Bicycle Touring in the Old, Old Days
Long before the advent of padded shorts, sports drinks and granny gears, back when British steel was about as exotic as a bicycle got, an AP telegraph operator named Jerome K. Cohen jumped on his bike and roamed the roads of the South.
He had no maps. All through Tennessee, he never once saw a road sign giving distance or directions. He guessed the way at crossroads. On one trip, he recalled, “I crossed eight mountain ranges, fifty large creeks and waded half as many small ones.”
Such was the life of the long-distance bicyclist a century ago. And despite all that’s changed, both his happy tales and his tribulations from the road sound utterly familiar to anyone who’s biked many miles today.
Cohen’s recollections were recently found in a musty 1920 journal on the activities of The Associated Press, the news outfit where Cohen tapped keys at blinding speed to report the events of his time to newspapers across the nation.
Bicycles were growing in popularity in those years, but the rise of the automobile would soon eclipse that mode of travel. Bicycles would become something that kids rode and competitors raced on. But Cohen was a dedicated man on wheels. He estimated he rode 25,000 miles around Alabama alone, and he was no slouch.
In 1912, he said, he rode 107 miles from his home base of Birmingham, Ala., to Montgomery, Ala., in 12 hours, consuming a then-astonishing $5 worth of food on the way.
The precise bicycle he rode is a mystery lost to history but he offered clues: It came from Birmingham, England, took him two years to get via Canada, and was the same as cyclists of every nationality used in six-day races, then a popular form of breakneck competition and entertainment in Europe and America.
Asked about those clues, cycling author Jim Langley told us it was probably a B.S.A. model. Birmingham Small Arms, best known for motorcycles, also had a bicycle division
Some thoughts from Cohen on the joys, hardships and logistics of bicycle touring way back then:
WHY RIDE, JEROME?
My reasons for riding the bicycle are apparent, at least to myself. I find that any kind of work entails a strain, and especially if it is at night. One must have plenty of fresh air, exercise, and a change of scene to offset the strain. The bicycle offers to me all of these things.
The bicycle is cheap to purchase, costs nothing to maintain, and all one has to do is to hold it the way he wishes to go and pedal along. That sounds good here, but to get an idea of it you should get one out sometimes when the temperature is 100 in the shade and the sweat begins to roll out of your shoes. That is the way I like it, however.
FOOD AS FUEL
The expense of riding is in the food consumption, and not in the maintenance of the machine. It would surprise you to know how much energy one uses on a fifty-mile trip and to do any pulling at all there must be plenty of steam in the boiler.
Once on a little 45-mile trip from Birmingham to Jasper I consumed $2 worth, a hotel dinner before starting, two hotel suppers after arriving, and two hours later six oranges and four apples. Couldn’t get over level ground on an empty stomach, and incidentally, a bag of peanuts will take me five miles on a good road.
FIVE DAYS, 378 MILES, BIRMINGHAM, ALA., TO KNOXVILLE, TENN.
The roads in Alabama were fair, but in Georgia and Tennessee they were excellent, and I was on the Dixie Highway from Rome to Harriman, a distance of 155 miles. In no place in Tennessee was there a sign giving distance or directions, and at cross roads I had to use my own judgment and take a chance, but I came out all right.
In the eighty miles of the valley from Chattanooga to Harriman, which I rode, the wind was high for two days and it was an awful struggle, but I managed to make sixty miles each of those days, where I had figured on 80, so I made it up on the following days.
EVERYONE HAS A STORY
At one place in Tennessee, far up on a mountain, there was a little path leading from the main highway into deep woods. A little boy was sitting there alone and I asked him where the path led to. He replied: “It leads to Paw’s still but it don’t ever lead back again.”
