Mrs. Shoberg had only to mention her maiden name to gain the attention of the 75 old time cyclists assembled. A hush fell over the old-timers as, one by one, they stepped forward to shake her hand and tell her how well she looked “after all these years.”
—“Lady Champion Turns a Stag into Surprise,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 6, 1941
On Friday, September 5, 1941, nearly forty years after the last professional women’s bicycle race in America, the Sportsman’s Golf Club in Northbrook, Illinois, hosted a “stag reunion” of bicycle-racing stars of the nineteenth century. Billed as the first-ever reunion of the former racers, the event drew about seventy-five men from all over the country, including local man Arthur Gardiner (“world’s champion in 1898”), Walter Sanger of Milwaukee (“world’s champion in 1893”), and Gideon Hayes of Boston, now seventy-eight years old and the last man alive to have raced a high-wheel as far back as 1878. It was a day of storytelling and reminiscing.
Late that afternoon, James Bowler, alderman of Chicago’s Twenty-Fifth Ward, stood to share his six-day racing memories. He was interrupted, however, when the crowd noticed someone striding across the expansive clubhouse lawn, straight for the dais. It was a woman in her midsixties, smiling broadly, looking for all the world as if she belonged right there at the Sportsman’s Golf Course. Not a single old-timer recognized her. No women had been invited to the event or to the dinner to follow.
The woman introduced herself as Tillie Shoberg. “Tillie Anderson Shoberg,” she said, and that’s when they knew. Suddenly, this bespectacled “matron,” as the Tribune called her in its story the next day, transformed before their eyes into the spitting image of Tillie Anderson, the very best of the champion women racers of the 1890s. “I’m only four pounds heavier than I was when racing,” she told the men, and they believed her.
Tillie had driven solo the 650 miles from her cabin in Minnesota, stopping only for gasoline along the way. She was retired now, sixty-six years old, but she’d enjoyed a long career as a masseuse and caregiver in Evanston, only a dozen miles from Northbrook. Soon after the men had greeted Tillie and shaken her hand, the former stars lined up four deep for an official photograph, all the men in suits and ties, squinting against the afternoon sun. On either end of the wide rows a man straddled a safety, and in the back row two men stood abreast behind one of the old high-wheels. In the center of the second row, seated in the exact middle of everything, was Tillie Anderson Shoberg.
The Tribune article the next day focused almost entirely on Tillie’s surprise appearance. Her name was unfamiliar to the reporter and most Chicago-area readers. But those nineteenth-century male racers certainly remembered her. The day, and the Tribune story, was perhaps some vindication for Tillie after all these years: her championship was finally recognized by an official organization of wheelmen. She’d been the best woman racer any of the men had ever seen. She dominated the sport, the Tribune said, “a sport from which women have been barred for more than 40 years.”1
The bicycle-racing stars of the nineteenth century continued to gather every year. Most years Tillie joined them, always the lone female representative. Her last event was in October 1963, at the Como Inn in Chicago—not far from where Swedetown used to be. She was eighty-eight years old. The men’s group had dwindled to just ten. In the reunion photo, she is front and center one last time.