Authors: Tom D. Crouch
The Bishop's Boys (75 page)
The officials of Dayton-Wright took full advantage of Orville’s public relations value. He piloted an airplane for the last time on May 13, 1918, flying one of his 1911 machines in formation with the first Dayton-built DH-4 while the newsmen snapped away. After landing, he climbed into the DH-4 and went up again for a second ride, this time as a passenger.
Dayton-Wright needed all the favorable publicity it could get. The record of the company, and of the U.S. airframe and engine industry as a whole, was mixed. There were some bright spots, notably the development of the beautifully engineered Liberty engine and the production of such American-designed and built aircraft as the Curtiss JN-4D “Jenny” trainer. The disappointments, however, were overwhelming.
The promised aerial armada failed to materialize. A trickle of U.S.- built aircraft arrived in France, but in numbers much lower than predicted. The quality of the American product was questioned as well. The legend of the “flaming coffin” would be applied to the Dayton-built DH-4S before war’s end.
Grover Loening was among the small manufacturers who complained that their bids for government contracts had been rejected in favor of large firms that substituted influence in Washington for experience in aircraft construction. Dayton-Wright was their favorite target.
It was Gutzon Borglum, a sculptor with an ego to match the size of the faces that he would one day carve from the rock of Mount Rushmore, who first raised the cry of scandal. Borglum, a self-styled aviation expert, wrote to President Wilson in the fall of 1917 complaining that the Aircraft Production Board had ignored a design he submitted. Newspapers echoed the charges of collusion and conspiracy. A Senate investigating committee substantiated a great many of the allegations, including the fact that Deeds had shown favoritism to his friends. President Wilson appointed Charles Evans Hughes, ex-presidential candidate and future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, to head a special commission to study the aircraft procurement program.
The Hughes Commission did not bring charges against Deeds, but it documented examples of mismanagement and favoritism and suggested that the Army court-martial him. The Army finally decided against such drastic action. Orville himself testified before the Hughes Committee, but he was neither a stockholder nor a decision maker in the Dayton-Wright Company, and avoided being tarnished.
Dayton-Wright survived the scandal. After the war, the firm produced a series of interesting aircraft, including the R.B. Racer, and the XPS-1, the first airplane in the U.S. Army inventory to feature retractable landing gear. General Motors bought the company in 1919, and kept it going until June 1, 1923, when the automotive giant pulled out of the airplane business.
Orville retained a tenuous connection with the company until GM closed the doors, serving as a consulting engineer on special projects, including the R.B. Racer. He remained in his West Side laboratory most of the time, as he had during the war, making occasional trips out to the plant to consult with old friends like James H. Jacobs, one of the men who went back to the old days of the original Wright Company.
Together, the two of them developed and patented the split flap, a trailing edge device designed to increase lift and enable a pilot to reduce the speed of his machine in a steep dive. Even here there was disappointment. A Navy Bureau of Aeronautics Report issued in January 1922 dismissed the split flap as being of no value. Twenty years
later, a new generation of naval aviators operating Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers in the Pacific would return a very different verdict.
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The split flap was Orville’s last important technical contribution to aeronautics. With the demise of Dayton-Wright, he retired from active flight research and severed his final ties with American industry.
Yet during the mid-1920s, Orville emerged as one of the most revered men of his generation. There was a mythic quality to his fame. As the sole survivor of the team that had given flight to the world, he was seen as the living embodiment of an American tradition of heroic invention that stretched back to the early years of the Republic. He was, quite literally, a legend in his own time—an exemplar and an inspiration for future generations of Americans.
For all his fame, Orville remained something of a puzzle. Those who met him were frequently startled by the disparity between their expectations and reality. A
New Yorker
reporter who visited Dayton to do a profile of Orville in 1930 expected to meet a legend. Instead, he found a “gray man … dressed in gray clothes.” “Not only have his hair and his mustache taken on that tone, but [also] his curiously flat face … a timid man whose misery at meeting you is so keen that, in common decency, you leave as soon as you can.”
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Orville could never mask his painful shyness. He was uncomfortable even when accepting the plaudits of an admiring crowd. At the same time, he knew that he could not escape that role. The result was an unsatisfactory compromise between his desire for privacy and the need to represent Wilbur and the other members of the family with dignity. Orville was the honored guest at scores of banquets over the years, but he absolutely refused to speak from the podium. He would not so much as offer an after-dinner thank you into a microphone, although he did, on occasion, write comments to be read by others. Requests for radio interviews were dismissed out of hand, and there are no known recordings of his voice.
There were those who sought to trap him into making a short speech. On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of powered flight in 1943, he was honored by cabinet members, congressional leaders, and high-ranking military officers at a black-tie dinner in Washington. As usual, he agreed to attend only with the understanding that he would not be invited to speak.
The chairman had no intention of honoring that agreement. Without warning, Orville was asked to step forward and present the Collier
Trophy to his one-time student, General “Hap” Arnold. Stony-faced, he walked to the podium, handed the trophy to the embarrassed Arnold, and returned to his chair without uttering a word.
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The tension between desire and duty was also apparent in the record of Orville’s long-time service on various aeronautical boards and commissions. His most important and longstanding relationship with a government agency began in 1920, when President Wilson appointed him a member of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA).
Founded in 1915, the NACA was charged with aiding the fledgling American aircraft industry by conducting research and development. The agency was not in the business of building airplanes; its job was to identify key research problems whose solution would open the way to further progress. The first and most important of the NACA facilities, the Langley Research Center, opened at Hampton Roads, Virginia, in 1917. The discoveries emerging from wind tunnels and laboratories at Langley over the next twenty years help to explain the rise of the U.S. aircraft industry from a position of weakness in 1918 to world leadership by 1940.
The work of the NACA was directed by the committee whose name it bore. And the members had supervisory authority over the heart of the organization—the research program.
Orville remained a member of the NACA longer than anyone else in the history of the committee. His record of attendance at the annual and semiannual meetings over a period of twenty-eight years was exemplary, yet his personal contributions had no special impact on the NACA program. He concentrated on those issues of greatest interest to him, such as championing the cause of the small inventors who wrote in search of advice or assistance. He participated in discussions but rarely exercised leadership.
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His service on the board overseeing the operation of the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics followed a similar pattern. The single most important privately funded effort to improve the quality of American aeronautical enterprise during the interwar years, the Guggenheim Fund began operation in 1926 and went out of business in 1930. The Guggenheims did not intend the fund to be self-perpetuating; rather, they were convinced that a sudden infusion of cash aimed at particular areas of research over a short period might lead to major breakthroughs in aeronautics. They were right.
An elder statesman of aeronautics, Orville spent much of his time attending conferences during the 1920s and 1930s. Here he sits with fellow members of the board of the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics at Port Washington, Long Island, December 13, 1928. (Standing, from the right: Nobel laureate Robert Millikan, Harry Guggenheim, Charles Lindbergh. Seated, from the right: William F. Durand, Orville Wright, Daniel Guggenheim.)
The fund underwrote the establishment of aeronautical engineering programs at major universities from coast to coast. Perhaps the most visible result of this program was the creation of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT). Under the leadership of the redoubtable Hungarian scientist/engineer Theodore von Karman, GALCIT quickly became a major center for research into the esoteric realm of high-speed flight and rocket-engine technology.
The members of the Guggenheim board funded pioneering research leading to the development of early “blind-flying” instruments and sponsored the most important of all U.S. aircraft safety competitions. The fund was short-lived but had an extraordinary impact. Through his faithful attendance at meetings and his participation in the deliberations of the board, Orville helped to shape a program of lasting importance. His name was a distinct asset to the work of the fund. As in the case of the NACA, however, he rarely exercised leadership on the Guggenheim board.
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Like his grandfather and father before him, he responded to pressure by establishing a buffer between himself and the outside world. That was Mabel Beck’s role. She was the gatekeeper who screened those who wished to contact Orville Wright. After Katharine and the nieces, she was the most important woman in his life.
Roy Knabenshue brought Miss Beck into the Wright Company as his secretary in 1910. Following the dissolution of the exhibition team, she went to work in the president’s office as Wilbur’s secretary. Orville liked her and kept her on. Within a matter of months she had become indispensable to him.
Her job was her life. No one came to Orville Wright except through her and, as an old friend of Orville’s once remarked, “she was not one to be smarty with.”
Acerbic and abrasive, Miss Beck was never a favorite with those closest to Orville. Even the men whom he regarded as his best friends—aeronautical journalist Earl Findley, the English writer Griffith Brewer, and Wright biographer Fred Kelly, for example—approached her with caution. They may not have liked Miss Beck, but they could not afford to offend her.
Orville was never a prompt or reliable correspondent. Mabel Beck was the channel though which most of his friends communicated with him. That presented special problems for men like Findley and Kelly, whose friendship with Orville had economic and professional value.
Both were journalists who built their early reputations at least in part on the success of interviews with Orville. In later life, Findley earned his living as the editor of
U.S. Air Services
, a leading aeronautical trade journal. Quotes, articles, and opinions from Orville became a hallmark of the magazine.
Kelly, a free-lance columnist and writer, based some of his most successful pieces on the career of his friend. He was the authorized biographer of the Wright brothers, and the editor of the first volume of their published papers.
For both Kelly and Findley, access to the historic letters, diaries, journals, and photos stored in the laboratory on North Broadway was through Miss Beck. She knew the story, and the materials, as well as Orville did. She was the one who answered their questions, or urged Orville to do so. And when Orville was displeased, Miss Beck delivered the bad news.
Findley could cite bitter experience. In 1915, at the very beginning of their friendship, Orville agreed to allow Findley and a young friend, John R. McMahon, to prepare a biography of the Wright brothers.
They visited Dayton, interviewed Orville, Milton, and Katharine at length, and were given limited access to the papers.
They worked for six months on a first draft, which Findley mailed to Orville. Confined to bed with back pain, Orville thought the manuscript entirely too personal and chatty. Rather than explaining his feelings directly, he asked Mabel Beck to reject it, commenting: “I would rather have the sciatica.” She did so, using precisely those words.
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The family regarded Miss Beck with undisguised disdain. “After some twenty years,” Lorin’s daughter Ivonette recalled,
she became more and more possessive. She knew that with her knowledge of the Wright story in all its aspects, she had a job for life. Knowing Orville, she was sure he’d never make a change. She felt the power of her position and seemed to want to alienate everyone from Orville in order to have his full attention for herself. She tried to alienate my father, Lorin, but was not successful. She tried to push her way into Orville’s household, but she ran into spunky little Carrie [Kayler Grumbach, the Wright housekeeper for half a century], who was a match for her. Carrie told “Mr. Orv” if “that woman” ever came in the front door of the house, she would leave by the back door.
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