Wright Brothers, Wrong Story

by William Hazelgrove

  But if you wanted to get to Orville or you wanted information, then Mabel Beck was the conduit. Kelly had made a point of being nice to her at every opportunity, and that wasn't easy. The truth was, “Mabel had complete charge of the papers, and she let him see only what she chose to and often hindered his work.”8 Kelly had known Orville for over twenty years, but that didn't matter. Orville had known Findley for a long time when he gave him his walking papers. Even Charles Lindbergh couldn't get Orville to commit to a biography. He had visited Orville a month after his flight and then tried to straighten out the whole Smithsonian thing, and, when that didn't work, he tried to get him to agree to a biography.

  Lindbergh gave up and wrote in his diary:

  It is a tragedy, for Wright is getting on in years, and no one else is able to tell the story as he can. It seems that Wright does not trust anyone to tell it properly. The words and phrases people use in telling the achievements of Orville Wright and his brother are never quite satisfactory and never of sufficiently comprehensive accuracy…. There are many writers who would be glad to do a book in cooperation with him but the writers do not understand aviation enough to suit him. He prefers a technical person…. I am afraid the book will never be written.9

  So Lindbergh had bombed out along with Earl Findley.

  The phone rang. Kelly swore and stubbed his cigarette. He walked across the room and picked up the phone.

  “Fred…it's Orville.”

  Kelly had a bad feeling. Usually it was Mabel who called him. Orville told him he wanted to stop and would pay him for what he had done so far. Kelly stared at his typewriter and jammed his hand down into his robe pocket. He should have kept writing for the papers. His payday was going right out the window. He rubbed his forehead, staring at the bare trees outside his office.

  “Let me ask you a question, Orville…. Would you have given up on the morning of December 17, 1903?”

  Orville was silent then chuckled.

  “No. I guess not. Okay. Let's continue.”10

  Fred hung up and breathed deeply. He went back to his typewriter. He was halfway done. He had almost suffered the same fate as Findley. He had passed every page to Orville and accepted all his edits, censoring, and strange suggestions. He wasn't going to write anything that Orville didn't want him to write—but there were questions, there were the secrets under the black ice that threatened the Wright legacy. There was the fight with the Smithsonian that had been going on for twenty years and was a symptom of Orville Wright's obsession with making sure that history treated him fairly.

  Kelly didn't really write what he began to suspect. It was like a creeping virus, but he knew if he breathed a word of it, there would be no publication. Orville would see to that. The way Kelly saw it, Orville had thrown snake eyes more than once. He had been the one who flew the airplane in the photo in 1903 because Wilbur had been unsuccessful the day before and they had to make some adjustments. The world would see Orville lying down in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour wind, fighting to keep the plane aloft, while John T. Daniels snapped a picture that showed Wilbur running alongside. And then Orville drew the ultimate card when he survived typhoid fever and Wilbur didn't. Neither brother had ever put pen to paper. Neither brother had said this is the way it happened, so there was a vacuum. Orville could say this is how it happened, and no one could question him. The dead asked no questions.

  Kelly stared at his typewriter, feeling the fatigue again of the past year—too little money, too many cigarettes, too much coffee. The writer's life was killing him. He was exhausted, and now all his work could be for nothing. Orville Wright had gone off on one of his spells, the same spell that put him in a knockdown fight with the Smithsonian Institute and a refusal to give them the 1903 Wright Flyer. Kelly slumped down in his chair. There was a war, and he should have been covering that, but he had thrown his career aside for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He was going to set the bar for historians to follow one hundred years down the line. He was no historian, that was for sure, but he could tell a story.

  He looked over his notes. Orville had shipped the 1903 Wright Flyer to London fourteen years before, and now it was deep below ground while the bombs from the Luftwaffe pounded London into dust. The very technology that allowed the Germans to rain hell from the skies was being bombed by them. The Smithsonian desperately wanted the Flyer back. America wanted the Flyer back. President Roosevelt wanted the Flyer back. Lindbergh wanted the Flyer back. The country needed it to come home. And Orville Wright was the man with his finger on the button. Even if he gave in, it couldn't come across the ocean until the war ended, lest a German U-boat send it to the bottom of the Atlantic.

  The truth was Orville had crossed his arms like a petulant child. It all came down to what really happened in 1903. Sometimes Kelly thought Orville saw his own personal legacy in danger of blowing away like the shifting sands he and his brother had walked almost forty years before. Kelly lit another cigarette and stared at his manuscript. He was willing to play ball, but if Orville was going to pull the rug out from under him, maybe he should just tell the real story. He really doubted he could ever finish with Orville flip-flopping back and forth. That's the thing with history: it really belongs to who tells the story first. Everything else that follows is held up against that first story. But the real story, that was something else.

  The only thing that mattered to Orville Wright was to get the Smithsonian to say that he and his brother had built the only plane that could fly in 1903. If someone could solve that for him, then Orville would be forever in his or her debt. Secretary Charles Doolittle Walcott of the Smithsonian had his back against the wall. He needed to bring back the plane. He needed to get the Flyer back from London. Kelly rubbed his chin. It would look really bad if he published the book and everyone read about how the Smithsonian had lied and forced Orville to send the Flyer to London.

  Maybe he should let Secretary Abbott over at the Smithsonian know what was coming. There was the real story, but Abbott would want this thing put to bed before publication. Kelly shook his head. It was a pity. The real story would be a hell of a lot more interesting. Mabel Beck knew the real story, but she would never talk. She knew where all the bodies were buried. He would finish this chapter and write Abbott a letter. Who knows, he, Fred Kelly, might just be the man to bring back the plane that had flown at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903.

  He was a boy whose father sold whiskey from a baby carriage that he made in his home. His father would wheel the buggy around with the baby and reach underneath the wool blanket for his customers, making one delivery after another. It was the Depression then, 1935, and everyone made any money they could. John Wohlganger was thirteen now; he shined shoes and made deliveries for a dry goods store. One of his customers was Orville Wright, who always demanded his shoes be spit shined, and then inspected the shoes very carefully before tipping.

  His laboratory and office at 15 Broadway in Dayton was famous. The local boys liked to hang around and get glimpses of the man who had invented the airplane. “Orville Wright's office was not on street level. The front entrance was recessed, and there were stairs to the front door. The office part of the building was made with red wire-cut bricks with deep-set mortar joints. The shop part of the building was of cement blocks on street level,” John recalled years later.1

  John had to pull himself up on a ledge in the alley just to get a glimpse of Orville Wright in his white smock, and he didn't want Ms. Beck to catch him. Her face was winter. The commandant of Orville Wright. Nobody got to Orville Wright without going through Ms. Beck. She was the gatekeeper, secretary, assistant, centurion, guard, troll, and protector of the surviving inventor. Even the family had to go through Ms. Beck, and they hated and feared her but appreciated what she did for Orville. In her memoir, Ivonette Wright Miller, niece of the brothers, wrote, “She felt the power of her position and seemed to want to alienate everyone from Orville in order to have his full attention to herself.”2 Niece S
ue Wright once had her car serviced at a garage near the laboratory. Since she had a long wait, she decided to wait in a comfortable place. She rang the bell at the laboratory. Mabel opened the door.

  “Is Uncle Orv here?” Sue asked.

  Mabel frowned. “You mean Mr. Wright?” she asked coldly.3 “Wait here. I will see if he is in.”

  She disappeared into Orville's office. Sue said she heard her say to him, “It's Sue.”

  “She never would speak to any of us if we met on the street,” Sue recalled. Orville's brother Lorin's daughter later wrote, “she became more and more possessive. She knew that with her knowledge of the Wright story she had a job for life. Knowing Orville, she was sure he'd never make a change.”4 Even so, John Wohlganger liked to watch the inventor: “During the three years I shined Orville Wright's shoes, I got to know him rather well. He was always dressed to perfection; he usually wore a black suit and black shoes; his shirt was white with a stiff collar.”5 “Shoe shines at that time were five cents, and Mr. Wright usually tipped a nickel. He was most particular about the shine and inspected his shoes all around the soles and heels before he paid me.”6

  One day, John was making his way down the alley when he decided to peek in the window. To get to Orville's office, he had to jump up and grab onto the brick ledge with his fingers and hoist himself up. John grabbed onto the cold bricks. It was January and just a few flakes were wisping down. Mabel Beck was sure to be around, so he would just raise his eyes over the ledge and get a quick peek.

  The boy pulled himself up ever so slowly. It was 1935, and his meal of beans and cheese and prunes wasn't sitting well. Bricks, bricks, then the glass. He raised himself up until his eyes crested the sill and his head appeared in the window. There was Orville Wright in his smock. He had on his shined shoes that John had just worked over the day before. The boy stared, his eyes growing, because sitting on Mr. Wright's lap was Mabel Beck. “Here is what I saw…. Mr. Wright was sitting in his office chair facing North Broadway. He had his white smock on. There was Mabel Beck, sitting across Orville's lap, [her body] facing me. She had on a long-sleeved, light-colored blouse and a dark skirt. The reason she couldn't see me was because her eyes were closed. She and Orville were kissing.”7

  The unmarried woman with the close brown hair and the air of a school marm was now kissing Mr. Wright. John felt his face burn. The two adults couldn't see him, because their eyes were closed. The inventor was leaning back in his chair, and Ms. Beck had her legs crossed like a young girl. The boy felt his breath leave, and then he dropped to the ground and ran as fast as he could down the alley. John Wohlganger would not speak of what he saw for sixty years.

  The woman the boy had seen was Mabel Beck, the daughter of Charles Beck, who was a machinist, and his wife, Lena, who lived in McPherson Town and then moved to Dayton in 1897. Mabel graduated from Steele High School in 1907 and then worked for three years at Moses Cohen's Furnishings and Hats. Mabel at eighteen was pretty, with dark hair and a plump figure. Moses occupied the ground floor of the United Brethren Building. On the thirteenth floor was the Wright Aeronautical Company. Roy Knabenshue had been hired to head up an aerial team of fliers for exhibitions. He stopped into the store, and Mabel Beck waited on him.

  “I need to hire a secretary,” he told the young woman. “I like your looks and the way you do your work, but you would have to type and write shorthand.”8

  Mabel jumped at the chance, took a course in typing and shorthand, and then went to work for the Wright brothers. She was Wilbur's secretary until he died in 1912 from typhoid fever, then she became Orville's secretary.9 The world would never see Orville again unless it saw Ms. Beck first. Orville soon gave her a picture of himself that Mabel had framed and kept on a bedside table. She was there when Charles Lindbergh came to visit. She was there when the great flood of 1914 buried the Wright Flyer and she and Orville dried out the muslin canvas and recovered the wings.10 One did not speak of Orville without Mabel.

  They were always together, right up to the day on January 27, 1948. Orville was working in the laboratory with Mabel when he suddenly stopped talking and slumped in his desk chair. With pinched mouth and pale skin it looked like another heart attack. Orville had suffered a mild heart attack back in October 1947 while running up the steps of a building. He had been careful, ever since, not to push himself. Mabel frantically called Dr. Allen Horwitz across the street, who rushed over and examined Orville. It was a stroke that left Orville unconscious for the entire ride in an ambulance to Miami Valley Hospital.11 Mabel would never see him again. Orville died three days later. He was seventy-seven.

  Now he was dead. They were all dead—Wilbur, Katherine, Milton, and now Orville. The Wright brothers, the Wright clan, were gone. Poof. Dust. History. All that was left were their planes, and one in particular held the world in thrall. Death had brought the question to bear about the destiny of the 1903 Flyer. Everyone assumed Mabel Beck would be the executor and possessor of the will:

  Family and friends assumed that Orville had named Mabel Beck as the executor of his estate and waited patiently for the secretary to produce a will. When nothing happened, Harold Miller proceeded to Orville's bank to check on the will's whereabouts. Bank officials then contacted Orville's lawyer, Charles Funkhouser, who produced the will. To everyone's surprise Orville had named Miller and Howard Steeper, both nephews by marriage, as his executors.12

  The two nephews studied the 1937 will “and discovered the passage deeding the machine to the Science Museum [in London] unless Orville had revoked the clause with a letter indicating his new disposition.”13 Orville had said there was a letter. The 1903 Flyer had gone to England, but there was no letter saying what to do with it. Probate Court Judge Love ordered Harold Miller to look for the letter, and he began with the most obvious person. It was as if that grim, tight-lipped Mabel Beck had just walked into the room and once again blocked access to Orville Wright. The woman who had given one biographer his walking papers and kept close rein on the second was back. The centurion at the gate was there again.

  There had been whispers of something more between the inventor and his secretary for years. That would explain a lot. She was the only person Orville would trust to be the keeper of a letter that would change the course of history. But she had disappeared after Orville Wright's death, and no one could get hold of her. Miller finally tracked her down at the home she shared with her sister. Mabel acknowledged that there was a letter “but refused to produce it.”14 The keeper of all knowledge, the woman who held the answers, was not going to give up Orville's final wish concerning the most important plane in the world.

  Mabel Beck had the letter and was keeping it. She had become the final footnote to the story of the invention of the airplane. A story that began back in 1884.

  It was cold. The boys puffed breath and scraped the ice with their steel skates. The pond in Dayton, Ohio, was frozen down several feet. Boys with hockey sticks had discovered it long ago, and the shaved ice that now sprayed up had been accumulating for weeks. The games were rough, but there were rules. Oliver Crook Haugh knew no rules. He was older and the bully of the block, if not the town. His teeth constantly ached. Later, historians would say that cocaine tooth drops might have precipitated the invention of flight.

  Or maybe Oliver Crook Haugh was insane. Before he was electrocuted in 1906, he claimed to have proven that two personalities can exist in one person: “All that I do know is, that if I die for these crimes, I shall have at least established the proof of the theory on which I have always insisted—that two beings, one of good, the other of evil, may exist in the same man, and in that respect at least I shall have rendered a distinct service to posterity.”1

  More likely Oliver Haugh was a full-blown psychopath, but the cocaine tooth drops certainly didn't help. There was no regulation for drugs then. Old ladies mixed cocaine with water and became horribly addicted. Opium was in abundance. Coca-Cola would make its mark by giving everyone a boost of cocaine that was st
ill found in the coca leaves used in its recipe up until 1929 and corner the market on soda.2 An apothecary was there to give opioids to whoever had a nickel to buy them, and doctors need not get in the way.

  Oliver was fifteen when Wilbur met the boy who lived down the street in Dayton. They had skated before together. The Wright brothers were known as well-dressed, quiet young men who were the younger two sons of Bishop Wright, a well-respected man of the town. So, the three young men were on the frozen pond again playing hockey with the sticks flying. Haugh didn't dress like the Wrights. He wore no tie. He dressed like a laborer and was already known as the neighborhood bully, and he had the build of a man, if not a football player. Wilbur was eighteen. He had excelled in his classes, and there was talk of him heading off to Yale. “His schedule of classes would daunt a modern honors student: Greek, Latin, geometry, natural philosophy, geology and composition with general scholastic averages of 94, 96, and 95 for the first three terms.”3

  Wilbur enjoyed riding the high-wheel bicycle, excelled at gymnastics, and even sang with an informal social club known as the Ten Dayton Boys as their youngest member. He was said to have a fine bass voice. A childhood friend, John Feight, recalled that “he played on the Central High football team and was one of the swiftest runners in the school.”4 Wilbur was tall, slight, and fresh-faced; his grey eyes betrayed a luminous intelligence. His father was a successful bishop in the church and while not wealthy, the Wrights occupied the top rung of the middle class. This trip to the pond was a childhood skate before stepping into the adult world of the East. But here was Haugh skating toward Wilbur like a comet of doom.