The Charles S. Frey Memorial Bicycle Collection was donated by Ruth Frey Axe of Los Angeles, CA. Mrs. Axe has long-standing connections with Pomona College, where she was Henry Raup Wagner’s assistant when he donated the Northwest Cartography Collection and other gifts to the Carnegie Library during the 1920s and 1930s. Their visits to Claremont were described by Mrs. Axe in her lively biography of Henry Wagner published in AB Bookman’s Weekly in 1980.

The reason behind the bicycle collection is a personal one. Ruth Axe had a sister-in-law, Annabelle (Norris) Frink Frey, who graduated from Pomona College in 1918. When Mrs. Frey's son Charles was killed in the Second World War, Ruth Axe, an avid book collector, decided to dedicate a collection to his memory and donate it eventually to Pomona College. In her own words, she “had decided at the start that [the collection] would be formed in the memory of my nephew…after Charles’s death (at age 21) [his mother] and I had established a small book fund at the College in his memory. I thought that the bicycle collection would add to that memorial.”

Both Ruth and her husband Harold were enthusiastic bicyclists for many years. Harold Axe started bicycling seriously during World War II, when the public was asked to curtail gasoline consumption. So cycling was the subject around which Ruth Axe accumulated her memorial collection in honor of her nephew. Over the years, she gathered a wide assortment of items, from children’s stories, newspaper clippings, correspondence, pictures, and magazines to several of the earliest books and periodicals on the subject. After Mrs. Axe donated her collection, it was put on display in the Honnold/Mudd Library from November 1983 – March 1984.