One imagines life in Albuquerque back in 1907 was probably pretty chill. A town of around 10,000 in those days, and not a one of them had to upload a .pdf of a prior submission and convert it to a Word doc before editing and sending a Track Change Draft2.docx to the boss for review before getting it back and accepting some/all of the edits and submitting on Grants.gov along with the required 424s by the midnight Eastern deadline (10:00 PM MST).

No, Albuquerque was a simpler place back then, with a quaint Old Town separated from a more bustling New Town, a railroad, and, depending on which historian you talk to, either tens or hundreds or tens of hundreds of saloons, brothels, and saloon/brothel combos. You know…simple.

Yet even during ABQ’s sleepy, bucolic early 20th Century life (saloons/brothels aside), there existed a menace terrorizing the City, a malevolent force still with us today. Of course, I can only be referring to one specific horror:

I think it’s the numbers that stand out most for me in the news story above. That and the damaged gowns. That five dollar fine in 1907 is equal to about $163 today, but it’s the other number five and the number fifteen that really stand out. Five as in the number of days in jail “Police Judge Craig” sentenced the offender, and fifteen as in the age of the terrorizing perpetrator.

Despite Judge Craig’s sentence involving “being locked up in the dark cell for a short time,” the menace that is cyclists on the sidewalk continues to this day. Perhaps the death penalty should have been considered instead starting back in 1907. I’m just joshing, especially as a growing adopter of riding on the sidewalk myself. Why just yesterday I rode some sidewalk at Louisiana and Montgomery, and it felt great! Certainly greater than it feels riding the roadways of Louisiana at Montgomery.

Of course back in those good ‘ol days, 15-year-olds were not only eligible for jail but to also have their name in the paper. Turns out young Mr. John Sautell was deeply interested in multi-modal transportation, as he was later named as a horse thief in 1908.

Despite what history wants to tell us about horse thieves back in the day, young Mr. Sautell and horse stealing accomplices not only did not receive the death penalty or vigilante justice, they were instead basically left to their own recognizance by someone “believing the best policy was to treat the boys pleasantly…” Maybe things weren’t quite as Billy the Kid wild back in pre-Statehood New Mexico as we have been led to believe.

Alas, I can find no other newspaper references to Mr. John Sautell and wonder if he extended his nefarious multi-modal activities to things like riding the street car without paying. Because this is the Internet and because we live in such an age, I will instead claim, without zero basis in evidence, that this photo from the Albuquerque Museum archive shows John Sautell riding a bicycle alongside the Albuquerque Street Car in 1917.

Note the person we are outlandishly claiming as John Sautell is cheating by hanging onto that truck. That’s so John Sautell. If Mr. Sautell happens to still be with us, age 131, one hopes he spent his recent years renting e-scooters with a stolen credit card and leaving them in a heap mid-sidewalk at the corner of Louisiana and Montgomery. Oh yeah, the e-scooter menace no longer plagues our fine city. Thankfully, bicycles and bicyclists, including me, still do.