EPILOGUE

The men who had surrounded Taylor during his epic reign had dispersed. On a cool day in 1929, Taylor drove down a New York road, looking up at a canopy of sycamore trees arching overhead. From his room inside the Hotel Dauphin, Birdie Munger looked out his window like an expectant father. A successful inventor and automotive executive, the sixty-six-year-old former bike racer was winding down in his last days of life. Despite his achievements in the fastest-growing industry in history, in his waning days, Munger’s mind often drifted back to another place and time. He had followed Taylor’s career both here and abroad, and though the automobile had provided him a good living, it had also separated him from his good friend.

He and Taylor had grown up in those enterprising years wedged between the horse and the automobile, a time when the bicycle had become a quintessential part of the great American way of life. Through trial and tribulation, the machine had become a part of them, a bond even old age couldn’t erase. As simple as they may seem today, there was something special about those early days of the bicycle. Nearly all writers spoke of this at length. “Cycle tracks,” wrote H. G. Wells, “will abound in utopia.” And Munger, during his racing and manufacturing days, and later as Taylor’s mentor, manager, prophet, and confidant, had been at the forefront of it all. He had moved into the automotive age because profit dictated he do so, yet it was those days with his protégé and around the sport he loved most that had shaped him and produced his fondest memories. “It was in our blood,” wrote auto executive Charles Sinsabaugh, one of Munger’s friends and former race reporter for the Chicago Daily News.

With thinning hair and arching back, Munger cinched his front door open and stared out. Taylor hobbled inside. The two old racetrackers embraced, then retreated to Munger’s study.

Taylor had come west seeking words of wisdom on his book from his former sage advisor. He laid a pile of old newspaper clippings on a large table. As they had atop Munger’s Indianapolis bachelor pad in the early ’90s, the two talked bike racing for hours. A good deal of laughter was followed by silence and obvious moments of reflection.

As night fell, shortly before departing, Taylor reached for a large bag and spilled its contents on the table. Munger’s face glowed as he ran his eyes over a series of old photos of him and Taylor, and the shops, like Hay & Willits, that once rimmed “bicycle row” in Indianapolis. There were surely photos of the old Newby oval where each of them had won races, near the area now bristling with the cars of the Indianapolis 500. Taylor flipped open his book and handed it to Munger. Munger read Taylor’s dedication page:

To My True Friend and Advisor, Louis D. Munger:

Whose confidence in me made possible my youthful opportunities for riding. Mr. Munger prophesized that one day he would make me the fastest bicycle rider in the world and lived to see his prophecy come true.

Knowing he had played a significant role in one of America’s greatest sport stories, Munger had difficulty containing himself. All the reminiscing stoked emotions that had lain dormant in the aged auto executive. The benevolent white man who saw special qualities in Taylor, when others were calling him a useless little pickaninny, broke down. Taylor joined him. In the adjoining room, Munger’s wife, Harriet, must have felt the heavy air of emotion. Taylor gathered his belongings.

Late that night, Munger escorted Taylor to his front door and uttered his last good-byes. From his window, he watched the stiff form of his good friend disappear into the night.

A few short months later, in the waning days of the Roaring Twenties, Louis D. Munger, a man with the heart of a lion and the soul of a saint, passed into history. At some unknown place and time, in the fog that was his last years of life, Taylor read the news with grief.

After a successful racing career, Floyd MacFarland, Taylor’s chief antagonist, became manager of the Vailsburg’s Track in Newark, New Jersey. Vailsburg became the epicenter of American track racing, continually drawing large crowds throughout the 1910s while many others shuttered down. During winters he ventured overseas, promoting six-day races in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, and Vienna.

But MacFarland, the man who had tried to knock Taylor out of the sport, remained a controversial and pugnacious figure to the end. On an April morning in 1915, he became agitated with a man named David Lantenberg, who was setting up billboards along the rail of the Vailsburg Track.

Separated by over a half foot in height, the two men went at it jaw to chest. Realizing he was outmatched physically and orally, Lantenberg turned his willowy frame around and resumed screwing his sign into the wood board. When he felt a long, clawlike hand grasping his arm, Lantenberg spun around rapidly—screwdriver still in hand.

For Floyd MacFarland, life ended with the sight of Vailsburg’s wood track and the sharp tip of a screwdriver, the loud angry shriek of Lantenberg’s voice, the smell of wood shavings, and the searing pain of metal piercing his neck, sliding through his skull and into his brain. As MacFarland collapsed senseless to the ground and the dreadful cacophony of his large body thumped on the wood surface, some witnesses looked away as blood and matter spewed forth. Others rushed to his aid, including a grief-stricken Lantenberg. At the hospital, MacFarland was pronounced dead and Lantenberg, who never meant to kill him, charged with murder.

Papers all over the country carried the shocking front-page news. Thousands of people came to say farewell to MacFarland at the home of Frank Kramer, by then a legendary figure at the Vailsburg Track. Eighty-five floral arrangements were received, requiring three horse-drawn wagons to carry them to the cemetery. “He was a villain,” admitted Hugh McIntosh, the man who booted him out of Australia, “but a likeable one.” Nearly every rider past and present was there.

There were no reports of Taylor being one of them.

William Brady was lying supine in a hospital bed when someone handed him the phone. With his legs in plaster casts, the longtime “ticker-fiend” learned that the stock market had, as he put it, “laid an egg.” In no time, the fortune he had earned managing boxing, Broadway plays, and bike racing was gone. But having lived through the 1890s depression, he was able to take it all in stride. “I’ve seen too many depressions,” he said, “both Class A and Class B, to get brash about them.”

Brady had lost his investments but not his knack for spotting successful ventures. One day, a desperate man named Elmer Rice handed him a tired manuscript that had been rejected by every manager in New York. Brady loved it, then somehow scraped together $6,000 to buy the rights to the play and movie. That tragic story called Street Scene won a Pulitzer Prize, cementing his place as America’s most successful Broadway producer. It also reminded Americans of his uncanny knack for uncovering hidden success in a story or a person that others couldn’t see—a talent gleaned from his early sporting days.

At his wife’s, actress Grace George, urging, Brady had reluctantly quit pugilism and race promoting around the time Taylor gave up the American racing circuit in the early 1900s. He now passed time with celebrities like Milton Berle, Helen Hays, and David Warfield. But Brady was an anachronism who often eschewed modernity. With his doctor’s blessing, he disposed of his automobile, preferring instead to walk or ride down the avenue where Manhattan Beach Track once teemed with howling racing fans. He had been caught up in the turn-of-the-century bike racing era; “A champion streaking round the track hunkered over on his wheel in one of them old-time races,” he wrote in his second autobiography, “was the epitome of human speed.” The two-person version of the six-day race that he created—now universally called “Madison’s”—was still going strong, attracting 150,000 fans in the late '20s, the largest crowds for any event in the Garden’s long history.

But Brady preferred the days of old when men like Taylor rode for six days nearly nonstop in his first professional race. “Major Taylor,” he liked to tell reporters, “is the greatest rider on earth.” He even ripped on his own creation. “Nobody has a better right to run a thing down,” he wrote of the tamer two-person race, “than the fellow who invented it.”

Whenever he could sneak away from his latest play, Brady would slip into the new Madison Square Garden and bounce around with happy abandon, tossing primes at the new crop of riders. Alongside his friends and fellow bike-racing fans Bing Crosby, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, Brady often reminisced as he sipped his rye. “I remember when cigarette packages carried pictures of bike racers right up along with my musical-comedy stars and baseball heroes.” Though his life had become devoted to the theater, he was proud of his days in the sport. “We left our mark on the business,” he said, as the smoke from his cigar ringed out his window and onto Broadway. On a January day in 1950, the old raconteur would see his last sunset at the age of eighty-six, having indeed left his mark on three of America’s most popular pastimes—and on one of its greatest sports legends.

The press never allowed Arthur Zimmerman to live down his racing days. Nor did he want them to. A prosperous businessman in retirement, sinking his six-figure racing fortune into successful New Jersey hotels, Zimmerman had a hard time staying away from the racetrack. Though he had retired and then returned to racing many times, his official retirement after a mid-'90s race in Paris was met with universal remorse. “Zimmerman’s retirement,” wrote one East Coast reporter years later, “was regretted just as much as the Babe’s departure from baseball.”

Whenever Brady or other race promoters needed an attendance boost for an event, he’d gladly show up to fire off the pistol, fine-tailored suit draped over his shoulders, diamonds in his shirt pocket, cigar pinched in his fingers. Fans and reporters would flock to the track and wax nostalgic with “King Arthur,” reminiscing about the early days of bike racing. “Just as Babe Ruth was the idol of the baseball fans and Bobby Jones of the golf followers,” one writer remembered, “Zimmie was the favorite of the racetrack patrons.”

For young riders like Taylor, Zimmerman was the sun around which all things had revolved. Taylor constantly measured his performances and his sportsmanship to Zimmie’s, as did the press. Zimmerman stood tall as an ideal role model from that moment they first met when Taylor proclaimed himself to be the proudest boy in the world. With each season, a new batch of riders, hoping to emulate him and his friend the Flying Negro, came up through the ranks. With or without an invitation from promoters, Zimmerman—suffering from rheumatism in his declining years—was known to hobble up to track aprons, gazing out at the young riders, and watching as the wheels of his sport rolled on without him. He was, Taylor cooed, “the hero of all boyhood, as well as my own, ever since I was able to read the newspaper.”

Even the ground he raced on was immortalized. When a Miami, Florida, developer learned that his golf course was set to cut through the very ground where the Great Zimmerman once raced, he wouldn’t allow his workers to destroy the track.

On a breezy October day in 1936 while visiting friends in Atlanta, Zimmerman died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-seven. In one of the roughs on that Miami golf course, portions of the track rose up, standing as a testament to the one-time popularity of America’s first international superstar.

Sometime around 1930, a former bike racer named Jim Levy stirred nervously in the sales office of his Chicago Buick dealership. Prophetically, auto sales had begun dropping eight months before the stock market crash, and Levy, like most car dealers at the time, sat wondering where his next sale was going to come from. Just then, a wizened old man wearing clergy-like clothes and thick-rimmed glasses limped up to him. It was Taylor, in one of his only known sightings in Chicago before his death. And he wasn’t there to buy a car. After small talk about the old days—there is no indication they knew each other well—Taylor pulled out a copy of his blue-bound autobiography with a drawing of him inside a globe on the book's jacket. He splayed it open on Levy’s desk. As he had at auto dealerships from Worcester to Chicago, Taylor tried sweet-talking Levy and his salesmen into buying a stack of his books to be given as a gift to car-buying customers. Levy reached for $3.50 and bought a copy or two, probably rare signed copies that, if a person could find one, sell for two hundred times that amount today.

Much of Taylor’s final movements remain shrouded in mystery—the kind of riddle that frustrates yet intrigues. Someday the gaps may be filled, but then again, perhaps this is the only way his final days could be drawn up.

What is known is that he descended into the same life of poverty and obscurity from which he had initially risen. Having left Worcester for Chicago in the same state as he entered it in 1895—a few dollars short of flat broke amid a depression and facing an uncertain future—Taylor watched helplessly as history repeated itself.

Taylor could not have picked a tougher time or place to sell his book, or for that matter, to sell anything. The Great Depression loomed heavy over the city. Thousands slept in parks, at rail stations, and under cardboard boxes. “I do not know how it may have been in other places . . . but in Chicago the city seemed to have died,” one woman recalled. “There was something awful—abnormal—in the very stillness of the streets.” Being the largest manufacturing city in the nation, Chicago was especially hard hit. By 1932, the worst year, 750,000 Chicagoans, nearly half the workforce, were unemployed. One hundred sixty thousand Chicago families received relief from private and public agencies. Soup kitchens dotted the landscape.

When Taylor took up residence at the YMCA on South Wabash Avenue, which often subsidized rents for those who couldn’t pay in full, he may have been one of those receiving relief. Known as the “colored” Y and standing in a neighborhood called Bronzeville, the five-story brick building trimmed with Bedford limestone became Taylor’s home for two years. It was there a few years before his arrival that Carter G. Woodson, a historian who stayed at that Wabash Y during visits to the city, formed the idea that if whites learned more about blacks, race relations would improve. In 1926, he started black history month. He chose February because it contains the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, plus Valentine’s Day, a day of love and affection. Though he has never been properly recognized for his pioneering role, few men personify the spirit and the original meaning of Woodson’s black history month better than Major Taylor.

In that respect, the Wabash YMCA may have been a fitting stop for Taylor. In other ways, it had to have been unsettling. For one, it was a far cry from the comforts of the seven-bedroom home, beautiful wife, and admiring neighbors he had enjoyed in his adopted town of Worcester. But more importantly, for a black man so used to mingling with whites—and one who had always judged people by their character, not their color—the segregation had to be disconcerting, even unnatural. During the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the North early in the twentieth century, formal and informal segregation limited them to only certain areas of the city. Taylor must have felt suffocated by this. One can imagine him, as he had throughout his life, testing those rigid racial divides, on occasion drifting across the artificial borders, stepping bravely into the white world, copies of his memoir tucked into his side. “In closing,” wrote Taylor in his last chapter, “I wish to say that while I was sorely beset by a number of white riders in my racing days, I have also enjoyed the friendship of countless thousands of white men whom I class as my closest friends.”

With the six-day race still going strong—helping to keep viable the new Chicago Stadium that had already teetered on bankruptcy—Taylor likely mixed with the diverse crowd at the endurance test that had launched his professional career. There, with more than 125,000 racegoers twice a year, he would have found the largest base of fans interested in his book. Chicago also still had outdoor racetracks. Taylor probably introduced himself to the new crop of riders, doting on them, filling their eager ears with tales of his races against Jacquelin, Bald, and MacFarland—then gently coaxing $3.50 for a copy of his book, signed by his wavering hand. “All the kids talked about Major Taylor and loved him,” remembered ninety-five-year-old Worcester resident Francis Jesse Owens. “I have a soft spot in my heart for him because when we were kids and we’d be racing bicycles and a guy would say, ‘Who do you think you are, Major Taylor?”’ He had used a common phrase that would later be parodied by speeding motorist; “Who do you think you are, Barney Oldfield,” referring to Taylor’s former rival who became a famous race car driver.

But except for a few dozen cities, the colorful outdoor racing world that saw Taylor rise to superstardom had sadly atrophied. Many historians point to the automobile to explain the once-grand sport’s demise. But a quick glance at horse racing brings pause to such claims. The popularity of the two sports had run parallel: wildly popular in the 1890s and early 1900s, each boasting hundreds of robust tracks, followed by near extinction, leaving only a few dozen mostly rundown tracks by the late ’20s. Because of aggressive lobbying for relegalized wagering by a handful of wealthy, enterprising men, horse racing experienced tremendous growth in the 1930s and beyond.

There was mild debate in a handful of cities, including Chicago during Taylor’s stay, about whether the new laws allowing pari-mutuel betting applied to bike racing as well as horse racing. With the same concerted effort, some believe, bike track racing could have remained on par with other sports in the American conscience like it has in much of Europe. At that seminal moment, and each year since, the sport needed a William Brady, James Kennedy, or “Huge Deal” McIntosh to pursue legalized betting. No such figure materialized. Much like Taylor’s own life, the sport therefore withered on the vine, its legacy surviving mainly in the memory of those who lived it, or in a few rider’s postmortems found only in obscure books now collecting dust in libraries or at rare auctions.

The halcyon days were over. One by one, the vibrant velodromes that had roared with millions of voices became wind-whipped and deserted. Others met with the wrecking ball, to be replaced with the distant din of baseball bats cracking, horses galloping, or industry churning. Even Madison Square Garden, a magnificent creation of the Gilded Age where Taylor’s career began and Brady courted his wife, fell into disrepair. Before it was torn down and replaced in 1924, the once-grand pleasure palace was nothing but a creaky old place.

Early in 1932, Taylor weakened. In what is believed to be the last photograph ever taken of him, he looked frail and old. But he maintained his honor. Sporting a well-fitting suit, smart tie, and a handkerchief pressed neatly into his coat pocket, Taylor looked hallow-eyed at what appears to be a Bible, like a man of the cloth preparing to read from the gospel. Taylor had preached in Worcester and Australia, and the photo suggests that when strong enough, he had continued spreading the word of God to the attentive ears of Chicago’s many needy, perhaps at one of the Baptist churches near the YMCA.

But as the nation sunk to its lowest ebb in the spring of 1932, Taylor faded. The excess weight he carried after his racing career and the shingles he suffered during the ’20s combined to further weaken his heart and kidneys. Eventually his life contracted further, confining him to the Provident Hospital. James Bowler, a longtime Chicago alderman and former pro racer, became Taylor’s white benefactor. Bowler had competed at the 1899 World Championships in Montreal and had raced Taylor to a draw in Chicago that same year. Feeling content to have tied a rider of Taylor’s stature, Bowler then refused a rematch. More than three decades later, Bowler stepped up on Taylor’s behalf, bringing in the city’s best surgeons. But Bowler’s benevolence came too late. For a month, the doctors worked on him, probably until all money and hope was gone.

Weak, shaky, and virtually alone, Taylor was forced to live out his last days in the sterile internment of the Cook County Charity Ward. Suffering from chronic myocarditis, the resulting fatigue, shortness of breath, and severe chest pains made him a hostage in his own body. But as Taylor lay in that liminal state between life and death, he felt prepared for the afterlife. “And I have always said,” he had told a reporter at the height of his career, “I’m not living for one day or two. I am going to live on and on—I am living for the eternal, and to a man who knows he is living for the eternal, and will one day face the Supreme Being, a day or two now isn’t of much consequence. God has always taken care of me, and I believe he always will.”

At two-thirty on the afternoon of June 21, 1932, Major Taylor’s fifty-three-year-old heart failed him. In an undignified scene, the body of the world’s fastest man lay in the Cook County Morgue unclaimed. Nine hundred miles south in New Orleans, his daughter Sydney received a copy of the Chicago Defender—the only paper to report his death—from a mysterious source. As is often the case, with age comes understanding and yearning for family reconciliation, sometimes too late. “I feel terrible he died alone in a hospital,” she later said. “I didn’t realize it then, because I was always mad at him. But I sure do wish I would have called him back and said, ‘Daddy, I didn’t understand what it must have been like to be a black man in those days.’”

Initially, she couldn’t bring herself to tell Daisy. But eventually she found the words and the courage to tell her of his passing. Daisy, who would live in anonymity for another thirty-two years, could peer out her window in wistful silence, her thoughts drifting back to those glory years.

More than a week passed from the day of Taylor’s death and still no one came forward to claim his remains. The county eventually arranged for his burial in an unmarked pauper’s grave in the welfare section of the Mount Glenwood Cemetery. There, a handful of anonymous men buried the man who once was the world’s most popular athlete, a man who had attracted record crowds in dozens of countries on three continents. Almost no one came. The few who did watched him go under in a plain wooden box clutching a Bible, his last earthly possession, then turned their backs to his grave and walked away. Behind them, deep beneath that hardened Chicago earth, laid the memory of a lost era, and the remains of the gentle man who led it.