Maiden Flight

by Harry Haskell

  Harry, Stef, Kate, Mr. Page—they’re all in this together. It’s a conspiracy, that’s what it is—a conspiracy to get me to sit down against my will and write the book. God knows, I’d sooner turn it over to one of them and be done with it if I could. But I’m the only one who can do the job right. Nobody else knows the full story—what the problem of flying consisted of, what the state of the art was when Will and I tackled it, what we originated, what we used that others originated, to whom we owed most, how we came to succeed in actually flying, and so forth and so on.

  Book or no book, though, you can be sure the Smithsonian won’t give in without a fight. One time I was in Washington for a committee meeting and Langley’s successor, Dr. Walcott, took me to see the rebuilt aerodrome. Although he took unusual pains to be courteous, I felt obliged to point out that the machine on display in the museum was not the same as the one Curtiss flew at Hammondsport in 1914. Walcott stood most of the time looking down at his hands, which he kept in nervous motion. He asked me to send him photos and details of the changes that Curtiss had made. He certainly was very uneasy about the matter, which I considered a hopeful sign. But that was a long time ago, and the Smithsonian hasn’t backed down yet.

  In my opinion, Griff Brewer said the last word on the subject way back in 1921. In his address to the Royal Aeronautical Society in London, he stated categorically that it was untrue to suggest that Langley’s machine of 1903 had ever flown or ever could fly—and he had the facts to prove it. Everyone who understood anything at all about aeronautics was bound to be convinced by Griff’s presentation. Harry agreed that he had turned out a bulletproof case, no matter what dust throwing the other side might resort to. Stef and Harry swung into action drumming up publicity for Griff’s talk in the New York Times and other papers, while another friend of ours at Johns Hopkins brought it to the attention of the scientific journals.

  Kate said Harry was on the job every minute, working like a horse to make sure our side of the story got out. And Stef talked Griff’s paper up to everyone he saw. We have him to thank for that fine piece in the New Republic and the corker of an editorial that Mr. Page published in the World’s Work. Then Nature weighed in with a tendentious article that was clearly inspired by the urgent appeals of the Smithsonian people. For years they had been quietly spreading their propaganda, putting us in the position where an answer to it would have looked like an unprovoked attack on Langley. Now the editor of Nature deliberately brought this point into the issue by asserting that Langley had done all the scientific work, while Will and I merely contributed the mechanical device that brought his scientific knowledge into practical use!

  We saw then that we were in for a long, hard struggle—much to Kate’s gratification, no doubt. She used to marvel at my calmness, but I saw no point in getting all worked up over the Smithsonian’s mendacity. What did she expect, after all? Human nature is much the same in all times and places. Didn’t Father teach us that the natural state of mankind is depravity? Speaking as a man of science, I see no reason to question the validity of that hypothesis.

  All the same, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to force Walcott and his cronies to eat their words. I recollect coming across one of the Smithsonian’s misleading pronouncements one time and calling out to Sterchens, “The conflict deepens. On ye braves!” It felt almost like the good old days, when Father and Will confronted his false accusers in the church: the Wright family against the world!

  Katharine

  Orv was like a new man after we got back from the Mayo Clinic that fall. He worked from morning to night and drove his automobile all around town without experiencing any pain whatsoever. We were having some ups and downs in the course of the fight with the Smithsonian, but that was to be expected. The main thing was that we were making some important points. There had always been an impression that the Langley machine antedated the Wright flyer by many years. People were coming to realize that the two machines were contemporaneous. The public now knew for the first time that Curtiss had made changes in the Langley machine. We hadn’t convinced some of them that the changes were important, but in time I was confident that we would get all the facts out in the open.

  Stef was one zealous missionary for our cause. He never lost interest or quit, even when Orv was in the doldrums. A good, everlasting friend he was to us both—but how I would have hated to have him for an enemy! Stef always insisted that it was the cause of truth he was trying to serve, but he couldn’t make me believe that there wasn’t a lot of personal devotion mixed up with it. His attitude toward Orv was almost touching. One day, out of a clear blue sky, he declared to me that he admired Little Brother more than any living man he knew. Then he paused, just to make sure he meant what he had said. “Yes,” he added presently, “I mean just that.”

  Stef reminds me of the boys in his precise way of expressing himself. If only writing came half as easily to Orv as it does to him. Stef’s account of his exploits in The Friendly Arctic is simply entrancing. He is a born storyteller—even if he does believe a few too many of his own tall tales! Little Brother has a way with words himself. He can write as clearly and interestingly as anyone I know, and on his own subject no one can touch him. But, gracious me, how he does hate to put words on paper! He has almost an inhibited will when it comes to writing letters and speeches and such. He doesn’t even care to receive letters. At our summer place on Lambert Island he doesn’t take a bit of interest in his mail. He is always afraid there will be some letters for him!

  Orv’s story of the invention of the airplane would make a great and immediate impression. It would carry conviction too, because there would be no careless statements in it. You never saw anything to equal Bubbo’s ability to get things exactly straight. It is a joy to see him go after an opponent in an argument. He simply won’t get off the track, no matter how alluring this side issue or that one may be. His memory has never been much good on the book he has just read or the play he has seen, but it is like a steel trap on the facts in aeronautical science and history.

  Everyone agrees that the book ought to have been written ages ago. Orv himself has long seen the necessity of doing the job, but his bad back and his natural aversion to writing always held him back. Harry told me once that if he hadn’t known the Wright brothers and did not have personal confidence in them, even his faith would have been shaken by that boneheaded editorial in Nature. He argued up and down that it was essential for Orv to get his story out before the article became part of the standard literature on the subject—and he expected me to take Little Brother in hand, if you please!

  I finally did get Orv to send Griff Brewer some suggestions for an article on Langley’s work. And I felt sure he would agree to collaborate with Burton Hendrick on a series of articles for Arthur Page’s magazine, the World’s Work. We met Mr. Hendrick at the Pages’ country house on Long Island, and afterward Orv told our host that if the book finally had to be turned over to someone else, Mr. Hendrick would be his choice. Of course, nothing came of it in the end. I’ve about given up hope that Orv will ever get around to writing the book. At bottom, he feels just as I do—that it is ridiculous for a man to have to howl and howl to call attention to what he has done, when it is as plain as day to anybody with eyes to see. Orv has no time for personal advertising, that’s all, and I respect him for it.

  Harry was such a trump through the whole business. What a blessed relief it was to find one modest person among writers! The more I saw of him, the more I admired him and wanted to be his friend. He and Isabel had both been so fine and brave. I wished with all my heart that Orv and I could do something besides sit at home and worry about them. I valued Harry’s friendship more every year because I saw clearly what a priceless possession it was. As Stef so nicely put it, “Understanding another human being is a delicate task.” Harry has always understood me. Even in college, he was a kind of safety valve. I knew he would make allowance for my explosive nature and my foibles and no harm would be d
one, no matter how silly I was. Yes, a warm, steady friendship is about as good a thing as there is in this often disappointing world.

  When I think of a good friendship, the two things I always associate with it are steadiness and serenity. Yet those are the very two things that I can’t put into my friendship with Stef. He is a poet when it comes to human relations, and he has such exquisite, delicate ideas. Almost without realizing it, I allowed him to become a big part of my life in those years—so much that it scared me just a little bit. For a time I almost couldn’t bear the joy our friendship gave me. It felt like a miracle, and the preciousness grew on me continually, in the most substantial, wholesome way. It was one of the best things that had ever come into my life, and by what a queer chance! To be able to have such a feeling about anyone is a blessed thing.

  It did my heart good to bring Harry and Stef together and see them become fast friends. I never had any inkling that they might be rivals as well—at least, not until the time their paths nearly crossed at Hawthorn Hill. Stef was on a lecture tour in Ohio and sent me a telegram from Cleveland a few days before Christmas. It was just a quick note letting us know about his itinerary, but the first sentence brought me up short: “This is the day Haskell should be with you and I can get no nearer than the Portage Hotel at Akron.” Was my imagination playing tricks, or did I detect a whiff of jealousy in Stef’s words?

  Harry

  The Wrights had sung Stef’s praises so loudly that Isabel and I jumped at the chance to meet him when he breezed through Kansas City in the fall of 1920. We got in our invitation just ahead of the Honorable Richard Sutton, my safari-loving dermatologist friend. In some ways, Stef could be Doctor Dick’s twin brother. No doubt Arctic explorers and big-game hunters are cast in the same mold—aviators too, from what I’ve seen. Certainly Stef made no secret of his high regard for Orville. At one time, there was talk of his collaborating with Griff Brewer on a general history of flight, or even with Orville himself on “the book.” But the idea was quietly shelved after Katharine pointed out that Stef was hardly qualified to voice an opinion on aeronautical subjects.

  Stef is a vivid and engaging writer, and Orville evidently respects his competence in scientific matters. If anyone could have gotten Katharine’s brother to stop procrastinating and get on with the job that needed to be done, it was Stef. On the other hand, the Wrights are hardly wild about the racy Greenwich Village crowd that Stef runs with in New York. A cheap bunch of self-styled intellectuals, Katharine calls them—and that’s just for starters. As a matter of fact, I was surprised that she took such a shine to Stef. As a rule, she has no time for the East Coast smart set. Whenever its baleful influence slips into my writing, she accuses me of aping Henry Mencken and Sinclair Lewis.

  I must admit there is some truth to the charge. Sometimes I do wish I were as clever as the “Sage of Baltimore.” My old chief at the Star, William Rockhill Nelson, would have snapped Mencken up in a trice and set him loose on our fair city, Kiwanized, Chamber-of-Commerced, Heart-of-Americaed as it is. The Old Man was no mean hell-raiser in his own right. Some of the sparkle went out of the Star after Colonel Nelson died in 1915. For a time I was tempted to pull up stakes and try my luck in Washington or New York. Katharine was all in favor. She thought a change of scene would do me good. But that was before the staff bought the paper and made me editor. Now I feel about Kansas City the way Katharine feels about Dayton: it will always be my home, the place I was meant to be.

  On the whole, I’ve been happy at the Star, and the paper has been good to me. Yet one can’t help having second thoughts. Things might have worked out quite differently, after all. What if I hadn’t happened to show up at the Star on the very day the assistant telegraph editor resigned? What if I had taken one of the other jobs on offer in St. Louis, Denver, or New York? For that matter, what if Isabel and I hadn’t become engaged in my senior year at Oberlin? What if I had been free to ask Katharine for her hand instead? I know now that she was always in my heart, “airy and true,” like her namesake in the Stevenson poem:

  We see you as we see a face

  That trembles in a forest place

  Upon the mirror of a pool

  For ever quiet, clear and cool.

  Stevenson is a special bond between Katharine and me. I was so taken with his descriptions of the South Seas in the Vailima Letters when it first came out that I sent her a copy for graduation. And when I finally got up the courage to say I loved her, it was Stevenson’s words that came out of my mouth: “Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill.” That’s just how we felt—that our real home was in each other’s hearts, no matter how far we roamed.

  But what am I saying? After all, my feelings for Isabel were no less real and sincere. When I first got to know her at Oberlin, she was so bright and cheerful and quick as a flash about seeing things. She was the very soul of sympathy. What young man could resist falling in love with such a charmer? Isabel was my idea of a thoroughly modern woman. She reminded me of Shaw’s Candida or Ibsen’s Nora. It was she who introduced me to plays, dancing, card playing—all the guilty pleasures that my parents had forbidden under their roof. I recall Father’s indignation when some limb of Satan left a deck of cards lying on our front porch. Undoubtedly it was intended as a personal affront, and it went to the mark. Father took satisfaction in tearing up the cards into little bits to show what he thought of them.

  I guess I was pretty much “all head” in those days, as Katharine often reminds me. Isabel was just the opposite—full of laughter and the sheer joy of living. She had the great gift of making routine household tasks seem fun. We used to gather in the kitchen after dinner, singing at the top of our lungs while she washed the dishes and Henry and I dried them. It was on her account that I joined the Unitarian Church after Father died. Isabel understood why I had lost faith in the stern Old Testament God my parents worshipped. She had the patience and fortitude of a saint. All through her long illness, even when she could barely raise herself out of bed, she never uttered a word of complaint or reproach.

  Watching Isabel waste away year after year, helpless to relieve her suffering, was enough to crush any man’s faith. In Charles Darwin’s letters, I came across his suggestion that there was so much cruelty and evil in the world as to militate against the probability of any beneficent personality behind it. That had long been my opinion, but I hadn’t had the realization of it until my own experience with Isabel. Certainly I would hate to be responsible for a universe so full of capricious cruelty as ours. It must be the weight of inherited fear come down from the stone-ax days that makes us assume a beneficent first cause is engaged in the torture we see around us and bids us kiss his hand.

  Take Katharine’s “little brother,” for instance. If there were an ounce of justice in the world, Orville wouldn’t have been forced to spend the best years of his life fighting to vindicate himself and Wilbur. The Smithsonian long ago would have admitted that the Langley business was a fraud and a cheat. The Wright flyer would be hanging in Washington today instead of London. But it seems to be human nature to hate to admit we have been wrong. Not even Darwin was immune to envy. At one time it looked as if Alfred Russel Wallace’s sketch on natural selection might take from him the credit of years of hard work. Somewhere in his letters Darwin writes, “I thought I had sufficient greatness of soul not to mind about priority. But I am ashamed to say I was mistaken.”

  I have often recalled Darwin’s words in connection with Orville’s ordeal. There is one crucial difference, though: Wallace was on the square; Curtiss and the Smithsonian were not.

  Orville

  “We learn much by tribulation,” Father once wrote, “and by adversity our hearts are made better.” By those lights, my heart must be as stout as an ox’s by now. Fifteen long years of scrapping with Curtiss and the Smithsonian have taught me how Father felt when he locked horns with his fellow Brethren. He had right on his side, the same as I do. Yet it took years to reclai
m his good name after Reverend Keiter and those other bandits hounded him out of the church. We were at Kitty Hawk when he lost his case in 1902. An infamous outrage, Will called it. He vowed then and there to make the members of the committee who had convicted Father sign a written retraction.

  Father never could have won that fight on his own. It was Will who pored over the ledger books, week after week, and showed how Keiter had fiddled the accounts. My brother could outsmart and outlawyer the best of them. I remember one of our patent hearings when the judge asked him to explain how something or other worked. Will calmly strode over to the blackboard and drew a simple figure that anyone could understand. After the trial, Curtiss’s lawyer complained that if it hadn’t been for Will and his “damned string and chalk,” they would have won the case. Ullam had more brains in his little finger than most men do in their heads. But it was Curtiss and his diabolical scheming that did him in, as sure as the typhoid.

  My fondest wish after Will and Father passed away was to live in peace and quiet at Hawthorn Hill. With the profits from the sale of the Wright Company, and Carrie to keep house for us, Kate and I had everything we needed. If only those two women weren’t so darned headstrong. Even this place was scarcely big enough to hold them both. And neither Carrie nor Kate has ever had a good word to say about Miss Beck. So my secretary is bossy and high-handed, is she? I daresay she is. But I never knew a woman to be more competent, efficient, and dedicated to her work. I hardly see how I could have managed without her these past few years. Just knowing she’s sitting outside the laboratory door gives me the peace of mind I need to concentrate on my work.