Museum exhibit on bicycles rolls back the years

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/CELIA STOREY
Bill Gatewood and Jo Ellen Maack visit April 28 a red room full of antique and BMX bicycles waiting to be arranged in exhibit rooms for the show  “Different Spokes”  at the Old State House Museum.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/CELIA STOREY Bill Gatewood and Jo Ellen Maack visit April 28 a red room full of antique and BMX bicycles waiting to be arranged in exhibit rooms for the show “Different Spokes” at the Old State House Museum.

Bicycles are merely the latest fluffy stuff to drift into Arkansas, aren’t they? Just faddish imports, the newest little trendy trend.

Except that they aren’t.

Bicycles - and buying them, riding them, building routes for riding them - have been part of Arkansas culture at least 130 years.

That is just about as long as they’ve been popular anywhere in the nation.

“What we’ve discovered is Arkansas followed the national trend from the very beginning,” says Jo Ellen Maack, curator for a new exhibit on the history of cycling in Arkansas.

“Different Spokes” opens to the public at 10 a.m. Saturday at the Old State House Museum with a day of family-friendly biking activities as well as the first Bike/Walk Arkansas Summit (see accompanying story). On display through February 2016, the exhibit will chronicle Arkansans’ fascination with human-powered two-wheelers; the impact of cycling on women’s freedom; and advances in bicycle engineering.

But how does one tell the story of cycling? Collect a bunch of machines and hang them up in chronological order? Bike wheels cast lovely geometric shadows, but how eloquent and/or informative would mere objects be? Is cycling merely about machinery?

April 28 - days before carpenters had built display platforms and before the staff had affixed vinyl letters to the tall false walls that protect the original plaster of the state’s first Capitol (1836 and on the National Register of Historic Places) - Maack, museum director Bill Gatewood and exhibit director Gail Stephens walked a reporter through three rooms filled with bicycles they’d found for the show.

Unlike most Old State House exhibits, these things don’t come from the museum’s vaults. They are nearly all on loan from bike shop owners, private collectors and other museums.

“This isn’t the way we normally hold artifacts,” Maack noted, as she stood before about a dozen bikes propped by their kickstands or tilted against padded furniture. Gathered and yet apart from one another, they might have been a silent herd of metal cows.

“We have a storage facility a few blocks from here, and normally the loads go there,” she said. “They are processed and photographed and cataloged. But we didn’t want to be moving the bikes so much because it was so difficult. So we just had to improvise and keep them here.”

Elsewhere on the first floor of the museum, in larger rooms where voices and footsteps echo, 20 or so machines stood waiting, from tall and spindly, giraffe-like high-wheelers towering above reproduction bike stands to surprisingly undented and sleek but ready-to-rumble-looking little kids BMX bikes.

Which raises the question: How have these awkward to store and (typically) heavily used objects survived even a decade, let alone 100 years and more?

Once people stop riding a bike it quickly falls into rust and ruin. Mom and Dad say, “Get rid of that thing, you’ve outgrown it.” So it’s sent to the landfill, left beside a Dumpster, sold for scrap, donated to charity, chopped up by somebody’s cousin who is a sculptor ….

But only one of the metal machines gathered for “Different Spokes” shows evidence of long years, a “Latonian” model Boren bicycle from the 1930sor ’40s that was manufactured on Main Street in Little Rock.

So who hangs on to old bicycles ? Who has the ability to keep them in primo condition?

“Of all the exhibits that we have done … the folks that are involved in cycling are clearly the most passionate about this pursuit,” Gatewood said. The museum mounts one large show a year, and “Different Spokes” is that show for 2014. Still on view in the museum’s five upper galleries is “Lights! Camera! Arkansas!” Contributors to that show “are passionate, for sure, but [cycling] folks are just over the top, and thank goodness.”

“It comes through in the video that we’ll be playing here in the gallery,” he added. “In fact, two or three of them teared up in their interviews, they were so moved by it.”

IT TAKES A FAMILY

“What was really interesting was some of the bike shop owners have kept bikes from their childhood,” Maack said. They had parents who were willing to store a lot of bulky stuff.

The Old State House hasn’t been able to do that. “That’s exactly why we haven’t gone out and purchased a large number for the collection. We have what’s relevant to here in Arkansas, but … they take up a lot of space,” Maack said. “But you go to any bike shop in town, I would lay money, they are going to have a back room or a basement where they have bikes that either they’ve kept from their childhood or they’ve picked up through the years.”

So finding modern bicycles to display was “easy enough,”Maack said.

“With the old bikes, the 1890 bikes, I just started calling. I called three people in Missouri and just started tracking down and finally found somebody that gave me somebody’s name that gave me somebody’s name and then found a gentleman in Hot Springs Village,” Kenton Graham.

A member of the Wheelmen of America, Graham collects 19th-century American high-wheelers. He has lent seven items from his collection - which until a few years ago, he rode for fun. “They weren’t just pretty bikes sitting around,” Gatewood noted.

(Gatewood also has clambered atop reproduction high-wheelers and pedalled them along the Arkansas River Trail. “I’ve just thought about it so much I felt I had to,” he said. And yes, it was a little too thrilling.)

“The exhibit will feature bicycles that were popular in the 1880s through today,” Gatewood said. “They represent the high wheel, and high wheel safety bikes, up through modern carbon-fiber racing bikes, BMX bikes, mountain bikes … and what else have we got? A wooden bike from Grant County made in 1897. And we’ve got a homemade recumbent mountain bike.”

That massive, off-road “Frankenbike” was created by Mike Kelsey of Mena, who chopped up his original full-suspension Diamond Back DBR V8 bicycle after medical problems made racing on single-track trails in an upright saddle impossible.

“We’ve also got a bicycle made by Brent Trimble in Berryville,” Gatewood said. “He was a pioneer in carbon fiber. And we have the latest, greatest racing bike, a prototype from Orbea.”

MADE IN ARKANSAS

Orbeas are assembled in Little Rock from parts made overseas but the exhibit will also include bicycles manufactured entirely in Little Rock and shipped around the world. Roadmaster “Nimble” bikes are part of the museum’s permanent collection. They were made by AMF Cycling Co., a division of American Machine & Foundry, once the world’s largest producer of recreational goods.

In middle of the 20th century, AMF employed hundreds of workers on 65th Street in Little Rock.

“AMF was not the first to make bikes here. There was a company called Boren,” Maack said. “In 1922, I believe, is the first indication we have of them. They were active through World War II. They were made down on Main Street around Sixth and Main.”

The Boren that the museum has to show is a black “Latonian” model borrowed from Historic Arkansas Museum; the leather saddle’s split and peeled back, exposing a naked wooden base, and the paint’s a patchy psoriatic mess of black and rust stains. But still attached to its rear fender is a Little Rock city license tag that expired in May 1943.

“And we have some interesting little curiosities,” Stephens said, including toy license plates children collected by buying boxes of Post cereals between 1968 and 1980.

On loan from the Grant County Historical Museum is a hulking white-oak bicycle crafted in the 1890s by farmer W.A. Shackleford for one of his sons. Its white-oak wheels resemble wagon wheels, with wooden spokes. The chain and bolts appear to be repurposed from horsedrawn buggies and farm equipment.

“We also have Trooper Mike the Talking Bike, which the State Police used as an educational program and took around the state,” Maack said. “It taught safety rules to children. A lot of kids remember that.” CONTRIBUTORS

Maack said that learning the stories behind all these objects has not been so simple. Research took “at least two years,” and the focus has been not on things but on people. And it’s far from complete.

They hit pay dirt when Gatewood persuaded Tim Scott, assistant superintendent of Devil’s Den State Park, to help.

“Ah, if they were just relying on me, it wouldn’t have gotten done,” Scott said Wednesday. But as the pioneering conductor of the state’s first mountain bike race (in 1989), he knows cycling’s people - and not merely the off-road-racing people.

“Really what it involved was getting a couple of teams together, kind of the Little Rock guys and the guys and girls up in Northwest Arkansas, and putting them together, contacting people who might have artifacts and also writing up a lot of the copy for the exhibit to give to [the museum staff].Obviously, they had to rewrite everything.”

Among cyclists he engaged to help research topics (road and off-road riding, cyclocross, downhill racing) and review proposed scripts were Misty Murphy, regional trail coordinator of the Razorback Greenway; Paxton Roberts of Bicycle Coalition of the Ozarks; Alan Ley of Bike Bentonville; David Renko of Progressive Trail Design; and Steve Schneider, regional representative forthe International Mountain Bicycling Association; Steve Shepherd, a “consummate” cyclist and race official for USA Cycling and former chief financial officer of Orbea USA; Dan Lysk of Arkansas Cycling & Fitness; and Joe Jacobs of Arkansas State Parks and the Arkansas Outside website.

“I have learned more about cycling than I ever thought I would,” Scott jokes. “When we were writing up the copy, it’s almost like doing a little college paper. … The stuff I wrote I sent to the committee up hereto review and make any edits, and it’s like sending it to your teacher.”

Another breakthrough for the researchers was the appearance of an article by freelancer Monty Cole in Active-Style (“Once Upon a Bicycle,” Sept. 16, 2013) about a sensational event in 1886 on a bike racetrack where Little Rock Central High School stands today. The curators recruited Cole to write about West End Park and bike racing there.

A BEGINNING

To help the public appreciate the storytelling in the three rooms of the exhibit, Gatewood said, “we will have a gallery brochure, a video, podcasts attached to our website and a host of programs over the next year and half.” Expect to see a BMX event in the street in front of the museum. Possibly a documentary on TV. “We’re thinking historic tours, probably on the River Trail. We anticipate a fundraising ride for the Old State House.”

Scott suspects that the exhibit will spark a larger conversation.

“I think for a lot of folks it will be not what’s there but what’s not there,” he said. “And then, hopefully, they’ll come in and fill the gaps.

“There’s a lot more to cycling in Arkansas out there.”

“DIFFERENT SPOKES” Old State House Museum 300 W. Markham St., Little Rock Saturday-February 2016 Hours: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 1-5 p.m. Sunday Admission: free Opening day: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Family Day, hands-on activities, high-wheeler demonstrations, games oldstatehouse.com, (501) 324-9685

ActiveStyle, Pages 25 on 05/05/2014

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