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  AROUND THE WORLD ON TWO WHEELS

  AROUND THE WORLD ON TWO WHEELS

  Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride

  PETER ZHEUTLIN

  CITADEL PRESS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  For my late father, Lionel Zheutlin, a kind and gentle soul.

  Contents

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE: Going Woman

  CHAPTER TWO: Female Paul Jones on a Wheel

  CHAPTER THREE: A Woman with Nerve

  CHAPTER FOUR: Le Voyage de Miss Londonderry

  CHAPTER FIVE: A Girl Globe-Trotter

  CHAPTER SIX: Annie Is Back

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Tour on a Bike

  CHAPTER EIGHT: A Whirl ’Round the World

  CHAPTER NINE: Capture of a Very Novel “Wild Man”

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Appendix

  A Note on Sources

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  AROUND THE WORLD ON TWO WHEELS

  Prologue

  The maiden with her wheel of old

  Sat by the fire to spin,

  While lightly through her careful hold

  The flax slid out and in

  Today her distaff, rock and reel

  Far out of sight are hurled

  And now the maiden with her wheel

  Goes spinning round the world

  —Madelyne Bridges, Outing magazine, September 1893

  On the morning of January 13, 1895, an enthusiastic crowd, giddy with anticipation, lined the streets of Marseilles to see the arrival of a brave young American in her early twenties. As the petite, dark-haired cyclist pedaled into town with one foot—her other foot, wrapped in bandages, was propped on the handlebars—the Stars and Stripes flew in the breeze from an improvised mount on her bike frame. A loud cheer went up and people waved and shouted as she wheeled by. Dressed in a man’s riding suit and astride a man’s bicycle, she was accompanied by several Marseilles cyclists who had ridden with her from the village of Saint Louis. The riding party proceeded to the Brasserie Noailles where the local cycling club, the Cyclophile Marseille, hosted a luncheon in her honor. Feted in Paris for several weeks, she had braved bitter cold and snow to reach the south coast of France.

  Annie Londonderry was already famous by the time she reached Marseilles. The French press had been writing about her prolifically since her arrival in France, at the northern port of Le Havre, on December 3, 1894. She had started from Boston seven months earlier in a daring attempt to become the first woman to circle the globe by bicycle, and, it was widely reported, to settle an extraordinary, high-stakes wager between two wealthy Boston businessmen.

  While in Marseilles, Miss Londonderry endeared herself to the local population. She donated to a children’s clinic several pieces of jewelry she had purchased in Paris. Admirers sent her countless letters at l’Hôtel de Provence, where she was staying. Unable to reply to them all, she set visiting hours, published in the local newspapers, when people could come to meet her. There, she sold photographs of herself, which she autographed, to help pay her travel expenses. She became a familiar, if curious, sight on the Cannebiere, riding up and down the boulevard, her bicycle and her clothing festooned with advertising ribbons, and handing out leaflets promoting the wares of perfume maker Lorenzy-Palanca, and the dairy cooperative of Alpes-Bernoises.

  On Friday, January 18, a crowd filled the city’s Crystal Palace to see her. When the famous cyclist appeared, dressed in a suit provided by la Maison Jaegel, a local boutique, the audience applauded wildly. As Miss Londonderry circled the room on her ivory and gold Sterling bicycle, an orchestra, conducted by the Maestro Trave, struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. In a brief speech, translated into French, she told the people of Marseilles they were “the elite of the French nation.” The crowd roared its approval and threw flowers at her. She had, said one local newspaper, “captured the hearts of the people of Marseilles.”

  Two days later, thousands gathered to bid Miss Londonderry adieu as a drum and bugle corps and a delegation of local cyclists escorted her aboard a French paquetbot, the 413-foot steamship Sydney. Deeply moved by the outpouring of affection, she wept. Then Miss Londonderry and her Sterling bicycle sailed away through the Mediterranean toward the Suez Canal and points east.

  But, unbeknownst to the people of Marseilles, the young cyclist from Boston with the Irish name was, in fact, Annie Cohen Kopchovsky (Mrs. Simon “Max” Kopchovsky), a Jewish working mother of three young children, ages five, three, and two. What the people of Marseilles also didn’t know is that “Mlle. Londonderry” was not simply a cyclist on an around-the-world journey, but an illusionist possessed of what one American newspaper called “an inventive genius.” She was, to be sure, making a trip around the world by wheel, though she made liberal use of steamships and trains, as well. But just as Londonderry was not her real name, with Annie Kopchovsky things were rarely as they appeared. There were even some who questioned whether she was a woman at all.

  By the time she arrived in Marseilles, Annie was halfway through a traveling fifteen-month theatrical production starring herself, a veritable one-woman carnival on wheels who turned every Victorian notion of female propriety on its ear. An inveterate storyteller, consummate self-promoter, and masterful creator of her own myth, she turned her journey into one of the most outrageous chapters in cycling history, and herself into one of the most colorful characters of the gay 1890s.

  For more than a century, the story of the audacious and charismatic Annie Kopchovsky and her attempt to circle the world by wheel has been lost to history. Who was this mysterious young woman on a bike? What was she like? How did she free herself from the social constraints that surrounded late Victorian women, and undertake such an adventure? Finally, how did an anonymous working-class Jewish mother from the tenements of Boston’s West End transform herself into a new woman—the daring, internationally renowned globetrotter, Mlle. Londonderry? In short, what happened?

  Chapter One

  Going Woman

  ANNIE KAPCHOWSKY IS A POOR RIDER, BUT INTENDS TO DO THE EARTH*

  Good health to all, good pleasure, good speed,

  A favoring breeze—but not too high

  For the outbound spin! Who rides may read

  The open secret of earth and sky.

  —Anonymous, Scribner’s Magazine, June 1895

  Monday, June 25, 1894, was a perfect day for baseball in Boston. The weather was fair, if somewhat overcast, but the hometown team, the Beaneaters, was in Louisville to play the Colonels. The big news this early summer day—news carried by telegraph cables to newspapers across the country and around the world—was the assassination the previous day in Lyon of French president Sadi Carnot at the hands of an Italian anarchist.

  With the South End Baseball Grounds on Columbus and Walpole streets quiet, some who might have gone to the ballpark chose instead to ride the swan boats plying the lagoon in the Boston Public Garden. Others sat on benches, reading the news from France. Pedestrians strolled along gently curved walkways under the garden’s graceful willows. If any of them had wandered the short distance to the gold-domed Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill they would have been treated to an unusual sight. There, at about eleven o’clock in the morning, a crowd of five hundred suffragists, friends, family members, and curiosity seekers gathered at the steps to see a young woman about to attempt something no woman had before—an around-the-world trip by bicycle.

  Annie Cohen Kopchovsky arrived in a barouche accompanied by a friend, Mrs. Ober-Tow
ne, and Mrs. J. O. Tubbs, head of the local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Her close friends, Pear Stone and Susie Wyzanski, were there to meet her. Governor Green-halge was expected to preside over the proceedings, but sent word at the last moment that he could not attend, much to Annie’s disappointment, no doubt. Though “the event lost something of the glamour that comes with state patronage,” the scene was a festive one.

  Annie was dressed in typical late Victorian attire: a long dark skirt, a dark blue tailored jacket with billowing leg-o’-mutton sleeves, a white shirtwaist with a striped collar and a neat bowtie, dark gloves, and a flattopped hat, under which her dark hair had been tied up in a tight bun. “[S]he was short and lightly built,” reported the Boston Post. “Her face was unmistakably Polish; her eyes, big brown and sparkling, her mouth wide but well formed and stamped with determination, her complexion olive, her hair dark brown, waving luxuriantly over a countenance full of expression.”

  To one side, Captain A. D. Peck of the Pope Manufacturing Company, maker of Columbia bicycles, stood watch over the Columbia “wheel” on which Annie would make her journey. Peck, an officer of the Massachusetts chapter of the League of American Wheelmen, a cycling organization, was dressed in his formal riding attire, including epaulets bearing the abbreviation “MASS,” which allowed him to pass “as a State dignitary.”

  Mrs. Ober-Towne briefly addressed the crowd, declaring her conviction that “woman should have the same chances as men.” The head of the WCTU spoke next. “May she set a noble example wherever she goes!” shouted Mrs. Tubbs, who also expressed the wish that Annie would “spread good tidings…among the Bedouins and the nations of the earth.” She then introduced Annie to the crowd. Annie kissed all the women around her, asking each “if she had got her hat on straight,” and announced she was making the trip to settle a wager between two wealthy Boston sugar merchants:

  “I am to go around the earth in fifteen months, returning with five thousand dollars, and starting only with the clothes on my back. I cannot accept anything gratuitously from anyone.” She turned her pockets inside out to show that she was penniless.

  Mrs. Tubbs held up a copper coin and offered it to her. “A penny for luck!” she declared.

  “I can’t take it,” replied Annie. “I must earn it.”

  “Take it as pay in return for speaking for the white ribbon, then,” said Mrs. Tubbs, who pinned a white ribbon, the emblem of the WCTU, on Annie’s right lapel.

  Next, a representative of New Hampshire’s Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company stepped forward, handed Annie $100, and attached an advertising placard to the skirt guard on the rear wheel of her Columbia. The money was payment not only for carrying the Londonderry placard on her bicycle, but for Annie to use the surname “Londonderry” throughout the journey, as well. The latter served more than a commercial purpose; it had a practical one. It would ease her journey to travel under a name that didn’t call attention to the fact that she was a Jew. And, more prosaically, she already had a keen awareness of the importance of publicity and a penchant for showmanship; “Annie Londonderry” would be far more memorable than “Annie Kopchovsky.”

  “Anyone else make a bid for space on the wheel?” she asked. There were no other takers that day, though there would be many down the road. “There was quite a crowd present to see her off,” reported the Chicago Daily Inter Ocean, “the advertising man being particularly prominent.”

  As she prepared to mount her bicycle in front of the State House, her husband and three small children were nowhere to be seen, and she lamented to a reporter that her brother, Bennett, who was in the crowd, “didn’t come up to say good-bye.” Bennett may have thought his sister was meshugineh, Yiddish for “crazy,” or he didn’t expect her to get very far—or, perhaps, both.

  As Captain Peck steadied her bicycle, she climbed into the saddle at last. Then, carrying only a change of underwear and a pearl-handled revolver, Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, now Annie Londonderry, “sailed away like a kite down Beacon Street.” She would not return for well over a year.

  IT WAS “one of the most novel wagers ever made” said one Iowa newspaper: $20,000 to $10,000 that a woman could not go around the world on a bicycle as had Thomas Stevens a decade before. The wager was designed to settle an argument between two wealthy Boston men, but carried on at all levels of society in the 1890s, in homes, parlors, public meetings, work places, legislatures, rallies, and newspapers—indeed everywhere—about the equality of the sexes, a debate that carried well into the twentieth century and, one could argue, continues today. The requirement that the woman earn the formidable sum of $5,000 en route above her expenses made the journey not merely a test of her physical toughness and mental fortitude, but of her ability to fend for herself in the world. If she succeeded, she was to win the staggering sum of $10,000 in prize money.

  Talking to reporters as she traveled, Annie often gave idiosyncratic descriptions of the wager. She sometimes said it prohibited her from earning money as a journalist, her chosen profession, and that she was prohibited from speaking any language other than English, even though the only other language she actually knew was Yiddish. One newspaper reported, fancifully, that “when riding she must dispatch a postal card to Boston every ten miles telling where and how she is, as well as the condition of the roads.” Annie even told one El Paso newspaper that the wager prohibited her from contracting matrimony during the trip, not disclosing that she was already married.

  ANNIE KOPCHOVSKY WAS, on the surface, as unlikely a candidate for the adventure she was about to undertake as one could imagine. Slightly built and a novice cyclist, she was a Jew, a married woman, and a working mother who was helping her husband, a peddler, to support a growing family.

  It was a hectic household. When Annie left Boston in June 1894, she and her husband, Max, and their children lived in the same Spring Street tenement in Boston’s West End as did Annie’s brother, Bennett, his wife, Bertha, and their two young children, ages four and two. Max was a devout Orthodox Jew who spent hours studying Torah and attending shul. Bennett was an up-and-coming newspaper executive determined to make a success of himself at the Boston Evening Transcript, one of the city’s many daily newspapers. Annie, though already the mother of three and only in her early twenties, worked as an advertising solicitor for several Boston dailies—a vivacious, bright, and attractive young woman and a skilled conversationalist, a woman who could charm even the most frugal customers into buying the newspaper space she had to sell.

  She came to the United States in 1875 from Latvia as a young girl of four or five with her parents, Levi (Leib) and Beatrice (Basha) Cohen, and her older siblings, Sarah and Bennett. The Cohens were relatively early arrivals in Boston’s Jewish community, for it wasn’t until the 1880s that large waves of Jewish immigrants began arriving in America, many fleeing oppression in czarist Russia. Boston’s Jewish community was relatively small, however, because the city had a reputation for virulent anti-Semitism. Many Jews remained in New York, where most, like the Cohens, first entered the country, or headed to the midwest or south to Baltimore, Savannah, and Charleston.

  In the mid-1890s, about 6,300 of Boston’s 20,000 Jews lived in the West End, the largest concentration of Jews in the city, but only a quarter of the neighborhood’s ethnically diverse population. The West End was filled with new arrivals from all over Europe who tended to carve out small ethnic enclaves block by block. Spring Street was in the heart of the Jewish community, but within a few city blocks were clusters of Irish, Portuguese, Poles, Germans, Russians, and Italians, and a significant number of African-Americans, as well. It was one of the most ethnically mixed neighborhoods in America, a great churning place of immigrant life; a place where one would hear intriguing stories of faraway places.

  In the early twentieth century, Mary Antin described the West End in her memoir, The Promised Land, and her experience, arriving as a young child, was not unlike Annie’s:

  Anybody
who knows Boston knows that the West and North Ends are the wrong ends of that city. They form the tenement district, or, in the newer phrase, the slums of Boston…the quarter where poor immigrants foregather, to live, for the most part, as unkempt, half-washed, toiling, unaspiring foreigners; pitiful in the eyes of social missionaries, the despair of boards of health, the hope of ward politicians, the touchstone of American democracy….

  He may know all this and not yet guess how Wall Street, in the West End, appears in the eyes of a little immigrant from Polotzk. What would a sophisticated sight-seer say about Union Place, off Wall Street, where my new home awaited me? He would say that it is no place at all, but a short box of an alley. Two rows of three-story tenements are its sides, a stingy strip of sky is its lid, a littered pavement is the floor, and a narrow mouth its exit.

  But I saw a very different picture…I saw two imposing rows of brick buildings, loftier than any dwelling I had ever lived in. Brick was even on the ground for me to tread on, instead of common earth or boards. Many friendly windows stood open, filled with uncovered heads of women and children. I thought people were interested in us, which was very neighborly. I looked to the topmost row of windows, and my eyes were filled with the May blue of an American sky!

  Nevertheless, life in these tenements was hard and cramped. Though she was writing about New York, Gail Collins’s description of tenement life could apply to Boston’s West End, as well: “No one in the tenements had any privacy—apartments looked into one another across narrow air-shafts, and women often carried on conversations with each other while working in the respective kitchens. A husband and wife knew that half the neighborhood could hear them arguing, or making love.”