The brief AP dispatch, datelined December 18, 1903, stirred up a nest of happy memories. When I read about the successful flight at Kitty Hawk on the front page of the Star, my first thought was of how proud Katharine must be to see Wilbur and Orville make good. At Oberlin she had spoken about the boys so often, and with such warmth and affection, that I almost felt I knew them. The popular image of the two stiff-necked “mechanics” from the Buckeye State just didn’t add up in my mind. Katharine always had been so sociable and vivacious, the kind of woman who lit up a room with her presence. It wasn’t easy to picture her as Wilbur and Orville’s kid sister.
When I finally caught up with the three of them in Washington, I realized that my fellow newspapermen were all wet. The Wright brothers had earned the reputation of being “fierce” with reporters, but as far as I was concerned they couldn’t have been more approachable and down to earth, Orville in particular. With his neatly trimmed mustache, starched white collar, and well-tailored three-piece suit, he might have passed for a bank manager or a small-town businessman. Not in my wildest dreams would I have taken him for what he actually was: a scientific supergenius with one of the most brilliant inventive and imaginative minds in human history.
Orville
The Wright brothers, they call us—as if Will and I were the only male pups in the litter! Do those fool reporters never bother to get their facts straight? There were four of us boys, not counting the twin who died in infancy, may he rest in peace. Reuch and Lorin were the original Wright brothers. They left home a good while before Will and I opened our first bicycle shop over on West Third Street. Reuch and I were a full ten years apart, and so unlike each other in temper and outlook that you’d never guess we had the same blood in our veins. He married young and struck out for Kansas City, where he and Lulu brought their four children into the world.
Reuch was a restless man, a loner, and about as stubborn as a Missouri mule. More than once Will and I tried to help him out when he was hard up, but it was no use. As Kate said, a person couldn’t do anything to please Reuch; he was just naturally suspicious of everything and everybody. Lorin and he were as different as night and day. Easygoing and easy to please, that’s Lorin for you—not that he can’t be as ornery as the next fellow when it suits him. Runs in the family, you might say. Lorin tried his luck out west for a spell too. After Mother passed away, he came back to Dayton and settled down with Netta to raise a family in the old neighborhood, down the way from the house we grew up in on Hawthorn Street.
And then there was Kate—Sterchens, we called her, or Swes for short. She was the baby, born August 19, 1874, three years to the day after me. There was always a special bond between us. As children we shared birthdays, toys, playmates—pretty near everything, in fact. It was Kate who held the family together after Mother died; maybe that’s why I always seemed to feel like a little boy around her. When I had the accident at Fort Myer, she dropped everything and camped out beside my hospital bed for seven weeks, like my guardian angel. I said to her, “Sterchens, you watch and don’t let them hurt my leg!” I didn’t trust those army doctors within an inch of my life. Kate had always looked after us at home when we were ill, and I knew I could depend on her. As Mr. Chanute said, she was devotion itself in those days.
Growing up, Will and I knew all of Kate’s schoolmates, and our friends were her friends too. She and I threw some swell house parties in the old days. How Father used to fret and fume when he caught on we’d been playing bridge behind his back. In his book, card games, dancing, and such were Satan’s work. Once the Wright Company got off the ground, there never seemed to be enough time for such diversions. Will and I were on the move pretty much nonstop. Wherever we happened to be, though, we could always count on Kate to keep us up on the news from home. One Halloween she wrote about how she and her friends had dressed up in sheets and pillowcases and told one another’s fortunes in verse. I can still recite hers, word for word:
You’ll early leave this earthly sphere,
But not by death! O! No!
You’ll guide an airship without fear,
Win fame and a rich beau.
Oh, Swes, Swes, how could you do it? How could you run off and leave me to rattle around this big, empty house alone? We were so happy together, just the two of us, happy and settled and fixed for life. The idea of you falling in love never seriously crossed my mind. I didn’t think of you as appealing to other men, not in that way. In hindsight, I should have read the handwriting on the wall the minute you introduced us to Harry that day in Washington. The way you sprang up to greet him—it was like you were a schoolgirl again, all flustered and excited and beaming with pride.
Katharine
I was proud to have Will and Orv meet Harry and know that he was a friend of mine. They liked him right away. They liked most of my friends, if it comes to that—newspapermen excepted! And who can blame them? The way the papers mangled the story of the first flight was simply scandalous. When Lorin hand-carried Orv’s telegram from Kitty Hawk to the city editor of the Dayton Journal, all Mr. High-and-Mighty had to say was, “Fifty-seven seconds, huh? If it’d been fifty-seven minutes it might have been a news item.” I wanted to scream! Harry wasn’t like that at all. He didn’t come on gangbusters or set himself up on a pedestal. The boys knew instinctively that they could trust him. And seeing how quickly Will and Orv took to Harry made me like him all the more.
Some way we hadn’t had much to do with each other since Oberlin. It was Harry who let our correspondence drop after he and Isabel were married, but I would have stopped writing regardless. I just didn’t feel comfortable keeping up a regular correspondence with a married man. I’ve always thought it is not right to make any wife even a little bit uneasy. Anyhow, the letters he wrote me in those years were all lost in the big Dayton flood of 1913. The fine edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Vailima Letters that he gave me at commencement in 1898—that was spoiled too. I tried to replace it later but couldn’t get it in the original binding. I wonder if Harry kept the book I gave him for graduation—someday I’ll have to ask him. I doubt it meant half as much to him as the Stevenson did to me.
My college roommate told me about visiting Harry one time in Kansas City. Such pride he takes in showing off his library! I can just picture him pulling the books off the shelves, one by one, and reading his favorite passages to Margaret. Books are one of the things that brought us together—books and a sense of common values, the solid, old-fashioned values that Oberlin stood for in our day. Harry loved the old Oberlin as much as I did. We fussed and fussed about every subject under the sun: poetry, philosophy, religion, literature, history—even mathematics! I’ll never forget winning that twenty-five-dollar prize for my essay on the Monroe Doctrine in my sophomore year. I was so proud and happy when Harry—a respected upperclassman, if you please—walked me home from chapel after the ceremony. His praise was the sweetest of all. Yes, I always cared a lot for Harry’s opinion of me. I made no bones of that!
I’m the only one in our family with a college diploma—not that it does me any credit to crow about it. Reuch and Lorin attended a Brethren school in Indiana, but they weren’t cut out for book learning, I guess, and soon drifted away. Will had a first-class head on his shoulders—he would have gone to Yale if it hadn’t been for his ice hockey accident. As for Orv, he was clever enough at brain work—when he wasn’t working in his print shop, fixing bicycles, or just plain horsing around. A regular practical joker Little Brother was—and still is, from what I hear. One time his sixth-grade teacher sent him home for doing something wicked and told him not to come back without a written apology from our parents. Bubbo couldn’t face telling them the truth, so he played hooky the rest of the year. I thought he’d catch it for sure, but to my amazement Pop didn’t come down hard on him. As a matter of fact, I think he admired Orv’s independent streak.
Father respected independence in us women as well—up to a point, anyway. He put me through Oberlin so I coul
d earn my living as a schoolteacher and not have to depend on him in his old age. Then, after I came home and started teaching at the high school, he deeded the Hawthorn Street house over to me so I would never have to worry about having a roof over my head. All those years I spent living with him and the boys, as housekeeper, mother, sister, and daughter all rolled into one, I knew I could make my own way in the world if it ever came to that.
Considering he was born before the Civil War, Pop’s views on the woman question were surprisingly advanced. He never for one minute doubted that women were entitled to the vote just the same as men. His convictions on that point were unshakable. One time, before the last war, he and Orv marched side by side in a suffrage parade through downtown Dayton. Pop was eighty-six years old—and was I ever proud to be his “Tochter” that day! In other ways, though, he was no different from most men of his generation. When he went away from home on church business, he used to write practically every day, reminding me to do this, that, or the other thing. He was a regular fountain of advice about cultivating modest feminine manners, keeping my temper under control, and everything.
The fact is, I s’pose, Pop was well-nigh helpless without a woman by his side. Mother used to do everything for him. He told me once that he never published an important editorial in the church newspaper without reading it to her first. If it wasn’t clear to Mother, he said, there was no use expecting anyone else to understand it. They were as devoted to each other as any two people I ever knew. Pop said the light of our home went out when Mother died. I was only a girl of fifteen, but no one had to tell me that I was expected to step into her shoes. One letter Pop wrote nearly did me in, it pulled my heartstrings so: “But for you, we should feel like we had no home. I often think of something or see or hear of something that Mother would know and care something about, but she is not here, and there is no one knows or cares anything about it.”
Mother was called Susan Catharine—such a beautiful name! Sometimes Pop got muddled and spelled my name with a C instead of a K—but I didn’t take it to heart. It was his refusing to treat me like a grown woman that got my dander up. Even after I came home from college, he fussed and brooded over me like a mother hen. He insisted on knowing where I was going of an evening, who I was going out with, when I’d be home—and everything! After the boys went off to Europe in ’07, every peculiarity he ever had came out in full blossom. I couldn’t even leave the house in broad daylight without being lectured. I told Will and Orv that it was a pathetic state of affairs when going out for the cream was treasured up as the chief diversion of the evening.
Men! I’ve always lived with them and don’t look on them as such a wonderful treat. Yet everyone knows the world has always been managed by men to promote that very idea. Women are dependent on the opinion of men in a way that men wouldn’t tolerate for a second if our roles were reversed. Once in a great while a woman can break through and make a place for herself, but she has to be very exceptional. Even Pop had his blind spots when it came to dealing with my “sect.” I’ll never forget the letter he sent me in Pau, warning about the danger of going up in a hot-air balloon. “It does not make so much difference about you, but Wilbur ought to keep out of all balloon rides.” Well sir, Orv and I went up in a balloon just the same, and we both lived to tell the tale. Nuff said!
It was a different story with the boys. From the time I was a little girl in flannel petticoats, they treated me as a reasonable human being and their equal in every way that mattered. They even paid me good wages to be their social manager and general dogsbody overseas. The one thing they just couldn’t seem to get into their heads was how hard it was to give up my job after Bubbo had his accident. I never did anything so well as the teaching I did at the high school. Some way, teaching Latin and history to those children made me feel useful and needed. What’s more, I had grown accustomed to having my own money to spend as I liked—not as much as Will and Orv had, mind you, but enough to ensure I would never be a burden to them or Pop.
It’s not as if I didn’t feel lucky to be working with the boys. I loved every minute of it—the travel, the adventure, the interesting people we met. But the flying machine was their baby, as Will liked to say, not mine. After they started building airplanes and hired a regular secretary to look after the business, there was less and less real work to keep me occupied. It wasn’t until Will died that it weighed in on me that I was horribly dissatisfied with my life. As far as I’m concerned, there is no excuse for doing nothing but fritter away my time. If a man did that, I’d have my own opinion of him, you can be sure! But nobody would have understood if I hadn’t played nurse to Orv in Virginia or stayed home to take care of him and Pop after Will was gone.
Little Brother positively refused to hear of my going back to teaching, no matter how hard I tried to make him see what it meant to me. When you come right down to it, he depended on me just as much as Father ever did—maybe more. I was the only one who could assure him that everything was being done for him. Some way, he was more like a lover than a brother to me. One of the girls in Dayton told Orv that I was the only woman who could ever suit him—and I ’spect she was right!
Orville
The day Kate came into this world was the day my problems all began. It was my third birthday, and they brought me upstairs in the old house to take a gander at my new baby sister. I saw then that I was getting into a peck of trouble, and I’ve never got out since.
As far back as I can remember, Kate and I were as close as hand and glove. The time I came down with typhoid fever, she insisted on staying home from college and nursing me back to health. And after the accident at Fort Myer, she was the only person I could bear to have near me. The moment she walked into my hospital room, smiling as if nothing much was the matter, I knew my injuries couldn’t be so bad after all. The army doctors had dreaded her coming and were relieved that she wasn’t hysterical. Little did they know I was the one would have gone off my head if it hadn’t been for Swes. For weeks she stayed by my bedside from the middle of the afternoon until seven in the morning. Yes, Kate was the most loyal sister a man could ask for.
It was the same with Will. Pop always said he and I were as inseparable as twins. From the time we were little we lived together, played together, worked together, even thought together. Practically everything we achieved was the result of conversations, suggestions, and arguments between us. It made no difference which one of us invented what, we always took credit jointly. Why, Ullam even blamed himself for the smashup at Fort Myer. He claimed it never would have happened if he had been there to keep visitors from distracting me while I worked. We had an unspoken pact, Will and I—and Kate too—that we would always look out for one another, come hell or high water.
We’d still be looking out for one another too, if it hadn’t been for the rotten seafood my brother ate in Boston. Will was so worn down by the pressures of work that when the fever grabbed hold of him, his body plumb gave out. May 30, 1912, it was—the darkest day of my life. It felt as if part of me had died with him. I had just purchased a new family car, and for weeks on end Pop, Kate, and I drove around in a fog, hardly exchanging a word. The worst thing of all was coming out here to Oakwood to check up on the new house. Will and I had bought the lot in February, and the workmen had started to lay the foundation. When I stood over the cellar hole and thought of Will lying in his grave up on the hill, I about gave up the ghost right then and there.
Like everything we did, Hawthorn Hill was meant to be a family project. But Will had too many other fish to fry to give it his full attention, so Swes and I ended up planning the house together, inside and out. We told the architect what we wanted in each room and even made a special expedition to Grand Rapids to shop for furniture. Naturally, it made no difference that my signature was on all the checks; the new place was always going to be more Kate’s than mine. Matter of fact, the first set of drawings the architect showed us was labeled “Residence for Miss Katharine Wright.” I had a go
od laugh when I showed them to Father. “We can’t fool anybody,” I said. “Everyone knows who will own the house.”
It was Kate who insisted that we had outgrown the house on Hawthorn Street and needed a bigger place. Now that Will and I were respectable businessmen, she said, we had to have a home fit for entertaining—so there was nothing for it but to pull up stakes and move. Not that there was a whole lot left to move after the Miami River got through with us in the spring of ’13. About all we managed to salvage from the old house were a few books and several small pieces of furniture. We might have saved almost everything had we had more notice of the flood, but Kate and I overslept and had to be out of the house within half an hour.
When the three of us finally moved out here to Oakwood a year or so later, we felt we had landed in the lap of luxury. We had lived practically on top of each other in the old house, so having room to spare took some getting used to. Father had the entire east wing pretty much to himself, except on rare occasions when the corner guest room was occupied. Kate took the bedroom across the hallway from his, overlooking the front drive, between my room and Will’s. She called Will’s room the “blue room,” on account of the blue wallpaper, but to me it will always be Will’s room, for all that he never slept in it. It’s almost as if he were still with us.
Harry
Shortly after the war broke out in Europe, in the fall of 1914, I was pleasantly surprised to find a letter from Katharine in my mailbox, written on her new Hawthorn Hill stationery. She was up in arms over news reports that Wilbur and Orville had modeled their original flyer on a machine built by Samuel P. Langley, the former secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. The source of this preposterous claim was Glenn Curtiss, one of the Wrights’ principal competitors in the airplane industry. Sometime before Wilbur died, Curtiss had gotten hold of a Wright flyer, purportedly “for scientific purposes,” built his own airplane based upon it, and begun giving exhibition flights.
Maiden Flight Page 2