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

by Crouch, Tom D.

  The depth of Milton’s desire to insulate and protect his sons from the harsh treatment that the world meted out to honest folk was never more apparent than in the late summer and fall of 1908, when Wilbur was making his first public flights in France. “I wish you could be in the home circle,” Milton wrote that September, at a time when his world-famous son was besieged by admiring throngs. “You are so alone, if not lonely.”15

  Milton was certain that he knew what Wilbur must be feeling. “I have had some experience in being thousands of miles away from home, away from my family,” he reminded his son. “But I was in my own country and amid my own language. In 1859 I was a full month distant, and mails about six weeks en route. In 1885, 1886, 1887, and 1888, I was about 7 or 10 days away. I do not like to have you so far from us all, with your cares and experiments.”16

  Surrounded as he was by “those who have a lack of sympathy, and even inward hostility,” Wilbur must be suffering from the “lack of home sympathy.”17 Milton cautioned him to mind his health and to be careful while flying, but he was far more concerned about what those “hostile strangers” might do. He warned his son to be especially alert to the danger of sabotage. “Before making a flight,” he suggested, “you should inspect your machine carefully, to be sure that no one has tampered with it.”18

  If the French did not kill Wilbur, Milton feared, they would most certainly attempt to rob him. “Astute experimenters,” he advised, “will catch up with you, prevent your profit, and steal your credit, as well as [your] cash, at last.”19

  Time and again he reminded Wilbur that the applause of the multitude was not to be trusted. “The ties of blood relationship,” he admonished, “are more enduring and more real.”20

  But if Milton sought to protect his children from the harsh reality of the world, it is also clear that he was very much afraid of being abandoned by them. He struggled to mask those feelings. “As long looked for,” he wrote to thirty-nine-year-old Wilbur in August 1908, “you [and Orville] are both far away, probably never to be much at home after this. But I … [will] say little about it.” Still, Wilbur and Orville could scarcely avoid reading between the lines of a letter received in July 1908. “We miss you,” their father remarked, “but while your business goes forward I have to accept the inevitable.”21

  Milton would grow more demanding in years to come, creating considerable tension in Katharine’s life after her graduation and return home. She and her brothers accepted this side of their father’s nature without complaint, however. Bishop Wright had faced problems with Reuchlin, but there was never the slightest sign of rebellion among his three youngest children. They revered him, never doubting that he wanted only what he thought best for them. More important, they believed he knew what was best for them.

  Nor was there any question who was the head of the household. Wilbur spoke for all of them in a letter written to Milton while the printing establishment suit was being heard by the Ohio Supreme Court in December 1898.

  I hope that Mr. Young [the Old Constitution attorney] will insist strongly that there is no law in America requiring churches to leave the essentials of faith and practice to be legislated upon from time to time as majorities may dictate … it is the privilege of churches to protect the rights of their legitimate spiritual children in future times, by “extraordinary and impractical” restrictive rules … for the protection of those who have inherited the spirit of the founders.

  “The Fathers knew what they were doing,” Wilbur concluded. “They had a right to do it; the Court is bound to protect that right.”22

  Clearly, Wilbur regarded the church situation as a metaphor for life—“The Fathers knew what they were doing.” Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine were deeply involved in and affected by their father’s problems. They never doubted the righteousness of his cause or the way in which he attempted to resolve the difficulties he faced. Like Milton, they came to believe in the essential depravity of mankind. The world beyond the front door of their home was filled with men and women who were not to be trusted.

  Gradually, they would become as isolated as their father—and as combative. The ten-year fight in the courts for the property rights of the Old Constitution church served to draw them closer together. An honest person was well advised to expect the worst of others, and to rely on the security and support of the family.

  The reorientation of the Wright family following Susan’s death was a continuous process, not completed until Katharine’s graduation from Oberlin in 1898. It involved the working out of a new set of dynamics. As father and daughter began the complex task of establishing a framework for family leadership within which both could function, Wilbur and Orville were exploring the advantages of a partnership between brothers.

  chapter 7

  A BUSINESS FOR BROTHERS

  1889~1891

  The year 1889 was a turning point for each member of the Wright family. It brought the sadness and uncertainty of Susan’s death and the dissolution of the old church. But there was a sense of new beginnings as well, particularly for Wilbur, who emerged from the four years that he had spent convalescing, reading, and nursing his mother to discover that his younger brother had caught up with him.

  Orville turned eighteen that August, a little more than a month after his mother’s funeral. He had come back from Indiana with the family in 1884 under something of an academic cloud. Involved in some bit of mischief, he had been sent home from the sixth grade with a warning that he would not be allowed to return to school unless accompanied by one of his parents. Busy packing, Susan simply kept the boy out of school for the last few weeks before the move to Ohio. As a result, Orville did not receive his sixth-grade certificate, and had to prove himself before being allowed to enter the seventh grade.1

  His reputation for mischief was apparently well founded. Miss Jennings, his eighth-grade teacher at the second district intermediate school in Dayton, found it necessary to seat him in the front row where she could keep an eye on him. He retained that seat the following year, 1887, when both he and Miss Jennings were promoted to the ninth grade.

  Orville was not an outstanding student, but he got by. His ninth-grade marks included a 79 in Latin, an 86 in algebra, and a 92 in botany. Orville raised all of his grades during his sophomore year, earning a 90 in Latin, geometry, and history; his tenth-grade instructors credited him with good deportment and “medium” habits of application.2

  Nor was he a particularly memorable pupil. William Werthner, his ninth-grade instructor in botany, later described him as “a quiet, reserved boy, faithful in his work, but not strikingly different from the rest … whom I would have forgotten had not his sister Kate in after years also attended our school and told me she was the second of her family to recite in my classes.”3

  In truth, Orville was more interested in printing than in schoolwork. While the family was still living in Richmond he had become fascinated by the line illustrations in magazines of the period. After reading up on the subject in Chamber’s Cyclopedia, he tried his own hand at cutting wooden printing blocks, using the spring of a broken pocket knife as a scribe. Wilbur presented him with a proper set of wood-cutting tools that Christmas.

  When they arrived back in Dayton, Orville was delighted to discover that his old friend Ed Sines, who still lived in the neighborhood, boasted a small printing outfit. When that proved inadequate, Wilbur and Lorin traded an old boat for a more professional press, which they presented to the young printers. Milton pitched in with twenty-five pounds of used type.

  The first major project undertaken by the firm of Sines & Wright was a small newspaper, The Midget, aimed at their eighth-grade classmates. Milton suspended publication when he discovered that the first issue included an entire page consisting of the name Sines & Wright printed twice diagonally across the sheet. Their readers would feel cheated, he explained. It was probably just as well. The issue contained a notice that the next number would include Miss Jenning’s thoughts on “The Inherent Wi
ckedness of School Children.” Orville’s already shaky academic record might not have stood the shock.4

  Before long the printing operation had taken over the “summer kitchen” at the rear of the Wright house, and the boys were accepting commissions for the job printing of handbills and advertising circulars, as well as letterhead, business cards, envelopes, and tickets. They boasted that Sines & Wright would “do job printing cheaper than any other house in town.”5

  Orville spent two summers as an apprentice at a local printing shop to improve his skills and, with Wilbur’s assistance, designed and built his first professional press out of a damaged tombstone, buggy parts, scrap metal, and odd items scrounged from local junkyards. He could now accept contracts for bigger jobs, including the publication of church pamphlets. The first of these was Wilbur’s Scenes in the Church Commission, issued under a new imprint—Wright Bros.: Job Printers, 7 Hawthorn Street. It was the first time that phrase—the Wright brothers—had appeared in print.

  Orville Wright (center rear) had already lost his enthusiasm for formal education when he posed on the steps of Dayton’s Central High School with Paul Laurence Dunbar (left rear) and other members of the Class of 1890.

  At the time of his mother’s death, Orville had already decided that he would not return to Central High School for his senior year, 1889–90. He had abandoned the regular program the year before, enrolling in special advanced courses intended to prepare recent graduates for college. As a result, he lacked several credits and would not be able to graduate with his class.

  It was no matter. Orville had little interest in higher education—he wanted to be a printer, and by 1889 he knew the basics from the bottom up. He had constructed a press capable of handling sheets of up to eleven by sixteen inches, and had mastered a variety of specialized professional techniques, including stereotyping, the art of casting columns of set type into sheets of wet cardboard.

  Orville had a much stronger commitment to the enterprise than did Sines. When a local grocer paid his advertising bill with two dollars’ worth of popcorn, Sines argued that they should split the fee and eat the profits. Orville preferred to resell the popcorn to another grocer and buy additional type. Unable to resolve the dispute, Orville bought Sines out, becoming sole proprietor of the printing firm. Sines continued to work as an employee until the Wrights sold out completely in 1899.

  Orville began work on another, larger, press in the spring of 1888. Like its predecessor, the new press was built up of a collection of scrap parts. The frame was constructed of four-foot lengths of firewood, while the framework of a folding buggy top was used to ensure a uniform pressure of the type on each sheet. Orville again drew on Wilbur’s services as a consultant during the process of design and construction.

  By July, he reported to his father that the new press was almost complete. With a makeshift inking arrangement Orville was already printing five hundred sheets an hour; when the final system was in place, his speed would double. The press was large enough to print a double page of the Conservator at once.6

  Ed Sines recalled that the new press intrigued professional printers:

  E. C. James, I think he was pressman for a Chicago [printing] house at that time, came to the [Wright] print shop almost every time he was in the city. One day he walked into the front office and asked if “that Wright press is running today.” When we told him it was running at that time he said he would like to see it. Well, he went back into the press room, stood by the machine, looked at it, then sat down beside it and finally crawled underneath it. After he had been under the machine some little time he got up and said, “Well, it works, but I certainly don’t see how it does the work.”7

  When the new press went into operation Orville expanded his printing services. He could now bid on lucrative church and business contracts for tracts, pamphlets, and annual reports. Milton, who served as Old Constitution publishing agent from 1889 to 1893, was able to direct considerable business to his son.

  On March 1, 1889, Orville began publication of a weekly newspaper, The West Side News. It was intended to function as the keystone of his small printing enterprise, producing enough income to justify his decision to quit school, forego college, and devote all his time to publishing. He was betting that the residents of West Dayton had sufficient pride in their own identity to support a local newspaper, which, he promised, would represent “the interests of the people and business institutions of the West Side. Whatever tends to their advancement, moral, mental, and financial, will receive our closest attention.”

  The first few numbers were distributed free of charge. The original subscription rate, 50 cents per year, or a penny a week, was later raised to a quarter a month, or a dime for six weeks. Readers found hard news in short supply. The bulk of the copy was made up of clippings from other newspapers and magazines, an occasional editorial, and short snippets of broad humor. (March 1, 1889: “The city elections will be held Monday, April 1. Vote early and often.”)

  By the end of April, The West Side News had begun to show a profit. Orville moved his equipment out of the old carriage shed at the rear of 7 Hawthorn into rented quarters at 1210 West Third. Far more important, Wilbur’s name now appeared on the masthead as editor. Orv was satisfied to list himself as printer and publisher.

  We have no way of knowing how Orv drew his brother into the project, but it was probably not a very difficult job. Wilbur was intrigued by the possibilities of the little paper. It would give him an opportunity to do some writing and to read extensively for clippings that could be reprinted. Even the preparation of advertising copy represented the sort of challenge that he enjoyed. Still, work on the four-page, four-column weekly was not particularly demanding. The expansion of the paper into a daily was almost certainly his idea.

  The last issue of The West Side News appeared on April 5, 1890. Old subscribers found the first issue of its successor, The Evening Item, on their doorsteps on the afternoon of April 30. If The West Side News was an advertising sheet with pretensions, the Wrights promised their readers that the Item would contain “all the news of the world that most people care to read, and in such shape that people will have time to read it.” Subscribers would receive “the clearest and most accurate possible understanding of what is happening in the world from day-to-day,” and were reminded that “it is not always the largest papers that do this most carefully and successfully.”

  Advertisers could expect the paper to “boom up the business interests of the West Side and increase the value of West Side property. If there is anyone on the West Side who does not think it worth a cent a day to have a daily paper here, it must be that he has no property interests in the West Side and does not know how to read.”8

  The novice editors did their best to deliver on their promises. In addition to scouring the West Side for local news, they subscribed to a wire service, which enabled them to include “about the amount of telegraph news furnished by Dailies outside Cincinnati.” A typical issue (May 2, 1890), featured a headline story on international affairs (“Czar Scared—He Runs Away to Escape Assassination”), followed by the welcome news that the “boys” down at the Columbia Chain Bridge Works had finally received their back pay. There was an account of the traffic jam created when a Consolidated Tank Line wagon broke down in front of the Item office on Third Street, and a challenge offered by Dr. Brown and George Sharkey, checker champions of neighboring Browntown, to meet any and all comers from Miami City.

  James Gordon Bennett, William Randolph Hearst, and Joseph Pulitzer were building empires on sensational stories and banner headlines. The Wrights were not averse to trying their hands at some small-scale yellow journalism in the hope of attracting a few additional subscribers. An account of a fire at a Montreal insane asylum was headlined: “Roasted in Red, Roaring and Terrible Flames.” “Death Locked in the Juice of a Poisonous Root” told the story of a French Canadian family that fell victim to a mess of bad parsnips. “Died for Love—Tragic Suicide in an Ohi
o Hotel” and “Leprosy—Dread Disease Among Chicago’s Millions” were self-explanatory—and, the Wrights hoped, irresistible.

  But if the brothers had a weakness for lurid headlines, they also provided their readers with first-rate coverage of local events that the larger city dailies overlooked. When Terrence Powderly, head of the Knights of Labor, a pioneer industrial union, wrote to a West Dayton friend with a description of labor unrest in Detroit and Chicago, the Wrights knew about it, and so did their subscribers.

  The Item gave West Side citizens a detailed record of the daily events—large and small—that made up the life of their community. The badly decomposed body of John Danner, a sixty-eight-year-old man who had been missing for a week, was found floating face down in the Miami Canal that May. The remains of an unidentified black child were discovered in the hydraulic channel near the Ohio Rake Works several days later. City detectives were at work on both cases.

  West Dayton had been a racially mixed neighborhood since the end of the war, and, as stories in the Item suggested, race relations were not always the best. In the spring of 1890 one Will Adkins was set upon by a gang of “colored youths” near the Flying Dutchman, a local tavern. Wilbur reported that “one of the Negroes got Adkins finger in his mouth and bit entirely through it. It will be months before the finger will be in condition to use again.”

  Not all of the news was bad. The economy was looking up. One day in late April a local factory shipped thirty-three carloads of threshing machines out on the noon train. Local merchants, anxious to take advantage of the better times, filled the back pages of the Item with advertisements for spring sales.

  The Item offered comment and opinion as well as local, national, and international news. The Wrights spoke to city hall on behalf of the West Side, calling attention to the poor condition of the streets and sidewalks, leaky sewers, and the deficiencies of the streetcar companies. Wilbur addressed the major issues of the day—labor unrest, the farm problem, and the monetary crisis—from a traditional Republican perspective in an editorial column on the second page. While he sympathized with the workingman and expressed moderate admiration for labor leaders like Terrence Powderly, he was certain that no one would really benefit from a strike.