Chapter 5

UTOPIA

If a man manufactured bicycles in 1895, had blindfolds placed over his eyes, and was spun in circles until disoriented, an unexplainable energy field would have tossed him on a train, then dropped him off somewhere in New England. If a black man was employed by a bicycle manufacturer in 1895, had grandiose dreams of racing bicycles as a professional, and was searching for a safer place to live, that energy field would have placed him on the same train.

The gravitational pull that drove Birdie Munger and Major Taylor to Worcester, Massachusetts, that year had already attracted more than two hundred bike manufacturers to the greater New England region. From these industrial masses came every conceivable type and size of bike maker. On one end of the spectrum stood the Irish and European emigrants recently disgorged from the steerage section of myriad ships, working in small groups from cramped work sheds, copies of Horatio Alger’s book by their sides.

The opposite end of the spectrum produced giants like the Pope Manufacturing Company, the largest employer in all of New England. Its founder, Colonel Albert A. Pope, was a colossal figure, with a Burl Ives beard, a bone-crushing handshake, and an insatiable appetite for good food, great wine, and even greater women. Following his exemplar service as a captain in the Civil War, Pope took such a liking to the title of colonel, he went ahead and promoted himself. Having witnessed all the blood, guts, and dead-horse stench one man could possibly endure, Pope had decided he never wanted to see or smell despair again. But when he came crashing into Boston in 1876, it was during an unsightly equine epizootic, “giving the air,” recalled one historian, “a rich equine flavor.” Soon to become the man most responsible for the decline of the horse, he evidently didn’t much like the stench and set out to do something about it.

Only a few short years after barnstorming into Boston, Colonel Pope became the undisputed king of the bicycle world. When he wasn’t lavishly entertaining at his fifty-acre Cohasset estate on Boston’s South Shore, he shuttled via private railcar between his plush four-fireplace Hartford penthouse office and his even plusher Boston office. From the assembly lines of his six-story factory buildings snaking over endless city blocks, more than one million “Columbia” bicycles—some six hundred a day—would roll onto the streets.

Known as a pioneer in labor relations, Pope had 3,800 high-powered sales agents positioned all over the world. And his machines were found everywhere; after President McKinley’s assassination in 1901, Teddy Roosevelt—the first president to ride in an automobile—was escorted in a Pope automobile, flanked by argus-eyed secret servicemen on Pope bicycles.

Pope, a high school dropout, virtually owned the press. He glossed the pages of nearly every paper in America with glitzy ads, hauled in their best scribes via private railcar for tours of his elaborate headquarters, and then dazzled them with his latest models, finest food, and best wine.

He was also the father of the League of American Wheelmen and the 1880 “good roads movement,” the lobby group that began paving America from coast to coast decades before the widespread use of automobiles. From his cavernous factory interior, the first assembly lines were employed. During his reported visits, Henry Ford would have seen the first use of electric welding, cold-drawn steel, case-hardening, pneumatic tires, brakes, refined ball bearings, and hollow metal rims. Ford must have taken mental notes as the Columbia bicycles, made up of eight hundred separate parts, were inspected five hundred times by twenty-four quality control inspectors. “If the Carnegies and Rockefellers were the captains of industry,” wrote Pope’s biographer Stephan Goddard, “Pope would rank as second lieutenant.”

Between the small underfunded emigrant shops and the mammoth Pope Manufacturing Company stood the Worcester Cycle Manufacturing Company, run by Birdie Munger and his bear-faced partner, Charles Boyd. With his recognizable name and experience in the business world, Munger found raising capital easier than most, and he and his partner did just that. They bought loads of expensive machinery, leased seven acres of prime Worcester land from the largest trust in the country, and lined it with spacious factory buildings. There they churned out six models of bicycles with names like The Boyd and the $100 Lady Worcester.

They added another factory in Middletown, Connecticut, where the sleek $125 Birdie Specials were built. Following Pope’s lead, they placed large ads in several papers aggressively touting The Mechanical Wonders of the World, and even opened a “general office” on prestigious 45 Wall Street. “These models bear out all that was promised of them,” raved a New York Times reporter.

Munger’s plants were a beehive of activity as the demand for bicycles, especially women’s models, at times exceeded supply. Hundreds of blue-shirted craftsmen standing in knee-length stockings toiled amid a riot of belts, pulleys, whirring wheels, and grinding machines. In separate rooms were men who specialized in forging, brazing, buffing, polishing, nickel plating, and case hardening. Demand for bicycles was so high, manufacturers like Pope, and probably Munger, had to make extensive use of outsiders. Watch factories made cyclometers, knit-kneading factories made spokes, and rubber hose factories made tires.

With all the activity, Munger had no problem keeping Taylor busy. He had him working as a machinist, accompanying him to bicycle trade shows, and shuffling between Worcester and Middletown as messenger of important company documents. In his duties as a machinist, Taylor was said to be twice as productive as many of his peers, earning him the nickname “Speed Boy.” As a messenger of valuable documents and possible handler of company money, he had also gained his employer’s confidence.

But inside those factory walls where the entrails of myriad bicycles were splayed out around him, Taylor’s mind occasionally drifted as it had in Indianapolis. The itchy feet he’d had since his youth still radiated from him, gnawing at him, making him feel like a caged lion. It is hard to imagine Major Taylor, given the talent he had already shown, plugging away in a noisy factory, grinding down metal tubes and assembling parts, and not believe that valuable time was being frittered away.

For a short time, he lived with Munger and Munger’s new wife, Harriet, at a Bay State house, probably eating hearty home-cooked meals. At some point, he moved out on his own, sharing a tiny flat at 13 Parker Street with a friend named Ben Walker. Whenever he had a spare moment, he’d pore over his options; there was always the grease and the sweat and the dollar-a-day manual labor inherent in building bicycles. And then there was the challenge, the potential riches, and the notoriety of racing them. On its surface, it seems like it would have been a simple decision. But he was a black man living away from his family in a strange city. And as much as he wanted to race, the fearful memories of the treatment he’d received in Indianapolis had never left his mind. He had already been scarred, and at times, he would say later, he even considered quitting racing. Furthermore, he was no longer in the midsized pond that was Indianapolis. He was living in the East, seat of racing’s influential governing body and home to most of the nation’s top riders. The competition would be much stiffer than anything he had ever experienced.

Shortly after the doors at the Worcester Cycle Manufacturing Company flung open, the firm received a valuable publicity boost. From his office on Wall and Broad, Munger sat down to a cup of coffee, gazing out at the financial district as the Dow reached 45 and Colonel Pope’s stock, recently at $5, rose to $75. He nearly spilled his coffee as he read a letter crossing the wire from Deming, New Mexico. A rider named A. B. Simons had set world records for the one-quarter and one-third mile sprint while riding his Birdie Special. Like winning a stage of the Tour de France today, setting world records was good for business in the 1890s. Simons was elated. “The Birdie Special is the fastest wheel made,” he beamed through a cross-country wire. Simons’s records, proclaimed the New York Times, “set people talking about the Birdie Special, the wheel on which the record was made.”

Surely Munger slipped Simons’s memo into Taylor’s envious hands. And Taylor surely read it and began dreaming big dreams again. He immediately joined the Albion Cycling Club, an all-black local racing team, and started training at every opportunity. He had some honing to do. He had turned seventeen in November 1895, but his body had yet to fill out beyond its slight, jockey-like stature; his skin and muscles still had the soft, pillowy look of youth. From years of bike riding, Taylor had developed decent leg muscles, but his lesser-used upper body lacked girth. In long-distance endurance races, not wanting extra weight of any kind, cyclists often had muscular imbalances. But Taylor’s real interest was in short-distance track racing, a sport in which brute force is essential and a heavier all-around build is warranted. Knowing this, Taylor had tried developing his muscles at the Indianapolis YMCA, but had been thwarted by its rules against blacks.

So after noticing a YMCA in Worcester, he and Munger decided to test the racial waters one autumn day shortly after arriving in town. At the time, only one percent of the town’s population of 100,000 was African American, and neither he nor Munger knew exactly what to expect.

Because he had already pondered giving up racing, the day they walked into the Worcester Y may have been among the most important in Taylor’s life as well as in the hierarchy of African American sports history. When they entered, they were greeted by a gracious man named Edward Wilder, the Y’s athletic director. Wilder sat them down and listened as they spelled out Taylor’s wants and needs. Paying no attention to Taylor’s color, Wilder then devised an intensive training routine consisting of light dumbbells, Indian clubs—two ten-pound wooden baseball bat–like objects used for strength training—and the use of a Whitley exerciser, a pulley and cable device he could use at the Y, on the road, and at home. Wilder also introduced him to deep-breathing exercises, probably something akin to modern yoga—a routine Taylor would use during his career.

From that day forward, partially for his sport and partially perhaps as a form of affirming payback for Wilder’s compassion, Taylor followed his instruction to the letter, taking great pride in his physique and overall appearance. It would become the physical foundation from which he would build his incredible power and stamina in the years to come. The absence of racial tension at the Y, the freedom to finally develop like his rivals, and the extraordinary sensation of social equality meant the world to him. “I was pleased beyond expression,” he later gushed. It was such an emotional event he remembered it vividly when he sat down to write his memoirs three decades later. “I wish to pay my respects at this time to Mr. Edward W. Wilder . . .” he wrote. “I am firmly convinced that I shortly would have dropped riding . . . were it not for the cordial manner in which the people [Wilder and others in Worcester] received me.” That a stranger would spend time with, and care about, a reedy little black kid who had just arrived in town inspired and motivated him. It was time, he and Munger believed, to feed off his motivation, to stick his toe into the local amateur scene.

A spring sun hovered in the Massachusetts sky as Taylor strolled out of the Worcester YMCA early in 1896. At Wilder’s and Munger’s urging, he had trained diligently throughout the winter, including during his travels between factories and trade shows. Munger had watched with keen interest as his protégé morphed from a thin-as-a-rake sixteen-year-old, into a slightly less thin-as-a-rake seventeen-and-a-half-year-old. With the biggest local amateur event of the season, the Worcester Telegram Race, scheduled for May, Munger, surely aware of the publicity value in a good showing, laid out a stiff riding program to supplement Wilder’s routine.

Reconnoitering the race route—a strategy well ahead of its time—Taylor repeatedly rode every inch of the route for weeks in advance. Munger also took him to the now-famous George Street hill climb for hard-core training. While not a lengthy hill, George Street is a veritable goat path that tilts upward at a lung-piercing incline of nearly 20 percent, making it excellent training grounds. Today, even with twenty-speed carbon fiber bikes, thinner tires, and a well-surfaced road, it’s a horrendous ascent. But in 1896, riding up its unpaved outer banks on a single-speed track bicycle was a quad-busting, heart-pounding affair. For years, hubristic locals had gathered at its imposing base with every intention of making it to the peak, only to wind up in oxygen debt halfway up its precipice.

When word spread that the black kid from Indianapolis was about to try his luck on the harrowing climb, a crowd gathered on both sides of the street, eager to watch the inevitable suffering and eventual capitulation. Probably snickering into the collar of his light spring coat, Munger held his watch as Taylor tore up the brutal climb with comparative ease. Taylor then amazed the locals by repeating his conquest seemingly at will. The hill apparently became part of his treacherous all-around training routine and to this day, locals challenge themselves at the annual Major Taylor George Street climb. “Everyone who knew him,” remembered elder Worcester resident Francis Jesse Owens, “knew he was about the only guy who put a bike up the George Street hill and he did that before they blacktopped it.”

After months of intensive conditioning, Munger, with Wilder’s help, believed Taylor was ready to test the local racing scene. Having seen the silver Telegram trophy shining through the window of a local business, Taylor agreed. Collectively, all they could do was hope that the vote against a whites-only racing world by the Massachusetts delegates a few years earlier suggested a more racially open society.

The ten-mile Worcester Telegram race held on May 9, 1896, was for Taylor the greatest example yet of the wild popularity bike racing enjoyed in America. Though it was just an amateur race with no national significance, it was the biggest local race of the season and fans showed up in droves. In the days leading up to it, operators at the Kyle & Woodbury telephone service heard talk of almost nothing but the race. On race day, the trolley car management team was completely overwhelmed. All day long, their cars were loaded down to the gunwales, every inch jammed with bodies hanging over the sides. Overanxious fans jumped out of windows—or climbed over the motormen’s shoulders—and tumbled onto streets, some forgetting to pay.

Block after block of horse carriages lined both sides of the street, competing for space with thousands of bicycles and the crush of people. One unfortunate reporter, given the thankless job of counting bicycles, finally gave up after reaching 4,200. High-society gents rolled into town in their elegant Brougham or Ivory Surrey carriages, arguing over gear ratios, the best racing models, and who they believed to be the best rider. After thoughtful technical analysis, they tracked down the nearest bookmaker and placed their money on the most logical rider. Their wives, according to one reporter, had a simpler and perhaps more accurate means of picking the winner—“The rider with the prettiest colors,” of course.

By race time, the town’s business district was a virtual ghost town. All told, fifty thousand people—more than had ever turned out for a daytime event in Worcester’s long history—lined the race route. “Everybody was there,” wrote one scribe, “except the men in the accident ward of the county hospital.” Eighty riders competing on ten different teams threw off their sweaters at the start.

Taylor was there, standing inconspicuously alongside his Albion teammates. A ring of reporters stood around looking indifferently at him and his team of black riders. They jotted down a few notes about him, unknowingly the first of hundreds they would write in coming years, and walked away. Perched in the trees above him, Taylor saw flocks of boys and girls as thick as birds. One of Taylor’s heroes, Willie Windle, whom he had met in Indianapolis as an impressionable fourteen-year-old, came to watch the race.

After several unsuccessful attempts, the starter squeezed the gun and the riders piled on the course. Because of the tight thicket of riders, Taylor, according to one report, was repeatedly bashed by another rider. Though he was on a weaker team with a few out-of-condition riders, Taylor stayed with the leaders, seesawing back and forth between second and sixth place.

Once he and the rest of the peloton had pushed out of sight, the crowd hovered around a gold-trimmed race bulletin board that was updated every few minutes—or as fast as the phone operators could take down notes. Those who were unable to attend the race jammed phone lines with one subject on their mind. “Any news from the race?” “Who’s winning the race?” “Who won?” “How did the clubs show in the race?” Toward the end, Taylor’s teammates faded. One rider, believed to be hopped up on drugs, fell three times. Taylor was able to stay with most front-runners, but ahead of him, a rider named James Casey of the well-trained Vernon team had built an insurmountable lead. Lacking a strong team to pace him, Taylor rallied in vain to catch Casey, his grit carrying him to a respectable sixth place.

Though he hadn’t won, it was an important day for Taylor and Munger. While the newsmen with their front-page coverage couldn’t get enough of the bike race, they were surprisingly silent on the other race—the usually volatile issue of blacks competing opposite whites. In their coverage, which included a few mentions of Taylor, the word “black” hardly came up. New England, with its abolitionist history, was proving to be more than just a haven for bicycle manufacturing. For the time being at least, Taylor had found his personal utopia. “I was in Worcester only a very short time,” he later beamed, “before I realized that there was no such race prejudice existing among the bicycle riders there as I had experienced in Indianapolis. When I realized I would have a fair chance to compete against them in races, I took on a new lease of life.”

Taylor spread his new life-lease around the Eastern amateur racing scene. From Worcester, he trained to New Jersey to compete in the popular twenty-five-mile Irvington-Millburn race, or Derby of the East. It was a gamble on his part; the race had a history of racial strife. In the preceding years, a black rider named Simmons had been tossed in and out of the race like a hot potato. The race organizers had fought bitterly among themselves and with local cycling teams over whether to allow Simmons, or any blacks, into their decade-old event. Endless meetings in front of packed houses were held, but they had difficulty reaching a consensus. Some men got fired over the flack, several threatened to leave, and others actually left.

Taylor somehow snuck in among the 153 white riders without incident. Escaping his notice among the crowd of twenty thousand, the Great Arthur Zimmerman attended, watching Taylor’s progression with keen interest. Fortunately, Taylor had lively legs that day. He found himself in a vicious head-to-head dual with Monte Scott, the race leader, and one of the best amateur road racers in the East. Everything went well until the last half mile when someone materialized, seemingly from nowhere, with a large pail of ice water. He dumped it in Taylor’s face. Temporarily startled, Taylor lost Scott’s wheel and his wide draft, finishing twenty-third. With his focus shifting to track racing, it would be one of the last road races in which Taylor competed.

His amateur days rolled on. At a one-mile open track meet in New Haven, Connecticut, Taylor took first place and a shiny gold watch, which he promptly gave to Munger in appreciation, he said, “for some of the many kindnesses he had extended to me.” In Meridian, Connecticut, he took second place, earning a beautiful dinner set, which he packaged and sent to his mother for her birthday.

Shortly after the Connecticut races, Munger and Taylor received an invitation to a special event in Indianapolis. They wasted no time packing their bags. The former high-wheel racer and his black protégé were coming back, and they had something to prove.

The train carrying Major Taylor and Birdie Munger clattered into Indianapolis in August of 1896. George Catterson, the real estate mogul who had sponsored the muddy Indianapolis-Matthews road race that Taylor had won, had recently opened a velodrome called the Capital City Racetrack. The fifteen thousand–person track, erected on Catterson’s land near today’s Indianapolis 500, was large and modern enough to attract big names. At its grand opening a professional rider named Walter Sanger had set the one-mile track record, charging around the surprisingly slow track in 2:19 2/5. Sanger wasn’t in the same league as American heavyweight Eddie Bald, soon to be named 1896 American sprint champion, or Tom Cooper, Bald’s chief rival, but he was a seasoned pro.

Munger knew Taylor had improved rapidly, placing top ten in nearly every one of his amateur races, but he wasn’t sure if he was ready to go up against a professional. He was dying to find out. Unfortunately, either because of Taylor’s color or his amateur status, Munger wouldn’t get to see Taylor compete against Sanger, the doyen of the peloton. But Catterson, a kindly man who had been friendly to Taylor in years past, did allow him to use the track for an unofficial race against time. After the treatment he’d received in Indianapolis, including being barred from some of their tracks, Taylor wanted to show his hometown fans how much he had progressed.

He would get his chance.

A curious crowd arrived to see if the native lad could come anywhere near the speed of Sanger, the wily veteran. It would take them just 2:11 to find out. Munger stood on the track apron watching Taylor’s body flatten out, his pace building, his Birdie Special humming over the track. Munger, and several other clockers, held a watch by his side, the seconds ticking off in his hand. At the half-mile marker, Munger knew something special was happening. Taylor was on a tear! In over a decade spent around countless cyclists, Munger had never seen a seventeen-year-old display that kind of speed on a slow track. Not in an open race, not in an exhibition.

Taylor kept steamrolling ahead, quicker and quicker, flying over huge swaths of track in a blaze. Taylor careened around the oval for the third and final lap before ripping into the homestretch. There was a remarkable grace to his form, not unlike a manta ray slicing through the ocean floor. When the teenager, still three months shy of eighteen, passed under the one-mile marker, Munger looked down at his hand in disbelief. At the slow Capital City track, Taylor had worked a mile in 2:11!

It was an unofficial record on a new track, but he had trounced Sanger’s mark by eight-plus seconds. The crowd couldn’t fathom what they were seeing.

This extraordinary performance was no fluke. Later that evening, buoyed by his success and the animated crowd, Taylor made a run at the one-fifth-mile track record. Flanked by a few pacesetting friends, he powered around the track with everything he had left. At the finish line, the timekeepers clicked their watches and looked up in stunned silence again: he had lowered the record by two-fifths of a second.

On hearing the news from the race announcer, the crowd let out a roar. The white riders milling about in the locker room made a beeline for the track to see what all the commotion was about. Just then, Taylor walked past an earful of racial slurs and outright threats of violence if he dare show his black face at the track again. Though he hadn’t even raced opposite a white rider, they also cussed out race director Catterson for allowing a black man on the track.

Old wounds had been reopened, but Taylor had his track records, though unofficial. He clopped off to Indy’s Union Station, reliving memories of his youth and anguishing over the harsh realities of his coming adulthood. With mixed emotions, he and Munger boarded a red-eye train pointed toward Worcester. In a move of curious prescience, Taylor placed another newspaper article describing his achievements in his growing scrapbook, as though he knew where his life was headed. Stretching out in his wide berth, Munger could peer over at his protégé and smile.

But back at Munger’s factory headquarters, the bicycling industry was beginning to shake at its core. In the coming days, he and his promising black prodigy would have tough decisions to make.

The bicycle manufacturing world tilted on its axis in 1896, less than a year after Munger had opened his New England factories. At Colonel Pope’s “fireproof” Boston headquarters one chilly day, William Ashton, Pope’s head janitor, walked over to a fifth-story windowsill and saw smoke rising. Six stories beneath him, down in the bowels of the basement, wood crates near the boiler had somehow ignited. For the next few hours, a fiery chain reaction took place, treating Bostonians to a spectacular pyrotechnic display the likes of which they hadn’t seen since the Great Fire of ’72. What began as a tiny spark became a flame, percolated, rolled up through the woodpile, morphed, took a right turn out of the boiler room, licked at the backs of retreating mechanics, then jetted straight for the stairwell.

Startled, janitor Ashton stormed past bloomer-clad Back Bay ladies taking lessons in the fifth-floor riding academy, then began a death-defying descent down the steps, smoke piercing his lungs. The blaze continued up the elevator wells and stairwells, ripped through the pine-wood ceiling of the first few floors, taking out 1,700 bicycles and 20,000 pieces of machinery in its destructive wake. Thirty-five terrified employees working overtime scattered in all directions, some smashing windows, others stampeding toward stairs in hopes of beating the inferno to the exits, their bloomers crackling down the steps. In the hallway, a black-suited elevator conductor stood doggedly at his post like a loyal captain on a sinking ship.

Then, on the fourth floor, the inexorable force of angry red flames met the highly flammable tire room filled with five thousand tires as well as the grease-filled ball bearing room. The advancing flame won. In the middle of it all, an electric power plant sang out a booming chorus heard throughout Boston. Meanwhile, thousands of lights popped under the heat, shooting beams of light like lightning bolts in all directions. Outside, walls of snarling flames melted the elaborate terra-cotta trimming and, because no one had turned off the power, a thicket of downed power lines danced on the sodden streets, zapping onlookers below.

Within a half hour, the one-alarm fire became two, three, four, and then a full-scale, citywide general alarm. Nearly every fireman in town circled the place, hooking up hoses, setting up ladders, and dousing the building in water, one fireman snapping his leg in the confusion. Like sweating bodies trying to cool themselves, hotel buildings across the street began smoking from the scorching heat. Panicked guests scalded their hands when they touched their windows.

Meanwhile, Ashton clawed his way to the second floor before succumbing to smoke inhalation. Somehow, he slid into the second-floor sanctum of Pope’s personal secretary, R. W. Winkley, where the two of them, half delirious, were helped down a ladder by Boston’s finest.

The mammoth conflagration shuddered along in an unbridled push toward total annihilation. It crackled up to the fifth and final floor, taking out the riding academy and all freshly used bicycles, their rubber tires and leather saddles vaporized, steel wheels still gyrating in eerie suspense. Finally, it made a frenzied beeline for Pope’s sacred penthouse suite filled with reams of Civil War memorabilia, priceless oil paintings, and a vast library of Wheelmen and various other cycling periodicals. Like the Great Fire of London, it hovered there, lapping and licking its blistering, one-thousand-degree flames at decades of colorful volumes of American literature and rare artifacts.

At 11:30 p.m., the all-out siren finally sounded. Miraculously, no one died in the fire—it could have been a mini-holocaust. In the weeks before the fire, as many as six thousand people a day had attended banner exhibitions inside its doors—but within eight hours the massive “fireproof” factory was no more. POPE BICYCLE BUILDING IN RUINS, headlined the next morning’s Boston Post.

The colonel, who was in Manhattan designing a nationwide swath of bicycle ads, received a pithy telegram from his round-faced, playboy son: Burned to the Ground. Wire Instructions. Only partially insured and fully angry, Pope sped home. Arriving in Boston, the bicycle giant stood under the smoldering hulk of his former headquarters, picking through the skeletal remains—scorched bicycles with icicles dangling from them, charred machinery, unrecognizable furnishings. Losing his precious, fortune-building bicycles was bad enough, but losing his Civil War memorabilia clearly irked the bicycle magnate.

His anger had actually surfaced a few months before, but the fire really heated him up. Many of the small manufacturers and some midsized firms had been hawking bikes at prices that didn’t fit into his business model, and he didn’t much like it. “Colonel Pope,” warned one reporter, “is tired of the small dealers and makers.” He had talked a handful of them into folding their firms into his, but many refused.

However, after the fire, all bets seemed to be off. Knowing he wielded enough power to move markets, Pope issued a dictum that would achieve just that. Much like the auto industry in the early 1900s, he and his larger manufacturing friends like A. G. Spaulding and A. H. Overman began slashing prices from $100 down to $75. Their competition-pruning strategy sent shock waves throughout the industry. And it worked. Almost overnight, scores of small, lightly funded shops, which had survived by offering bikes cheaper than his Columbias, went out of business. A few midsized firms survived.

Others shivered in their expensive factory offices.

Thirty-eight miles to the west, in Worcester, Birdie Munger must have read the news and blanched. Niche models like his Birdie Special could command higher prices, but the big sellers like the family-oriented Boyd and the Lady Worcester could not. Before long, he placed the first of several pay-cut notices on his factory bulletin board. Hundreds of employees were suddenly faced with a wrenching dilemma. They could accept a pay cut—an unappealing alternative considering many were earning only a dollar a day to begin with. They could take their noble bike-making skills and try rapping on other employers’ doors in the depths of America’s financial crisis. Or they could train like mad six or seven days a week, muddle through the amateur leagues, qualify for a professional racing license, and throw in their hats with thousands of starry-eyed wannabe Zimmermans.

If he hadn’t already, surely Taylor began reading the tea leaves when those first notices arrived. In the fall of 1896, he turned eighteen. As a young man living far away from his family, he had taken comfort inside his good friend’s factory walls. But he must have feared giants like Pope pushing midsized bike makers like Munger’s over the brink, leaving him out on the streets or back at the dreaded farm.

If not a machinist, he could always be a racer. But unlike the hundreds of bike-builders-turned-racers about to join more than a thousand existing pros, Taylor, if he chose that route, faced an added challenge that would pale in comparison to all others. He was, after all, black, while almost all of them were white. This fact became an even greater defiance when the U.S. Supreme Court codified race segregation with the landmark Plessey v. Ferguson case that same year. From a race relations standpoint, with the nebulous new doctrine of “separate but equal,” the nation, according to many, was regressing.

In this increasingly hostile environment, there was no guarantee Taylor would be granted a professional license, no matter how prodigious his talents appeared to be. Even if he were able to turn pro, would he be guaranteed access to every track, including those in important Southern states? The odds could not have been more against him in the cold, lonely days that lay ahead.

As evening neared one fall day in 1896, Taylor could peer out his factory window and watch flaky, black soot rise from the chimney stacks. He felt a sense of unease in the metallic whir of Munger’s factory floors. So did the hundreds of blue-shirted workers engaging in their specialties—wheel assembly, framing, enameling, and brazing. Outside, the public lamplighter, all dressed in black, raised a long pole to the streetlights, igniting them with the spark generated from the pole’s tip.

Somewhere along the line, perhaps from Munger’s many contacts in the industry, Taylor was given the names and numbers of a few men who could, they believed, help him turn professional. Taylor sauntered into Munger’s office, walked by the pay-cut notices hanging on the wall, and picked up a phone, an old rectangular oak box with a crank handle on the side. He rotated the handle one full turn. At Kyle & Woodbury’s central office, a switchboard operator would have picked up the line and asked to whom he wished to be connected. He told her. She scanned the list of subscribers tacked up on the wall, probably let out a hearty laugh, and then dialed. The phone rang somewhere in New York, startling, among others, a wiry, high-strung man speed-puffing a cigar in his office suite. He picked the phone up. Taylor’s voice crackled over the noisy line . . .

Some historians believe that the 1890s produced the greatest number of truly eccentric characters. In addition to Colonel Albert A. Pope, there was also Diamond Jim Brady, the colossal railroad baron, and, of course, the stern-faced Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Morgans. But on the other end of Taylor’s phone line sat perhaps the greatest character of them all—someone working his name into the zeitgeist of 1890s America. His name was William A. Brady, a man the likes of which this country may never see again.