Franz Duelberg’s 1927 Boogmans Stayer
Franz Duelberg’s 1927 Boogmans Stayer
Motorpace bikes, or “Stayers” are pretty rare. It is pretty unusual to find one of these on the west coast of America, and really weird that we have a half-dozen of them on Bainbridge Island. We have a story about that. First, some background…
Stayers like this are made for an esoteric type of bicycle track racing that involves drafting behind a Derny or a motorcycle (check out the photos for an idea). The reversed fork keeps the bike stable at the extremely high speeds associated with motor paced events. This particular stayer was originally built by the Belgian Boogmans bike company for a German track cyclist named Franz Duelberg. Boogmans had a reputation for making some of the best racing bikes of the era.
Boogmans head badge
The fork is supposed to be backward.
How did it get to Bainbridge Island? Well, Mr. Duelberg left it with Pop Brennan’s bike shop in New Jersey sometime after he retired from racing. The bike stayed in Brennan’s bike shop for thirty years until Bill Brennan traded it to a man named Otis Taylor. Otis was a cycling coach (and blues musician) who lived in Boulder, Colorado. Otis’ friend Sully really liked the bike, and talked Otis out of it when she moved to Bainbridge Island in the 1990’s.
A motor-paced track race
The bike was displayed on a wall in her house on Kallgren avenue until the day of the Nisqually earthquake, when it fell off the wall and the wooden rims got damaged. Sully brought the bike down Kallgren to her neighbor Jeff (who happened to own Classic Cycle at the time) to see if he could repair it. Not only did Jeff have the 80-year-old-odd-sized rims with which to fix the bike, he had a matching Boogmans stayer built in the same year! Quite a trip for an old bike to make to meet up with one of its dozen-or-so sibblings!
A big gear for extremely fast racing
Really neat chain stays
The cyclist who originally raced the bike? Duelberg was fast. In his rookie season Franz partnered with another new racer, a young Jimmy Walthour jr., and together the duo won the 1928 six-day races in Detroit and Chicago. In November 1936, a Melborne newspaper exclaimed “Duelberg Brilliant! One of the finest exhibitions of motor-paced bike racing that has been seen in Melbourne was given by the German Franz Duelberg at the third board track cycling meeting at the Exhibition on Saturday night.” So this bike made a trip to Australia too…