It was cold. The boys puffed breath and scraped the ice with their steel skates. The pond in Dayton, Ohio, was frozen down several feet. Boys with hockey sticks had discovered it long ago, and the shaved ice that now sprayed up had been accumulating for weeks. The games were rough, but there were rules. Oliver Crook Haugh knew no rules. He was older and the bully of the block, if not the town. His teeth constantly ached. Later, historians would say that cocaine tooth drops might have precipitated the invention of flight.

Or maybe Oliver Crook Haugh was insane. Before he was electrocuted in 1906, he claimed to have proven that two personalities can exist in one person: “All that I do know is, that if I die for these crimes, I shall have at least established the proof of the theory on which I have always insisted—that two beings, one of good, the other of evil, may exist in the same man, and in that respect at least I shall have rendered a distinct service to posterity.”1

More likely Oliver Haugh was a full-blown psychopath, but the cocaine tooth drops certainly didn't help. There was no regulation for drugs then. Old ladies mixed cocaine with water and became horribly addicted. Opium was in abundance. Coca-Cola would make its mark by giving everyone a boost of cocaine that was still found in the coca leaves used in its recipe up until 1929 and corner the market on soda.² An apothecary was there to give opioids to whoever had a nickel to buy them, and doctors need not get in the way.

Oliver was fifteen when Wilbur met the boy who lived down the street in Dayton. They had skated before together. The Wright brothers were known as well-dressed, quiet young men who were the younger two sons of Bishop Wright, a well-respected man of the town. So, the three young men were on the frozen pond again playing hockey with the sticks flying. Haugh didn't dress like the Wrights. He wore no tie. He dressed like a laborer and was already known as the neighborhood bully, and he had the build of a man, if not a football player. Wilbur was eighteen. He had excelled in his classes, and there was talk of him heading off to Yale. “His schedule of classes would daunt a modern honors student: Greek, Latin, geometry, natural philosophy, geology and composition with general scholastic averages of 94, 96, and 95 for the first three terms.”3

Wilbur enjoyed riding the high-wheel bicycle, excelled at gymnastics, and even sang with an informal social club known as the Ten Dayton Boys as their youngest member. He was said to have a fine bass voice. A childhood friend, John Feight, recalled that “he played on the Central High football team and was one of the swiftest runners in the school.”⁴ Wilbur was tall, slight, and fresh-faced; his grey eyes betrayed a luminous intelligence. His father was a successful bishop in the church and while not wealthy, the Wrights occupied the top rung of the middle class. This trip to the pond was a childhood skate before stepping into the adult world of the East. But here was Haugh skating toward Wilbur like a comet of doom.

Wilbur skated away from the boy-man zeroing in on him like a later fighter pilot. Maybe Haugh had it in for Wilbur. The preacher's kid. Smart. Well-dressed. Well-spoken. Everything Haugh was not. The weather was getting colder, the breath from the boys steamed into the clear December evening. The skates cut the ice with the steel blades grooving what would be iced over again when the next thaw came. Haugh was physically stronger than boys his age and bigger than Wilbur, who was facing off in front of him. Maybe he had the puck and maybe he didn't, but Haugh lifted his wooden hockey stick straight into Wilbur Wright's face and shattered his upper teeth and broke his jaw. History was altered with the teeth and the blood on the ice. Wilbur went down to his knees while Haugh skated off. It would later come out that not only did Haugh enjoy the cocaine drops, but he drank and used other drugs that landed him briefly in the Dayton Asylum for the Insane.

Oliver Haugh would go on to become a doctor and along the way was accused of several murders. He was probably a serial murderer, but there were no forensics to link him to his victims.⁵ When he was finally electrocuted in 1906 for killing members of his family and then setting their home on fire, it was estimated that he had dispatched at least sixteen people. Wilbur returned home to be fitted for false teeth and have his jaw set.

But the damage went far beyond the physical. Something that Wilbur had not seen before—evil—had entered his world. His father, Bishop Wright, wrote in his diary, “A few weeks later he began to be affected with nervous palpitations of the heart which precluded the realization of the former idea of his parents, of giving him a course in Yale College.”6 The pain in his teeth and his jaw was unending. There was no Novocain, and Wilbur would not take the opioids that others so willing did for anything from a headache to a hangnail. Yes, there had been a physical blow with real damage, but the psychological blow was life-changing. Stomach issues began to haunt the young man as he convalesced in the Wright house with his mother, Susan, who was dying of tuberculosis. The dying light of winter was all around him now. The evil in the darkness. The pain. Then depression. Wilbur Wright began a spiraling descent into a physical and psychological breakdown that would last for three years.

Many late-nineteenth-century families succumbed to a singular event that left lasting consequences. Medical science did not understand the connection between the psychological impact of many diseases and injuries. Bishop Wright's brother had suffered an attack of dyspepsia that left him without his “wit in conversation and public speaking.”⁷ The family prescribed immediate prolonged rest for Wilbur, known as “the rest cure,” which was medical science's answer to all problems for which there was no easy answer. Wilbur became a semi-invalid recluse; he did not leave his home. His view of the world had been shattered along with his jaw and teeth. The evil that was Haugh had touched Wilbur, and he recoiled with heart palpitations, chronic indigestion, and a full-blown depression that made him a loner who became obsessed with caring for his mother. He became the caretaker of the hospice. Was it the confluence of two horrible moments of his life that destroyed all dreams of college, of Yale, of going into the bigger world of the East? Was it the sudden realization that his mother was dying and that he, too, could die? Whatever it was, the journey into the dark night of the soul had begun for Wilbur Wright.

Milton Wright would sum up the incident in 1913 with a cryptic entry in his diary: “The man who threw the bat that struck Wilbur became one of the most notorious murderers in the history of Ohio.”⁸ The hockey stick was a bat, but this could become semantics. Whatever the weapon, it altered Wilbur Wright's life right there. No longer was he the bright, energetic eighteen-year-old headed out for college. He became a moody, reclusive, sickly young man. The world had proved that his father was right about everything. There was evil out in the world, and only the family was a refuge. Retreat. Retreat. Leave the evil world as the good bishop admonished. Milton Wright would be described as “isolated and combative…not adept at the skills required to make friends and influence people…reconciliation, negotiation and compromise…were foreign to him.”9 In time, the same would be said of Wilbur.

Born in 1828 in a log cabin in Indiana, Bishop Wright was the son of Dan Wright, a farmer who had fought in the Revolution. Dan married Catherine Reeder on February 12, 1818. As Tom Crouch cited in The Bishop's Boys, “Milton Wright took great pride in the fact that his mother was the product of two first-generation Ohio families.”¹⁰ Of Milton's father it would be said, “he was grave in countenance, collected in his manners, hesitating in his speech, but very accurate.”¹¹ He didn't drink or smoke. The apple did not fall far from the tree. Milton joined the United Brethren Church and preached his first sermon at age twenty-two. The Protestant Brethren church believed in “the abolition of slavery, women's rights, and the opposition to Freemasonry and its secretive ways.”¹² The church and Milton were one, and he hit the road and never looked back while spreading the good word. After he became a bishop, he was mostly gone from the family and instructed them from afar in long epistles: “Make business first, pleasure afterward, and that guarded. All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden to others.”¹³

All that Bishop Wright required was that a hot meal, a warm bed, and a loving family await him after his long journeys. He would insist on this even when his two sons became world-famous and his daughter had passed into middle age. The trick was to keep everyone at home, and it was a godsend that Wilbur had become his wife's caretaker. That rendered Milton free to continue traveling and have the hearth fires burning when he returned.

Milton was crafty that way. His older sons had not done well. Reuchlin and Lorin had married and had families, but neither man prospered and both were in chronic distress over money and health. They had children, wives, and homes, but they were on the brink of disaster. In 1889, Reuchlin headed West to Cincinnati, then took a job with a lumber company in Kansas, and then a job with the Kansas City, Memphis, and Birmingham Railroad. His baby died and after thirteen years he returned to Dayton still unable to provide for his family.

Lorin headed West as well and ended up in Coldwater, Kansas, forty miles southeast of Dodge City. He took on the Western life with a hat and a gun but found the brooding isolation heavy. Looking out of a window in town, he saw a wolf loping down the street through the snow. He would head back to Dayton and for the rest of his life tell stories about the Wild West, a failure in all but fables. The bishop could now point and crow, You see! This is what comes of going into the world! Wilbur would slink in the background of his father's edict. Evil follows man in the world. Milton Wright could point to the two older brothers and say to his daughter, Katherine, and his younger sons, Orville and Wilbur, You see what happens when you venture into the world? It is not to be trusted. Better you stay under the family roof, where all is safe and secure. Wilbur—who was still in pain and still suffering from the assault, the psychic pain of his mother's demise, and his own personal hell—could offer no rejoinder. Risk was to be avoided at all costs.

The economy was not strong in the 1890s. “All across America young people were finding it much more difficult to strike out on their own than their parents and grandparents had. Times were hard.”14 This might have contributed to the Wright brothers abstaining from an interest in women and family life in general. Orville eventually wanted to establish himself as a printer, and the only way to do that was to remain at home. Wilbur had entered a dark land and taken up the role his father left vacant with his incessant traveling for the church. He was the young man adrift now with no direction, no compass to govern his life, just the caring for his mother and his own wounded soul.

Could there be any more desire to escape from the harsh realities of life than this three-year journey into the heart of darkness? This was at a time when there were no psychoactive medications. There was no therapist standing by to administer the answers to the basic questions a young man might have as to why he was brutally assaulted. This all went toward crafting Milton Wright's view of the world. Milton could go out in the world and do God's work, but his daughter and her two brothers should keep him company when he returned. This would be even more true when Susan Wright died. The bishop saw his life as a potentially lonely road, and he would cultivate his daughter to stand in for his wife, and his sons to never marry, to never leave. Even when Wilbur was at the zenith of his fame as the inventor of powered flight, Milton sent him letters, reminding him, “the ties of blood relationship are more enduring and more real.”¹⁵

More real than what? Than becoming world-famous and eventually wealthy. Milton was a covetous old sinner in that he was psychologically castrating his children. He would record in his diary, “there is much in the papers about the Wright brothers. They have fame but not wealth yet. Both these things, aspired after by so many, are vain.”16 Neither Orville, Wilbur, nor Katherine would have a family life outside of Milton's orbit. When Katherine did attempt to do so later in life, she was cast out by Orville in the vein of the father. Bishop Wright was the star of the household, and even the invention of manned flight could be seen as frippery. He was a one-man wrecking ball against perceived depravity and would even split with his own church and throw in with the old conservative faction against the more progressive elements.

In his pictures he is a man with a bad comb-over and an Amish beard; he seems pious, self-absorbed, and judgmental. Even the death of his own wife would not slow his travels, though she was the angel in his life. The bishop would later acknowledge that Wilbur's care for Susan allowed him to continue his traveling. This was far greater than the invention of the airplane, and the bishop framed it all in the glory of God and himself: “His mother being a declining, rather than suffering invalid, he devoted himself to taking all care of her, and watching and serving her with a faithfulness and tenderness that cannot but shed happiness on him in life and comfort him in his last moments.”¹⁷

Susan Koerner, born in Virginia, was brought West by her father, who was a German wagon maker. If her sons were mechanical, then it was because of Susan Wright. She was mechanically inclined and could create toys out of things around the house and treasured anything her boys made. When she met Milton Wright, she required him to wait three years before accepting his proposal of marriage. She was a woman who wanted to be sure. Her pictures are dour. She is the bishop's wife, the woman who must endure. Smart and painfully shy, she would give these traits to her son. The Wrights moved around as Milton's career required and as he spent six of every twelve months on the road. His wife quietly packed up the family as they moved from Fairmont, Indiana, to Millville, Indiana, where Wilbur was born in 1867, and then to Hartsville, and, finally, in 1869, to Hawthorne Street in Dayton Ohio, where Orville came into the world in 1871.

In every picture she is plainer, more tired, and more the enduring woman of the late nineteenth century. Then, in 1877, they moved yet again to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and finally back to Dayton in 1884. Dayton was then becoming the modern city of the Midwest, with electric streetlights and a growing population of 40,000. Abraham Lincoln had spoken there in 1859 in front of the courthouse, and now a brand-new library was being constructed. Industrious and growing, the populace needed a new railroad station. The bishop would continue to travel six months out of the year, but this was home. There was no running water, and baths were taken in a tub on the floor of the kitchen. The boys grew up with Abe Lincoln austerity, though they were better off than the log cabins of the plains. Gas fireplaces provided heat for the entire house, and everyone had to keep their doors open at night to stay warm. Out back was an outhouse and a well and a shed for the horses. Their father had been born in a log cabin, and the Wright brothers were not that far removed—at least in sprit.

But this was where Wilbur Wright's three years of isolation provided a very different education. Slowly, surely, he began to emerge. He became the ghost prowling the upper floor of the Wright home, carrying his mother down the stairs. The stoic who would never say much began to awake. His intelligent mind would not be snuffed even by a crazed, cocaine-jazzed psychopath. Evil altered his life but didn't destroy it. The eighteen-year-old young man began to read his father's books between bouts of caring for his mother: “There could be found the works of Dickens, Washington Irving, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, a complete set of the works of Sir Walter Scott, the poems of Virgil, Plutarch's Lives, Milton's Paradise Lost, Boswell's Life of [Samuel] Johnson, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Thucydides. There were books on natural history, American history, a six-volume history of France, travel, The Instructive Speller, Darwin's Origin of Species, plus two full sets of encyclopedias.”18

It was a house of readers, with Milton setting the tone. Wilbur began to systematically read and educate himself in the great quiet of the empty house during the day. He was no longer attending high school. Officially, he was a dropout, as was his brother later. His life had been turned upside down, and for the next three years the life of the mind would take precedence over the physical life. The man who would emerge from these three years would cement his distrust of the world outside. His interior life became preeminent, and maybe it was here the great escape of Wilbur Wright began to take hold.

A schoolmate would later say, “the strongest impression one gets of Wilbur Wright is of a man who lives largely in his own world, not because of any feeling of self-sufficiency or superiority but as a man who naturally lives far above the ordinary plane.”19 One must live in one's own world to do what others cannot. Wilbur Wright began to fly alone at a very early age. Between 1886 and 1889, the bishop's library became his escape, and his father later noted the homeschooling he approved of: “He…used his spare time to read and study, and his knowledge of ancient and modern history, of current events, and literature, of ethics and science was only limited by the capacity of his mind and extraordinary memory.”²⁰

Milton had already violated his tenet he would adopt after the first successful flight—that of his two sons being equal in mind and spirit. Oliver Haugh had murdered Wilbur's sense of purpose and left him adrift, but he had also provided space for a greater life purpose. Wilbur did not know it, but he was an artist. Haugh had made him become the artist without a calling, not confident in mind or body. His rehabilitation over three years in his father's house would produce a very different person who would escape ultimately by leaving the earth.

Wilbur had at one time considered teaching and had written his father, “I have always thought that I would be a teacher. Although there is no hope of attaining financial success as might be obtained in some of the other professions or in commercial pursuits, yet it an honorable pursuit, the pay is sufficient to allow me to live comfortably and happily and is less subject to uncertainties than almost any other occupation. It would be congenial to my tastes and I think with proper training I could be reasonably successful.”²¹

But that went out the window with the decision not to go to college. Years later, before taking up flight, Wilbur would write, “I do not think I am specially fitted for success in any commercial pursuit even if I had proper personal and business influences to assist me. I might make a living, but I doubt whether I would ever do much more than this [run a bicycle shop]. Intellectual effort is a pleasure to me and I think I would be better fitted for reasonable success in some of the professions than in business.”²²

In 1889, Susan Koerner Wright died. Wilbur's self-imposed three-year isolation ended, and Orville, now eighteen, decided to build a printing press in the back shed with some spare parts. He had dropped out of his last years of high school and enlisted his brother Wilbur in his venture, and they began to publish the West Side News.

Orville had a checkered past in school. In eighth grade he had been sat up front so his teacher could keep an eye on him. “Orville was not an outstanding student, but he got by. His ninth-grade marks included a 79 in Latin, an 86 in Algebra, and a 92 in botany.”23 Instructor William Werthner didn't see anything remarkable in Orville Wright, who was “a quiet, reserved boy, faithful in his work, but not strikingly different from the rest.” The year of his mother's death, Orville decided he would not return to high school for his senior year. The bishop, curiously, said nothing, probably seeing the public school as an institution that pulled his children away.

Orville didn't care about school anyway. He saw a publishing empire where his older brother saw drudgery. Still, he was his younger brother, and Wilbur was always mindful of his role to take care and look out for him. “My father and brother, seeing my determination to become a printer, managed after a while to get a small printing press for me,”²⁴ Orville would later write. The bishop noted that, “Before long the printing operation had taken over the summer kitchen at the rear of the Wright house, and the boys were accepting commissions for the job printing of handbills and advertising circulars, as well as letterhead, business cards, envelopes and tickets.”²⁵

Orville shows a prowess early on in construction of all things mechanical. He built his first press out of “a damaged tombstone, buggy parts, scrap metal, and odd items scrounged from local junkyards.”²⁶ His second, larger press consisted of “four-foot lengths of firewood, while the framework of a folding buggy top was used to ensure a uniform pressure of the type on each sheet.”²⁷ An office at 1210 West Third Street was secured, and the firm of Wright and Wright was in business. Classmate Paul Laurence Dunbar, who later rose to international fame as an American writer, briefly edited the Dayton Tattler, a weekly newspaper printed by the Wrights.

A Chicago pressman stopped by and examined the homemade press. Ed Sines, an employee of the new company, recalled that the pressman “went back into the press room, stood by the machine, looked at it, then sat down beside it and finally crawled underneath it…. He got up and said, ‘Well it works, but I certainly don't see how it does work.’”²⁸

Even though they together formed the firm of Wright and Wright, it was Orville's baby. The paper had changed its name to the Evening Item, and Orville felt they were doing well, but he picked up on his brother's indifference: “I've been making [$]2.00 to [$]3.25 a day in the office but I have to divide it with Will so that when the week is over I don't have much left. Will's working on the press, at least he says he is, but I can see little signs of it from the appearance of things.”29 Little brother was questioning big brother's commitment. The truth is business bored Wilbur, while Orville found business and mechanical challenges absorbing.

Wilbur would later write to his father that he was thinking again of going to college: “I have thought about it more or less for a number of years but my health has been such that I was afraid that it might be time and money wasted to do so, but I have felt so much better for a year or so that I have thought more seriously of it and have decided to see what you think of it and advise.”³⁰

The printing business ran its course about the time a national craze took over America that, at least for Wilbur Wright, would eventually lead to the building of the first airplane, namely, interest in the bicycle. The advent of the safety bicycle, an improvement over the high wheelers, lead to the opening of the Wright Cycle Exchange and then the Wright Cycle Company, where they would manufacture their own brand. Wilbur would be the reluctant partner until another catastrophic event involving his brother would alter his life again.

Wilbur Wright had been cast adrift by a madman and then fell under the tutelage of a father who, with the certitude of John Brown, believed that outside the family evil lurked. Business would be another prison for the man without direction. Escape had to be a terrestrial concern, if not an existential mission. In the gloom of his father's parlor in those years of physical and mental anguish, Wilbur must have looked out the window and seen the birds soaring on the wind and thought to himself…if only he could fly away.