Maiden Flight (21 page)

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 Cordes, 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.

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.”

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).

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.”