Maiden Flight

by Harry Haskell

  Sterchens, we called her, or Swes for short: The Wright children went by a variety of nicknames that constituted a sort of private family code. Katharine was Kate or Katie to her friends, but her brothers called her Swes or Sterchens (from the German for “little sister,” Schwesterchens), while her father used the more formal German Tochter (daughter). Lorin was affectionately known as Phiz, Reuchlin as Reuch (pronounced “Roosh”), Wilbur as Ullam, and Orville as Bubbo, Bubs, or Bubbies. Katharine habitually referred to Orville as Little Brother, despite the fact that he was her senior by three years.

  My college roommate: Margaret Goodwin and Katharine were charter members of the lovelorn Order of the Empty Heart, to which Katharine refers later. They remained close friends after college and visited the St. Louis World’s Fair together in 1904. Two years later, Margaret died of tuberculosis. Shortly before her own death, Katharine endowed a scholarship at Oberlin in her roommate’s memory.

  if it hadn’t been for his ice hockey accident: The “accident” that changed the course of Wilbur’s life may in fact have been a malicious attack by the neighborhood bully. As David McCullough writes in The Wright Brothers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), a young tough named Oliver Crook Haugh, deliberately or otherwise, “smashed [Wilbur] in the face with a stick, knocking out most of his upper teeth.” Years later Haugh would be executed for murdering three members of his own family.

  I never did anything so well as the teaching I did at the high school: A classics scholar at Oberlin, Katharine taught Latin and history at Dayton’s newly opened Steele High School from 1899, a year after her graduation, until 1908. Although she chafed at women’s second-class status on the faculty, by 1902 she was earning twenty-five dollars a week, 10 percent more than Harry was paid at the Kansas City Star.

  It was Kate who insisted that we had outgrown the house on Hawthorn Street and needed a bigger place: The Wrights’ seven-room house at 7 Hawthorn Street, on Dayton’s low-lying West Side, was badly damaged in the 1913 Miami River flood. But Katharine and her brothers had begun planning their new mansion in suburban Oakwood several years earlier. The old house remained on its original site until 1937, when Henry Ford moved it to Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. After Orville’s death in 1948, Hawthorn Hill passed to the National Cash Register Company, which maintained it as a guest house. Today it is open to the public as a national historic site, jointly administered by Dayton History and the Wright Brothers Family Foundation.

  She called his room the “blue room,” on account of the blue wallpaper: As Harry tells us later, the “blue room” was where he and Katharine secretly kissed and petted after Orville had retired for the night. It was the bedroom at the southeast corner of the second floor, just across the hall from the guest room where Harry slept, and linked to Katharine’s room by a shared bath. Orville’s bedroom was at the far end of the house, some forty feet down the corridor. In April 1926 Katharine wrote to Harry that “we really need the blue room, dear, when you come for a visit. It was such a sweet place to love you, with the lovely moonlight for our only light.” Although no trace remains of the original wall color, Sarah Heald of the National Park Service has identified the “blue room” through a historical analysis of Hawthorn Hill’s furnishings.

  Certain high-ranking Smithsonian officials pursued Curtiss’s campaign of misrepresentation for their own ends: The story of the bruising competition between Curtiss and the Wrights—of which the characters in this book naturally present a one-sided view—is told in Lawrence Goldstone, Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies (New York: Ballantine Books, 2014) and Edward J. Roach, The Wright Company: From Invention to Industry (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014). On Orville and Katharine’s long-running feud with the Smithsonian, see Tom Crouch, The Bishop’s Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright (New York: Norton, 1989) and Ian Mackersey, The Wright Brothers: The Remarkable Story of the Aviation Pioneers Who Changed the World (London: Little, Brown, 2003). Ironically, the Wright and Curtiss companies merged in 1929, long after Orville sold the business, to form the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, which still exists today.

  the Bishop, whose lonely crusade against the forces of darkness in the church had consumed so much of his and his children’s lives: Milton Wright first crossed swords with his ecclesiastical brethren in the 1880s over the issue of admitting members of secret societies into the church. In 1901 he discovered that Rev. Millard Keiter had embezzled thousands of dollars of church funds, but the elders refused to take action. When the Bishop, ably seconded by Wilbur, pressed his case, he was forced to stand trial, ostracized, and briefly expelled from the church before finally being vindicated in 1905. Ian Mackersey recounts the Wrights’ ordeal in fascinating detail in The Wright Brothers (see preceding note).

  a special Justice Department investigation issued a report: Government investigators found Edward Deeds guilty of favoritism in steering lucrative contracts to the Dayton-Wright Company, which he had founded in 1917, and recommended that he be prosecuted. Orville served as a consultant to Dayton-Wright after selling the original Wright Company in 1915; he testified at the hearings of the Hughes commission but was not implicated in any wrongdoing. Upon receiving the commission’s report, Secretary of War Newton Baker dumped the political hot potato into the lap of a US Army board of review, which declined to press charges against Deeds.

  his real name, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, is such a mouthful: In fact, Stefansson’s birth name was William Stephenson. Born in Manitoba, Canada, he grew up in South Dakota and changed his name in 1899 in acknowledgment of his Icelandic parentage.

  there has been talk about him and that lady novelist: Stefansson’s dalliances with Hurst and sundry other women are documented in letters preserved in the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College, many of which date from the same period in which he and Katharine were becoming emotionally involved. If Katharine was aware of Stef’s philandering, she never spoke of it in her own letters, but it was an open secret among his artist and writer friends.

  neither Carrie nor Kate has ever had a good word to say about Miss Beck: Fourteen-year-old Carrie Kayler came to work for the Wrights in 1900 and remained in Orville’s employ until his death in 1948. After Katharine’s marriage, Carrie and her husband moved into a suite of rooms at Hawthorn Hill to look after Orville. Both Carrie and Katharine resented the protective cocoon woven around Orville by the strong-willed Mabel Beck, whom he had “inherited” from Wilbur as his private secretary.

  Kate and I used to hole up on Lambert Island for weeks on end: The Wrights first visited their future summer home in 1916 while vacationing on Georgian Bay, on the northeastern shore of Lake Huron. Lambert Island was a twenty-six-acre expanse of exposed granite on which the owner had started building and then abandoned a vacation compound for his wife. Orville was so taken with the setting that he purchased the island a few months later. From 1918 to 1926, he and Katharine spent up to two months there every summer. The rustic simplicity and privacy of their summer “camp” afforded a welcome respite from the fishbowl formality of Hawthorn Hill. Orville continued to vacation on the island with various family members and friends until World War II.

  I had no idea how reckless Stef’s ambition was until the Wrangel Island episode flared up in the newspapers that fall: A footnote in history books today, the ill-fated scientific expedition to Wrangel Island—an Arctic wilderness off the coast of northeastern Siberia that has been called “the Galápagos of the far north,” successively claimed by the American, Canadian, and Russian governments—that Stefansson organized in the early 1920s temporarily soured his relations with the Wrights. The essential details are presented piecemeal in the narrative that follows, as they gradually became known to Katharine, Orville, and Harry. Although Stef emerged from the fiasco with his reputation largely unscathed, criticism of his conduct was so intense that he felt compelled to plead his case in a book titled The Adventure of Wrangel Island (1926).<
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  President King intended to appoint her to Oberlin’s board of trustees: Katharine served as an Oberlin trustee from 1924 until her death. Keenly aware of her special status as only the second woman to hold such an appointment, she reveled in locking horns with her male colleagues and the college administration, making her influence felt in such areas as faculty appointments, gender discrimination, and building plans. She may have inspired the $300,000 bequest that Orville made to Oberlin in his will, which was used to offset the cost of building the Wilbur and Orville Wright Laboratory of Physics.

  I was so taken with it that I went back the following day and purchased another copy for myself: The Wrights hung their copy of the Rouen Cathedral print in what Katharine called the “cold-storage room” or “trophy room”—the front parlor at Hawthorn Hill—where it was photographed after Orville’s death in 1948. A snapshot that Harry sent to Katharine during their courtship shows the identical image on display in the dining room of the house in Kansas City.

  It was absolutely the first time that anything pro-French had been so much as mentioned in that setting: Katharine returned from her first visit to France in 1909 a confirmed Francophile. Among the few possessions she brought to Kansas City was an autographed photo of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Allied commander in World War I. She laced her correspondence with French phrases and once wrote Harry a note in French, thanking him for sending her flowers. But her command of the language was imperfect. “I would like to do something with French but I have a curious feeling that it’s no use,” she replied when Harry suggested they take French lessons together in Kansas City. “I can’t remember anything long enough to build up any kind of a knowledge.”

  Western Union was on the line with a telegram for Katharine: Telegrams such as the ones between Katharine and Harry were taken down in Morse code, transmitted over dedicated wires, decoded and printed out at the receiving end, and delivered by special messengers. To ensure the message arrived promptly, a Western Union employee telephoned the recipient while the paper telegram was en route. Katharine would have taken such a call in the phone closet located at the far end of the central hall at Hawthorn Hill, safely out of earshot of Orville in the dining room.

  Then I tried the Postal: Katharine is referring to the Postal Telegraph Company, Western Union’s principal competitor until the two companies merged in 1943.

  Sinclair Lewis’s so-called Sunday school class: Sinclair Lewis spent several months in Kansas City in 1926–27 researching and writing his bestselling novel Elmer Gantry, an unflattering portrait of a loose-living fundamentalist preacher. Katharine, who took a dim view of Harry’s Unitarianism, was shocked when he told her about attending one of Lewis’s irreverent “Sunday school classes” at a local hotel. “Maybe I’d better darn stockings on Sunday mornings,” she wrote. “It may be better for my soul—and yours, too, dear!”

  a sort of wild John Gilpin ride: Orville is referring to a character in a popular eighteenth-century ballad by William Cowper who careened comically through the British countryside after losing control of his horse.

  our tastes in literature run pretty much along the same lines: When Harry graduated from Oberlin in 1896, Katharine gave him a collection of essays by James Russell Lowell; two years later he reciprocated by presenting her with a prized edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Vailima Letters. Their correspondence is strewn with comments on books they were reading. They shared a love of Romantic poetry—Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and especially Stevenson. Katharine was initially bemused by Harry’s interest in modern drama and philosophy, but eventually conceded that Shaw “has a lot of sense.” Her own taste in fiction was decidedly middle-brow; among her favorite contemporary authors were Hamlin Garland, Josephine Bacon, and Dorothy Canfield. She couldn’t abide Sinclair Lewis or H. L. Mencken, whose work Harry admired, and when he sent her Philip Gibbs’s mildly antiwar novel The Middle of the Road, she dismissed it as “parlor pacifist nonsense.”

  he slipped his hand down where I love to have it and held it against me: This is the closest Katharine comes in her letters to describing the physical act of lovemaking, but the passion that her relationship with Harry unleashed in her is never far below the surface. Until her side of their correspondence was made public in the early 1990s, Wright biographers naturally assumed that Katharine had little interest in sex. Adrian Kinnane, whose unpublished psychological study of the Wright family called “The Crucible of Flight” (1982) has provided rich insights for historical accounts (including this one), states categorically that “there is no sign that Katharine allowed herself romantic involvement with anyone,” either before or—surprisingly enough—after her marriage. The portrayal of Katharine as fundamentally asexual accorded with the well-established image of her brothers as lifelong celibates. One senses that the sensuality Katharine expressed to Harry in her love letters was as much a revelation to her as it was to him.

  not letting them have any credit before the public: Bylines almost never appeared in the Star in the Nelson era, or for some years afterward. As an editorial writer, Harry was so accustomed to anonymity that it became an ingrained habit; even when he started writing a weekly column in the 1930s, titled Random Thoughts, he signed it only with his initials. Not until he won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials in 1944 was his individual contribution to the paper publicly recognized.

  Mr. Akeley’s bronze elephants: Carl Akeley’s miniature sculpture of two African elephants supporting a wounded comrade had a double significance for Katharine as a memento of both Hawthorn Hill and Akeley’s close friend Vilhjalmur Stefansson. According to Lorin Wright’s grandson Wilkinson Wright, Katharine asked Carrie Kayler Grumbach—with whom she stayed in touch after her marriage—to pack the sculpture up and ship it to Kansas City. Carrie stood firm, however, explaining that she “couldn’t take those things out of the house without Mr. Orv’s permission.”

  my new stationery, with the initials K.W.H. woven into a neat little circle at the top: The letterhead on the stationery Katharine used in the mid-1920s, while she was living with her brother, read simply “HAWTHORN HILL / OAKWOOD / DAYTON . . OHIO.” She reported to Harry that although Orville was “inclined to be critical of my buying,” he “likes my new stationery so well that he wants to get some for himself.” The fact that she waited a full year after moving to Kansas City to order new letterhead under her married name suggests that she was in no hurry to shed her old family and home ties.

  I can be of little help to her in talking about aviation developments: Despite Harry’s close ties to the “fathers of flight,” trains remained his preferred mode of travel; not until 1947 did he take his first ride in a private airplane. Katharine, likewise, rarely had occasion to fly after her much-publicized early sorties with Wilbur and Orville.

  we had a visit from the Bulgarian Haskells: Harry’s older brother Edward, a missionary stationed in Bulgaria, brought his Swiss wife and three of their children to Kansas City in June 1927. His twelve-year-old daughter recorded in her diary the dressing-down her younger brother received from Katharine. Eldora found her new aunt “very nice although she would be nicer if she did something worth while. A person who lives as idle a life as she does has no right not to be nice.” Ironically, Katharine was even harder on herself: while still living in Dayton as Orville’s helpmate, she confided to Harry that “there is no excuse for my doing nothing. If a man did that, I’d have my opinion of him.”

  I’d say the children of missionaries were no less inclined to Goopish behavior than the common garden variety: Gelett Burgess’s humorous cautionary tales about the “Goops”—children who “lick their fingers . . . lick their knives . . . spill broth on the tablecloth . . . [and] lead disgusting lives”—were among Katharine’s favorite readings for her young nieces and nephews.

  he sat down at his desk and turned out a column for his newspaper: William Allen White’s moving eulogy to his teenage daughter Mary, which appeared in the Emporia Gazette on May 17, 1921, is justly
famous and widely anthologized. Among Harry’s papers is a galley proof of the essay that White apparently gave him at the time of her death.

  Writing, which used to be my delight, has become an almost forgotten art with me: Katharine’s hundreds of surviving letters—surely a mere fraction of the actual total—show that she treated letter writing as both an art form and a social obligation. At the height of her quandary over leaving Orville, it was not uncommon for her to write Harry two or even three letters in a single day, typically in beautifully formed longhand. When Orville gave her a Hammond typewriter for Christmas in 1921, she enthused to a friend that she “took to it as a duck does to water. . . . It saves so much wear and tear. I have a large correspondence which otherwise would be a burden.” A sampling of her correspondence has been digitized and is available on the Library of Congress website.

  I left him my entire estate free and clear—apart from a few small bequests to Carrie, Lorin, and other special people: The $50,000 that Wilbur left Katharine in 1912 made her a woman of means. In her own will, executed on August 5, 1927, she made several small bequests and left her residuary estate to Harry, stipulating that certain additional legacies be paid to family and friends after his death. However, Harry elected to fulfill her wishes as soon as his finances permitted. On January 1, 1931, he mailed a $1,000 check to Orville and disclosed that he also intended to distribute bequests early to Katharine’s other heirs. How Orville felt about his sister’s posthumous gesture of reconciliation is unknown. In acknowledging receipt of the money, he wrote to Harry, “If you should ever need the use of it, don’t hesitate to let me know and it shall be yours.”

  as soon as we get the mortgage paid off: As recounted in my book Boss-Busters and Sin Hounds: Kansas City and Its “Star” (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009), the newspaper remained so profitable throughout the Great Depression that the employee owners were able to retire all outstanding debt in the early 1930s, several years ahead of schedule. As a major stockholder in the Star Company, Harry eventually amassed a considerable fortune.