By Lorenz J. Finison, Club Historian
For CRW's 60th anniversary, WheelPeople and Club Historian Lorenz J. Finison are taking a look back through the club's history. This article was originally published in April 2016's issue of WheelPeople under the title "The Early Days of the Charles River Wheelmen: Part 2."
In 1969, the C.R.W. Newsletter reported that "touristy Rockport was dazzled by a League of American Wheelmen Roundup parade led by Dr. Paul Dudley White," a heart specialist, advocate of bicycling since the 1930s, founder of the Committee for Safe Bicycling in 1957, and activist for bike paths. At Rockport: "Little Miss Heart paraded with twenty high wheelers and other antique cycles, five unicycles, and hundreds of other bicycles." A "showstopper" family group rode tandem: Charles and Alma Harris with their two daughters, 2 1/2-year old Bonnie and 5-year old Louise. "All wore matching blue and white jerseys and Bonnie rode in a backpack on her daddy's back while Louise rode in a child's seat on the back of the tandem."
As the Newsletter exulted: "Not many people at the bandstand will forget the performance put on by the antique cyclists and not many will forget the New England clambake served outdoors by the ocean with the smell of the sea air. The highlight after the clambake was a speech by Dr. White. The luxurious Ralph Waldo Emerson Inn was filled to capacity that night with tired cyclists." White's presence connected in other ways. The Bicycle Institute of America, representing the bicycle trades, had commissioned Norman Rockwell, the famed illustrator, to provide a portrait of Dr. White, and prints were auctioned off for over a thousand dollars to benefit the Heart Fund. The cyclists got great media coverage including twelve minutes on the WBZ-TV show, New England Today.
A year prior to the Roundup, C.R.W. president Ralph Galen was elected L.A.W. New England States director and biked 1,000 miles to the L.A.W. national meeting in Marion, Indiana. The L.A.W. had been mid-west dominated since its revival in the 1950s. A proposal surfaced during the fall to put the next annual Roundup in New England. C.R.W. co-founder Fred Chaffee started exploring venues, and settled on Rockport. The L.A.W. president at the time, mid-westerner Hartley Atley, suggested that Galen not only do the local arrangements, but do the whole program too, since Atley would be frequently out of the country. Galen pushed back, suggesting that "now you are asking me to do what in my opinion you should be doing yourself." Within a few days, Atley resigned and made way for Galen to organize the Roundup, and to be elected L.A.W. president. He was the first L.A.W. president from New England since the early 1900s.
The Rockport Roundup represented opportunities to ally with other cycling organizations. And C.R.W. made the most of these connections. Headliners and organizers included: Eugene Cummings, President of the Northeast Bicycle Club (the main racing club in the area, started by Dick Ring and Buddy Dodd in 1957); John Moore, an industrial arts teacher, and advisor to the Cyclonauts Bicycle Club of Hampden (started as a teen club in 1965, and rode a double century meeting up with members of the C.R.W. in 1968); and "Tip" O'Neill, Cambridge Congressman, and auctioneer for bikes donated by Columbia and Schwinn to White and Rockwell. Dan Henry of the New York City Cycle club and inventor of the "Dan Henry" road arrows, auctioned off the Norman Rockwell prints. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Town of Rockport issued proclamations for "bike day" in honor of the occasion. Of the bicycle dealers present, Ben Olken stood out as the most consistent booster of cycling organizations since he opened the Bicycle Exchange in Harvard Square in 1933. He supported the American Youth Hostels, White's Committee for Safe Bicycling, and the Charles River Wheelmen. The Bicycle Exchange was a central place for C.R.W. communications and new member recruitment.
In theory, cycling bonds would be cemented further in after-roundup trips to Nova Scotia (led by John Likins, an electrician-in-training, and Stuart Bradford, a young biologist faculty member at UMass-Boston). The tours included C.R.W. members, but cyclists from other parts of the country too, eager to take the "Blue Nose" from Bar Harbor to Yarmouth and cycle far beyond. Twenty-eight cyclists joined, but as one leader remembered it, the tour was "loosely structured due to different interests and capabilities," and the rain and gloom of the Nova Scotia coastline. Likins went off with C.R.W. photographer Henry Soron to Peggy's Cove and Halifax, and then out the Annapolis Valley and back via the south shore to Yarmouth. Ralph Galen and John Vanderpoel ended up on Cape Breton Island and the Cabot Trail. The rest went out to Smith's Cove or Digby and did day trips, including a century ride down Digby Neck and back.
Boston was in the midst of a bicycling Renaissance! In the fall following the 1969 Rockport Roundup, C.R.W. members joined Dr. White, Boston Parks and Recreation Commissioner Joseph Curtis, and a representative from the Mayor's office to initiate the "first of what [the Commission] hoped would be many rides, with a ride starting from City Hall plaza on October 14." The C.R.W. members included Mary Jane Condon, Ralph Galen, Harry Kriche, Ronald Sinjian, and Cutler West - a wealthy retiree from Polaroid. "The park commission wanted help from C.R.W. and other cyclists for future rides and other activities like laying out bike routes and paths." A Boston Herald story about the event featured bicycling as a means to physical health coupled with bicycling as a means to environmental health - to reduce air pollution.
Taking a cue from such activism, Division of Family Health Services program director George Gulick, along with Re-Creation '70 and Ecology Action, organized an October 8, 1970 "Ride Your Bike to Work Day,” to include Curtis and led out by Paul Dudley White. Curtis told the press that “the city has proposals before the federal government for funds to construct new bike routes through the city, provide racks and build bike stops with benches, shelters, trees and planting.”
The Bike-to-Work Day rally featured two cycling engineering workers from the Boston Naval Shipyard – both African American – Charlie Lee (an ex-Tuskegee airman) and Wilbert Mason, unusual in the largely “white” world of bicycling in the 1970s. Both were members of the Charles River Wheelmen, and both ran for the C.R.W. Board in 1971. Mason was elected. Also in 1971, World War II veteran Frank Williams, a black electrical engineer at Boston Naval Shipyard, and participant in the Nova Scotia tour, chaired the bulletin mailing committee for C.R.W.
Days after the Bike-to-Work event, Gerry Wright, an environmentalist and founder of a transition house for youth, Dynamic Action Resident Enterprise (DARE), organized yet another Bike Day ride into Boston to converge on Boston Common. Streams of riders from all over the Greater Boston region coalesced. Wright went out to the Old North Bridge in Concord to gather up riders for the commute to Boston. Ralph Galen rode his 1886 model high wheeler, and Commissioner Curtis promised that the city would make a major effort to provide "more space for cyclists." Cutler West, a commuting cyclist and C.R.W. member helped to pay the expenses for the Common event out of his “Bicycle Foundation,” which sought to encourage “utility as well as recreational cycling.”
Earth Week in April, 1971 also included a Bike to Work Day, sponsored again by the Division of Family Health Services and held in conjunction with the opening of a Green Belt Bikeway which stretched, in theory, from the Boston Common to Franklin Field.
That fall, to promote commuting, a competition was organized by Randy Selden, founder and head of the Association for Bicycle Commuting, and Lou Antonellis, the city bike coordinator. Nine auto-bike pairs assembled at various locations in a “morning race to the office.” Everyone had to observe the rules of the road, including stopping at all red lights. Final score: bicycles 7, autos 2. Among the pairs were the two Bailey brothers, founders of C.R.W. George Bailey took on the new undersecretary of human affairs Donald Scherl, from near Coolidge Corner, Brookline, and made the trip in 16 minutes, beating Scherl by five minutes. His younger brother Bruce competed on a ten-speed bike against newly elected city councilor Larry DiCara, from Di Cara’s home on Codman Hill avenue in Dorchester. DiCara took the Southeast Expressway and Bailey cycled up “Dot Ave.” Bailey made it to City Hall in 26 minutes and won by three minutes. “Bailey described his route as ‘hairy.’ ‘I didn’t cheat. I stopped for every red light. If I didn’t, I’d have been wiped out.’” In a letter to the Boston Herald, the previous year, DiCara, despite his opposition to the overbuilding of highways, had ridiculed the idea of the Green Belt Bikeway. He called it an “insult to the citizens of the city,” and a “needless and costly luxury,” especially considering that it would “benefit only a few and some would not be citizens of the city.” His letter prompted a response from David Gordon Wilson, C.R.W. member, MIT engineering professor, and member of the Paul Dudley White's Committee for Safe Bicycling: “Compared to what? The Southwest Expressway [I-95 extension]? The Inner Belt [I-695]?” Both of these highways were resisted by strong community-based organizing, including some C.R.W. cyclists like George and Bruce Bailey, and indeed, by DiCara himself.
The bicycling Renaissance invigorated other organizations too, most importantly expanded Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) and American Youth Hostel (AYH) cycling options, and connections to charity. Charity rides spread rapidly in 1969 when the Massachusetts Teachers Association sponsored "Ride-a-Bike," to aid the Massachusetts Association for Retarded Children (MARC).
In September, 1971, and for several years after, Donna Haines, C.R.W. member, AYH ride leader, and Tewksbury school teacher, promoted AYH/MARC rides. C.R.W. members frequently joined in with these rides and actively championed them. What was the difference? One former AMC bike leader, Warren Sass, summed it up in one word: "accomplishment." In his view, the "accomplishment" bikers all gravitated to the C.R.W." Accomplishment in a broad sense was a feature for all the clubs, as witness the care in doling out distance badges in this era. But the balance between physical accomplishment, sociality, naturalist/environmentalist and charitable interests in the ride and beyond it differed amongst the groups.
The C.R.W. was certainly the beneficiary of enthusiasm generated by the environmental movement: it was in on the beginning of the bicycle Renaissance. In 1972, George Bailey, reflecting on the history of the still-young C.R.W. indicated that membership was over 300, and "is still increasing and its activities are broadening. It has members whose interests range from casual cycling to racing, from family tandems to single thousand-mile journeys. The membership also includes a far broader range of interest, background and viewpoint that did its predecessor, the Boston Bicycle Club, with its singularly 'Social Register' membership."
Bailey may have exaggerated the differences. The Boston Bicycle Club of the 1880s was more upper middle-class professional than of the truly wealthy elite. It included doctors, dentists, lawyers, newspaper men, and politicians. If you could have added a large dose of engineers to the mix, it would have looked like the C.R.W. founders. In the 1890s bicycling became more varied in its class membership, and clerks of various kinds took up the sport. Like now, however, cycling did not extend to factory operatives or others of similar social position.
Bailey claimed that:
The present club has held its share of the inevitable cocktail parties, but it has reached out beyond these environs. Dr. Galen himself brought a group of inner-city youngsters along on the 1968 Wheel Around the Hub. The boys found the experience a great success.
Now the Wheelmen look not only to continued cycling activities but to greater political involvement. Efforts will continue to involve larger numbers of bicyclists, and safety programs to eliminate or modify dangerous road fixtures will be encouraged. A bicycle path program and the reservation of sections of public highways in some areas may well be workable - programs which follow the example of the Cape Cod National Sea Shore. In many other ways, the Charles River Wheelmen will endeavor to add new dimensions to the goals set by their historic elder pacemakers in the promotion of self-propelled ground transportation.
The year 1972 closed out very well for cyclists. C.R.W. had increased in membership from a struggling 35 in 1967 to over 300 at the beginning of the year. Rockport rider Bonnie Harris, was now six years old. On October 1, wearing her C.R.W. cap, she climbed on the back seat of a tandem with its sprocket “welded up high enough to accommodate her first grade legs,” and set off with her father Chuck on a 138 mile three day “Pedal Against Pollution” from Pittsfield to Boston.
In Amherst the cyclists heard an impassioned speech about bikeways from Olympian racer John Allis, and then rode to Marlboro where the C.R.W. came out to escort them to Boston’s Government Center. At the end, Bonnie hopped off her tandem and told the waiting press, simply: “Cars are no good.”
The Pedal Against Pollution represented a flowering of environmentalist bicycling. Despite Allis' championing of bike paths to achieve that end, however, paths were by no means universally accepted as practical wisdom or philosophy. The C.R.W. founders were almost all commuting cyclists, and yet the club was dedicated to recreation. How these conflicting allegiances, practices, and priorities interacted is another story to tell. Stay tuned for Part 3.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The article is based on Finison’s book: Boston’s Bicycling Renaissance: Cultural and Political Change on Two Wheels. University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. The book is a follow-up to Boston's Cycling Craze 1880-1900: A Story of Race, Sport, and Society. University of Massachusetts Press, 2014. Many of the source materials are in the Bicycle History Archives at UMass-Boston Archives. A footnoted version of the article is available at: Bostonscyclingcraze.blogspot.com
