EVERETT — In 1899, a man named Andy Fritz pieced together a marvel of technology.
It was a Gem-brand bicycle with inflatable tires, a diamond frame and a chain-gear drive.
He probably put together dozens of Gem-brand bicycles just like it to sell around Everett, then a muddy little frontier town populated mainly with laborers, loggers and prostitutes.
Fritz had no idea then of the fantastic journey that one bike would take.
That against all odds it would survive more than a century. That it would end up hanging in a Shoreline workshop 111 years later, the prized possession of a collector.
It’s a reminder of an invention that changed Snohomish County — and the country.
Americans were deeply infatuated with bicycles by the time Andy Fritz put together that Gem.
In the space of a half-dozen years, bicycles went from being the gentleman’s expensive plaything to the must-have item in towns and cities across the country.
Historians call it the Bicycle Craze. At its height in the 1890s, an estimated 4 million Americans owned bikes. Hundreds of manufacturers were churning them out. In far-flung places, men with blacksmith skills, like Andy Fritz, were ordering the components from the East and assembling them for sale.
Bicycle historian Carl Burgwardt of the Pedaling History Bicycle Museum in New York calls it a forgotten period in history. It’s what made the Gay Nineties such a sociable time.
“It was as popular and as much of a necessity to the public as the personal computer is for us today,” he said. “It was the first solo mechanical form of transportation. It swept the nation and the world.”
The bicycle spurred the invention of the automobile. It captured the imaginations of Wilbur and Orville Wright, who opened a bike shop in 1893 in Dayton, Ohio, before they got around to ushering us into the era of flight.
It led to campaigns for more roads and better roads.
It empowered women and even changed the way they dressed. Out with the long Victorian skirts and corsets and in with — gasp — bloomers.
Englishman John Kemp Starley came up with the innovation that made it all possible. In the 1870s and ‘80s, bicycles were pricey, slow and dangerous. They had a high front wheel and the term “taking a header” came into being because every jolt or rut in the road led to the rider being dumped on his or her head.
Starley had the bright idea to scale down the front wheel and add a chain-gear drive. He called it the Safety Bike. Those improvements, along with the invention of a workable inflatable tire by an Irish veterinarian named John Dunlop, made bike riding enjoyable, more comfortable and safe. The design of the bikes we ride today aren’t all that different from the models our great-great grandparents were toodling around town on.
The price came down from $150 — half a year of a working man’s wage — to $40 to $60, Burgwardt said.
Cycling quickly became the second most popular sport in the country, right behind baseball. Towns big and small formed racing teams.
“If you were a young man, you wanted to be the champion of the town,” he said.
Rows of planks
Like cities across America, this county’s hamlets succumbed to bike mania, too.
Everett had a cycling team and so did Snohomish, local historian Dave Dilgard said. In the 1890s, Everett sprang to life. It was a hasty settlement of factories, shops and stick-framed houses built on the promise of the railroad. Never mind that the few streets in town were rows of planks — local men were racing their bicycles down them.
Races were big affairs that usually took place right down the main street in town, probably along relatively flat Rucker Avenue.
The results were given the kind of coverage in the newspaper reserved today for pro football. Snohomish’s team usually beat the stuffing out of Everett’s.
Bicycling also was a pleasurable pastime for men and women who wanted to bump their way down a country cow path or wagon road.
One of those paths became an iconic fixture of the county when an avid cyclist from Snohomish, David Lewis Paramore, paid $15 for a logger to carve a pathway through a massive old-growth cedar located east of today’s intersection of Highway 9 and Marsh Road. The Bicycle Tree became a beloved magnet for locals and visitors to the area, said Peter Blecha, a staff historian for historylink.org.
“In those days it was enough for people in Snohomish to ride to the tree and head back again,” he said. “They weren’t into doing long-distance aerobics and having their hydration bottles. It was more a jolly outing among friends.”
Andy Fritz wasn’t the only seller in Everett. Dilgard said several sporting goods stores sold bicycles, including Arthur Baily’s in the Riverside neighborhood. Shoppers could pick up their bicycles, along with fishing tackle. Around 1898, Baily’s shop had etched on its window pane “Bicycles &guns for sale or rent.”
By 1902, the first automobile had arrived in Everett, purchased by a local printer.
Automobiles and motorcycles eventually supplanted bicycles. People continued to ride them for work and pleasure, especially when the Depression hit. Kids’ models became readily available around this time too. They became the fixture of newspaper boys (and sometimes reporters) as well as delivery services.
The streets were so full of them in the 1920s, they became a minor civic nuisance — at least to some people, Dilgard said.
One overly ambitious Everett police officer earned the nickname “Bicycle John.” In a moment of frustration, he impounded about a hundred bikes left on the sidewalks by children. The kids were angry, so were their parents and there was no way to tell whose bike was whose, Dilgard said.
As for Andy Fritz, there’s no record of what happened to the bicycle maker. The only trace of his business seems to be a single bike that’s managed to survive 111 years.
A rare find
Ron Summer said he bleeds bicycles.
The 61-year-old Shoreline man collects rare and precious bicycles and their bits.
A few of his favorites: A 1912 Racycle. A bike produced in 1930 in Canada. A 1950 Schwinn Paramount with French components.
He does it out of pure passion. He’s been a cyclist since the first time his feet touched two pedals as a child. Now in his retirement, he specializes in finding the hard-to-find parts and pieces of bicycles that are, as he puts it, way cool.
Even though he’s lost most of his eyesight, he still travels to a velodrome in Seattle to put in some laps.
It’s not hard to find a century-old Columbia or a Crescent on the East Coast. But to find a bike put together in Everett — that’s unusual, he said.
Summer knew he had found something special when he came across a bike with a nickle-plated badge that read: “1899, GEM, Built by Andy Fritz, Everett, Wash.”
He had been invited to take a look at a storage room full of bikes kept by another Arlington collector earlier this year. That collector, in turn, had snagged the Gem and a load of other older bikes in 1983 from an Everett bike shop going out of business.
That shop had apparently stored them away ever since a metal collection drive for the war in the 1940s. For whatever reason, the bikes were never melted down. The Gem sat unused, unridden for decades.
The inflatable tires were ripped, the leather seat was worn, the frame aged by time. When Summer spotted the Gem, he thought, “Oh my God, it’s a bike made in Everett.”
He paid $1,600 for it and another bike. Summer said he’s not sure if he’ll ever sell it.
He’s searching for 1890s bicycle tires to replace the worn ones. With a little oil and some love, it should function perfectly.
Maybe, someday soon, Andy Fritz’s bike will ride again.
Debra Smith: 425-339-3197, dsmith@heraldnet.com
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