July 17, 1905: I hope things are going all right. Tell Emma to give you a change in the lunch, if you get tired of the fare. Be sure to water the flowers.26
July 19, 1905: I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the grass wasn’t trimmed a speck. I can cut the grass, it’s the trimming I can’t stand.27
July 27, 1905: I hope Emma won’t break the family purse with her grocery bills. I’ll be home soon.28
August 1, 1905: I hope Emma will have something decent to eat. She won’t boss that ranch after I strike the place, I can promise her that. I hope things haven’t been too uncomfortable. If you lay it on too thick about missing me, the neighbors won’t believe you. I’d be moderate about it, if I were you.29
The letters are laced with Katharine’s dry and infectious humor, but it is a safe bet that Emma left thankfully.
In assuming the role of female head of the family, Katharine had done precisely what her father expected of her. Yet there were times, particularly as he grew older and more dependent on her, when the bishop felt the need to remind Katharine that she was, after all, his daughter, and not really a full partner at all.
His attitude toward Katharine in this regard was very different from that toward his sons. In the thousands of pages of letters and diaries that he left behind, there is not a single angry word directed at either Wilbur or Orville. He could reason with them. He expected his daughter to do as she was told—and quickly.
In the fall of 1908, when Katharine was supervising Orville’s hospital care following a flying accident at Fort Myer, Virginia, Milton became convinced that she was neglecting her duty to keep him informed. “The natural inference,” he remarked in the most curt terms, “is that you are down with typhoid fever. We are so ashamed to tell the many inquirers after Orville’s condition that for four days we have no word from you, so we have to say that we suppose it is because you are sick. But if you are down sick, news might disturb you. So I will close.”30
On one isolated occasion Milton went much further, addressing Katharine in a fashion that can only have caused her some measure of genuine anguish. Upon learning that Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine had taken a balloon ride in France in 1909, he wrote to tell his daughter that “It does not make much difference about you, but Wilbur ought to keep out of all balloon rides. Success seems to hang on him.” He also let her know that he would “do as I please when you … come home. The idea of my making thirty-thousand dollars, and being bossed by you, who can save nothing, is ridiculous.”31
It is important to realize that Milton did not attack Katharine with malicious intent. Allowance must be made for the fact that he was an eighty-year-old man, lonesome for his children and concerned for their welfare so far from home. At the same time, the letter underscores the extent to which Katharine served as a target when her father was displeased, and the lengths to which he would go to remind his daughter of her subordinate role in the great scheme of things.
Katharine found real satisfaction in her father’s house, but there can be no doubt that the Wright men were the primary beneficiaries of the arrangement. Milton could continue his church work, crisscrossing the country and fighting his battles, confident that the haven to which he had always returned was in the best of hands.
Wilbur and Orville enjoyed the benefits of life within a warm and stable family, while escaping the responsibilities that consumed the time and energy of married men. Katharine, far more than the others, paid a considerable physical and psychological price. It was her most important and least recognized contribution to the work of the Wright brothers.
Theirs was not a house without children. Some of the most vivid impressions of life at 7 Hawthorn during the decade after 1896 come from the four youngsters who spent almost as much of their early lives with their grandfather, aunt, and uncles as they did with their parents. Lorin and Netta lived on Horace Street, only a block or so away from both the house and the cycle shop. Their children—Milton, Ivonette, Leontine, and Horace—were the family favorites.
“Grandpa Wright’s house was a favorite place. He and my Aunt Katharine and my Uncles Wilbur and Orville spent many days entertaining us there,” Leontine recounted. “Sometimes there was picture taking, fascinating candy making, good reading sessions, and good games indoors and out.”32
Ivonette had similar happy memories. “When my mother had an errand taking her downtown, and had one child she couldn’t take with her, we were dropped off at the bicycle shop, and either Orville or Wilbur, or both, baby-sat us. They were never too busy to entertain us.”
Orville was Ivonette’s particular favorite. “If he ran out of games he would make candy. If he happened to be busy with something else, he would make caramel, which was easier to make and the kind children couldn’t eat fast. If he had time, he made fudge with a long thermometer to test how long it should be boiled. It was beaten to the right consistency and it was delicious.”33
Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine did not have children of their own, but Lorin’s children (clockwise), Ivonette, Leontine, and Milton (Horace not shown), were very much a part of their lives.
The children, at least, appreciated Orville’s brand of humor. He was, Ivonette recalled, “a terrible tease,” who would stop at nothing to carry off the perfect joke. As the youngest, “Bus” was usually the butt of his uncle’s elaborate schemes.
During many of our Sunday dinners they used to tease me as to whether they had enough potatoes, since I always liked mashed potatoes. One Sunday Uncle Orv remarked, “It seems funny how Bus’s plate always makes for the mashed potatoes,” and with that my plate started to move towards the mashed potatoes he was serving. It turned out he had pasted a thread to the bottom of my plate which he pulled toward him.34
Orville was the more patient of the brothers. “Wilbur would amuse us in an equally wholehearted way,” Ivonette noted, “but not so long.”35
Both brothers took the business of entertaining the children very seriously. Milton, Lorin’s oldest boy, remembered the magic lantern shows and other theatrical spectaculars. “There were two characters that took part in the shadowgraph shows, Sam Bonebrake, who was tall and thin, and Jim Higgenbotham, who was short and fat and had a high squeaky voice. There was always a big build-up before each show. Uncle Orv and Uncle Will spent hours in the shop making these jointed sheet metal figures.”36
Holidays were always a special time. Christmas trees had been absent from the Wright house when Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine were small, but Milton had mellowed by the time his grandchildren arrived. All of them recalled the tree, the presents, and songs sung by the entire family. Horace remembered that Valentine’s Day was also
something of an occasion in our house. After dark we would put our valentines at the door, stamp our feet, and run. One year Uncle Orv put on a yellow raincoat, a top hat and when he heard the kids coming down the street, slipped out the back door and around the corner so he would be following us as we approached his house. I had slipped in the gate and was going up on the porch when Uncle Orv turned in the gate, caught me under his arm, and carried me into the house. As they all sat around laughing, I slipped out and down the street to a light. In my collection of comic valentines I found one of a pig in a top hat and coat very similar to the one Uncle Orv had used. It had a verse on it about his piggish ways, and I left it while they were still laughing on the inside.37
“In the afternoon,” Ivonette recalled, “Orville, Wilbur, or Katharine read to us.” The Goop Tales, Alphabetically Told, by Gelett Burgess, was a particular favorite. The book described, in humorous verse, the various faults that were to be avoided by good children:
Roderticus was meek and mild
He softly spoke, he sweetly smiled
He never called his playmates names
He was polite when playing games
But he was often in disgrace
Because he had a dirty face.38
When Wilbur was flying in France in 1908, he received a letter from Gelett Burgess
requesting an interview. He replied that he would be very pleased to meet the author of the book he had read more times than any other. Burgess was delighted, assuming that Wilbur was referring to one of his volumes of essays. Wilbur was too much the gentleman to admit that he meant The Goop Tales.39
Milton’s grandchildren were the second generation to benefit from his taste in educational toys. Nor had Wilbur and Orville lost their enthusiasm for mechanical playthings. “When we were old enough to get toys,” Ivonette remembered, “Uncle Orv and Uncle Will had a habit of playing with them until they were broken, then repair[ing] them so that they were better than when they were bought.”40
Of course not all presents were store-bought. Milton had returned from his church trips laden with brightly colored stones, dried flowers, and other souvenirs for his children. Wilbur and Orville continued that tradition. “When they took their glider to Kitty Hawk,” said young Milton, “I thought it must be a fine place to take a vacation, particularly after they sent me such fine souvenirs as a dried horseshoe crab and bottles containing genuine sea water and sea sand.”41
Milton Wright applied the disciplinary skills he had honed on his own children to his grandchildren as well. Young Milton and Ivonette retained vivid memories of a closet set beneath the stairs of the house on Hawthorn Street. It was a large walk-in affair, with a small window high up on the wall; the closet was kept furnished with picture magazines and reading material. A disobedient child was simply ordered into solitary for a period of enforced reading and serious thinking.42
“My grandfather had other methods of punishment,” Ivonette recalled. “He would put us on the floor, turn a chair over us, and sit on it so we couldn’t get up. When he thought our dignity had a jolt, he would let us out.” A rambunctious child was often sentenced to a term sitting on top of the icebox, where he or she would at least no longer be underfoot.43
Lorin’s youngsters were not the only children in the family. Every effort was made to remain in close touch with the Kansas Wrights. Reuch and Lulu had lost little Catherine in 1892, but their three remaining children—Helen Margaret, Herbert, and Bertha Ellwyn—were family favorites and, from time to time, the object of some concern.
Reuch, Lulu, and the children visited Dayton in the spring of 1901. It was not a pleasant occasion. Lulu was out of sorts, complaining about her husband’s lack of ambition and inability to get ahead. But it was her treatment of young Herbert that most concerned the Dayton Wrights.
“A bright manly little fellow,” Herbert seemed to be unfairly put upon. The boy refused to stand up for his rights in disputes with his sisters. Parental decisions usually went against him. At one point Lulu had remarked that the boy ought to be taken out of school and put to work in business as soon as possible.
As the psychologist Adrian Kinnane has suggested in his outstanding study of Wright family dynamics, the episode had special psychological meaning for Wilbur. The bicycle business was no longer booming. The cycle craze had peaked in 1896–97; within two years sales had begun to drop precipitously. The slump was inevitable. The huge sales boom of the 1890s had saturated the market.
But the poor business climate was not the real reason for Wilbur’s malaise. In spite of his interest in cycling and the mechanical aspects of bicycle repair and construction, he felt “trapped” in a “commercial pursuit” for which he was ill-suited, and which had not enabled him to develop his latent talents and abilities.
Wilbur feared that Herbert was in danger of being caught in the very same trap from which he himself was struggling to escape. The situation was serious enough to warrant a long letter to Lulu. “Please understand that I am not presuming to blame either of you, or even to assert as a fact that there is any blame or cause for it,” he stressed.44
But … I could not help wondering whether he [Herbert] would ever have a chance to develop his best qualities and choose a life work in which these qualities would be an assistance instead of a hindrance. When I learned that you intended to put him into business early I could not help feeling that in teaching him to prefer others to himself you were giving him a very poor training for the life work you had chosen for him, for in business it is the aggressive man who continually has his eye on his own interest who succeeds…. If Herbert were less retiring and more self-assertive than he is I would entirely agree to putting him into business early for that is the best training in the world for a business life and is the path which practically all the leaders in the business world have followed. I agree that a college training is wasted on a man who expects to follow commercial pursuits. Neither will putting a boy who has not the aggressive business instinct, to work early, make a successful business man of him.45
Wilbur concluded that Herbert, like his father and uncles, had “talent sufficient to make him really great.” He was not self-assertive, however, and would require the thoughtful guidance of his parents.
If left to himself, he will not find out what he would like to be until his chance to attain his wish is past. You may say that he ought to be more aggressive or that if he was really determined to be a great scientist or a great doctor or a great business man that he would find means to accomplish his end without assistance from his parents. But this is really saying that he must exercise talents that he has not got, in order to get a chance to develop talents he already has.46
Wilbur cited his own experience, and that of his brothers, as proof. “I entirely agree that the boys of the Wright family are all lacking in determination and push,” he admitted to Lulu. “None of us has as yet made particular use of the talent in which he excels other men, that is why our success has been very moderate. We ought not to have been business men.” Herbert could suffer a similar fate if Lulu and Reuch did not provide careful guidance.
There is always danger that a person of his [our] disposition will, if left to depend on himself, retire into the first corner he falls into and remain there all his life struggling for a bare existence (unless some earthquake throws him out into a more favorable location) when if put on the right path with special equipment he would advance far. Many men are better fit for improving the chances offered to them than in turning up the chances for themselves.47
It must have been an extraordinarily difficult letter for Wilbur to write. The Dayton Wrights had never found it easy to get along with Lulu under the best of circumstances. The decision to send her a letter filled with criticism of the way in which she was raising her children can only have been inspired by a conviction that the matter was of overriding importance.
For fourteen years, from 1885 to 1899, Wilbur had allowed life and opportunity to pass him by. He had drifted passively along, nursing his mother and fighting his father’s battles rather than striking out on his own to acquire the education needed for what he regarded as the most suitable career—teaching. Rather than stepping boldly toward his own goals, he had taken the easy path, joining forces with his younger brother to run two small businesses, an occupation for which he believed he had little talent. He had talked of breaking free, dreamed of going to college and seeking to explore his own potential, but he had lacked the courage, or the energy, to do anything about it.
Wilbur had by no means given up on himself. He had always known that the great opportunity of his life might still lie in the future. If so, he meant to seize it without hesitation—and follow wherever it might lead.
Only now, in the spring of 1901, had he begun to realize that an “earthquake” had already occurred. He had a new hobby so fascinating and challenging as to be all-consuming, giving him a new sense of purpose and direction in life. In the upstairs room at the bike shop, Wilbur and Orville were hard at work on their second glider.
BOOK TWO
Wings
chapter 10
THE YEAR OF THE FLYING MACHINES
May~September 1896
It was the summer of the Front Porch Campaign and the Cross of Gold. William Jennings Bryan, at thirty-six the youngest man ever nominate
d for the office of President, traveled ten thousand miles between July and November 1896, giving six hundred speeches to an estimated five million of his fellow citizens. To his friends, he was the “Boy Orator of the Platte,” “the Great Commoner,” and the “Silver King.” Republican newspapers dismissed him as “an irresponsible, unregulated, ignorant, prejudiced, pathologically honest and enthusiastic crank.”
William McKinley preferred to let the electorate come to him. Thousands of them did just that. Delegations from every corner of the nation were headed for Canton, Ohio, that summer. They were met at the station by a brass band and marched to the lawn of the McKinley home for an audience with the great man. Portly, and balding, he spoke of a full dinner pail and a sound dollar, and was as rock-solid as he looked.1
Americans followed the progress of the campaign in the pages of their daily papers. Those newspapers, and the men who ran them, had become a power in the land. The average newspaper reader of the 1890s remembered his daily paper of the decade before as a thin, spiritless thing. For centuries, the scope of such publications had been limited by the necessity of setting type by hand and printing one sheet of paper at a time.
Technology had changed all that. The combination of the linotype machine, the curved stereotype plate, and the high-speed rotary press, all introduced in the 1880s, enabled a publisher to set a vast amount of type in a short period of time, and to print up to 18,000 standard-sized papers an hour on both sides of a continuous roll of newsprint.
Technology had provided the means of mass-producing newspapers. The effort to take economic advantage of that potential transformed the practice of journalism in America. It was no longer enough to inform the reader; the goal was to stimulate, provoke, and titillate.
The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright Page 14