Newark, N.J., Started a National Cycling Tradition

By Peter Joffre Nye

For more than three decades that lasted through 1930, Newark, New Jersey, achieved international renown for its outdoor board cycling track. The best racers from both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific competed there from May through Labor Day. They hurled around the pine oval before paying crowds that routinely filled the grandstands and bleachers twice weekly and contributed to making cyclists America’s best-paid athletes until Babe Ruth joined the Yankees.

While most Americans today identify bicycle racing with Lance Armstrong riding the roads of Europe in races such as the Tour de France, bicycle racing on tracks—called velodromes—enjoyed prestige for a generation accustomed to live entertainment. Race promoters usually charged spectators 25 cents for general admission. They held programs that included a variety of matched sprints, pitting two or three star professional riders in a one-mile race and a variety of massed-start and handicap events with dozens of cyclists contesting distances from a quarter-mile up to 50 miles in professional and categories.

When the racing programs sold out of 12,500 tickets at the Newark Velodrome, located on South Orange Avenue in the Vailsburg section, the overflow went to watch baseball—the Class A Newark bears played in Wiedenmayer Park.

Newark served as the home base to a vital American racing circuit on the Eastern Seaboard. It produced homegrown world champions August Zimmerman of Asbury Park and Frank Kramer, a native of Evansville, Indiana, who settled in East Orange. Others familiar to Newark audiences included Barney Oldfield and Ralph DePalma, pioneer daredevils of automobile racing, and French expatriate Albert Champion, founder of Champion Spark Plug Company.

The Newark Velodrome measured six laps to the mile, a little less than 300 yards around. Its steeply banked turns, 52 degrees at the top of the track turn and 25 degrees on the straight, accommodated racers in vibrant-colored silk jerseys who leaned at speeds topping 35 MPH. They set dozens of world records to put the city on the record books published in many languages.

The late Alf Goullet, who set a few world records on the Newark Velodrome, said he had heard of Newark while growing up near Sydney, Australia. He immigrated at age 19 in 1910 to the United States and headed straight to Newark. “The really best riders went there to compete,” he remarked in an interview at his home in Red Bank in 1990 as he approached his 100th birthday.

He said that the top sprinter was Kramer. When Goullet arrived, Kramer had embarked on a 10-year steak of national professional sprint championships.

In 1912, the race promoter John M. Chapman, manager of the Newark Vélodrome, drew on international contacts to organize the world championships that year in Newark, sanctioned by the Union Cycliste Internationale, the sport’s governing body, late that summer. Racers from as many countries as those who went to the Stockholm Olympics that summer converged on Newark. The stands, bleachers, and grassy infield filled with fans. One was a young woman named Hattie LeMond, whose cousin Cliff Bullivant trained racers and whose grandson Greg LeMond would become America’s first Tour de France champion.

The program culminated in the professional sprint championship, a one-mile event to determine the world’s fastest rider. Local hero and reigning national champion Kramer, riding a nickel-plated bicycle and wearing his trademark white jersey, entered as a heavy favorite. He advanced through a series of qualifiers to reach the final against André Perchicot of France and Alfred Grenda of Tasmania. Kramer later admitted he was nervous, but the crowd—and reporters covering the event—didn’t notice as he beat his rivals to win the world sprint title.

Year after year, national champions from many countries went to Newark to compete against Kramer in an effort to defeat him and usurp the U.S. title. Sports writers referred to Newark’s races as New Jersey’s national sport. He stretched his national championship streak to 16 years, from 1901 to 1916, a record that remains. In 1917, Arthur Spencer, a burly 19-year-old finally defeated 37-year-old Kramer.

Yet Kramer came back to dethrone Spencer to regain the national sprint title in 1918. Kramer won it the last time in 1921 before retiring at age 42.

Newark’s reputation made it a popular destination for racers until the property it squatted on expired at the end of 1930. By then the Great Depression started to strangle the national economy. The Eastern Seaboard’s vélodrome circuit collapsed.

A new vélodrome opened in 1933 in Nutley. However, dwindling attendance led to the Nutley Vélodrome closing in 1937. It looked like New Jersey’s cycling tradition was fading into history until a Somerville bicycle shop owner, Fred “Pop” Kugler, introduced a 50-mile race around the streets of the north-central New Jersey town. He christened his event the Tour of Somerville and held it on Memorial Day.

Local businesses donated household furniture and other merchandise, which helped to draw leading riders of the era from around North America. Over the decades, The Tour of Somerville emerged as America’s longest-running bicycle race.

In 1986, the New Jersey Assembly acknowledged Somerville’s role in cycling. It appropriated funding to found the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame in Somerville to honor the men and women riders, contributors such as promoters, and industrialists who made the nation’s sport and industry what it is today. The Hall of Fame has been preserving and exhibiting memorabilia and artifacts relating to competitive and recreation cycling. It has inducted nearly 100 persons, including Goullet, Kramer, Chapman, and Kugler. For more information on the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame and inductees, visit the Web site, www.usbhof.com.