|
Up
A Life on Hold
(You are here.)
  Need
to
find your
bearings?
Try
these
navigation aids:
If
this is your first
visit, please stop by:
Something
to share?
Please:
|
|
 hen
the Wrights moved back to Dayton for the last time, their mother was in
poor health. Wilbur, a top-notch scholar and athlete, seemed bound for
Yale. He enrolled in Central High School and took college preparatory
subjects such as advance Latin and Rhetoric. He also played football,
and his teammates remembered how swiftly he could run a ball down the
field.
 The
Beginnings of Football
In the winter of 1886, his dreams of college came to an end when he
was smashed in the face with a stick during a game of
"shinny" (a precursor to hockey) and lost his front teeth.
Complications ensued. Although his facial injuries healed, a few weeks
afterwards he developed "nervous palpitations of the heart"
and digestive problems. After a year's rest, these too disappeared, but
Wilbur was somewhat changed. He thought himself an invalid (or at least
as someone with a frail, vulnerable constitution) and decided that a
college degree "would be money and time wasted." He may have
also had a change of heart about leaving home, especially with his
mother so sick -- the Wrights were a tight-knit family. Whatever the
reason, he put his life on hold and made it his job to nurse his mother
Susan. His curiosity and his affinity for learning remained unchanged,
however. When he wasn't looking after his mother, he read voraciously.
The
Long Memory of the Wrights |
Wilbur Wright was 17 when his family moved to Dayton, Ohio. He was an
accomplished gymnast, football player, and scholar bound for college.
All of that would change in the blink of an eye.
|
|
Orville lost
interest in school and went from being a good student to relatively mediocre. At the same
time, he began to be interested in printing. While still in Richmond, he had experimented
with wooden block printing. Back in Dayton, he found that an old boyhood friend, Ed
Sines,
had a small printing press and the two began printing small jobs -- handbills,
letterheads, business cards, and so on. Orville also worked several summers as a printers
"devil" (apprentice) to learn the trade, developing his professional printing
skills.
In 1889, Bishop Milton Wright split from his church over a new constitution allowing
membership in secret societies, which the Bishop bitterly opposed. Secret societies such
as the Masonic Order had been a pernicious influence in the early years of American
politics. When the United States was very young, secret societies formed an elitist network that conferred upon their members unfair advantages
in business and political activities. But by the latter half of the nineteenth century,
these had mostly devolved into social clubs with only a vestige of their former
power. Nonetheless, the Bishop regarded the secret rituals and symbols employed by
Freemasonry and others as a sacrilege. With other United Brethren conservatives, he
organized a new sect, the Church of the United Brethren in Christ (Old Constitution). At a
church congress in Pennsylvania, he was unanimously elected its head, then came home
to Dayton to find his wife failing. A little more than a month later, Susan Wright died of
tuberculosis.
|
Although Orville lost interest in school in general, he seemed to like the
sciences. This painstakingly detailed sketch of a pussy willow branch is from his 1897
botany notebook.
The class of 1890 at Central High School in Dayton, Orville's last year in
school. Orville stands in the middle of the doorway. His friend Paul Laurence Dunbar, who
later became a great poet, stands at the upper left.
|
