Beginning in 1963 until 2017, Wandering Wheels was a ministry that reached young people through cross-country cycling.
Started by Bob Davenport, head football coach at Taylor University from 1957 to 1966, thousand-mile-plus bike trips developed students' spiritual, physical and academic lives.
In addition to spring break and interterm trips, Wandering Wheels completed 68 transcontinental tours involving over 3,500 riders, sometimes offering them for class credit.
These trips even went international, taking students biking in Europe, China and the Holy Lands.
Dan Boyd graduated from Taylor University in 1969. He took his first trip with Wandering Wheels in 1968, biking from San Francisco, California, to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, over 4000 miles away.
Cooking and eating were done out the back of a cook trailer pulled by buses hauling gear. Students would sleep in churches, schools and even on the desert floor, but preferred the schools because they had showers, not garden hoses in the back.
“The coach had his football team, and there were other athletes on the ‘68 trip I went on,” Boyd said. “I lived in Wengatz, on the third floor, and we all went together. I never would have made it without those guys.”
Biking 100 to 175 miles a day, students could spend evenings putting on concerts for churches and schools, seeing places and going to cookouts.
Boyd went on several trips as a photographer during and after his time as a student. He went on a total of eight trips, including Spring Break trips, Interterm trips and cross-country summer trips.
The trips got innovative. Among his memories of funny stories, mishaps and extreme weather, Boyd said that they wore hockey helmets before bike helmets were invented and were the first to put flags on the backs of their bikes.
Almost anyone he talks to does not know about Wandering Wheels and its integral part in the rich history of the Taylor community, but his photos document the story.
Keira Martin is a Senior Public History student who worked in the Taylor University Archives this summer, processing meeting minutes from the school year, annual records processing and database organization, physical organization of materials, and looking through old Echo editions to find “fun facts.”
Martin also had the opportunity to work on preserving materials and artifacts of the C.S. Lewis collections, Inklings collections, and George MacDonald collections. She will be focusing on Wandering Wheels for her senior thesis she is writing this semester.
“My main paper is focusing on the development and efficacy of sports evangelism, and kind of defining what sports evangelism means,” Martin said.
Going forward in her project, Martin hopes to look through the artifacts and context surrounding the ministry and record oral history from former riders.
The Wandering Wheels community is still active in their love of the program and continues writing letters to talk about their experience.
Though Wandering Wheels was not a Taylor program, many Taylor students participated, and certain classes were completed through Wandering Wheels, such as history programs and practicums.
“Looking at how the educational aspect affected their sports evangelism progress (is) what my thesis is directing towards, which is, again, really fun for me,” Martin said.
Like many students, before coming to Taylor, Martin had never heard of Wandering Wheels.
Martin learned about Wandering Wheels through her time enrolled in the archives class. Throughout her time with the artifacts and conversations that kept occurring, newsletters and documentaries, the reach is far.
“(It’s a) subculture that exploded during the 1960s and 70s, for the main part,” Martin said. “I heard about it through the archives, and then I kind of just kept going. I'm obsessed with it enough to spend my senior year thinking about cycling, which isn't even a sport that I play.”
Martin will work on an archives project separate from her thesis project that will be going up this Spring, and the exhibit will mainly focus on the artifacts about Wandering Wheels in the possession of the archives.
