Given their father’s fervent belief in the importance of childhood exercise, it is hardly surprising that the Molineux boys were pushed to develop their bodies as well as their minds. All three grew into fine figures of young manhood. But Roland in particular matured into a superb physical specimen.
He seemed fashioned by nature for gymnastics, with a lithe, compact frame, exceptional coordination, and a ferociously competitive spirit that even in his adolescence burned beneath a carefully cultivated mask of upper-class hauteur. His specialty was the horizontal bar. With a tenacity inherited from his father, he spent countless hours at the gymnasium, perfecting acrobatic moves—somersaults, twists, and spectacular dismounts—that dazzled onlookers.
In 1882, shortly before his sixteenth birthday, Roland was pulled from the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute—where, like his brothers, he was sent to study chemistry in preparation for a career in the paint business—and shipped out West. Little is known about this interlude in Roland Molineux’s life, since the reasons for his sudden removal were kept secret from all but his closest relatives. According to some later accounts, he spent the time working on a ranch. In 1884, his father traveled West to fetch him home.1
His two years of rugged living had added muscle to Roland’s already well-knit physique. Back home, he lost no time in returning to his former life, earning his high school equivalency while throwing himself into the city’s flourishing athletic scene. One year later, in 1885, at a competition sponsored by the New York Athletic Club, he won the first of several national titles, becoming the amateur horizontal-bar champion.
To be an amateur sporting champion was no small distinction in 1885. In the decades since Edward Leslie Molineux published a widely reprinted essay deploring the “physical deterioration of the American race”2 and calling for mandatory military and gymnastic exercises in the public schools, the country had been seized by what one contemporary observer called a “passion for athletic sports.”3 It was an era that witnessed a nationwide mania for bicycling, a craze for “physical culture,” and the birth of modern sportswriting; when baseball became the national pastime; A. G. Spalding grew rich peddling sporting goods and guidebooks to the public; and heavyweight title bouts received the kind of frenzied, front-page coverage formerly reserved for Civil War battles and presidential elections.
There were, of course, sharp class distinctions in the realm of American sport. While gentlemen and shopkeeps, bankers and bricklayers might mingle at the ballpark or follow the Jeffries-Fitzsimmons rivalry with equally obsessive interest, the members of the upper crust tended to gather in elite athletic clubs. The first of these organizations in America was the New York Athletic Club, founded in 1868 by a small group of socially prominent sportsmen looking for like-minded young athletes to compete with. Created to foster the Victorian ideal of “pure” amateur sportsmanship, the NYAC rapidly evolved into a highly selective social club—a bastion of snobbery whose membership requirements (including steep initiation fees and annual dues) were designed to exclude lower-class applicants.4
By 1885, the NYAC—which had begun life in a rented flat equipped with Indian clubs, dumbbells, and a few other pieces of weight-lifting gear—had moved to an elegant building on Sixth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street. In addition to its state-of-the-art athletic facilities—gymnasium, swimming pool, fencing and sparring room—it featured a luxurious dining hall, billiard parlor, and library. The unofficial credo of the club was articulated by one member, who told a New York Times reporter, “I have no aspersions to cast on men who work for their living with their hands, but they are not exactly desirable members for a club which wants to establish itself on the plane of social clubdom.”5
It was a sentiment that Roland Molineux would have heartily endorsed. Not that he himself was a member of the very upper reaches of society. He was, after all, the son of a tradesman. To be sure, the General had done very well in the paint business. But his success and social prestige merely placed his family in the ranks of Brooklyn’s commercial aristocracy—a far cry from Mrs. Astor’s 400.
Nevertheless, Roland, from an early age, put on the airs of a gentleman. Though certain of his acquaintances sneered at his pretensions, his own father looked upon them with tolerance, even a measure of pride. Why shouldn’t his boy aspire to the very heights of gentlemanly refinement?
Despite his comparatively déclassé background, Roland developed a snobbishness worthy of Ward McAllister, tastemaker for the city’s social elite, who famously sniffed that “a fortune of a million” was nothing more than “respectable poverty.”6 Punctilious in his dress, Roland would only deign to patronize the same tailors and haberdashers who catered to the “upperdom.” Even when stripped for an athletic performance, he exuded an “air of aloof singularity and pride in station and form.”7 His most famous surviving photograph—taken during his reign as national horizontal-bar champion—shows him posing in his tight-fitting gymnast’s uniform, chest outthrust, short sleeves rolled up to reveal his chiseled shoulder muscles, a look of patrician ennui on his finely molded countenance.
It was the image he would always project to the world: debonair, dashing, with a hint of aristocratic disdain. But his blue-blood persona masked a much darker reality.
Already, by adolescence, he was embroiled in trouble. Though years would pass before the world learned the truth, there was a shocking reason for his sudden withdrawal from high school and lengthy sojourn in the West. At just fifteen years of age, he had engaged in a dalliance with an older married woman—a neighbor named Mrs. Kindberg—and was named as a corespondent in the divorce suit brought by her husband when the affair came to light. Roland’s father had hurried his boy out of town until the scandal was resolved.8
Given his own high moral standards—to say nothing of his admitted primness as regards “the genus female” (as he fondly referred to the opposite sex)—Edward Leslie Molineux could not have been pleased with his son’s sexual misconduct. Perhaps he wrote it off to wild oats. Still, the General stood steadfastly by Roland, taking quick and decisive measures to save his son—and the family’s good name—from public dishonor.
Following a brief course of study at Cooper Union, Roland, at the age of twenty-one, was put to work at his father’s company, where he honed his skills as a chemist. He also continued to compete in gymnastic events, defending his title at the yearly competitions sponsored by the Amateur Athletic Union and making audiences “wild with enthusiasm” at the annual exhibitions held at the Adelphi Academy.9 To all outward appearances, he seemed to have matured into a responsible young man—the prodigal son who, as the General hoped, had put his shameful ways behind him.
But Roland was nothing if not devious. Even at the C. T. Raynolds Company, under the watchful eye of his father, he could not keep from flirting with trouble and courting disgrace.