The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright

by Crouch, Tom D.

  Within seven years, Wilbur Wright, the man who had turned his back on Cordy Ruse’s horseless carriage, would prove the truth of those words. In so doing, he would also fulfill the outrageous prophecy of the Binghamton editor: the airplane would indeed be the work of bicycle men.

  chapter 9

  HOME FIRES

  1898~1905

  The years 1896–99 were quiet ones in the Wright household. Business at the bicycle shop was steady, with enough growth each year to be encouraging. In 1897 the brothers transferred the company to a new shop, at 1127 West Third, a house that had been remodeled into a duplex storefront. The owner, Charles Webbert, rented the other half of the building to Fetters & Shank, undertakers.

  The Wrights were kept busy honing their carpentry skills. They remodeled the back room at 1127 West Third into a well-equipped light machine shop, complete with line shafting driven by the old gas engine. They fixed up the house as well, adding the porch, installing shutters on all the windows, and doing some remodeling upstairs.

  With Katharine away at college and the bishop still on the road, the two men had a great deal of time by themselves. Orville, at least, developed a serious pride in mastering the culinary arts. When they tired of their own cooking, they boarded with a widow down the block.

  There was plenty of relaxation, as Ed Ellis, Wilbur’s best friend, recalled in 1909:

  Years ago when they were in the bicycle business, the country runs with “all the trimmings” were a regular thing with them. I have camped for weeks at a time in a party with Wilbur Wright, when the canoe (of his own make), the gun, fishing tackle and other paraphernalia were as dear to him as to any of us…. I remember that during that camping stint of ours, Wilbur and I tramped some four miles trying to buy some chickens. We “got” the chickens.1

  Wilbur had been a member of the Ten Dayton Boys, the social club formed a decade before when he was still in high school. Beyond two formal annual dinner meetings, however, the group was now inactive. Cycling offered a social outlet for both brothers. They sponsored local races as a means of promoting the shop, and participated in the long weekend “runs” into the surrounding countryside. They were singers as well, members of an informal local chorus.

  Music was something that all the family enjoyed—usually. “Orv began lessons on the mandolin,” Katharine reported to her father in 1900. “We are getting even with the neighborhood at last for the noise they have made on pianos. He sits around and picks that thing until I can hardly stay in the house.”2

  We know that Orville took the mandolin with him to Kitty Hawk in 1900. The harmonica was Wilbur’s instrument, as Lorin’s daughter Ivonette recalled:

  At Christmas time it was customary to get together Christmas morning, in the early years…. I remember one year when the box from our Kansas cousins was opened. One of the gifts was a small mouth organ with horns protruding from it to increase the sound. After the excitement of opening all the presents had subsided a bit, Uncle Will, who was sitting on the stairway landing, with his long legs stretched out in front of him, started to play the instrument with all the flourishes he could command. He played the melody and accompaniment as if he had done it for years. None of us was aware that he knew how and were all convulsed with the way he carried it off.3

  In one significant respect, the three youngest Wright children set themselves apart from their contemporaries. Wilbur was twenty-nine in 1896, Orville twenty-five, and Katharine twenty-two. They were ripe for marriage, yet none of them showed any serious interest in the opposite sex. They seemed bound by an unspoken agreement to remain together and to let no one come between them.

  Many years later, older residents of Richmond recalled that Wilbur had courted a young lady in high school. There is nothing to indicate that he ever looked twice at a woman again in his life. Those who knew him after 1900 suggested that potentially eligible women actually frightened him. Charles Taylor, for many years employed as a mechanic at the bicycle shop, remembered that Wilbur

  would get awfully nervous when young women were around. When we began operating at Simms Station on the outskirts of Dayton in 1904, we always went out on the traction cars. If an older woman sat down beside him, before you knew it they would be talking and if she got off at our stop he’d carry her packages and you’d think he had known her all his life. But if a young woman sat next to him he would begin to fidget and pretty soon he would get up and go stand on the platform until it was time to leave the car.4

  Sex was a subject on which the entire family maintained silence. That was to be expected in any late Victorian American household. Still, the fact that the brothers and their sister were unmarried fascinated the public after 1908. When queried about his marital status, Wilbur simply replied that he did not have time for a wife and an airplane. Charles Taylor was probably closer to the truth. “Will kept saying he didn’t have time for a wife,” he remarked, “but I think he was just woman-shy—young women at least.”

  Perhaps. But Wilbur, with his extraordinary sense of his own strengths and limitations, may simply have felt that freedom from family responsibilities was an essential element in his ability to concentrate his attention and energies.

  Certainly, he was always scrupulously careful with women. He regarded any suggestion of an illicit involvement as the worst slur on his character. This was most apparent in June 1909, when French newspapers reported that a Lieutenant Goujarde, an officer stationed at Champagny, had named Wilbur as a co-respondent in a divorce suit. He claimed that Mme Goujarde, an aeronautical enthusiast, had seduced Wilbur in order to win a bet with a friend. The two were reported to have lived together for two weeks in a Le Mans hotel.

  The story quickly found its way into the American press. It appeared in the Dayton Daily Herald on June 8, beneath a banner headline. Friends and family rushed to Wilbur’s defense. “In the first place, he is too clean a man, he is too moral a man to do a thing like that,” Ed Ellis told reporters.5 Lorin retorted that his brother was “not that kind.”6 Wilbur spoke out in an open letter to the editor of the Daily Herald. “The French people seem amused that I do not smoke or drink wine,” he noted, suggesting that the whole thing had been a bad joke akin to the European cartoons that showed him with a pipe in his mouth blowing billows of smoke.7

  Rumors of romance would continue to plague Wilbur to the end of his life. None was ever confirmed. It seems unlikely that he would ever have trusted himself so far with anyone outside the family.

  Wilbur’s tendency to distance himself from women seems to have been the result of a fear that romance would interfere with the more important things in his life. Orville was simply very shy. Jess Gilbert, a high school friend, remembered a particularly telling episode:

  By someone’s super-salesmanship, Orville had been inveigled into one of those gatherings we called “a party,” all free from restraint except that we must be home in bed not later than ten o’clock, just about the time the boys and girls start out nowadays. The picture of that party has lingered in mind all of these years, though the howling noise has died down. Orville sat in a straight-backed chair just inside the parlor door all evening, genially aloof from our games of Kiss the Pillow, Post Office, Forfeits and other stimulating enterprises. He was not disdainful; not haughty, not offensive. He simply preferred to have a passive part in our exuberance. He chose to be himself.8

  Gilbert’s story is reinforced by a photograph taken at another Dayton party during the 1890s. The happy faces of young men and women, gathered around a couch, are the central image. Off to one side, seated by himself and staring away from the camera, is Orville.

  Ironically, it was Orville, the shyest and least socially adept of the young Wrights, who came closest to marriage during this period. Agnes Osborn had been Katharine’s closest friend since grade school. During the months immediately after her graduation, Orville’s friendship for Agnes developed into something more. There were evenings of chess and romantic boat rides on the old canal. Agnes’s yo
unger brother Glenn, the proud owner of a Wright bicycle, remembered that Orville came calling dressed in his best suit, and loved to play practical jokes on his sister.

  Tradition in the Osborn family has it that Orville actually proposed marriage. Whatever credence is attached to such family stories, the romance came to nothing. Perhaps Agnes, a very religious girl, was put off by Orville’s cynical remarks on the United Brethren controversies. His practical jokes were certainly a bit rough for her taste. Another intriguing family story suggests that she really had her cap set at Wilbur, much more the courtly gentleman than his younger brother, but entirely unattainable. The most likely explanation is that Orville was simply never very serious about the whole thing.9

  Katharine’s attitude toward men and marriage was much more complex. In a world where marriage was assumed to be every young woman’s goal, she went off to Oberlin as determined as her brothers to resist romantic impulses.

  She had any number of close female friends. Surviving snapshots show them in their full skirts, shirtwaists, and hats, smiling Gibson Girls sitting on the steps of a college building or preparing to climb onto their bicycles for a picnic in the country. She brought them home during the holidays, and visited in their homes. Several of these young women remained her lifelong friends, but there is nothing to indicate that Katharine was ever serious about a man.

  Katharine, second from the right in this group of Oberlin co-eds, was the only college graduate in the family.

  More important, she lost few opportunities to reassure her father and brothers that she had no intention of even enjoying a simple evening with a man. She poked fun at the efforts of her friends who sought to impress potential beaux.

  Katharine’s need to satirize romance was never more evident than when she attended her first Oberlin class reunion in June 1900. “I know you’ll want to hear about Mag [Margaret Goodwin],” she wrote to her two “bubbos.” “Caesar [a male classmate] was with her on the train. If possible, he looked even worse than he used to look. Of course, Mag was snippy to him as usual. She told him the true state of her feelings. Anyway, she’s going to get paid up all right for he simply insists on taking her to the ball game Saturday. G. Harrison asked me, so I’ll save a quarter there.”10

  The message was unmistakable. You are not to worry, this fellow Harrison is nothing more than a free ticket to the ball game.

  “Mr. Sheffield,” another old friend, also visited: “called on us last evening—in a dress suit…. You never saw anything so affected in all your days,” she assured her menfolk from home. “He had a goatee which adds to his ridiculous appearance. He was just as friendly as ever but he is such a dude and so affected I couldn’t be natural and cordial.”11

  All too often, men were a source of anger and frustration in Katharine’s life, particularly when they refused to recognize her authority or accord her the respect that she deserved. Such a reaction is not at all difficult to understand on the part of a young woman trying to assert herself in a man’s world. Charles Taylor, whom Wilbur and Orville left in charge of the bike shop when they went to Kitty Hawk in 1902, was one of her favorite targets: “The business is about to go up the spout, to hear Charles Taylor talk. Say—he makes me too weary for words. He is your judge, it seems…. Today I got wrathy and told him that I was tired of hearing him discuss your business…. Mr. Taylor knows too much to suit me. I ought to learn more about the store business. I despise to be at the mercy of the hired man.”12

  “I simply can’t stand Charles Taylor,” she remarked the next month, “so I steer clear of the store. I have been in twice to telephone but we never said a word to each other! Imagine.”13

  She was justifiably outraged when the women teachers at Steele High School, where she taught after 1899, were unfairly put upon by the male establishment on the occasion of a teachers’ meeting in Cleveland in the fall of 1903.

  Mr. Miller, of the Big Four [railroad company] office, has offered to let fifteen [teachers] go on the Wednesday afternoon train, the Twentieth Century Limited. He suggested that the men of the high school let the women go on the afternoon train and he would let them [the male teachers] go at midnight. But the motto at High School is “Men first—if anything is left, women served.” So the men are making a great row and it will probably end in no one going on that fast train.14

  Katharine insisted on her right to exercise power within her legitimate spheres—the home and the school—as little Carrie Kayler could testify. Milton hired fourteen-year-old Carrie in 1900 to assist Katharine with the housekeeping. She left for a short time after marrying Charles Grumbach, then was lured back with the promise that her husband would be taken on as a handyman. The Grumbach’s were still working for Orville at the time of his death in 1948.

  During the years immediately after Carrie’s arrival, Katharine proved to be a demanding taskmaster. Ivonette recalls the first visit of Octave Chanute, the great Chicago engineer, to the Wright home in June 1901:

  Katharine, the hostess, had decided on melons for dessert and gave instructions that if one melon, on cutting, proved to be better than the other, Carrie was to make sure that Mr. Chanute got a piece of the better one. When the time came, Carrie saw that one of the melons was hardly ripe enough to serve and took the liberty of cutting up the remaining one in small pieces so that everyone could have at least a taste. Carrie’s impartiality evoked Katharine’s displeasure and for a while, it seems, there was some doubt in Carrie’s mind that she would ever be forgiven.15

  During the early years of their relationship, Katharine lost few opportunities to ensure that Carrie towed the mark. She was also careful to let her father and brothers know that the responsibility for managing their household sometimes weighed heavily on her, as in October 1902, when she remarked that she was “getting grey with troubles over washer women.”16

  Immediately after graduating from Oberlin, Katharine went to work as a teacher of English and Latin at Steele High School, which had replaced old Central High as Dayton’s principal secondary school. She remained at Steele until 1908, leaving behind a generation of students who adored her. But in her classroom, as in her home, Katharine insisted on her right to dominate the scene.

  “The children who sit in my class are not so nice as they were last year,” she wrote to Orville in the fall of 1901. “I have five or six notoriously bad boys assigned to my room. I was ready for them, and nipped their smartness in the bud.”17 When school opened in 1902, Orv asked his sister for a list of “the first week’s victims,” adding: “I like to see someone else catch it beside us.”18

  If Katharine struggled under the special handicaps imposed on a single working woman, she also took great pride in her job, and in the responsibility that went with it. “School began Monday,” she informed

  her “Pop” on September 12, 1900.

  I have a room on the third floor—the northeast one, overlooking the river. It is the prettiest room in the whole building. I have thirty-eight pupils sitting in my room. Then I have five Latin classes—three beginning, one second year and my January classes of last year consolidated into one. The work is very pleasant and will not be particularly hard. I like the first year pupils better than Juniors and Seniors.19

  She fought for additional duties, hoping for the opportunity to teach a class in Greek, and relished the chance to address the one hundred and fifty attendees at a parents’ night celebration.20

  In addition to affording Katharine an opportunity to make her mark in the world, the job also offered some relief from the loneliness that gripped her after 1900, when her father and brothers were absent on their fall and winter trips. “School begins next Monday,” she remarked to Milton in September 1900. “I am not sorry, for it has been lonesome for me this summer.” It was the same thing the following year. “School begins on the 16th. I wish it would begin right away. I am tired of doing nothing.”21

  In time, Katharine took on some of her father’s psychological coloration. She shared Milton’
s subconscious fear of abandonment and was always careful to let her father and brothers know how difficult things were for her when they were not around. One day seemed very much like another. “The house is so lonesome that I hate to stay in it, but I can’t rest as well anywhere else,” she noted in the fall of 1903.22

  She suffered from a string of colds, had trouble with her digestion, and voiced frequent complaints of “utter exhaustion.” But the men were not to worry. “I’ll be all right when you all get home again,” she assured them. A little guilt might bring everyone back together more quickly.23

  Nor did Katharine want to be forgotten during her own absences from home. Before leaving for a stay with friends in the summer of 1905, she arranged for a relative, Emma Dennis, to come in each day to take care of the house. A graduate of the Milton Wright School of Management at a Distance, Katharine then proceeded to bombard everyone with precise instructions as to their daily activities.

  July 10, 1905: I wish you would telephone to Joe Boyd to cut the grass about the middle of the week. It gets so coarse when allowed to grow too long. And please put up one string for that honey suckle vine…. And see that the flowers get some water…. Get up early Sunday morning and see that the children [Lorin’s] get washed and off to Sunday School!24

  July 13, 1905: You could tell our Emma to get some chickens and make sandwiches and deviled eggs et cetera if you wanted to have them out in the country for dinner…. Milton [Lorin’s son] could go out later and take the basket if you went before Emma was ready. And maybe Netta [Lorin’s wife] could go along to entertain Emma. Or Emma could get dinner at home and you could make ice-cream, or buy some for dessert…. And tell Emma to have my room cleaned….25