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While Calgary continues to develop as a cycling friendly city, it’s worth noting that the practice of pedalling around town was popular here more than a century ago. The below page from the Calgary Daily Herald on April 7, 1917 was filled with ads and articles touting the health and financial benefits of cycling, and how even “fashionable ladies” were riding bikes. One article on the page featured the story of a man who was still an active cyclist at the ripe old age of 63. (Of course, life expectancy in Canada for a male a century ago was a shockingly low 58.8 years of age, StatsCan says.)
Another Herald article from 1917 noted that bicycle owners needed to get better at purchasing licences, “otherwise the police will have them up in court.” Police told the Herald that they believed there were 4,000 bikes in the city that year, and 3,600 of those were unlicensed. The article is one of several highlighted by former Herald researcher Norma Marr who compiled a series of archive stories for a feature called the H Files. Here are some of her instalments from March 1999.
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