Gone with the Schwinn

This is the story of how I learned to, and how not to, ride a bicycle. I’ll also introduce you to the woman who rode around the world on a road bike to win a bet… and to fight for a better world. 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Today's stories about bicycles, bloomers, and finding a way forward.
It's also about me your host a pump care, but
mostly it's about making you smile. Welcome to an pump
Cares Chapter nineteen Gone with the Schwinn College was an

(00:38):
exciting time for me. I had made my way through
the Shimna tunnel, so I was officially an adult. I
had thrown myself into college theater productions and kept lending
better and better roles, and I was enjoying my new
found independence. There also seemed to be a lot more
girls around in Shimna. We had separate colleges for him

(01:00):
these speaking students and English speaking students. I obviously went
to the Indian College with my best friend Vide Segal,
but nearby there was an all girls college for English
speakers called St. Beats College. Now, to vij and me,
the girls of Sat Beats were goddesses. They were smarter

(01:20):
than all the scholars in India. They were more beautiful
than any starry night. They could stop a man's heart
with just one look. But that wasn't a problem for
us because they never looked at us, and of course
that just made us try harder to get their attention.

(01:42):
I had a particular trick I used to use. I
would pace up and down the Mall Road, waiting to
run into the saint beat girls, and as soon as
a small pack d my way, I would try to
show up my intelligence. I would walk alongside them, fix
my dreaming gaze on the sky, and then reside something
profound in English, broken choppy English. For a while, my

(02:07):
go to phrase was Newton's third Law, which I had
practiced tirelessly. The girls would walk by and I would say,
as if thinking out loud, yes, to every action, there
is an equal and oppository action. I hoped that this
law would hold true for me to my attraction, the

(02:27):
girls would have an equal attraction. But at last it
was just the opposite. But that didn't stop me from trying.
One day, I was walking down Mall Road with which
when we noticed a girl from the English school giggling
with a boy our age. The mystery boy was leaned
up against a bicycle. It was like James Dean had

(02:48):
beamed up from Hollywood and landed right here in Shimla.
Stylish Stylish mej and I walked away casually, but as
soon as we were out of sight, which it took
me by my shoulders, as he did every time he
had announcement. This time he said, a bicycle. Of course,
that's what we have been missing, as if that was

(03:08):
the only thing holding us back from winning over one
of those perfect creatures. But at the time I thought,
my goodness, yes, he's right. What better symbol of my
newfound adulthood and independence than the bicycle. I whipped my
notebook out of my bag and took the most important
note I would take my entire college career, Learn to cycle.

(03:30):
I underlined it three times, learned to cycle. Learn to cycle?
See why not? See why k Lee, see why Crely.
It wasn't long before I found a bicycle and got
to work. I had this romantic vision of my cycling
wind in my hair, going wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted,

(03:54):
and I thought maybe I could even have a girl
right on my handlebar. Us. The reality was quite different.
Shimla is a very hilly so there were no real
cycling roads, and for some reason, I thought it would
be easier to learn going downhill, So I walked my

(04:16):
bike to the top of a hill, hopped on and
tumbled over my front wheel almost immediately. Let me tell you,
I learned very quickly where the brakes were, and after
a week and plenty of scrapes, I got the hang
of it. Unlike me, we was less determined to learn.

(04:40):
He stalled for a month before I forcibly put him
on a bike. By then, I was feeling pretty confident,
so I offered to be his teacher. Okay, listen carefully.
The first day we refused to get on the bike
without me holding onto him. His instinct was to close
his eyes every time he gained a little speed, which

(05:00):
I school did him for. Okay, I remember people in
town laughing at us, and I can understand why two
young boys bickering with each other, one on a bicycle
with his eyes closed and the other holding onto the
bike like a disappointed father. For the next few weeks,
every day after class, which would get on my bike

(05:20):
and I would hold the bag and walked alongside him.
It took a week before we graduated to moving at
a brisk walk. Then one faithful day, wij was peddling
faster than I could walk, so I lightly took my
hands off the bike and we just sailed away. After that,
we began cycling together often. It was almost exactly as

(05:43):
I imagined. I could go anywhere I wanted, any time
I wanted. But I still had no girlfriend to ride
on my handlebars. So we and I decided to show
off a bit and cycled by St. Pat's College. Although
we had been practicing for a few weeks, which they
had one tiny problem with his cycling technique. He could

(06:05):
not follow the road. Instead, he would follow his line
of sight wherever he was looking, he would move. As
we wobbled up the roads to sand beads, a flock
of girls walked out of the building perfect time. I

(06:26):
tried to paddle with as much sophistication as I could
and adopted an air of scholarly interest. I was just
about to say, bij I was thinking about Newton's second
law of motion when I glanced over at my friend.
Wej had noticed the women as well, but he did
not look very scholarly. His eyes were locked on the group,

(06:49):
and he started hurtling straight towards them. The girls screamed
and scattered in all directions, but watching widges face, you
would think his bicycle had this I did to kidnap.
His eyes were as wide as the wheels themselves, and
they might as well have been spinning too. I yelled,
Wi left, left faithfully. His eyes shot sideways, and as

(07:13):
they did, his bicycle cut across the street. But at
that moment, a large truck was barreling down the lane.
In that instant, I was terrified and vige. He was
like a deer in the headlights. His gaze was locked
on the truck's front grill, and despite his wishious j
could only cycle towards that mountain of metal coming straight

(07:34):
at I knew this was not the first impression my
friend intended to make. He needed to look somewhere else,
anywhere else. I yelled, WI right, right, which his eyes
turned back towards the side of the road. His head
followed his shoulders too. Then the pike's handlebars swung around.

(07:54):
He swerved away in time, except now he was headed
straight for the concrete barriers on the side of the road.
Now there is a reason I've always turned to Wija
for advice. My friend is wise, and caught between a
truck and a hard place, he decided to forge his
own path, with the whole street watching, which aimed straight

(08:16):
for the mounds of cement, and with all the grace
of a true athlete, he somehow flew through the space
between them and went headfirst into a ditch. So this
scheme ended as all of my romantic misadventures with Wija.

(08:38):
Did neither of us want the girl, but we made
a memory that we continue to laugh about today. I
still love to cycle, and even now I relished the feeling.
It gives me, that joy and feeling of freedom. The

(09:00):
world looks different from a bicycle, and I want to
tell you the story of a woman who felt similarly.
In the spring of eighteen, a young woman stood outside
the Massachusetts State House and announced to a crowd of
hundreds that she would cycle around the world. Her real
name was any Cohen Kotowski, but after a big announcement,

(09:26):
a local water company called London Dairy Lithia spring Water
approached her with an advertising opportunity. They would give her
a hundred dollars if she put a promotional banner on
her bike and change her name to any London Dairy
during her travels and so on June, with just a

(09:48):
change of underwear and a revolver, Any London Dairy hopped
on a bike and headed west, traveling the world on
a bicycle under any circumstances is incredible. But what was
so remarkable about London Dairy was she had barely ridden
a bike before. She sat on a bicycle for the

(10:10):
very first time only days before her trip, and she
had only taken two short rides before she departed. But
the journey was about more than just proving her own ability.
London Dairy was doing this for all women. You see.
By London Dairy's account, she had gotten into an argument

(10:31):
with a well known businessman. As he talked, he insisted
that men were mightier than women, which London Daerry disputed strongly,
so he started rattling off the accomplishments of men, including
Thomas Stevens, a cyclist who had traveled the world on
a bike almost a decade prayer. The businessman noted that
no woman had made a comparable journey, and according to him,

(10:55):
no woman could make a comparable journey. So London Dairy
made a bet. If she would travel the world with
her bicycle in fifteen months, the businessman would give her
a price ten thousand dollars in cash or nearly three
thousand dollars in two day's money. London Dairry was a
young woman, an immigrant, a wife, and a mother, and

(11:18):
in eighteen nineties, all of these qualities made people doubt
what she could accomplish, but she was determined. As she
rode off on her bicycle, she vowed to be back
in Boston by September eight The journey was hard at
the time. The roads were mostly dirt, her bike wede

(11:41):
forty two pounds, which is very heavy by today's standards,
and she was having difficulty moving underneath her weighty dress skirts.
By the time Londonderry made it to Chicago, she almost
turned around, but nevertheless she persisted. She traded in her

(12:01):
clunky bicycle for a lighter, one immense, sterling roadster that
was half as heavy as her first bike. She also
found a pair of Bloomers, which gave her the mobility
she needed to travel the tricky roads. These upgrades re
energized her, and through a loophole in her bed, she
made her way to Europe with her bike on board
a steamship. Through a combination of cycling and sailing, she

(12:27):
made her way from New York to France, and when
she finally left Marcella for Egypt, thousands of fans gathered
to send her off, including a drum and bugle band
and a gggle of local cyclists, of course, and he
had to finance her travels, and according to her great
grand nephew, she did this by riding through the streets

(12:49):
with advertising banners, plack cards and ribbons attached to her
pike and pinned to her clothing. She was at times
virtually covered from head to tour with ads for everything
from milk to perfume. Not only was she an adventurer,
she was a skilled businesswoman. From Egypt, she went to Jerusalem,

(13:10):
Sri Lanka, then Singapore, then Vietnam. She was unstoppable and
along the way she had incredible adventures, some true and
some perhaps exaggerated. According to New York Times, London Dairy
delighted crowd with tales of her adventures that reporters across
the world dutifully reported. One was that she had been

(13:33):
valued by bandits in France, another that she had hunted
Bengal tigers in India, and still another that she had
traveled to the front lines of the Sino Japanese War,
where she was shot in the shoulder. She claimed at
various times to be a Harvard medical student, a lawyer
and often the founder of a newspaper and an accountant. Then, finally,

(13:54):
in March, circled back to the United States. She talked
in San France, Cisco, took off over the Golden Gate
Bridge and headed back east. In the weeks before the
September deadline, London Dairy was apparently knocked over by a
draw of pigs and broke her wrist, but even that

(14:17):
did not slow her down. She just put on a
cast and kept going. In September, she peddled back across
Boston lines right on time. She won the bet, she
got her ten tho dollar prize, and to all those
that outed her because of her gender, well she proved

(14:37):
them wrong. In the years that followed, bicycles became an
important part of the feminist movement, giving women the freedom
to move and travel. Suddenly, they no longer needed a
man's permission or helped to get around town. As London
Dairy would later write in her newspaper column, The New Woman.

(14:58):
I'm a journalist, and the new woman. That means that
I believe I can do anything that any man can do.
Some might say she did it better. That's it for
today's episode. I'm an opum Care, be kind to yourself

(15:20):
and thank you for listening. Pump Cares is a production
of I Heart Red You. I'm Your host an A
pump Care. Our executive producer is Mangy, Senior producer Julian Weller,

(15:43):
Associate producer Morgan Lavoy. Sound design and mixing by Julian
Weller and Dan Bauza. Music by Aaron Kaufman. Production support
from Emily Maronov and Married You. Writing by Lucas Riley,
Matt Riddle, Margoon Lavoy and Julian Weller. Lucas Riley and

(16:05):
Matriddle are our story editors. Thanks to Sikin Paru, Hermande Suza,
Godwin Amana, Sydium Studios, Cornel Burn and Popit Honble. Why
w