He was a boy whose father sold whiskey from a baby carriage that he made in his home. His father would wheel the buggy around with the baby and reach underneath the wool blanket for his customers, making one delivery after another. It was the Depression then, 1935, and everyone made any money they could. John Wohlganger was thirteen now; he shined shoes and made deliveries for a dry goods store. One of his customers was Orville Wright, who always demanded his shoes be spit shined, and then inspected the shoes very carefully before tipping.

His laboratory and office at 15 Broadway in Dayton was famous. The local boys liked to hang around and get glimpses of the man who had invented the airplane. “Orville Wright's office was not on street level. The front entrance was recessed, and there were stairs to the front door. The office part of the building was made with red wire-cut bricks with deep-set mortar joints. The shop part of the building was of cement blocks on street level,” John recalled years later.1

John had to pull himself up on a ledge in the alley just to get a glimpse of Orville Wright in his white smock, and he didn't want Ms. Beck to catch him. Her face was winter. The commandant of Orville Wright. Nobody got to Orville Wright without going through Ms. Beck. She was the gatekeeper, secretary, assistant, centurion, guard, troll, and protector of the surviving inventor. Even the family had to go through Ms. Beck, and they hated and feared her but appreciated what she did for Orville. In her memoir, Ivonette Wright Miller, niece of the brothers, wrote, “She felt the power of her position and seemed to want to alienate everyone from Orville in order to have his full attention to herself.”² Niece Sue Wright once had her car serviced at a garage near the laboratory. Since she had a long wait, she decided to wait in a comfortable place. She rang the bell at the laboratory. Mabel opened the door.

“Is Uncle Orv here?” Sue asked.

Mabel frowned. “You mean Mr. Wright?” she asked coldly.3 “Wait here. I will see if he is in.”

She disappeared into Orville's office. Sue said she heard her say to him, “It's Sue.”

“She never would speak to any of us if we met on the street,” Sue recalled. Orville's brother Lorin's daughter later wrote, “she became more and more possessive. She knew that with her knowledge of the Wright story she had a job for life. Knowing Orville, she was sure he'd never make a change.”⁴ Even so, John Wohlganger liked to watch the inventor: “During the three years I shined Orville Wright's shoes, I got to know him rather well. He was always dressed to perfection; he usually wore a black suit and black shoes; his shirt was white with a stiff collar.”⁵ “Shoe shines at that time were five cents, and Mr. Wright usually tipped a nickel. He was most particular about the shine and inspected his shoes all around the soles and heels before he paid me.”⁶

One day, John was making his way down the alley when he decided to peek in the window. To get to Orville's office, he had to jump up and grab onto the brick ledge with his fingers and hoist himself up. John grabbed onto the cold bricks. It was January and just a few flakes were wisping down. Mabel Beck was sure to be around, so he would just raise his eyes over the ledge and get a quick peek.

The boy pulled himself up ever so slowly. It was 1935, and his meal of beans and cheese and prunes wasn't sitting well. Bricks, bricks, then the glass. He raised himself up until his eyes crested the sill and his head appeared in the window. There was Orville Wright in his smock. He had on his shined shoes that John had just worked over the day before. The boy stared, his eyes growing, because sitting on Mr. Wright's lap was Mabel Beck. “Here is what I saw…. Mr. Wright was sitting in his office chair facing North Broadway. He had his white smock on. There was Mabel Beck, sitting across Orville's lap, [her body] facing me. She had on a long-sleeved, light-colored blouse and a dark skirt. The reason she couldn't see me was because her eyes were closed. She and Orville were kissing.”⁷

The unmarried woman with the close brown hair and the air of a school marm was now kissing Mr. Wright. John felt his face burn. The two adults couldn't see him, because their eyes were closed. The inventor was leaning back in his chair, and Ms. Beck had her legs crossed like a young girl. The boy felt his breath leave, and then he dropped to the ground and ran as fast as he could down the alley. John Wohlganger would not speak of what he saw for sixty years.

The woman the boy had seen was Mabel Beck, the daughter of Charles Beck, who was a machinist, and his wife, Lena, who lived in McPherson Town and then moved to Dayton in 1897. Mabel graduated from Steele High School in 1907 and then worked for three years at Moses Cohen's Furnishings and Hats. Mabel at eighteen was pretty, with dark hair and a plump figure. Moses occupied the ground floor of the United Brethren Building. On the thirteenth floor was the Wright Aeronautical Company. Roy Knabenshue had been hired to head up an aerial team of fliers for exhibitions. He stopped into the store, and Mabel Beck waited on him.

“I need to hire a secretary,” he told the young woman. “I like your looks and the way you do your work, but you would have to type and write shorthand.”8

Mabel jumped at the chance, took a course in typing and shorthand, and then went to work for the Wright brothers. She was Wilbur's secretary until he died in 1912 from typhoid fever, then she became Orville's secretary.⁹ The world would never see Orville again unless it saw Ms. Beck first. Orville soon gave her a picture of himself that Mabel had framed and kept on a bedside table. She was there when Charles Lindbergh came to visit. She was there when the great flood of 1914 buried the Wright Flyer and she and Orville dried out the muslin canvas and recovered the wings.¹⁰ One did not speak of Orville without Mabel.

They were always together, right up to the day on January 27, 1948. Orville was working in the laboratory with Mabel when he suddenly stopped talking and slumped in his desk chair. With pinched mouth and pale skin it looked like another heart attack. Orville had suffered a mild heart attack back in October 1947 while running up the steps of a building. He had been careful, ever since, not to push himself. Mabel frantically called Dr. Allen Horwitz across the street, who rushed over and examined Orville. It was a stroke that left Orville unconscious for the entire ride in an ambulance to Miami Valley Hospital.¹¹ Mabel would never see him again. Orville died three days later. He was seventy-seven.

Now he was dead. They were all dead—Wilbur, Katherine, Milton, and now Orville. The Wright brothers, the Wright clan, were gone. Poof. Dust. History. All that was left were their planes, and one in particular held the world in thrall. Death had brought the question to bear about the destiny of the 1903 Flyer. Everyone assumed Mabel Beck would be the executor and possessor of the will:

Family and friends assumed that Orville had named Mabel Beck as the executor of his estate and waited patiently for the secretary to produce a will. When nothing happened, Harold Miller proceeded to Orville's bank to check on the will's whereabouts. Bank officials then contacted Orville's lawyer, Charles Funkhouser, who produced the will. To everyone's surprise Orville had named Miller and Howard Steeper, both nephews by marriage, as his executors.12

The two nephews studied the 1937 will “and discovered the passage deeding the machine to the Science Museum [in London] unless Orville had revoked the clause with a letter indicating his new disposition.”¹³ Orville had said there was a letter. The 1903 Flyer had gone to England, but there was no letter saying what to do with it. Probate Court Judge Love ordered Harold Miller to look for the letter, and he began with the most obvious person. It was as if that grim, tight-lipped Mabel Beck had just walked into the room and once again blocked access to Orville Wright. The woman who had given one biographer his walking papers and kept close rein on the second was back. The centurion at the gate was there again.

There had been whispers of something more between the inventor and his secretary for years. That would explain a lot. She was the only person Orville would trust to be the keeper of a letter that would change the course of history. But she had disappeared after Orville Wright's death, and no one could get hold of her. Miller finally tracked her down at the home she shared with her sister. Mabel acknowledged that there was a letter “but refused to produce it.”¹⁴ The keeper of all knowledge, the woman who held the answers, was not going to give up Orville's final wish concerning the most important plane in the world.

Mabel Beck had the letter and was keeping it. She had become the final footnote to the story of the invention of the airplane. A story that began back in 1884.