The Bishop's Boys (76 page)

Orville chided friends and family members for their inability to get along with Miss Beck, almost as though she was one of the practical jokes he took such delight in playing. Where Mabel Beck was concerned, not even Katharine could move her brother. It was clear that Orville approved of his secretary’s manner and placed enormous value on her services.

Miss Beck was his first line of defense, but Orville developed other far more subtle means of insulating himself from the world. Consider, for example, the design for living embodied in his home, Hawthorn Hill, and in his summer retreat on Georgian Bay.

The decision to leave 7 Hawthorn Street, where the family had lived for forty-two years, did not come easily, but the old neighborhood was changing for the worse. Wilbur and Orville originally selected a small lot on the corner of Salem Avenue and Harvard Boulevard, but Katharine thought it too near the center of the city. She wanted a wooded lot on high ground. Wilbur and Orville grumbled, then acquiesced.

Hawthorn Hill, named for the lovely old hawthorn trees that dominated the crest of a rise overlooking Dayton, was the ideal compromise. The brothers bought the seventeen-acre site near the corner of Park Drive and Harmon Avenue in the affluent suburb of Oakwood
in February 1912.
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The new house began as Katharine’s dream, but Orville took it over. Katharine believed that his original rough plans for the colonial mansion were inspired by the stately homes he had seen in Virginia in 1908 and 1909.

Wilbur took little interest in the project. Orville sent the preliminary floor plans to him during his stay in Europe in 1911. “You are wasting entirely too much space on halls,” Wilbur replied.
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For his part he wanted nothing more than a bedroom and a bath of his own. He died before construction began.

Orville turned his preliminary drawings over to the local architectural firm of Schenck & Williams, but followed every detail of the planning and construction. The interior and furnishings received the same close attention. Everything about the house had to be perfect. Painters unable to match the precise shade of red stain for the doors and woodwork were taken off the job. He did the work himself.

“When the carpeting first arrived,” his niece recalled, “the design around the border wasn’t exactly in line with the fireplace in the living room. Orville drew a detailed sketch of how the carpet should fit around the fireplace and sent it off to the rugmakers in Ireland. He got it changed to suit him.”
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The house was Orville’s machine for living. He designed the basic plumbing, heating, and electrical systems himself. “Knowing that rain water was mineral free,” one family member explained, “he used it for all hot and cold bath water. He had it piped from the roof into a first cistern. To remove the sediment, color, and odor, he designed … a special filter through which he pumped this water into the second cistern. To clean this filter there was a system for pumping a back-flow of the purified water through the filter, periodically.”
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Water was dispensed in Orville’s enormous second-floor bathroom through a series of circular shower pipes surrounding the bather from shoulder to knees. Special shields beneath the floor prevented any staining of the first-floor ceilings.

It was the same with the heating system. Standard controls were not acceptable. Orville regulated the temperature with a wire running from the furnace in the basement through the living room and on up to his bedroom. He was especially proud of an industrial vacuum system built into the walls so that Carrie had simply to plug her hose into an outlet in a room and throw the switch.
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Orville took great pleasure in maintaining all this. He devoted forty years of effort to fiddling with furnaces, plumbing, and wiring. Without
his constant attention they would have ceased to function. Carrie never did use the built-in vacuum—it seldom worked and created nothing but problems. When the National Cash Register Company purchased Hawthorn Hill as a guest house following Orville’s death, its first move was to install a rational plumbing and heating system.

Orville, Katharine, and the bishop moved into their new home, Hawthorn Hill, in 1913.

The house was filled with examples of domestic ingenuity.
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Orville drilled a vertical hole in each arm of his favorite overstuffed easy chair to accommodate a homemade bookholder that could be shifted from side to side. The reading glasses on the stand next to the chair had only one temple; Orville removed the other so he could whip them on and off with ease. The walls of the surrounding rooms were covered in expensive damask that had to be stripped, washed, and rehung each year. Orville designed and built a special tool to do the job.

The summer home was as much a part of his life as Hawthorn Hill, and he shaped it in precisely the same way. Recovering from a severe bout of sciatica in the spring of 1916, he treated his father and sister to a three-month family vacation, the first they had ever taken.

Canadian citizens, in a gesture of support for the war effort, were renting out summer homes to vacationing Americans and investing the proceeds in war bonds. Orville chose a cottage on Waubeck Island, in Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay. He fell in love with neighboring Lambert Island while exploring the Bay that summer. Before they returned to Dayton, Orville was the proud owner of the entire island, twenty acres of rocky Canadian real estate, complete with seven buildings: a main house; three smaller cottages; a pumphouse; an icehouse; and a tool shed. Thereafter he would return every summer until World War II.
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Orville had designed Hawthorn Hill himself. At Lambert Island he rearranged the existing buildings to suit his taste. “For exercise he was continually remodeling or moving the cabins,” his grandnephew George Russell explained. “We cut up one cabin into several small sections and moved it several hundred feet and remodeled it to fit with the island.”
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He ripped out the old docks as well, replacing them with new models designed to survive the harsh winters.

As in Dayton, the plumbing system was a matter of special concern. Water was pumped out of the lake and into a 300-gallon water tower with an old gasoline motor that only Orville could start. From there it was piped into the kitchen of the main cabin, where a special line ran into the back of the icebox. Cold water was always on tap.

“Orville’s Railway” was a special project that required several years to complete. Initially, it was nothing more than a small cart used to haul ice and baggage up a steep path of crushed gravel to the cottages on the crest of the hill. Within a few years Orville replaced that primitive system with a new cart running on a set of wooden rails. A cable and drum system driven by an outboard motor drew the cart up the incline. As with the pump, Orville was the only one who could operate the railway with any assurance.
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Outboard motors were the prime movers on Lambert Island. The automatic clothes washer consisted of a large metal tub set on a rod mounted at a 45-degree angle. Clothes were soaked, then placed in the tub. A Johnson motor down on the lake pumped a stream of water through a hose aimed at the tub. The clothes were thoroughly washed and spun in a single operation.
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Orville practiced the cooking skills developed at Kitty Hawk in the kitchen of the main house, which was filled with examples of his ingenuity. Fond of toast, he developed two special implements to guarantee a perfect product every time: a gauge to ensure that each slice of bread was cut to a precise thickness, and a toaster, constructed of two sheets of metal, to compress each slice as it was toasting.

The domestic spaces that Orville fashioned with such care, and the bits and pieces of homespun technology with which he furnished them, were his psychological shield. Wrapped in an environment of his own design and construction, he created a private world that he could control.

Orville did his best to draw every member of the family into that private world. On April 3, 1917, Bishop Milton Wright, eighty-eight years old, died. The services, held two days later at Hawthorn Hill, were followed by burial next to Susan in the family plot at Woodland Cemetery.

Orville (left), Katharine (second left), Horace (fourth right), Lorin (second right), and other family members enjoy a picnic.

Orville was head of the Wright clan now. Like his father, he was devoted to the notion of family. He shared Milton’s passion for genealogy, picking up the search for lost and obscure Wright ancestors. He hired lawyers and researchers to locate the homestead near Hillsboro, Virginia, where his mother had been born. When they returned with a suggested birthplace that did not match descriptions offered by his aunt and cousins, he sent them back to work. As always, he wanted only precise knowledge.
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But the family was changing. Reuch died in 1920 and Lorin in 1939. Their children were growing older, going off to college, and starting families of their own. Orville was careful not to let the youngsters slip away, and he worked hard to draw their husbands, wives, and children into the circle. His strategy for accomplishing that was pure Orville.

Lorin’s daughters, Ivonette and Leontine, were both married at Hawthorn Hill. “Uncle Orv” lost little time in teasing the new spouses and playing gentle practical jokes on them. Ivonette’s new husband, Harold S. (“Scribze”) Miller, was initiated at the annual Hawthorn
Hill Christmas dinner in 1919. Every person found his or her place at the table marked by a plain envelope containing a twenty-dollar bill—except for Miller, who found a small box of candy. “He thanked Uncle Orv for it,” Ivonette recalled,

Leontine’s husband, John Jameson, was welcomed in similar fashion. They were married on a hot day in June 1923. Orville rigged a special cooling device, a fan blowing over a tub of cracked ice, in the hall where the groom was waiting for the ceremony to begin. “The blessedly cool air that was wafted over me was a lifesaver, I can tell you,” Jameson recalled many years later. “Uncle Orv’s eyes danced as they always did when his ingenuity triumphed over a difficulty—or when he successfully pulled off a practical joke. Thereafter he always delighted in reminding me how he ‘put John on ice.’”
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Orville loved a good argument, and tried to goad those closest to him into impassioned debate. That had always been his way with Wilbur, and he saw no reason to change. He needled John Jameson, an advertising executive, about his profession. “What did I think about the economic wastefulness of advertising and how it exploited the people? He would mischievously try to goad me into an argument, which he loved and I usually avoided, because he could be pretty merciless at that game.”
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Harold Miller, who operated a savings and loan company, faced a similar grilling on the ethics of moneylending. Orville went so far as to argue the case for Soviet communism in an effort to spark an argument with him:

The teasing and joking was Orville’s way of drawing newcomers into the family circle, making them feel a part of things, and letting them know that he cared about them. It worked. Harold Miller and John Jameson grew extraordinarily fond of him, and he of them.