Pierce 1909 Advertisement — Hauser Bros., None Better, and the Heavy Service Model

Pierce Bicycles
None Better
$40
$45
$55

Pierce Racer Model

Snell and Harvard Bicycles
$25, $30, $35, $40
According to Equipment

PIERCE BICYCLES are too well and favorably known to need much praise. This year we have a new model in the Pierce Line, THE HEAVY SERVICE MODEL, built to stand abnormal use; extra heavy frome and forks, steel rims, G. & J. tires and coaster, $45.00. Please note we make no extra charge for steel rims on this model.

SNELL BICYCLES—The old reliable; Hussey bars, G. & J. tires, coaster brake $40.00.

HARVARD BICYCLES—This is a bicycle that we equip to suit the rider; prices range from $25.00 to $45.00, according to equipment.

BICYCLE REPAIRING—Our repair department is in charge of the best bicycle man in Salem; sick bicycles called for and delivered. Give us a trial.

A Full Line of Bicycle Sundries

Hauser Bros
PROP’S SALEM GUN STORE

A Full Line of Bicycle Sundries

[The advertisement is a ruled box divided into three panels across the head. The center panel carries an engraving of a dropped-bar racing machine captioned Pierce Racer Model in script. At the foot, the shop’s name is set as a large signature flanked by the sundries lines, above a banner reading PROP’S SALEM GUN STORE.]

[One advertisement from page 9 of the Daily Capital Journal of Salem, Oregon for Monday 5 April 1909, cropped out of the newspaper page.

This is the widest that the archive’s Pierce holdings reach geographically — Buffalo goods sold on the Pacific coast — and the retailer is the point of it. Hauser Bros. was a gun store. Eleven years after the Worcester column also held here, in a city three thousand miles from the factory, Pierce is being sold from behind a counter that sold firearms, with bicycle sundries stacked either side of the shop’s signature. The bicycle boom had collapsed in 1900 and the trade that survived it was largely this: sporting goods stores, hardware stores and repair shops, carrying two or three marques and doing the servicing themselves.

The prices tell the same story from the other side. Pierce sits at $40, $45 and $55 against Snell and Harvard from $25, so it is the premium marque on the wall but the whole ladder has come down — the 1898 sheet in this archive opens at $42 and closes at $100 for a tandem.

The new model announced here is THE HEAVY SERVICE MODEL, and every word of its specification is about surviving use rather than going fast: built to stand abnormal use, extra heavy frame and forks, steel rims, G. & J. tires and a coaster brake, at $45.00. The dealer then makes a point of charging nothing extra for the steel rims, which reads as a direct answer to a competitor who did. G. & J. is Gormully & Jeffery of Chicago, whose clincher tire was the American standard of the period.

Two details are the sheet’s own and are transcribed as printed. It sets frame as “frome” in the Heavy Service paragraph, and it writes the shop’s line as PROP’S SALEM GUN STORE. Neither has been corrected.

The body text was set from the Library of Congress machine OCR and then read line by line against the image at native resolution, which is why this record is marked as machine text checked by eye rather than as transcription.]