stubborn. Moulton later recalled that she fell five times her first day on the slick wooden planks. She seemed unsure of herself and nervous around the more experienced riders.
That afternoon Moulton spoke with Phil Sjöberg, Tillie's boyfriend, who, though just seventeen, was acting as her trainer, all dressed up in a suit and derby hat. Moulton recommended that Tillie drop out and try some other time. But Phil begged Moulton to give them another chance, and Moulton agreed. The next day Tillie came back, and sure enough, she did much better and continued improving each day. By the end of the week she was twirling headlong around the track and, like Lizzie, pushing Dottie and the veterans, making laps in less than ten seconds.
There was something special about Tillie. Her unique combination of size, strength, and speed struck all the prerace observers, even the gamblers — a fact made especially clear on Sunday afternoon, the day before the official start of the race. "[A] man came to me and told me he would give me $300 if I would 'throw' the race and allow anybody else to win," Tillie later recalled. "I laughed at him and told him it was my first race and I intended to win if I could, and I thought more of winning than I did of his $300." This was at a time when an average working family took home perhaps $600 a year.
The man didn't stop there. He came back later and offered Tillie $500. By then she'd heard that someone who'd seen her practicing had backed her in a bet for $1,500 — against the very man now asking her to throw the race. She refused again, and again he raised his offer, this time to $1,000. "I then told him that I knew he had a bet of $1,500 that I would not win," she said, "and that I was going to do my best to make him lose it."
Even with such fantastic figures floating before them — $200 to win the race, $1,000 to throw it — Tillie's immigrant family was still not entirely happy with her decision to enter. As Tillie's niece Evelyn Olson later recalled, Tillie's mother, brother, and older sister were in fact ashamed of her — at least at the start. "In the first place," Evelyn explained, "it was a gambling affair, and of course gambling was wrong. In the second place, if you will look at women's styles in those days, you will notice that to all practical purposes women had no legs, just very full skirts. For Aunt Tillie to brazenly come out in tights which of course were form-fitting was very daring. ... Of course, Grandmother and the others still loved her as deeply as ever, but they would have preferred if she had been engaged in a more lady-like occupation."
No doubt because of prejudices like those of Tillie's family, Manager Messier was careful in the days leading up to the race to portray the sport as wholesome entertainment. "The management wishes it distinctly understood," one item ran in the Tribune, "that all competitors will be compelled to wear either knickerbockers or bloomers." The tights would come later.
All Ready for the Word "Go"
Over a thousand paying customers — including "a great number of women," according to the Tribune — had already gathered when the ten contestants appeared on the floor of the Second Regiment Armory around 2:00 p.m. on Monday, January 27, 1896.13 The women were to ride in two squads of five, alternating one hour each in the afternoon and two hours each in the evening. It was a six-day race, three hours a day, for a total of eighteen hours' racing. In each squad Messier placed two experienced riders, two of his recent Minneapolis finds, and one of the Chicago girls.
Through his megaphone, Messier took on the role of emcee and introduced the first squad with a brief biography of each rider, highlighting her records and accomplishments, as well as any regional or national affiliations that might help to enlist or enflame the competitive biases of the spectators. First were two former high-wheelers: "Baby" May Allen of Liverpool, England, holder of the twenty-four-hour British record, and Lillie Williams of Omaha, Nebraska, former eighteen- and twenty-four-hour champion. Wearing the Union Jack around her waist, May Allen smiled and enjoyed the full applause from the spectators who ringed the track. She'd joined the racing business back in 1888 at the tender age of seventeen. "She'll smile if you ask her," people always said of May Allen, and the crowds loved her for it.
Then came two of the newcomers: Mate Christopher of Minneapolis, the new twenty-five-mile champion, and Minnie Hokenson, also of Minneapolis, in only her second professional race. Mate had earned her nickname, White Cyclone, the previous summer, first when she pushed the veteran Frankie Nelson to the tape at Athletic Park in Minneapolis and then later in exhibitions against trotting horses and locomotives at state and county fairs. She was twenty-three years old.
Last in the first squad was Lizzie Glaw, late of Berlin, Germany, now a proud member of Chicago's own women-only Knickerbocker Cycling Club. Though she didn't smile like May Allen, Lizzie drew an appreciative cheer from the Chicago partisans, especially the Germans.
Now the second squad stepped forward. Messier started with twenty-four-year-old Helen "Beauty" Baldwin of New York City, known from coast to coast as the Queen of the Wheel and reigning ten-mile and forty-eight-hour champion. Best known of the racers here, she was considered the favorite by most of the Chicago gamblers. "Go it, Helen!" cried some chappies from the balcony, and Helen grinned and waved. Next came upstart Dottie Farnsworth of Minneapolis, winner of the Christmas-week Washington Rink race and suddenly the reigning eighteen-hour champion of America. Dottie had studied theater in school, so she knew something about playing to the crowds. She'd cloaked herself from shoulders to heels in a flowing white woolen robe, and when Messier called her name she dropped the robe to reveal a glaring suit of red satin tied across her waist with a white sash. The trademark suit would earn her the nickname Red Bird. The appreciative chappies howled, and Dottie shone in their attention.
Messier finished his introductions with the lesser-known contestants: Norwegian Ida Peterson, now living in Minneapolis; Frankie Mack, also of Minneapolis; and finally, Swede Tillie Anderson, Chicago's hundred-mile road champion. This, Messier announced, would be Tillie's first race on a wooden track, indoors or out. There was a swell of local pride for her.
It was now twenty minutes after two. From the orchestra pit near the stage end of the arena, the Chicago Marine Band struck up John Philip Sousa's "The Thunderer," and the riders of the second squad took their seats along a bench behind the judge's stand. Dad Moulton, acting as starter for all stages of the race, separated the members of the first squad from their well-wishers and invited them to mount their wheels. To the crowd's delight the competitors spun several times around the track, riding in a loose bunch near the bottom of the incline, swooping nearly horizontal on the turns, just inches beyond the reach of the "railbirds" now ringing the track. Already the riding looked faster and more dangerous than any women's cycling the audience had ever seen — and the riders were just warming up. Then the women stopped and were guided, like horses at the gate, to the starting line by their derby-wearing trainers. Each attendant placed his right hand on the back of his racer's seat and his left hand on her left handlebar, and he held her steady as they waited for Dad Moulton to mount the stand and raise his pistol.
Chicago's six-day race was ready to begin.
CHAPTER 2
Watch the Woman Cyclists
People in tight places quit mopping perspiration to yell. Everybody, both in the pit and without, surged a bit closer to the track. Women, numbers of them with children and even babies, spoke of discomfort, but the men and boys had lost all faculties but sight and voice.
— "Tillie Wins by a Lap," Chicago Daily Tribune, February 2, 1896
In his inaugural bicycle races of the new era, H. O. Messier, a former competitive walker who'd only recently gotten into sports management, adopted a modified six-day format, limiting the women to just three hours of riding per day. Men's six-day races, Messier knew, were brutal round-the-clock marathons, essentially wars of attrition, with riders pedaling as many miles as they possibly could within the full 144 hours of the six-day week. They ate and drank on their wheels, slept as little as an hour or two a day, and by the fourth and fifth days became haggard-looking zombies. Much of the "sport" was watching these zombies zigzag drunkenly around the track.
Limiting the women to three hours a day comported with Victorian notions of female frailty, but the women's format also turned out to have several advantages over the men's and would become a key factor in making women's racing one of the most popular sports of the decade. The race was a multistage tournament, not just a single ongoing event, and each racing day became its own competition with its own drama — and of course its own ticket sales. This played particularly well in the daily papers, where the entire city could check box-score tallies of the previous day's scores and follow the overall progress of the race, building tension and interest. Day by day, breathless accounts rose to a crescendo, drawing larger and larger crowds to the arena as the Saturday finale approached.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Women on the Move"
by .
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