ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

If you’re ever near the Library of Congress and have a great deal of time, ask a librarian to escort you to the bicycle history section in the Adams building. After strolling down a vast corridor, passing by a jungle of better known American history, you will be ushered into a cavernous room. On its many shelves, weighed down by a century of gathering dust, rests one of the most remarkable and undertold collections of Americana. There, cycling periodicals like Bearings, Cycle Age, and Bicycle World are so thick, our librarian struggled to carry them to her copier. When you open their oversized pages, you will be transported back to a fascinating era, now largely lost to the world. Amid its countless photos and articles of one-time famous figures, one man’s story stands out above all others. Yet as voluminous as those magazines are, only a portion of the decades-long story of Major Taylor can be found in their pages.

The rest of his epic saga was strewn in dozens of countries on four continents. It was buried in musty old books written in many languages. It has lingered there in the fading memory of those few living people who’d met him or heard of him. Few life stories, in fact, require cobbling together more information from as many places as Major Taylor’s. For four and a half years, we sifted through a rubric’s cube of data. It was like a three-dimensional puzzle that seemed at times to have no end, a perpetual time warp of information, sometimes lacking exact dates, times, or places. Other times, it came to us in microscopic fonts needing magnifying glasses to decipher.

We scrawled our narrative’s general outline from Taylor’s autobiography. Yet in line with the usual Victorian reticence about private matters, Taylor hid things from the public in his memoir. Our narrative was enhanced by his extensive scrapbook that, evidenced by his letters to Daisy, revealed his inner sentiments, vulnerabilities, and secrets. But had we stopped there, viewing the world from one man’s eyes and remembrances, the story would still lack the depth and richness provided by the characters surrounding him. It was from Zimmerman’s scrapbook that we learned of Munger’s booming voice and Zimmerman’s propensity to walk off stages, leaving dignitaries scrambling. In a crinkly and coffee-stained seventy-year-old book—and Brady’s ninety-two scrapbooks—we were entertained by his brawl with Virgil Earp and details of his love for and contributions to the sport of track racing.

Hidden in a friable sixty-year-old book from Asia, we read of Floyd MacFarland’s profanity-laced tirades in front of Australian newsmen. Frank Van Straten’s entertaining biography on Hugh McIntosh helped us better understand this fascinating but complex sportsman. We were able to trace the seeds of anger bubbling inside William Becker from a source that appeared in our mailbox one day. An errant phone call to a former wheelman from that era transported us into the grandstand at an early century bike race as well as any article we ever read. Much to our surprise, he also willingly shared stories that he had heard about the titillating nightlife in France. Francis Jesse Owens, a Worcester resident nearing his centenary birthday, and one of the few living people who had met Taylor, shed light on Taylor’s declining days. When he spoke in his amazingly lucid way about the time Taylor patted him on the back and told him that he (seventeen at the time) was “a fine young boy,” and then tried selling him a copy of his book, we shut our mouths and listened.

Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, our research led us down some bizarre roads. We will not soon forget our phone call to Bob Lommel at the Stearns County (Minnesota) Historical Society, as part of our research into the strange death of Joseph Griebler. Since Griebler was a little known rider who had raced professionally for only a few months, we expected to be greeted with a puzzled, “Joseph who?” But much to our amazement, the minute the word Griebler sprang out of our mouths, there was a resounding “yes, we know his story well.” It turns out the society had a file with forty-five pages of letters and articles, enlightening everything from his prerace shoe shopping for his kids to his last dying words, “I’m awfully sick.” But the eeriest part came when he told us he had just gotten off the phone—Griebler died 111 years before our call—with city council members discussing a new bicycle trail named in honor of, you guessed it, obscure Joseph Griebler.

It was as if the story was waiting to spring forth from people’s lips, to be unburied from auctions, dusted off in libraries. It was begging to be unearthed and then pieced together. To get a better sense of the texture of the era, we bought (or tried to buy) everything we could get our hands on: Major Taylor buttons from an odd auction, rare Taylor trading cards from France, accordion fans and Ogden cigarettes bearing his likeness, Wheelmen magazines that survived the ruinous Pope fire era. Some purchases were flat-out scams—we are still waiting for that “one of a kind” Taylor trading card from someone in Finland. From an aged wheelman, we acquired a hard-to-find copy of Arthur Zimmerman’s book that, among other enlightenments, placed us inside Paris’s famous Café l’Esperance. We eventually amassed so much information the greatest difficulty was deciding what not to use; on one website alone, the phrase Major Taylor produced over two thousands hits. But many newspapers have yet to be scanned in for online searches. So we burrowed our heads under microfilm at libraries at various locations. Some trips added invaluable dimensions to the story. Philadelphia papers detailing the 1897 annual convention that attracted 50,000 fans, reportedly the largest paying crowd in American sports history, come to mind. Other trips were less revealing; one visit to a Midwestern town revealed so little new information, we had no choice but to turn it into a cycling vacation.

Except for the two years spent mired in a depression and some of his final years, Taylor’s movements could be traced almost daily from all the above sources—his first race in Indianapolis, his last amateur race where reporters spoke of other more “promising” riders, the investigation into his controversial first-class stateroom on the Kaiser Wilhelm, the old-timers’ race. On several occasions, we had to devour 500-page books just to find one important tidbit or interesting quip. Others produced next to nothing; a valiant attempt to learn more about Harry Worcester Smith, Taylor’s jockey friend, by reading a 1930, 1200-page tome proved to be a spectacular waste of time.

The file of those who helped us unravel Taylor’s story is thick and filled with the names of people who showed incredible munificence. We still remember the first time we met Keisha Tandy, the lovely young woman at the Indianapolis Museum to whom we are greatly indebted. Flanked by security guards, she led us down a long museum passageway deep into the bowels of the building. A special key was produced and a tall steel door creaked open. Once inside, she handed us blue plastic protective gloves, then spilled out a treasure trove of Taylor memorabilia—letters to Daisy and Sydney, photographs, medals, scribbled notes, newspaper clippings, postcards written in graceful calligraphy. We immediately sensed an awesome responsibility as we fingered through the stack. The stack has since invaded our basements, overwhelmed our thoughts, absorbed our free time. Taylor’s desire to preserve his forgotten star, combined with Keisha’s kind assistance, has added color and vigor to the story.

We contacted an untold number of other museum curators, librarians, and researchers in the United States, France, Italy, Belgium, Canada, Germany, and Australia. Ian Warden, one of our Australian researchers, didn’t come up for air until he had combed nearly every inch of Australasia. What he unearthed—and the organized manner in which he delivered it—helped us bring to life two divergent years in Taylor’s career: the extreme highs of his “royal honeymoon” year (1903), to the darkness and depression that began the following year. Ian became so excited by the story, he later wrote a five-page article on Major Taylor that appeared in an Australian paper. In a story like Taylor’s that played out in dozens of countries, readings came to us not only in varied national languages but also in regional and era-specific tongues. We wish to thank our translators Pat Choffrut and Christine Schoettler who together know more languages than an aged gypsy. They helped us translate those idiolects and patois that have long since faded from our vocabularies. With great rapidity and regularity, Bonnie Coles at the Library of Congress foraged through a pile of papers that often reached leviathan proportions. Though he never showed it, George Labonte, chief librarian at the Worcester Public Library, must have grown weary of our never-ending requests for additional newspaper clippings.

Our local librarians in Excelsior, Minnesota, a quaint village overlooking Lake Minnetonka, remained patient amid an assortment of strange requests. Carla Zimmerman (not related) at the Monmouth (New Jersey) Historical Society dusted off Arthur Zimmerman’s scrapbook, allowing us to paint a portrait of his dawn-age racing exploits and his singular contribution to Taylor’s career. While making us laugh, Richard Ruenhke, chief librarian in Ottumwa, Iowa, sent us gads of articles on races in and the history of Ottumwa in the 1890s. Somewhere in the middle of it all sat articles on the brothels that stretched from one end of town to the other, forever altering our belief in the sleepy history of our neighboring state. Bob Williams, track director at the National Sports Center Velodrome in Blaine, Minnesota, shared his technical knowledge of track racing. Special thanks to Florence Christenson and Harold Schroeder, our long time assistants who helped with every facet of the book.

Linda McShannock of the Minnesota Historical Society and Ericka Mason Osen, Historic Clothing Coordinator at the Conner Prairie Museum in Fisher, Indiana, helped us with the Victorian-era clothing: Daisy’s velvet walking suits, Taylor’s pleated gambler suits, Zimmerman’s gabardine shirts. Vince Menci at the United States Bicycling Hall of Fame introduced us to Jack Visceo. Only 104 years young when we interviewed him, Jack was living proof that cyclists really are the fittest athletes in the world. Through many contacts he developed over his long life, this honorary hall-of-famer filled in some holes on century-old mysteries.

Some of the most valuable insight came from the efforts of people we never met. It’s not possible to express enough thanks to those nameless people who scanned hundreds of millions of newspapers pages into websites like the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1842–1902), New York Times (1789–present), Boston Daily Globe, Washington Post, Atlanta Constitution, Chicago Times, Newspaper Archives (1607–present)—a website with 6,200 different newspapers—and Geneology.com (1640–present). Because of them, the information a historian can find in a few days would have taken years of painstaking research a few decades ago. We also thank our parents, Cyril and Madonna Kerber, for introducing the pleasures of reading to us at an early age. Our love for the written word began there.

It takes a prescient individual with a unique ability to see significance in obscure biographies. Perhaps our greatest reverence is owed to two such individuals, our literary agent, John Willig, and our editor, Holly Rubino. Possessed with great tenacity, John expertly got us a book deal with one of the fastest growing publishers in the United States. Holly saw in the contours of this story what it could be, and helped us get it there. We cannot thank her enough for doing so while simultaneously preserving our voice.

Our final thanks goes to Arthur Zimmerman for treating Taylor as an equal in an era lacking egalitarianism; Victor Breyer and Hugh McIntosh, for their contributions to Taylor’s career and our favorite sport; William Brady, for sticking up for Taylor and for making us laugh until no further sound came out; Birdie Munger, for his kind heart and color-blind eyes, seeing qualities in a young Taylor no one else could; and Andrew Ritchie, Taylor’s first biographer, who spent years researching and writing about Taylor in a professional and chronologically correct style. And of course we thank Major Taylor, not only for leaving a traceable imprint but for leading a life of unparalleled sportsmanship, resoluteness, and transcendence in a world brimming with malice. You have not been forgotten.