The Bishop's Boys (84 page)

The restoration of the 1905 Wright airplane for Deeds Park in Dayton was the last great project of Orville’s life.

He spent the morning of January 27, 1948, fixing the doorbell at Hawthorn Hill. His second heart attack came after he had arrived at the laboratory. Miss Beck immediately summoned a physician from across the street and called Carrie Grumbach at the house. Carrie reached the laboratory before the ambulance pulled away. Orville Wright died in his bed at Miami Valley Hospital three days later, at 10:30
P
.
M
. on January 30. He was seventy-seven years old.

Edward Deeds took charge of the funeral arrangements. The choice of a minister to conduct the services for a national figure who had not been to church or shown the slightest interest in religion for over half a century was a problem. Orville had once remarked that there were only two clergymen in Dayton whom he admired—a black preacher from the West Side and the Reverend Charles Lyon Seasholes, pastor of the First Baptist Church. Seasholes it would be.

Distinguished Americans flocked to Dayton for the funeral at the First Baptist Church on February 2. The leaders of the official delegation included General Carl Spaatz, Chief of Staff of the newly created U.S. Air Force; John Victory, long-time secretary of the NACA; Dr. Francis W. Reichelderfer, chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau; and Alexander Wetmore, the new secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

Reverend Seasholes’s eulogy summed up what most Americans had
always thought about Orville Wright. A genius, he was also “a man who was just one of folks like us—middle class, mid-Western American, with simple, devout parents, and simple and modest way of life.”
²³

Four jet fighters circled over Dayton as the funeral cortege drove toward Woodland Cemetery that afternoon. Flags flew at half mast from coast to coast; local schools were dismissed at noon. As they laid him to rest, the four jets swooped low over the cemetery in formation, dipped their wings, and flew off. All of them—Susan, Milton, Wilbur, Katharine, and now Orville—were together again.
²⁴

Reporters hounded the family over the next week. What was to become of the 1903 airplane? For the moment, there was no answer to that question. Officials of the Science Museum had not made Orville’s 1943 letter public, and he had not announced his intentions.

Family and friends assumed that Orville had named Mabel Beck as his executor, and waited patiently for the secretary to produce a will. When nothing happened, Harold Miller proceeded to Orville’s bank to check on its whereabouts. Bank officials then contacted Orville’s lawyer, Charles Funkhouser, who produced the will. To everyone’s surprise, Orville had named Miller and Harold Steeper, both nephews by marriage, as his executors.

He left an estate slightly in excess of $1 million. For the most part, the executors’ duties were simple enough. There was a large $300,000 bequest to Oberlin, Katharine’s alma mater; the remainder of the estate was broken up into bequests for members of the family, old friends, and employees.

The treatment of the historic materials that were part of the estate presented far greater problems. What was to become of the vast collection of letters, notebooks, scrapbooks, and photographs chronicling the invention of the airplane? The will charged the executors with the disposition of those materials.

So long as Albert Zahm had served on the staff of the Library of Congress, that repository of the papers of great Americans had been out of the question. Soon after Zahm’s retirement in 1945, however, Orville had opened discussions with Archibald McLeish, the distinguished poet who was serving as Librarian of Congress.
²⁵

Immediately after the funeral, Miller and Steeper received word from the Library that the papers ought to be regarded as a national treasure. The Library of Congress it would be—with one stipulation. Some means would have to be found to publish sections of the papers.

Marvin W. McFarland, a young scholar fresh from wartime service
with the Army Air Forces, was placed in charge of the program. The original plan called for the publication of pamphlets containing items from the collection on special topics—a booklet on propeller research, another on the wind-tunnel tests, and so on. What finally evolved was far more useful—an edited set of the most important materials from the collection that would enable the brothers to tell the complete story of the invention of the airplane in their own words. Initially planned as a three-volume set, later reduced to two,
The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright
were published by McGraw-Hill in 1953. They remain today as one of the finest sets of published American historical papers—a monument to the scholarship of McFarland and his colleagues.

The Library of Congress had decided to take only those materials relating to the history of flight. As a result, a wealth of purely family items—letters, papers, photos, and documents tracing the history of the Wrights back to their roots in seventeenth-century New England—remained in Ivonette and Harold Miller’s basement in Dayton for another quarter of a century. On May 2, 1974, the Millers and the other surviving heirs of the Orville Wright estate donated this second major collection to a local facility named, appropriately enough, The Wright State University.

Determining the most appropriate home for the world’s first airplane was more complex. When Miller and Steeper studied the 1937 will, they discovered the passage deeding the machine to the Science Museum, unless Orville had revoked that clause with a letter indicating a new disposition. Judge Love of the Montgomery County Probate Court ordered Harold Miller to look for such a document. He began in the most obvious place—with Mabel Beck.

Miss Beck admitted that such a letter existed, but refused to produce it. Miller left the office at once and called Earl Findley in Washington, who, in turn, called Miss Beck, reminding her of her obligation to respect Orville’s wishes. She turned the letter over to Miller at a meeting in Edward Deeds’s office the following day. The news that Orville Wright had relented and asked that the world’s first airplane be sent to the Smithsonian was announced the same afternoon.
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There was jubilation at the Smithsonian. When the new secretary, Alexander Wetmore, had first been informed of the stipulation regarding the airplane in the 1937 will, he had remarked to General “Hap” Arnold that, “So far as I know, no such instrument [a letter calling the machine back to the U.S.] was ever issued.”
²⁷
Believing
that the airplane would stay in England, Wetmore planned to have a full-scale replica of the 1903 Wright Flyer constructed for the museum.

Once the executors announced the existence of the letter, Wetmore immediately opened discussions with the heirs, and with the British government, to arrange the return as expeditiously as possible. Problems still remained to be solved. The executors and the lawyer for the estate insisted on steps to ensure that the Wright heirs would not be liable for an enormous inheritance tax on the priceless relic.

The final arrangement, approved by the Internal Revenue Service, called for the executors to sue the heirs for possession of the machine. This clarification of ownership was required to ensure that no heir would be able to return to the executors with a claim that he or she had been cheated out of a share of money that might have been made from the sale of the airplane to the highest bidder, or through exhibition fees. The executors stated in open court that, as the aircraft was beyond price, it would be sold to the United States National Museum for the sum of one dollar, thus freeing the estate of any potential tax obligation for the artifact. The people of the United States were the ultimate beneficiaries.
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The contract for the sale of the world’s first airplane to the museum would include other provisions as well, safeguards against a reopening of the feud. The airplane, for example, was never to be exhibited outside the Washington area. A specified label, approved by a committee of Orville Wright’s old friends, was always to appear with the machine on exhibition. Finally, if the Smithsonian 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. The Smithsonian signed.

The long feud came to an end on the morning of December 17, 1948. Eight hundred and fifty people attended the ceremony in the North Hall of the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building. They sat in chairs ranged along the east wall, facing a temporary speakers’ platform—and the great, tattered flag that Francis Scott Key had seen still flying over Fort McHenry in the dawn’s early light of September 14, 1814.

The Star Spangled Banner was but one of the American icons crowded into this building. George Washington’s uniform, Thomas Jefferson’s writing desk, Benjamin Franklin’s stove, the oldest American
locomotive, gowns worn by each First Lady since Martha Washington—precious physical reminders of two hundred years of American life were stuffed into every corner of the National Museum.

Visitors entered this cluttered treasure house through the North Hall, which housed the most popular single object in the museum, the
Spirit of St. Louis
. The silver Ryan monoplane had held the place of honor, suspended high above the central entrance doors, since its arrival at the Smithsonian in 1928. A month before the ceremony, workmen carefully moved the
Spirit
toward the rear of the hall to make room for a new centerpiece. Charles Lindbergh did not complain. When curator Paul Garber informed him of the impending move, Lindbergh remarked that he was honored to know that his machine would be sharing the hall with the world’s first airplane, the 1903 Wright Flyer.

The ceremony began promptly at 10:00
A
.
M
., for timing was of some importance. Precisely fifty-five years before, just after ten o’clock on the morning of December 17, 1903, the Wright Flyer had rolled down a sixty-foot takeoff rail laid out on the sand flats some four miles south of the fishing village of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and climbed into the air.

Alexander Wetmore opened the proceedings with a short welcoming speech, then he introduced the Honorable Fred Vinson, Chief Justice of the United States and chancellor of the Smithsonian Institution. Vinson in turn welcomed the guests and called Major General Luther D. Miller, Chief of Chaplains of the U.S. Air Force, to the podium to offer the invocation. Colonel Robert Landry, President Truman’s Air Force aide, read a greeting from the President, after which Sir Oliver Franks, British ambassador to the United States, made a few appropriate remarks.

Milton Wright, a nephew of the Wright brothers, then came forward to present the world’s first airplane to the National Museum. Vice-President Alben W. Barkeley accepted on behalf of the people of the United States with a speech which one of those present remembered as “poor, and poorly read.” The U.S. Air Force band concluded with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The Wright Flyer had come home.
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Many of the guests who filed out of the historic North Hall after the ceremony planned to attend a black-tie dinner that evening at which the prestigious Collier Trophy would be awarded to Captain Charles Yeager, John Stack, Lawrence Bell, and other members of the
NACA/Air Force/industry team which had conducted the first supersonic flight research program.

A few of the guests, it is to be hoped, paused to read the label on the world’s first airplane, hanging at long last where it had always belonged. It may have led them to wonder at the progress wrought in the forty-four short years separating Kitty Hawk from the sound barrier.

THE ORIGINAL WRIGHT BROTHERS AEROPLANE

THE WORLD’S FIRST POWER-DRIVEN,

HEAVIER-THAN-AIR MACHINE IN WHICH MAN

MADE FREE, CONTROLLED, AND SUSTAINED FLIGHT

INVENTED AND BUILT BY WILBUR AND ORVILLE WRIGHT

FLOWN BY THEM AT KITTY HAWK, NORTH CAROLINA

DECEMBER 17, 1903

BY ORIGINAL SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH THE WRIGHT BROTHERS

DISCOVERED THE PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN FLIGHT

AS INVENTORS, BUILDERS, AND FLYERS THEY

FURTHER DEVELOPED THE AEROPLANE,

TAUGHT MAN TO FLY, AND OPENED

THE ERA OF AVIATION

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1