Maiden Flight (22 page)

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 Adrian Kinnane, whose unpublished psychological study of the Wright family called “The Crucible of Flight” (1982) has provided rich insights for historical accounts (including this one), states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.

I fear it would be like rubbing salt in the wound for Orv to see my name in print:
Apart from a flurry of news reports, mostly in the society pages, that appeared soon after her move to Kansas City, Katharine—once among the most visible women in the world—all but vanished from the public eye in the last two years of her life. Fortunately, she continued to correspond with Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Agnes Beck, Griffith Brewer, and a handful of other friends. It seems probable that her decision to maintain a low profile after her marriage reflects an instinct for self-protection as much as sensitivity to her brother's feelings.

He always complained that McMahon's approach was too personal and chatty:
In 1915 Orville agreed to collaborate with two would-be biographers, John McMahon and Earl Findley, but he disapproved of the manuscript they produced and refused to endorse it. Fourteen years later, McMahon resurrected the material for a series of articles published in
Popular Science Monthly
. When Orville learned that Little, Brown planned to bring the serialized biography out in book form, he unsuccessfully attempted to quash it and was incensed when McMahon's
The Wright Brothers: Fathers of Flight
appeared in 1930.

My friend Agnes was “Orv's girl” when we were young:
Tom Crouch (see note to p. 21 on p. 232) writes of Agnes Osborn Beck that “tradition in the Osborn family has it that Orville actually proposed marriage” to her, but, for whatever reason, “the romance came to nothing.” In an
unpublished memoir, Agnes's daughter, Becky Rehling, recalls that Orville “developed the habit of calling on Agnes” while Katharine was at Oberlin and often took her to lectures and concerts. Although Orville “seemed a most persistent suitor,” however, “things never progressed to the point of tackling her Victorian father.”

Illumination Night at Oberlin:
The ongoing tradition of festooning the Oberlin campus with thousands of multicolored Japanese lanterns during commencement weekend began with the inauguration of President Henry C. King in 1903.

We returned on February 13 from my operation at the Mayo Clinic:
Harry's account of Katharine's last days is taken, nearly verbatim, from two letters he wrote shortly after her death, one to his brother Edward, the other to Griffith Brewer. The Wrights' biographer Ian Mackersey and I, working independently, discovered these previously unknown sources among photocopies of Edward Haskell's papers at the Ohio State University in Columbus (the originals are now at Harvard's Houghton Library) and the papers of Charles Gibbs-Smith at the Science Museum in London.

beside her father and mother and brother:
Until Katharine's death in 1929, Wilbur was the only one of the five Wright siblings buried beside their parents in Woodland Cemetery. (Orville would join them in 1948.) Reuchlin Wright, Katharine's oldest brother, is buried in Kansas City's Forest Hills Cemetery. Lorin and his wife, Netta, attended Reuch's funeral in 1920, but Orville's illness prevented him and Katharine from making the trip. Lorin, who died in 1939, was buried in his wife's family plot in Woodland Cemetery.

the original Wright flyer was finally repatriated from London, in accordance with Orville's wishes:
Upon resolution of his dispute with the Smithsonian in 1942, Orville confidentially notified the Science Museum of his desire to bring the 1903 flyer home from London as soon as it could be safely transported. In the event, the Wright flyer was not restored to its rightful place in the North Hall of the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building until December 1948. Harry came out from Kansas City for the installation and hosted a dinner for the Wright family at the Statler Hotel; it was the last time they were to see him. As Tom Crouch writes in his biography of the Wright brothers (see note to p.  21 on p. 232), the family's agreement with the Smithsonian stipulated that “if the Smithsonian ever recognized any other aircraft as having been capable of powered, sustained, and controlled flight with a man on board before December 17, 1903, the executors of the estate would have the right to take possession of the machine once again.”

a fountain that he intended to donate to Oberlin College in Katharine Wright Haskell's memory:
Harry served on Oberlin's Board of Trustees from 1930 to 1947. Through the generosity of members of the Wright family, the Wright Brothers Family Foundation, and other donors, the Katharine Wright Haskell Fountain was restored in 2007 by sculptor Nicholas Fairplay.

Charles G. Abbot
Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution from 1928 to 1944. Despite his amicable relations with Orville, institutional loyalty inhibited him from resolving their dispute over the Langley aerodrome until long after Katharine's death.

Carl E. Akeley
Prominent naturalist, taxidermist, and friend of Vilhjalmur Stefansson.
The Wounded Comrade
(1913), his small bronze sculpture of two elephants supporting an injured companion, was one of the treasured possessions that Katharine left behind at Hawthorn Hill.

Josephine Bacon
Prolific fiction writer known for her treatment of female themes. Katharine recommended her
Middle Aged Love Stories
to Harry early in their courtship.

Agnes (Osborn) Beck
Katharine's closest woman friend after her move to Kansas City. A neighbor of the Wrights when they lived on Hawthorn Street, she was rumored to have been Orville's girlfriend.

Mabel Beck
Orville's longtime and fiercely protective private secretary (no relation to Agnes). Katharine and Carrie Kayler Grumbach resented her influence over him.

Hiram Bingham
US senator from 1924 to 1933. Famed for discovering the Inca city of Machu Picchu in Peru, he served as an aviator during World War I.

Dr. Peter Bohan
Katharine's attending physician in Kansas City during her final illness.

Carlotta Bollée
Widow of Léon Bollée, French car manufacturer and flying enthusiast, who gave the Wrights facilities to repair their damaged flyer in Le Mans in 1908.

Griffith (Griff) Brewer
British patent attorney and longtime friend and business associate of Orville and Katharine. He served as an emissary between them after Katharine moved to Kansas City.

Frank Hedges Butler
English wine merchant, balloonist, flying enthusiast, and founder of the Aero Club of Great Britain.

Frank and Bertha Canby
Friends of the Wrights from Dayton.

Octave Chanute
Distinguished French American railroad engineer and aviation pioneer. His generously shared expertise was crucial to the Wright brothers' successful solution of the problem of flight.

Frank M. Chapman
Renowned ornithologist and author of numerous field guides, several of which he autographed for Katharine. She and her brothers were avid bird watchers.

Calvin Coolidge
President of the United States from 1923 to 1929. Katharine told Harry that she “didn't have much admiration for him until the intellectuals? brought out his virtues and superiority by their silly criticism.”

James Cox
Publisher of the
Dayton Daily News.
He served as governor of Ohio from 1913 to 1915 and again from 1917 to 1921.

Arthur Cunningham
Katharine's college fiancé, captain of the Oberlin football team, and later a surgeon. She broke off their secret engagement when she realized she wasn't in love.

Glenn Curtiss
Motorcycle racer, aviation pioneer, and the Wrights' most redoubtable business competitor. They accused him of stealing their patents, embroiling Orville in a prolonged series of bitterly contested lawsuits.

Edward Deeds
Dayton engineer, wealthy industrialist, and friend and business associate of Orville. His wife encouraged Katharine to accept Harry's proposal of marriage.

Geneva Farmer
Sick nurse to Harry's first wife, Isabel. Her attempts to snare the grieving widower provoked a concerned letter from Katharine, which in turn set off Harry's fateful “explosion.”

Earl N. Findley
Aviation editor of the
New York Times
and, along with Harry, one of the few journalists who enjoyed the Wrights' good graces.

Margaret Goodwin
Katharine's Oberlin College roommate from Chicago.

Carrie Kayler Grumbach
The Wrights' longtime housekeeper, with whom Katharine had a warm but competitive relationship. Carrie and her husband moved in with Orville after Katharine's marriage.

Bob Hadeler
The Wrights' young friend and neighbor who spent several summers with Orville on Lambert Island in Canada after Katharine moved to Kansas City.

Edward Haskell
Harry's older brother, a missionary stationed in Bulgaria.

Harry (Henry J.) Haskell
Editor of the
Kansas City Star
, Katharine's middle-aged lover and later husband. She considered him “all head” when they were students together at Oberlin.

Henry (“young Henry”) Haskell
Harry and Isabel's only son, who graduated from Harvard in 1924. Katharine and Harry both tried to hide their growing interest in each other from him.

Isabel Haskell
Harry's first wife, who succumbed to breast cancer in 1923. Katharine idealized them as a married couple and worried that Harry would rush into another woman's arms after Isabel's death.

Katharine Wright Haskell
The Wright brothers' younger sister, who hesitated for months before agreeing to marry Harry in November 1926. Her relationship with Orville was so close that strangers often mistook them for husband and wife.

Mary Haskell
Harry's missionary sister, who lived in Oberlin and cared for their aged mother. She begged Orville to forgive Harry for taking Katharine away from him.

Mrs. Tyler (Arabell) Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway's aunt and one of the Kansas City widows suspected by Katharine of showing an unhealthy interest in Harry after his first wife died.

Burton Hendrick
Noted American journalist and biographer. Orville designated him as his preferred collaborator on
a never-to-be-written book about the invention of the airplane.

Charles Evans Hughes
Former associate justice and future chief justice of the Supreme Court. Hughes led a Justice Department investigation into corruption and mismanagement in the wartime aircraft production program headed by Orville's friend Edward Deeds.

Fannie Hurst
Author of
Back Street
,
Star Dust
,
Lummox
, and other bestselling but now forgotten novels; also, unbeknownst to Katharine, one of Vilhjalmur Stefansson's far-flung love interests.

Leontine and John Jameson
Lorin Wright's daughter and son-in-law. Married at Hawthorn Hill in 1923, they were the only members of the Wright family who attended Katharine and Harry's wedding three years later.

Rev. Millard Keiter
Milton Wright's antagonist in the Church of the United Brethren. Their fierce hand-to-hand combat hardened the Wrights for their later battles with Glenn Curtiss and the Smithsonian Institution.

Henry C. King
Prominent theologian and longtime president of Oberlin College. He appointed Katharine to the board of trustees and presided over her marriage to Harry after Orville refused to hold the wedding at Hawthorn Hill.

Mella King and Katharine Wright King
Mother and daughter (no relation to Henry C. King) who were Katharine's friends in Geneva, Ohio. Katharine's ears pricked up when she learned that Harry had given her namesake a high school graduation present.

Laura and Irwin Kirkwood
Owners of the
Kansas City Star
. After Laura's death in 1926, Irwin and members of the staff bought the newspaper from her estate. Harry subsequently became editor.

Frank Lahm (“old Mr. Lahm”)
Expatriate American businessman living in Paris, and one of the Wrights' early champions. The sympathetic letter he wrote to Katharine after her marriage reminded her of the old days.

Lt. Frank Lahm (“young Frank”)
The Wright brothers' liaison in their business dealings with the US Army. Orville suspected him of being sweet on Katharine.

Samuel P. Langley
First secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. A distinguished scientist respected by the Wright brothers, he designed the ill-fated “aerodrome,” which plunged into the Potomac River shortly before the Wrights made their first flight at Kitty Hawk.

Kate Leonard
A college classmate of Katharine's who lived in Oberlin. They remained close friends after graduating and saw each other regularly.

Otto Lilienthal
German engineer and aviation pioneer whose experiments with gliders inspired the Wright brothers to build their own flying machine. He died as a result of a glider crash in 1896.

Charles Lindbergh
World-famous American aviator who made the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. His penchant for generating publicity made “Lindy” the antithesis of the modest, reclusive Orville.

George Longan
The
Kansas City Star
's managing editor whom Katharine and Harry saw socially.

Louis and Frances (Frannie) Lord
Katharine and Harry's friends and confidants in Oberlin. A professor of classics, Louis sided with the lovers but failed to persuade Orville to attend their wedding.

Anne and Frank McCormick
The Wrights' close friends and neighbors in suburban Oakwood. A well-known journalist, Anne spoke her mind to Orville in a fruitless effort to shame him into reconciling with Katharine.

John R. McMahon
Journalist and author of an early biography of the Wright brothers, which Orville considered invasively personal and attempted unsuccessfully to suppress.

H. L. Mencken
Brilliantly iconoclastic journalist and magazine editor who cofounded the
American Mercury
in 1924. Harry admired his writing, but Katharine considered him a self-promoting “smarty-pants.”

Ivonette and Harold (“Scribze”) Miller
Daughter and son-in-law of Lorin and Ivonette Wright. They were married at Hawthorn Hill in 1919.

William Rockhill Nelson
Laura Kirkwood's father and the
Kansas City Star
's cofounder, who died in 1915. Katharine accused the Nelson clan of thinking only of their own family.

George W. Norris
Influential progressive politician. He represented Nebraska in the US House of Representatives and Senate from 1903 to 1943.

Alec (Alexander) Ogilvie
English pilot who founded the British Wright Company with Griffith Brewer and Orville. The set of red-and-gold coffee cups that he gave to Katharine may have been a sign of deeper admiration.

Arthur Page
Editor of the
World's Work
, a widely respected magazine of news and commentary. The Wrights considered him a trusted ally, despite his persistent attempts to persuade Orville to write “the book.”

Roy Roberts
Washington correspondent and later managing editor of the
Kansas City Star
. He succeeded Harry as the paper's top editor in 1952.

August Seested
Chief executive of the
Kansas City Star
in succession to Irwin Kirkwood. After his death in October 1928, Harry was promoted to editor.

Lt. Thomas Selfridge
US Army officer and aviator who was killed in the crash of an airplane piloted by Orville at Fort Myer, Virginia, in 1908.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson (Stef)
Dashing Canadian explorer of the Arctic, lecturer, and prolific author of Icelandic extraction. His emotionally unsatisfying “friendship” with Katharine, coupled with his questionable professional ethics, helped propel her into Harry's arms.

Raymond H. Stetson (“the Prof ”)
Professor of psychology at Oberlin, to whom Harry turned for advice on wooing Katharine.

Richard Sutton (“Doctor Dick”)
Socially prominent Kansas City dermatologist, big-game hunter, and author. One of Harry's closest friends, Sutton urged him to “camp on the trail” and bag Katharine before it was too late.

William Howard Taft
Former president of the United States, chief justice of the Supreme Court, and chancellor of the Smithsonian Institution.

Booth Tarkington
Popular American novelist, best known for
The Magnificent Ambersons
.
Seventeen
, a mild-mannered satire
of Willie Baxter's puppy love for the worldly Lola Pratt, was a favorite of Orville's.

Charles Taylor
A mechanic, whom Katharine disliked, in the Wright brothers' bicycle shop. He built the engine for the original Wright flyer and rescued Orville from the wreckage of his airplane at Fort Myer in 1908.

Charles D. Walcott
Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution from 1907 until his death in 1927. His refusal to retract the Smithsonian's claim that Samuel Langley's aerodrome was the first powered aircraft capable of flight made him the Wrights' enemy.

William Allen White
Editor of the
Emporia Gazette
and Harry's closest male friend. A folk hero of American journalism, the “Sage of Emporia” accused the disconsolate widower of nursing a “grouch on God.”

Ernest H. Wilkins
Henry C. King's successor as president of Oberlin, serving from 1927 to 1946. Katharine served on the committee that selected him.

Horace (“Bus”) and Susan (Sue) Wright
Katharine's nephew and his fiancée. After moving to Kansas City, Katharine turned down an invitation to their wedding in Dayton on account of Orville.

Lorin (“Phiz”) and Ivonette (Netta) Wright
Katharine and Orville's easygoing older brother and his wife. Katharine looked to them both for support and advice throughout her ordeal.

Milton Wright (“the Bishop”)
Katharine and Orville's strong-willed but loving father and a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren. He died in 1917, three years after the
threesome moved to suburban Oakwood from downtown Dayton.

Orville (Orv) Wright
Brother of Wilbur and Katharine and elder statesman of American aviation. He considered Katharine's marriage to Harry Haskell a betrayal of a family pact and refused to attend the wedding.

Reuchlin (Reuch) and Lulu (Lou) Wright
The eldest Wright brother and his wife. Reuch plied a variety of trades in and near Kansas City before his death in 1920.