Fred C. Kelly smoked and drank his cold coffee. Awful. Cigarettes and coffee kept him going usually, but he felt a fatigue that even nicotine and caffeine couldn't mitigate. He lit another cigarette and blew the smoke out, tiredly watching the blue undulations float over his typewriter. He parked the cigarette and bent over his typewriter, his notes surrounding him. Man had flown thirty-nine years ago, and there was not one diary, not one book written by anyone to explain how it had happened. No one had written a biography of the Wright brothers.

Kelly picked up his cigarette and read over what he had written that day. He had known the man a long time. He had published his first interview with Orville, “Flying Machines and the War,”1 in an issue of Collier's in 1915. His sense of humor had won over the inventor of the airplane, and he had published many interviews and articles on Orville Wright, as long as they didn't dig too deep. He had been thinking of a biography for a long time, and the 1939 article for Harper's, “How the Wright Brothers Began,”² gave him an opening.

Kelly used that as a basis and got Orville to sign on with one stipulation: he would approve every single word. Kelly began sending pages to Orville and getting back crossed-out sections. It was going to be a long process. As one family member said, “writing a book with Orville Wright looking over your shoulder would not be an easy task.”³ It wasn't. He had to nudge Orville every step of the way just to respond to the pages. But it was all worth it. It would put Kelly's name on the map and maybe make him a rich man, or at least able to pay the mortgage.

Kelly leaned back in his chair. He had written a humor column for the Cleveland Plain Dealer for five years and then a column for the Statesman in Washington, DC, for eight years. That's when his career took off with his “Real and Near” column that ran for eight years and was the first column ever to be syndicated. He had done a little bit of everything and even served as a special agent for the FBI in World War I. Then he bought a farm in Peninsula, Ohio, and took whatever came his way.4 Kelly saw himself as a journalist first, but he was open to other things, one of those other things was to write the only account of how the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.

Kelly wasn't a historian, and writing anyone's history was tricky, but writing someone's history who insisted on reviewing every page was almost a sleight of hand. He had to be very careful. Anything personal was out. Orville Wright wanted it to be technical, but Kelly was a writer, and he knew nothing about aeronautical science. So, it was touch-and-go. Orville was moody, and Kelly was walking a tightrope every day. Still, he couldn't believe his luck. He alone was writing the definitive biography of the two men who had cracked the Rubik's Cube of flight thirty-nine years before.

It was hard to deal with Orville, but even harder to deal with his secretary, Mabel Beck. She was “fiercely devoted to him…acting as a buffer between Orville and the rest of the world. Anybody—whether business associates or family members—who wished to speak with Orville at his office had to go through Mabel first, and her attitude made it difficult, particularly for many of his business associates.”⁵

She had given the journalist Earl Findley the kiss of death years before and fired him when he really needed the money and had put in a lot of work. He had been a good friend of both Wilbur and Orville, and Katherine Wright, the sister, had been on Finley's side initially: “I've been talking to Orville about it and he says that he would only be interested in a carefully written, accurate account of their work…. We are now of the opinion that you could write such a book, if you had time enough to devote to the work.”⁶ Findley and another reporter had worked for six months on the first draft of the book and sent it to Orville for his approval. At the time Orville read the manuscript, he was in bed with severe back pains. “This manuscript is too personal and chatty,” he told Mabel. “Send it back. I would rather have the sciatica.”⁷ Mabel told Findley exactly that.

But if you wanted to get to Orville or you wanted information, then Mabel Beck was the conduit. Kelly had made a point of being nice to her at every opportunity, and that wasn't easy. The truth was, “Mabel had complete charge of the papers, and she let him see only what she chose to and often hindered his work.”8 Kelly had known Orville for over twenty years, but that didn't matter. Orville had known Findley for a long time when he gave him his walking papers. Even Charles Lindbergh couldn't get Orville to commit to a biography. He had visited Orville a month after his flight and then tried to straighten out the whole Smithsonian thing, and, when that didn't work, he tried to get him to agree to a biography.

Lindbergh gave up and wrote in his diary:

It is a tragedy, for Wright is getting on in years, and no one else is able to tell the story as he can. It seems that Wright does not trust anyone to tell it properly. The words and phrases people use in telling the achievements of Orville Wright and his brother are never quite satisfactory and never of sufficiently comprehensive accuracy…. There are many writers who would be glad to do a book in cooperation with him but the writers do not understand aviation enough to suit him. He prefers a technical person…. I am afraid the book will never be written.⁹

So Lindbergh had bombed out along with Earl Findley.

The phone rang. Kelly swore and stubbed his cigarette. He walked across the room and picked up the phone.

“Fred…it's Orville.”

Kelly had a bad feeling. Usually it was Mabel who called him. Orville told him he wanted to stop and would pay him for what he had done so far. Kelly stared at his typewriter and jammed his hand down into his robe pocket. He should have kept writing for the papers. His payday was going right out the window. He rubbed his forehead, staring at the bare trees outside his office.

“Let me ask you a question, Orville…. Would you have given up on the morning of December 17, 1903?”

Orville was silent then chuckled.

“No. I guess not. Okay. Let's continue.”¹⁰

Fred hung up and breathed deeply. He went back to his typewriter. He was halfway done. He had almost suffered the same fate as Findley. He had passed every page to Orville and accepted all his edits, censoring, and strange suggestions. He wasn't going to write anything that Orville didn't want him to write—but there were questions, there were the secrets under the black ice that threatened the Wright legacy. There was the fight with the Smithsonian that had been going on for twenty years and was a symptom of Orville Wright's obsession with making sure that history treated him fairly.

Kelly didn't really write what he began to suspect. It was like a creeping virus, but he knew if he breathed a word of it, there would be no publication. Orville would see to that. The way Kelly saw it, Orville had thrown snake eyes more than once. He had been the one who flew the airplane in the photo in 1903 because Wilbur had been unsuccessful the day before and they had to make some adjustments. The world would see Orville lying down in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour wind, fighting to keep the plane aloft, while John T. Daniels snapped a picture that showed Wilbur running alongside. And then Orville drew the ultimate card when he survived typhoid fever and Wilbur didn't. Neither brother had ever put pen to paper. Neither brother had said this is the way it happened, so there was a vacuum. Orville could say this is how it happened, and no one could question him. The dead asked no questions.

Kelly stared at his typewriter, feeling the fatigue again of the past year—too little money, too many cigarettes, too much coffee. The writer's life was killing him. He was exhausted, and now all his work could be for nothing. Orville Wright had gone off on one of his spells, the same spell that put him in a knockdown fight with the Smithsonian Institute and a refusal to give them the 1903 Wright Flyer. Kelly slumped down in his chair. There was a war, and he should have been covering that, but he had thrown his career aside for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He was going to set the bar for historians to follow one hundred years down the line. He was no historian, that was for sure, but he could tell a story.

He looked over his notes. Orville had shipped the 1903 Wright Flyer to London fourteen years before, and now it was deep below ground while the bombs from the Luftwaffe pounded London into dust. The very technology that allowed the Germans to rain hell from the skies was being bombed by them. The Smithsonian desperately wanted the Flyer back. America wanted the Flyer back. President Roosevelt wanted the Flyer back. Lindbergh wanted the Flyer back. The country needed it to come home. And Orville Wright was the man with his finger on the button. Even if he gave in, it couldn't come across the ocean until the war ended, lest a German U-boat send it to the bottom of the Atlantic.

The truth was Orville had crossed his arms like a petulant child. It all came down to what really happened in 1903. Sometimes Kelly thought Orville saw his own personal legacy in danger of blowing away like the shifting sands he and his brother had walked almost forty years before. Kelly lit another cigarette and stared at his manuscript. He was willing to play ball, but if Orville was going to pull the rug out from under him, maybe he should just tell the real story. He really doubted he could ever finish with Orville flip-flopping back and forth. That's the thing with history: it really belongs to who tells the story first. Everything else that follows is held up against that first story. But the real story, that was something else.

The only thing that mattered to Orville Wright was to get the Smithsonian to say that he and his brother had built the only plane that could fly in 1903. If someone could solve that for him, then Orville would be forever in his or her debt. Secretary Charles Doolittle Walcott of the Smithsonian had his back against the wall. He needed to bring back the plane. He needed to get the Flyer back from London. Kelly rubbed his chin. It would look really bad if he published the book and everyone read about how the Smithsonian had lied and forced Orville to send the Flyer to London.

Maybe he should let Secretary Abbott over at the Smithsonian know what was coming. There was the real story, but Abbott would want this thing put to bed before publication. Kelly shook his head. It was a pity. The real story would be a hell of a lot more interesting. Mabel Beck knew the real story, but she would never talk. She knew where all the bodies were buried. He would finish this chapter and write Abbott a letter. Who knows, he, Fred Kelly, might just be the man to bring back the plane that had flown at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903.