Maiden Flight

by Harry Haskell

  Harry passed through Dayton again on his way home from Europe in June. He and Kate had planned to travel together, but in the event, young Henry took her place. Harry had bounced back from his surgery and seemed in good spirits. He had lunch with Lorin and dinner with me at Hawthorn Hill. I made it clear that he would be welcome here at any time. By a curious coincidence, I ran into Stef a few days later at the St. Louis convention of the Aeronautical Section of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. We had a good talk, and he seemed relieved to hear that, as far as I was concerned, there had never been any ice between us.

  I often think back to the many times Harry and Stef stopped here, before I knew or even suspected anything about my sister’s feelings for either of them. Life was a good deal less complicated in those days, or so it looks to me now. Of course, none of us can predict the paths our lives will take. I foolishly imagined that Kate and I were on a safe and steady course; the truth was we were flying straight into the eye of the storm. I have no one but myself to blame. Any man who has piloted an aeroplane as often as I have ought to know that human nature is no less fickle and treacherous than Mother Nature.

  My big mistake was to assume that Kate was in control of her actions and emotions. I’ve always thought I was in control of mine, but now I’m not so sure. I guess Kate had to do what she had to do, the same as I did. Neither of us was wholly the master of his own fate. As a man of science, I have been guided all my life by the laws of physics. The phenomena I deal with in my work are measurable and predictable. In the laboratory I can set the parameters of an experiment and compute the results with a high degree of confidence. But if I have learned one thing over the years, it’s that life contains too many variables for us to be absolutely certain about anything. In the last analysis, there is no accounting for the human factor. It is always easier to deal with things than with men, and no one can direct his life entirely as he would choose.

  Orville Wright lived quietly in retirement at Hawthorn Hill for nearly two decades after Katharine’s death. His housekeeper, Carrie Kayler Grumbach, and his secretary, Mabel Beck, continued to serve him faithfully. Family members say he never spoke of his sister, though he did refer to her on at least one occasion: in a letter written toward the end of his life, he once again denied that she had played any role in the invention of the airplane. Not for many years would the “Wright sister’s” crucial contribution to her brothers’ work, and to Orville’s well-being, come to be widely recognized.

  On October 24, 1942, the Smithsonian Institution published a brochure entitled The 1914 Tests of the Langley Aerodrome. The document amounted to an official retraction of and apology for the Smithsonian’s longstanding insistence on the precedence of Samuel Langley’s ill-fated flying machine. Although he had finally been vindicated, the surviving Wright brother characteristically refused to gloat. In late 1948, eleven months after his death of a heart attack, the original Wright flyer was finally repatriated from London, in accordance with Orville’s wishes. Today it occupies a place of honor in the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.

  Harry Haskell sailed for Europe with his son in April 1929. Two years later, on a trip to Italy with his third wife, he commissioned a copy of a bronze statue by Andrea del Verrocchio for a fountain that he intended to donate to Oberlin College in Katharine Wright Haskell’s memory. Depicting an angel boy cavorting with a dolphin, it graces the entrance to what is now the Allen Memorial Art Museum. Every year on Katharine’s birthday Harry sent money for flowers to be placed on her grave, and every year on the anniversary of her death he reread her love letters.

  In his remaining years, Harry wrote two books on Roman history and won two Pulitzer Prizes for his editorials in the Kansas City Star. He stayed in touch with Orville and with younger members of the Wright clan, to whom he was fondly known as Uncle Harry. In 1948 the family asked him to write a book based on the brothers’ scientific papers, but he reluctantly declined, pleading poor health. “I have a feeling that Katharine would have liked me to do it if I could,” he wrote. “She was so proud of Wilbur and Orville and of their great achievements.”

  Harry Haskell died in 1952. The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, a definitive record of the brothers’ scientific work, appeared the following year under the editorship of Marvin W. MacFarland. Orville never got around to writing his own book about the invention of the airplane.

  Author’s Note

  In writing Maiden Flight, I wanted to let Katharine, Orville, and Harry tell their stories as far as possible in their own words. (Full disclosure: Henry J. Haskell was my grandfather and died two years before I was born.) No linear historical narrative, it seemed to me, could do justice to the tangled emotions, psychological complexities, and multiple perspectives of such a lovers’ triangle. I opted instead for a contrapuntal medley of interlocking memoirs, whose notes and themes are drawn from letters and other contemporary documents. It is my hope that the resulting three-part invention will help others hear the voices of these three extraordinary individuals as vividly as I hear them.*1

  A few short extracts from the protagonists’ many extant letters may serve to convey the distinctive flavor of their speech. Listen, for example, to Katharine responding in 1925 to Harry’s unexpected declaration of love in her characteristically breathless, unguarded voice, liberally punctuated with dashes, underlinings, and exclamation points:

  Harry, how can I tell where affection leaves off and love begins? I haven’t thought [about] your loving me or my loving you until you overwhelm me. Give me a little chance, please, and let me talk to you. I don’t know you, as you are now. I don’t see that I could ever leave Orv but let me talk to you. It just breaks my heart to have you send such a telegram. “It’s all right. Please don’t worry” etc. Of course it isn’t all right and, of course, I will worry. So I have sent you an answer and asked you to come—but I don’t know myself to what I have asked you to come. Don’t come if you will be more upset that way. Please, Harry, don’t care so much—and please do! (Katharine Wright to Harry Haskell, June 15, 1925)

  Katharine’s epistolary style changed remarkably little over the years. Compare this passage from a letter she wrote to Wilbur in December 1908, leaping at his suggestion that she and Orville join him in France:

  I have been thumping off letters for brother [Orville] till I am black and blue in the face. We are hopelessly swamped with correspondence. What do you do with your letters? I am beginning to get interested in getting the letters out of the way ’cause Sister is thinking about hanging onto brother’s coat-tails when he starts for “Yurp.” In fact I made a visit to the dressmaker’s today, prospecting a little. I suppose I shall have to have one good dress but I can’t go your pace on social functions. (Katharine Wright to Wilbur Wright, December 7, 1908)

  Orville, by contrast, expressed himself differently to various correspondents at different times and under different circumstances. Like many famous people, he presented one persona to the world and another to those close to him. Here is the folksy, intimate, and occasionally petulant voice he used in writing to Katharine (in this case, from Washington in 1908) and other family members:

  I haven’t done a lick of work since I have been here. I have to give my time to answering the ten thousand fool questions people ask about the machine. There are a number of people standing about the whole day long. . . . I find it more pleasant here at the Club than I expected. The trouble here is that you can’t find a minute to be alone. . . . I have trouble in getting enough sleep. (Orville Wright to Katharine Wright, August 27, 1908)

  And here is Orville’s “public” voice—matter-of-fact, scientifically precise, a shade impersonal (he’s writing to a British friend about the great Dayton flood of 1913):*2

  The water covered over half the city. At our Third Street office the water was about ten to twelve feet deep in the street, but did not quite reach the second floor. On Hawthorn Street it was about eight or nine feet deep and stood six feet on the first floo
r. Most of the things downstairs were ruined. We saved a few of our books and several small pieces of furniture. We might have saved almost everything had we had more notice, but Katharine and I overslept that morning and had to be out of the house within one half hour of the time we were up. (Orville Wright to Griffith Brewer, April 22, 1913)

  Unlike Katharine and Orville, Harry was a professional wordsmith. As a newspaper reporter and editorial writer, he was trained to express himself succinctly and directly. His epistolary voice was straightforward, unpretentious, and often spiced with colloquialisms, as when he wrote to thank Orville after a visit to the Wrights’ summer home in Canada:

  Since I got back from Lambert I have felt my handicap in not having Dr. Dick’s [a mutual friend in Kansas City] gift for description. If I had, Kansas City would know by this time that we went out sailing in a launch with an aviation motor so powerful that occasionally the boat left the water and took to the air, skimming over the tops of the islands. Ah, them were the days! I hope your busted back isn’t going to keep you and Katharine from making that Western voyage this fall. (Harry Haskell to Orville Wright, September 25, 1925)

  And here is Harry the ardent but ever-considerate lover, pouring out his soul in a telegram to Katharine, who is (as usual) agonizing over the prospect of leaving Orville:

  When I went to D[ayton] last June, do you remember I told you I wanted to help you find out what was in your heart. I haven’t changed since and I couldn’t possibly ask you to do what you thought you shouldn’t. You know that you don’t have to decide right away. There is plenty of time to think it over. I know your feeling for Orv, dear. If you finally decide you can’t leave him—even for the part of the time I have talked about, it will be all right dear. I’ll do my best. I love you, K whatever happens. (Harry Haskell to Katharine Wright, undated telegram)

  Allowing Katharine, Orville, and Harry to “speak for themselves,” without playing overly fast and loose with the sources, involved setting a few basic ground rules. First: use the characters’ own words whenever possible, with only minor adjustments for grammar, clarity, consistency, or flow. Second: never sacrifice factual accuracy for color or dramatic effect. Third: respect chronology. As Katharine’s biographer Richard Maurer observes, the day-to-day unfolding of her romance with Harry “is as exquisitely timed as a Samuel Richardson novel.”

  Throughout this book I have occasionally put Katharine’s words into Orville’s mouth and vice versa. (They often used the same or similar language to express themselves, and Katharine’s letters to Harry quote or paraphrase many conversations with Orville.) I have not hesitated to stitch together passages from letters written at different times or even to different people, provided I could satisfy myself that they were of a piece. In supplying the connective tissue necessary to construct a narrative, I have endeavored to mimic the memoirists’ characteristic word choices and turns of phrase—for example, Katharine’s fondness for up-to-date expressions like “bunk,” “corker,” and “nuff said,” and Orville’s preference for the old-fashioned “aeroplane” rather than “airplane.”

  Maiden Flight, then, is best described as an exercise in imaginative reconstruction. As such, it straddles the line between traditional historical fiction and the comparatively new genre known as creative nonfiction, which the Library of Congress defines as “works that use literary styles and techniques to present factually accurate narratives in a compelling, vivid manner.” For the record, every incident, fact, and emotion that the three protagonists describe is either explicitly documented or can be plausibly inferred from the historical record. Readers who are acquainted with the voluminous literature on the Wright brothers will recognize many of the events and anecdotes related in this book, and at least some of the primary sources upon which I have drawn. In allowing the “Wright sister” to step outside Wilbur and Orville’s shadow, I have endeavored to shed new light on the role she played in their private lives, as well as on her often misunderstood contribution to their scientific work. But Katharine’s abundant store of “human nature”—her lively and perceptive outlook on life, her great capacity for both love and indignation, her acute and sometimes crippling self-awareness—is worth recording and celebrating in its own right.

  Sources and Acknowledgments

  Katharine and Harry stayed in touch with each other after graduating from Oberlin in 1898 and 1896, respectively. How often they corresponded in the early years is unclear, in part because his letters to her were destroyed in the 1913 Miami River flood. After Harry’s first wife died in September 1923, however, they wrote to each other with increasing frequency and intimacy. Although Harry’s side of this later correspondence has unaccountably disappeared, he kept virtually all of Katharine’s many letters, spanning the period from early 1924 to a few days before their wedding in November 1926. The Katharine Wright Haskell Papers remain in our family’s possession but are available on microfilm at the State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center–Kansas City (formerly the Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri–Kansas City), Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University Libraries in Dayton, and other repositories. It was this epistolary treasure trove that inspired me to tell Katharine’s story and that made its telling possible.

  The other principal manuscript sources on which Maiden Flight is based include the cornucopia of Wright family papers held by Wright State University and the Library of Congress, supplemented by a smaller Wright brothers collection at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London; and the extensive correspondence of the Arctic explorer and author Vilhjalmur Stefansson, which is divided between the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College and the National Archives. I have also drawn freely on letters, academic records, and other material in the Oberlin College Archives, as well as on a small collection of Henry J. Haskell’s papers that I assembled while writing a book about my grandfather’s career at the Kansas City Star.

  For those seeking a straightforward historical account of the events chronicled in this book, I highly recommend the late Ian Mackersey’s The Wright Brothers: The Remarkable Story of the Aviation Pioneers Who Changed the World (London: Little Brown, 2003). Alone among the Wrights’ biographers, he devotes two full chapters to Katharine’s love affair with Harry, her subsequent estrangement from Orville, and the sad coda to his illustrious career. Richard Maurer covers the ground more concisely in a meticulously researched biography for younger readers, The Wright Sister: Katharine Wright and Her Famous Brothers (2003; rpt. New York: Square Fish Books, 2016). I owe each of these authors a debt of thanks for sharing their knowledge and insights, and for encouraging me to relate the story of Katharine, Orville, and Harry in my own way.

  For much-appreciated assistance of various kinds, I am happy to express my gratitude to Tracy Barrett, whose vividly fictionalized autobiography of Anna of Byzantium was an inspiration for my work; Dawne Dewey, head of Special Collections and Archives at Wright State University Libraries, who graciously fielded my questions and guided me through the Wright family materials in her care; John Dizikes, historian extraordinaire, whose comments and insights improved a preliminary draft of Maiden Flight; Sarah H. Heald, staff curator at the National Park Service, who shared her painstakingly researched historic furnishings report on Hawthorn Hill, the Wright family home in Dayton; Susan Marsh, whose valuable perspective as a sympathetic nonspecialist reader helped me tailor the book for a general audience; Lester Reingold, longtime friend, aviation writer, and avid Wright brothers enthusiast, who likewise commented on an early draft of the manuscript; and Paul Royster of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, who generously placed his publishing expertise and scholarly acumen at my disposal. Jordan and Anita Miller, my unflaggingly supportive acquiring editors at Academy Chicago, and their colleagues at Chicago Review Press, notably Jerome Pohlen and Ellen Hornor, brought the book to fruition with courtesy and professionalism.

  Special thank-yous go to my beloved wife, Ellen Rose Co
rdes, whose unflagging enthusiasm for the project sustained me over many years; and Amanda Wright Lane, Katharine and Orville’s great-grandniece and trustee of the Wright Brothers Family Foundation, who welcomed me and my sister to a Wright-Haskell family reunion in Dayton long before Maiden Flight was airborne.

  Explanatory Notes

  I told the boys there was at least one person outside the family who would know it wasn’t so: Harry wrote about his first meeting with the Wright brothers many times in later years. Katharine, to the best of my knowledge, recorded her early memories of Harry only once, in a long letter to Vilhjalmur Stefansson dated December 2, 1923. I am indebted to Ann Honious and Edward Roach of the National Park Service for providing photocopies of this and many other letters to and from Katharine in the Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Evelyn Stefansson Nef Papers at the National Archives.

  I was detained after breakfast three times a week to give aid and advice: Although Katharine was at pains to rebut news reports that she had assisted her brothers with their mathematical computations, she bristled at Harry’s suggestion that she needed help in math. In a letter dated November 13, 1925, she twitted him gently about his claim to have tutored her in freshman Math Review, saying, “I don’t think you ever did help me with that but maybe you did.”