David V. Herlihy - The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer and His Mysterious Disappearance

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
BOSTON NEW YORK
2010

Copyright 2010 by David V. Herlihy

All rights reserved

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selections from this book, write to Permissions,
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Herlihy, David V.
The lost cyclist : the epic tale of an American adventurer
and his mysterious disappearance / David V. Herlihy.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-547-19557-5
1. Lenz, Frank G. 2. CyclistsUnited States
Biography. I. Title.
GV 1051. L 463 H 47 2010
796.6092dc22 [ B ] 2009028857

Book design by Melissa Lotfy

Printed in the United States of America

DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Photo credits appear on page 314.

To my mother, Patricia Herlihy

Prologue: Alton, Illinois, October 28, 1952 ix

I: On the Road

1. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 30, 1887 3

2. Athens, Greece, January 4, 1891 25

3. Pittsburgh, August 9, 1891 49

4. Peking, China, November 3, 1892 71

5. Shanghai, China, December 15, 1892 95

6. Vancouver, Canada, December 20, 1892 119

7. Kiukiang, China, January 27, 1893 127

8. Ardmore, Pennsylvania, May 31, 1893 140

9. Calcutta, India, September 17, 1893 147

II: The Search

10. East Liverpool, Ohio, October 12, 1894 173

11. Constantinople, Turkey, March 23, 1895 194

12. Erzurum, Turkey, May 13, 1895 210

13. Erzurum, September 9, 1895 237

14. Erzurum, October 19, 1895 259

III: Epilogue

15. Repercussions 279

16. Reflections 293

Notes on Sources 305

Acknowledgments 310

Photo Credits 314

Index 316

P AUL COUSLEY LOOKED UP from behind his crowded desk and stared incredulously as an elderly man strolled into the pressroom of the Alton Evening Telegraph. Moments later, the veteran editor bounded toward the stranger with an outstretched hand. "Will Sachtleben?" he blurted. "Well, I'll be!" The visitor beamed, delighted that someone in this small town by the Mississippi River had recognized him after an absence of fifty years.

"Time was when Will Sachtleben was a popular hero in Alton, known to everyone," Cousley reminisced in the paper the next day. "His fame was nationwide, and wider still, because of his daring deeds." The editor himself fondly recalled the day, back in the spring of 1893, when Sachtleben and a college chum, Thomas G. Allen Jr., sailed into town on "safety" bicycles, prototypes of the modern machine. The intrepid pair had just completed what one newspaper pronounced "the greatest journey of this century, or perhaps of any century": a three-year, fifteen-thousand-mile romp across Europe, Asia, and North America. Incredibly, they had eclipsed a similar journey by Thomas Stevens, made a few years earlier atop an old-style "high-wheeler."

The American public, caught up in the great bicycle boom, relished Sachtleben's harrowing tales of adventure and hardship in exotic lands astride the wildly popular vehicle. Two years later, his fame grew even greater as he embarked on a second, no less daring mission: a trip to eastern Turkey to unravel the mysterious fate of another famous cyclist, Frank G. Lenz of Pittsburgh, who had disappeared toward the end of his own global circuit designed to set new milestones while validating the inflatable tire. Sachtleben's timing was impeccable: the ancient Ottoman Empire was on the verge of collapse, and American newspapers were rife with reports of widespread massacres of Armenians in the very region where the young wheelman had vanished.

The two old-timers sat down for a long chat about the good old days, when the bicycle was the fastest vehicle on the dirt roads and an exchange of letters could take months. Asked why he had come back to Alton after all those years, the retired theater manager and longtime Houstonian explained that he and his nephew, Charles King, had just driven to San Diego to visit Sachtleben's younger brother, Charles, the last of his four siblings still alive. They were on their way back to King's home in Columbus, Ohio, and Sachtleben wanted to revisit his boyhood home, a rambling Victorian on the corner of Seventh and Langdon.

"I have often thought of Alton," the eighty-six-year-old confided to Cousley. "Of my loving mother, also born here, who left us children so early in life, and of my self-sacrificing father, who said to me as we walked down the hill to the Chicago & Alton railroad station the day after my graduation from Washington College: 'Well, son, stay away until you get your fill.'" Added the aged adventurer with a sly smile: "I reckon I did just that."

The veteran newsman, ever on the alert for a good story, coyly mentioned that one of his retired writers was preparing a series of articles on colorful Altonians at the turn of the century. Sachtleben had barely agreed to submit a detailed account of his search for Lenz, the lost cyclist, when he noticed the time. "Now if you'll excuse me, Mr. Cousley," he interjected softly as he rose to his feet, "I really must be on my way."

"H E RIDES WITH a dash and daring that can almost be called recklessness." So marveled the Bulletin's sports columnist, describing Pittsburgh's newest wheelman, a nineteen-year-old prodigy named Frank George Lenz. Perched atop a massive, spidery wheel measuring fifty-six inches in diameter, the precocious Lenz, the reporter noted, "surmounts curbstones and dashes over objects with an ease and abandon that calls forth admiration from even old and experienced riders."

Young Lenz in fact cut a dashing figure on or off his wheel, with his sandy blond hair, boyishly handsome face, piercing blue eyes, and muscular five-foot-seven frame. His ever-flashing grin, easy-going manner, and cheerful company quickly made him as popular with the public as he was with his peers.

A decade earlier, at the dawn of American wheeling, this bookkeeper from a modest German American family might have seemed a bit out of his element. The pioneer wheelmen were predominantly eastern elitists who practiced medicine, architecture, law, and other prestigious professions, while emulating the predilections of their English counterparts. But the sport's popularity had grown considerably in the interim, as Americans enjoyed greater prosperity and increased leisure time. Cycling welcomed respectable, up-and-coming young men like Lenz, driven by ambition.

In Pittsburgh alone, the nation's twelfth-largest city with a population around a quarter of a million, the local fleet of wheelmen had grown from about twenty-five hearty riders to about three hundred, including a handful of lady tricyclists. The national figure, meanwhile, had surpassed 100,000. Numerous clubs flourished across the country, and a handful of manufacturers operated in the East and Midwest.

The impressive growth of the cycling industry in the 1880s was due in large part to the vigorous efforts of Albert A. Pope, the pioneer American manufacturer and the maker of Lenz's Columbia bicycle. This Boston businessman helped to quash the public's initial misgivings about the big wheel and to establish the sport as a healthy and gentlemanly pursuit, albeit a risky one reserved primarily for the young and athletic. Among other successful initiatives, Pope helped launch the League of American Wheelmen (LAW), a national lobby that pushed for better roads while promoting racing and touring.