It was at Chicago that Phil first came upon the scene. He is something of a wheelman himself, and has quite a reputation as a century rider. He, like Tillie, is a Swede, and it was only natural that they should become acquainted. Friendship ripened into love, and Phil threw up his job and was soon installed as Tillie’s trainer. He took the same watchful care of her in Minneapolis and Chicago that he did here. But this race settled it. The lovers can stand it no longer. Today Tillie, with the $250 safely tucked away, accompanied by her faithful Phil, left for the Windy City, and this week will be made one.
—“Lovers True,” Detroit News, March 30, 1896
The young women racers and their “pleasing costumes” were clearly part of the draw not just for the howling chappies but also, no doubt, for many of the married men.1 Perhaps for this reason, the race promoters tended to conceal the fact that some of these young women were themselves married, as was of course common for Victorian-era women in their early twenties. May Allen, for example, had during one of her racing tours of England fallen in love with a Brit named Harry Jeffs, and the two were married in 1890 when May was just nineteen. In December 1892, during the transitional lull in women’s bicycle racing, the couple had a daughter, Henrietta. By 1895, when May and the other former high-wheelers started in again, Harry took on the role of “the British girl’s” manager and trainer, and their marriage was rarely mentioned publicly. For promoters trying to attract crowds and for journalists garnering readers, it was perhaps best to allow local boys and men to believe that “Baby” May Allen was younger and more available than she actually was.
It’s also likely that, as challenging to the moral standards of Victorian society as women’s bicycle racing already was, it was simply too much for male sensibilities of the day to imagine these tough, athletic, ambitious women as wives or mothers. Better to think of them as teenage girls who would settle down and marry—and stop racing, of course—once they’d won a few races, or gotten injured, or simply found the right man. Married women, as far as most nineteenth-century men were concerned, needed to stay home, keep house, and raise children. Mate Christopher seems to have best fit that model, having burst onto the scene in the summer of 1895 and run competitively in a handful of races over a twenty-month career before retiring to marry at twenty-four.
As if racing alone weren’t enough of a challenge to convention, these women were also serious breadwinners. Helen Baldwin was a “type writer” before she took up racing.2 Tillie had worked for a few dollars a week at a laundry, picking up extra cash as a seamstress. Now she was making several hundred dollars per race. She reportedly earned a twenty-five-dollar weekly salary from the Excelsior Supply Company for riding the Thistle—and the company generally paid her an extra $200 or more for winning races.3 In addition, race promoters had begun luring her and the other top riders with signing bonuses of fifty dollars or more.4 In 1896, her first year of racing, Tillie won eight six-day races, each with first-prize money of at least $200. She also raced in more than a dozen single-heat matches, many for $100 or more. All told, she likely made $5,000 or $6,000, the equivalent of about $150,000 today, during her first full year on the track. For many of the men in the stands, it would be difficult indeed to imagine being married to a woman who earned so much money.
In Detroit in 1896 spectators saw that Tillie enjoyed the constant care and attention of a fair-haired young man wearing a dark suit and a stylish wide-brimmed hat. The young man was assumed to be Tillie’s brother.
Day after day and hour after hour, when Tillie was on the track, this young man stuck to his post, watch in hand. Every lap that the champion made was carefully noted. Every mile was timed to a second. If Tillie was going too fast, it was he who warned her. If too slow, he was the one who urged a faster gait. Every time Tillie passed him, there was some word of encouragement for her. When her work was over, it was he who wrapped her in her cloak and escorted her off the track. He looked after her wheel, and, in fact, was a guardian angel all week long. Tillie’s “brother” came in for a good share of praise for his efforts on her behalf.
Eventually, Detroit reporters realized that the young man was not in fact Tillie’s brother but a fellow Swede named Phil Sjöberg. Not only that, but the two planned to be married—“and thereby hangs a tale,” promised the Detroit News.5
Phil was born in Sweden in April 1878—three years after Tillie. Orphaned as a toddler, he was brought to America in 1881 by his much older sister Johanna, then twenty-seven years old, married, and the mother of her own daughter, Eugenia. Johanna’s husband, John Charles Nelson (né Karl Johan Nilsson), had settled in Chicago in 1871 before returning briefly to Sweden in 1875 to marry Johanna. Eugenia was born ten months later, and it would be another five years before the family was reunited in the States. John and Johanna, or Hannah, as she was now called, raised Phil as their son. They went on to have two more children.
John Nelson was a well-educated man whose facility with languages made him a successful manager of a bicycle factory employing workers from many of Chicago’s immigrant communities. John’s job at the factory may have been Phil’s first connection to cycling. Not much is known about the Nelson family, but it appears that Phil had a happy childhood, and he can certainly be counted as lucky to have fallen in with such a capable and industrious immigrant family.
It was during his early teens that Phil developed his mechanical familiarity with bicycles, and by the time of the bicycle boom of 1893 and 1894, he’d become an avid rider as well, good enough to be called “a cycler of note” by the St. Louis Republic.6 By June 1895, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, Phil was listed as one of seven “scratch” racers—those requiring no handicap—for a club race in Chicago, and perhaps that’s when he caught Tillie’s eye.7 At some point they met, possibly through the Swedish-dominated Monitor Cycling Club or perhaps simply through family connections in the tight North Side Swedish community. In that same month of June 1895, Tillie completed her first Elgin–Aurora century run, and it’s likely that Phil was among the Swedes who took note of Tillie’s obvious talent and encouraged her to sign up for the Second Regiment Armory race when Messier’s troupe came to town. By January 20, 1896, when Tillie appeared on the track for the first time and failed to impress Dad Moulton, Phil—still only seventeen years old—was acting as Tillie’s exclusive trainer.
Bound by their own cultural perspectives, the Detroit reporters spun the romance primarily as young Phil’s ticket to undreamed-of riches. “Tillie Anderson’s trainer is not a brother,” the headlines read, “but a fellow countryman who appreciated her worth.” They reported that the two planned to hold the wedding back in Chicago the week following Tillie’s victory in Detroit. Phil apparently would neither confirm nor deny the reports, “but evidently he knows when he has a good thing,” observed the Detroit News.8 Conceivably, the Detroit earnings gave Tillie and Phil enough confidence in their financial security to become engaged that week, but they didn’t officially tie the knot for another year and a half, on December 21, 1897, in Milwaukee. Tillie was by then twenty-two, and Phil nineteen.
News of the engagement did not, however, follow Tillie from city to city as she continued her racing career. Even three weeks before their eventual wedding, at a race in St. Louis, Phil was still being described as Tillie’s lovingly attentive brother: “Miss Anderson, who so far has been the star of the race, is attended by her brother. He, like his sister, is tall and a decided blonde. It is a pretty sight after each night’s race to see the brother care for the sister and assist her to her dressing room.”9
It was perhaps more comfortable for the male reporters—and undoubtedly many of their male readers—to view Phil and Tillie as siblings rather than lovers, given the nature of their professional relationship. Tillie in particular, as a “new woman” of the 1890s, must have enjoyed descriptions like this one from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “Miss Anderson has a young brother who waits on her, and he is a picture of his plucky sister.”10 A brother waiting on his sister was one thing, but the notion of a husband-to-be waiting on his fiancée would have been quite another. For Tillie and several other women on the racing circuit, though, that was precisely the arrangement: the man facilitated while the woman performed. It’s no wonder that most of the couples kept their marriages quiet.
The Detroit reporters, seemingly aware of the cultural dilemma Phil was facing, wondered how things might change for Tillie and Phil after the wedding. On the one hand, his role as trainer and attendant didn’t seem very manly, but on the other, Tillie’s income, much more than he could ever hope to match, was nearly impossible to give up. “He will not say whether he expects Mrs. Sjöberg that is to be, to continue her racing after they are married,” they said, not knowing that Tillie would indeed continue racing—and as Tillie Anderson, not Tillie Sjöberg. “But those who know him say they do not anticipate any very strenuous objection on his part to her continuing to rake in the shekels as long and as fast as she can.”11
There is no indication that the larger cultural tensions related to gender roles in society affected Phil and Tillie, as they made a perfect pair both on and off the track. Phil’s expertise and experience made him an excellent trainer and coach. It was Phil who guided Tillie through every race, helping her to gauge her speed and decide when to make jumps for the lead. Phil helped Tillie develop the strategies that allowed her to surge ahead to take even the closest finishes. He likely taught Tillie her signature move: riding high up the bank of the track and using the downward slant to gain momentum for a quick attack. This move was used first in France in 1894 shortly after the first banked tracks were developed for men’s indoor races.12 It was even more dramatic and effective on the steeply banked women’s tracks, and Tillie pioneered its use on the women’s circuit.
As Tillie’s coach, Phil would whisper as she sped by, or call to her in Swedish, or circle his arm to urge her on, while many of the other riders either had to go it alone or rely on less experienced trainers. On and off the track, Phil was Tillie’s trainer, masseur, coach, timekeeper, pacer, and even sparring partner. His devotion allowed her to live the life of a professional athlete. Her daily schedule, constantly overseen by Phil, began with an early wake-up call, a cold bath, and a brisk rubdown. After a light breakfast, she would exercise for an hour or two with Indian clubs, dumbbells, a jump rope, and a punching bag, often going a round or two with Phil with gloves on. Other times they would wrestle. After another rubdown, she’d have a low-fat dinner. In the afternoon, she’d ride her bicycle—outdoors in the summer, on a track, if available, in the winter, or on home trainers. Staying in racing condition was a full-time job, and her excellent conditioning paid off on the track.
Phil stood up for Tillie time and again in news reports and letters to the editor. Tillie continued to race as Tillie Anderson, but back in Chicago and for the rest of her life she proudly used the Americanized version of Phil’s last name as her own: Tillie Shoberg.
The marriages of May Allen and Tillie Anderson remained largely clandestine, but as the reporting became more starstruck there were occasional glimpses of romance involving others at the racetrack. A Chicago race at Tattersall’s in March 1897 featured a twenty-year-old novice named Garnet Hursey, a southern gal connected to some prominent families below the Mason-Dixon Line. She had met race manager “King Cotton” Benedict in Columbus, where she worked for one of the newspapers and enjoyed a reputation as a strong road racer. The weekend before the Chicago race she showed up at the track and managed, despite her lack of track-racing experience and against the bitter opposition of her parents, to land a place in the afternoon “amateur” squad that Benedict had arranged to try out new racers and to satisfy the overflow evening crowds, which exceeded ten thousand that week. Even in the afternoon squad, however, Garnet Hursey was clearly in over her head. Barely into the fifth mile of the first day’s race, Garnet collided with another racer on the steep bank of a turn, and both were thrown violently into the track’s protective fencing. The other racer landed face-first, badly bruising her nose and forehead, while Garnet dislocated her shoulder. Scared and hurt, Garnet declared that she’d had enough—and took her place in one of the boxes. There, she and the thirty-three-year-old Benedict had a chance to get to know each other better. Their courtship proceeded swiftly: sometime during that very week he proposed, and it was announced that they would be married on the Saturday morning before the final day of racing in the parlor of the Great Northern Hotel. May Allen agreed to serve as maid of honor.
At least one other romance developed on the women’s circuit, a May-December pairing between trainer Dad Moulton and one of his Minneapolis riders, Ida Peterson. Moulton trained most of the Minneapolis-based riders at one time or another, but at some point he focused his attentions on Ida. They’d met on the athletic fields of the University of Minnesota, where Ida was a music student. Minnesota was one of several schools that had employed Moulton as a track-and-field coach or sports trainer; he also worked for Iowa and Wisconsin. Ida was a large woman—a “giantess” by one account—with the physical strength to be a top-notch rider, but she routinely finished fourth or fifth behind Tillie, Dottie, Helen, and Lizzie.13 Ida became Dad’s special project—a kind of test case for his methods. “In Miss Ida Peterson,” reported the Burlington Gazette before a race in April 1898, “we will see just what is possible for a grand old master of physical culture to do with a big, strong, healthy young lady who has a desire to be all that is necessary to make an athlete.” Moulton intended to show “just what can be done with careful culture and steady training.”14
Ida apparently lacked the drive to finish strong, and Moulton tried to toughen her up. There were several occasions in which she wanted to leave the track because of fatigue or injury, but he gave her “the dead face” and pushed her on.15 Still, she never won a single race and seldom finished in the top three. Moulton’s experiment in modern training appeared to be a failure. Ida soldiered on, though, and ended up competing in over seventy-five six-day races through 1901, when she quit racing—and the two of them finally married. Moulton, at fifty-two, was exactly twice Ida’s age.