“Will seems to enjoy writing, so I leave all the literary part of our work to him,” Orville would explain. In fact, Orville, too, greatly enjoyed writing, though in family correspondence primarily, and especially in letters to Katharine he did so with spirit and humor. That Wilbur, in the early stages of their enterprise, wrote nearly all letters concerning their interests in the first person, as if he were operating entirely on his own, seems not to have bothered Orville in the least.
Orville was the more gentle of the two. Though talkative and entertaining at home, often a tease, outside the house he was painfully shy, something inherited from their deceased mother, and refused to take any public role, leaving all that to Wilbur. But he was also the more cheerful, the more optimistic and naturally entrepreneurial, and his remarkable mechanical ingenuity figured importantly in all their projects.
Where Wilbur was little bothered by what others might be thinking or saying, Orville was extremely sensitive to criticism or mockery of any kind. Then, too, Orville had what were referred to within the family as his “peculiar spells,” times when, overtired or feeling put-upon, he could turn uncharacteristically moody and irritable.
In public gatherings, it was invariably Wilbur who attracted the most attention, even if he had little to say. “By comparison,” one observer wrote, “Mr. Orville Wright does not possess any pronouncedly distinctive personality. That is to say, your eye would not be drawn to him among a crowd of men in the fashion in which it would instinctively dwell on Mr. Wilbur.”
Like their father, they were always perfect gentlemen, naturally courteous to all. They neither drank hard liquor nor smoked or gambled, and both remained, as their father liked to say, “independently” Republican. They were bachelors and by all signs intended to remain so. Orville liked to say it was up to Wilbur to marry first, he being the older. Wilbur professed to have no time yet for a wife. To others he seemed “woman-shy.” As remembered one associate, Wilbur could “get awfully nervous” whenever young women were around.
What the two had in common above all was unity of purpose and unyielding determination. They had set themselves on a “mission.”
They lived still at home with their father, an itinerant clergyman who was often away on church work, and their sister Katharine. Younger than Orville by three years, she was bright, personable, highly opinionated, the only college graduate in the family, and of the three still at home, much the most sociable. After finishing at Ohio’s Oberlin College in 1898, she had returned to Dayton to teach Latin at the new Steele High School, where, Orville noted, she would flunk many of Dayton’s future leaders. As she herself said of those she judged to be “notoriously bad” boys, “I nipped their smartness in the bud.”
Neat and trim, with her gold-rimmed, pince-nez glasses, and dark hair tied back in a bun, she looked every bit the schoolteacher. “Of the sawed-off variety,” as she said, she stood a bit over five feet, and all who knew her knew what a force she was. In a household of three men and one woman, she more than held her own. She was the most vivacious of the family, a tireless, all-season talker, and they all adored her for that. It was she who brought home her college friends and put on parties. Being the nearest in age, she and Orville were particularly close. They had the same birthday, August 19, and they had both been born there in the same house.
Bothered more by human failings than were her brothers, Katharine could turn “wrathy.” Orville’s practicing on the mandolin could set her off in grand fashion. “He sits around and picks that thing until I can hardly stay in the house,” she complained to their father. “You have a good mind and a good heart,” he would tell her. Still he worried. “I am especially anxious that you cultivate modest feminine manners and control your temper, for temper is a hard master.”
To their friends they were Will, Orv, and Katie. Among themselves Wilbur was Ullam; Orville, Bubbo or Bubs; and Katharine, Sterchens, a variation of the German word schwerchens, meaning “little sister.” Two brothers older than the three at home—Reuchlin and Lorin—were married and had families of their own. Reuchlin had moved to a farm in Kansas. Lorin, a bookkeeper, with his wife, Netta, and their four children, Milton, Ivonette, Leontine, and Horace, lived just around the corner from 7 Hawthorn Street. That both Lorin and Reuchlin had kept moving from job to job, trying to make ends meet for their families, appears to have given Wilbur and Orville further reason to remain single.
Their deceased mother, Susan Koerner Wright, had been born in Virginia, the daughter of a German wagon maker, and brought west as a child. Her children described her as highly intelligent, affectionate, and painfully shy. It was said that on her first visit to a grocery store after her marriage, when asked to whom the items should be delivered, she forgot her new name. But she was also cheerful and keen-witted, and to her family a “regular genius” in that she could make anything, and toys especially, even a sled, “as good as a store kind.
She was the most understanding woman [wrote Katharine]. She recognized something unusual in Will and Orv, though she loved us all. She never would destroy one thing the boys were trying to make. Any little thing they left around in her way she picked up and put on a shelf in the kitchen.
The mechanical aptitude of “the boys,” they all knew, came directly from their mother, quite as much as Orville’s shyness. Her death, from tuberculosis in 1889, had been the worst blow the family had ever known.
Bishop Milton Wright was a devoted father abundantly supplied with strong opinions and words to the wise, a middle-sized, dignified figure with a full, gray patriarchal beard, but no mustache, who liked to comb his thin gray hair most carefully over the top of his bald head. As with Wilbur, his characteristic “grave countenance” was not necessarily the best way to judge his mood of the moment or how he viewed life.
He had been born in a log cabin in Indiana in 1828 and had grown up with frontier ways and values. Though little is known about his mother, Catherine, his father, Dan Wright, a farmer and Revolutionary War veteran, had been a hero in the boy’s eyes. “He was grave in countenance, collected in his manners, hesitating in his speech, but very accurate,” by Milton’s account. He was an unyielding abstainer, which was rare on the frontier, a man of rectitude and purpose—all of which could have served as a description of Milton himself and Wilbur and Orville as well.
At age nineteen, Milton had joined the United Brethren Church in Christ, a Protestant denomination. He preached his first sermon at twenty-two and was ordained at twenty-four. Though he took several courses in a small college run by the church, he was not a college graduate. Founded before the Civil War, the United Brethren Church was adamant about certain causes—the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and opposition to Freemasonry and its secretive ways—and so Milton Wright remained in his convictions, as all who knew him were aware.