Bicycle Annie

I remember her as The Indian Princess. She said her father was a Choctaw chief. It confused me because of the O'Reilly..She would come over to our house on West Ave and get $ out of our soft-hearted mother. I remember it was dimes. We were always completely broke and with graduate school, working and 2 small kids my mother didn't always have time for her. She sold her same paper over and over to my mom for a dime.I remember onetime we hid from her in the bedroom. Our windows were always opened because of no AC. She heard us because I'm sure my brother and I aged 3 and 5 were giggling. Mother would told us to be quiet. She heard us and wouldn't leave. Don't remember what happened that time.

I also remember my brother and I playing outside and we would see her cresting the hill and run inside screaming "Mommy! Mommy! The Indian Princess is coming!" And try to hide. But most of the time she would come in and talk.

My father and mother rode bikes with seats for us kids until I was 4. They were so broke and couldn't get a car. My dad, (an Austin character in his own right) had been riding around town on a bike since the 1950's. People used to throw things at him and scream "Get a car!" People don't realize how unusual it was to ride bikes. Really until the 1980's.Daddy always admired her for her choice of transportation.

I remember in the 1970's when people started calling her Bicycle Annie. Especially since she got hit by the cab. She still rolled it around. She couldn't ride it because of the bent frame. I always thought it was so disrespectful since that wasn't her name. She seemed to be reduced to an Austin freak. She ended up walking first on 2 crutches, then one. She was immortalized on a mural on the drag. Rightly so. Think, a single woman on the streets, but never homeless, all those decades. Too proud to take straight up handouts. I thought she looked cool,in her way, and was mysterious. I always remembered how she ran for president. Imagine!

The following are memories of my parents.

From my mother:

After James went to New York I do remember her dropping by for money and catching me with a kitchen pan on my head playing with you kids. Not exactly who you want to see you dressed that way. She wanted money and I offered her eggs since I didn't have
any money, but like the excellent fund raiser that she was she said that
if Ihad money for eggs didn't I have some money to give her.

I had one of those papers. The headline was She Wolf does something
or the other. The She Wolf was birth control advocate, Margaret Sanger.
Remembe rthat she was a Catholic and once she sat down by Virginia Gonzalez at
evening mass and Virginia almost fainted and moved quickly away.

John Womack and Stuart Long both had great stories about her. She
lived in the apartment across from John and they were, as he said, suitemates.
Shegoes back to the early fifties at least.

I remember John's story well. They lived in the same apartment house and
shared a bathroom. It might have been the Halden Pharmacy building.
Someone else told me that she was always in the bathroom printing her paper,
but I'm not sure about that. John said that she told him that some boys
laughed and made fun of her, but when their ancestors came to this country
her ancestors welcomed them. He often gave her a few dollars.

Stuart Long told me that he talked to the priest about her. They had been
printing her newspaper free and the priest said just quit doing that.
Stuart said it was not the money he was worried about but her editorial
policy was getting a little extreme. She was a staunch Catholic.

A Catholic in our neighborhood told me that a new local priest who was
worried about her took to following her at night to see where she lived, but
gave up about 1:00 in the morning absolutely worn out. She refused to stop
and light any where. He also said that occasionally some Catholic woman's
charity would take her on and then quit soon totally disillusioned with
charitable activities.

Ann Gentry said that although she was dressed badly, it had a plan. Like
matching or jewelry; she didn't just throw on anything. (I remember this too. Except for the hose she always had a colorful skirt and Indian jewelry--gretchg)

From my father:

Gwen might be encouraged to tell the story of having Zelma over for tea
after a friendly encounter in Slaughter's Grocery, when we were all fellow
cyclists.I can still hear you telling excitedly in your childish lisp about "MissO'Weilly"
coming to visit.

Hi Everybody! You would not believe what a treat it has been for me to get to tell my daughters that they are actually related to "Bicycle Annie", Zelma O'Riley! I've known about Zelma and Bicycle Annie for a long time, you see, it turns out that she IS my wife's great aunt. That's right, you heard me right! My wife is blood-related to Zelma O'Riley. My wife's mother passed away recently and we started finding newsclippings and such; including Zelma's obituary among her niece's belongings. This is when we came across one of her ads from Up And Down The Drag announcing her candidacy for President of The United States in 1948.

The political advertisement read as follows:

Vote for Zelma O'Riley for First Woman President of The United States, she is Irish, she is Indian and she will care for you.

She wote of herself - She believes it will take a woman to save America and will conduct her campaign on the preparedness plank.

Her picture that appeared in her ads showed her to be an extremely beautiful woman.

So it is all really true, Zelma was Bicycle Annie and she really published a newspaper called Up And Down The Drag during her years in Austin. From what I can tell, Zelma was a political activist before her time and as far as that goes, she was also quite an individual and human being.

Zelma came to Austin, from Durant Oklahoma where she, her brother Lester and her sisters, Arlee, Zula, Lula, Ora (the Indian Princess) and Lela were raised by her parents John O'Riley and Mary Catherine Harkins, whose mother just happened to be 100% Choctaw Indian and who actually endured the Trail of Tears. Lula was my mother-in-law's mother. Amazing, isn't it?

So how in the hell is that for one fine how do you do? Is that wild or what? It is not that I don't have any other interesting characters in my ancestory, but I do not know how to explain my pride when recently informing my daughters that their great great aunt was the first woman to ever run for the office of The President of The United States.

We found a treasure trove of original copies Up And Down The Drag that we will be saving among our family keepsakes.

I have no doubt that everything else on this page, written about Zelma, is also true. We don't know alot about how she decided to move to Austin, but we know that she did return to Durant off and on. She passed away on April 30, 1991 and is buried in Durant.

Proudly posted,

wej

From my friend, John F.-Her name was Zelma O'Reilly (sp?) and I called her that even after the Daily Texan started calling her Bicycle Annie. She would often eat (French fries with lots of ketchup) at the Night Hawk on the Drag, where I would sometimes pick up a couple of Top Chopt steaks to go. One day I saw her bike in the parking lot, and I waited in the lot with my trusty Kodak Brownie, which I always carried in my car. When she came out, I said "May I take your picture?", and, as I related to Jane Greig many years later, Zelma answered in a voice that would chill a case of beer, "You may mind your own business."

From then on, each time I saw her on her bike, I would, traffic permitting, take her picture. Finally, when I had a good bunch of pictures, I decided that they would make a good present for my friend on his birthday (40th?) that was coming up. So I made the presentation and quit my obsession with pictures of her and started minding my own business as she had instructed.

I think her no-longer-existing newspaper was called "Up and Down the Drag."

In the early 1970s, Bicycle Annie frequented West Campus businesses one after another on a regular route, walking alongside a balloon-tired Schwinn or some such. If memory serves, her bike sported both a handlebar-mounted basket up front and dual, rear saddle baskets, always stuffed with newsprint.

Her dress was unusually colorful and her legs were swaddled in hose, even summertime. She always wore PLENTY of makeup: rouge, mascara, and bright-red lipstick on a big, puffy pre-Botox puss. She was never up for much conversation with passersby; in fact she could be downright dismissive.

I first heard "the straight scoop" about her at Nau's Pharmacy on San Gabriel at W. 24th street, next door to where I lived, and where I had a charge account, mainly used to eat breakfast and lunch and buy whatnot. Cigarettes were 35 cents a pack, coffee 15 cents, a hamburger and fries maybe $1.00, and--while seated in the cafe--you could "preview" whatever magazines were on sale.

Consequently, I was in Nau's several times each day and got to know the staff there well. One, who'd been there for years, told me that Annie's deceased husband had run a local neighborhood newspaper and that, after his death, she had delusionally continued to make the rounds of the paper's former advertisers, asking them to place ads in upcoming issues. At Nau's, they sympathetically played along: she usually left with a complimentary soft drink.

Later, in the mid-70s, she disappeared for a while; the story was that she had been struck by a vehicle. When she reappeared, she carried a crutch and tugged the bike along. She couldn't make quite as long a trek as before and wasn't seen quite as often. Still later, she jettisoned the bike and added a second crutch and bandages on her shins. Her appearance became increasingly, let's say, "less neat" (I remember her hose gathered around her knees.), and her demeanor evermore snappish.

I moved away in the late 70s and don't remember seeing her when I returned in the 80's.