I have listened to Jerome McDonnell’s mid-day, hour-long Worldview show on Chicago’s NPR station ever since he took over the helm from Sondra Gair in 1994, so when he emailed me a couple days ago with an invitation to be a guest on his annual bicycle show I had no hesitancy in saying yes. He interviews guests from war torn nations all over the world. Making a connection with a wayward cyclist from a campground in France didn’t concern him in the least.
He is an adept, most personable interviewer and a devotee of the bicycle, commuting nine miles every day via bicycle. I knew I would be in good hands with this Chicago institution. He said he had been following my blog for years and knew the extent of my travels and interest in Carnegie libraries and considered me “one of the world’s greatest cyclists.” I wouldn’t say such a thing, though when one looks at everywhere my bicycle has taken me the past forty years, it is an assumption one might make.
We arranged to check in with each other a couple hours before airtime to confirm we had an adequate connection. He has learned that Apple’s FaceTime is most reliable and so it was. He suggested we tape the interview right there, but I was along the road in a strong wind and more background noise than there would be at the municipal campground five miles away in the city of Mâcon that had been my destination, knowing that it would have WiFi to ensure the quality of our connection.
The only question he asked me before the interview was if was all right to mention my age. Certainly. It wasn’t part of his introduction, just something he slipped in later on towards the end of our twenty-minute conversation. I’ve always wondered how he preps for his show with the wide array of subjects and guests that he covers. He certainly did a thorough job knowing what questions to ask me.
One can give it a listen at https://www.wbez.org/shows/worldview/wbez-enters-the-ring-again-for-2019s-bike-to-work-week/b3fb8b1b-7853-4ae2-9638-e0334ad71abaI conclude the show. I tried to anticipate what he might ask. I thought one of his questions might be if I had a favorite Carnegie library among the more than 700 I have been to so far, but he had run out of time when the subject of Carnegies came up. We went too long as it was, as I noticed he edited a few minutes out of some of my long-winded responses.
There was much I was hoping to squeeze into our conversation, prominent among them the story of the tiny town of Merom in Indiana, the smallest community with a population of just 500 to receive a Carnegie grant, the usual $10,000 and among the last in 1916. The message board outside Merom’s library read in bold capital letters, “WELCOME GEORGE CHRISTENSEN.” Coming upon that was almost as much of a thrill as being on Worldview. The librarian at the Vincennes Carnegie had alerted the Merom librarian that I was headed her way and in typical small-town America hospitality aimed to please.
If there had been time to recount the seventy miles I had ridden before our interview I would have told him of having visited the grave of Roger Pingeon, the 1967 winner of The Tour de France, who also won the Tour of Spain in 1969 and finished second to Eddie Merckx in the 1969 Tour, the first of his five wins that The Tour is commemorating this year with its Grand Départ in Brussels.
Pingeon was buried in his hometown of Beaupont twenty miles from Mâcon. He died two years ago and this was the first time I had been in the vicinity since his death. As I was searching for his grave I vividly recalled the fond memories of my wanderings around cemeteries looking for the graves of other Tour winners—Anquetil, Bobet, Fignon, Coppi, Pantani, Robic, Garins, Petit-Breton, Lapize and a few others. When I’m in Belgium in a couple of weeks, I hope to add a handful more to the list.
Beaupont’s cemetery was one of the smaller ones I’d been to. I guessed right in perusing the right side of the cemetery first. His grave was two-thirds of the way down and at the far right side. The outline of France with a cyclist etched in the middle on his tombstone caught my eye before the name. All the flowers on the grave somewhat obscured an additional plaque of the young Pingeon in a Yellow Jersey. The same photo adorned a small billboard beside the City Hall a couple blocks away.
Beaupont was the quintessential French small town. It has a population of just 500, but had a small, grand cathedral, a prominent City Hall to be proud of, a WWI memorial, a cemetery and most important of all, a bakery. It is always a debate as to who is the most important resident—the baker providing everyone with their daily baguette or the mayor trying to keep everyone happy.
The sizeable city of Mâcon along the La Saône River will be hosting the start of the 8th stage of The Tour. Tour banners adorned all the light fixtures on the two-mile route out to the municipal campground on the outskirts of the city. A fixture was mounted at the starting point of the stage along the riverside boulevard with a digital readout counting down the days until The Tour’s arrival—39. A billboard in front of the City Hall advertised a ride for the locals this Saturday celebrating The Tour (La Fête du Tour), an event many of the Ville Étapes put on. With luck there might be a similar ride in Belfort, where I could be Saturday as I enter the Jura mountains.
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