What exactly happened is hard to determine, but to judge from the little that is known, there is much more to the story. According to an entry in Bishop Wright’s diary written years afterward, in 1913, the “man who threw the bat that struck Wilbur” became one of the most notorious murderers in the history of Ohio, Oliver Crook Haugh, who, in 1906, was executed for the murders of his mother, father, and brother, and was believed to have killed as many as a dozen others besides.
At the time of the hockey incident, Haugh lived just two blocks from the Wrights. He was only fifteen, or three years younger than Wilbur, but as big as a man and known as the neighborhood bully. As would be written in the Dayton Journal following his execution, “Oliver never was without the wish to inflict pain or at least discomfort on others.”
Whether he “threw” the stick at Wilbur accidentally or intentionally is impossible to determine. But it is known that he was then working in a drugstore on West Third Street and that the druggist, in an effort to relieve him of the pain of rotting teeth, was providing him with a popular cure of the day, “Cocaine Toothache Drops.” In little time young Haugh became so dependent on drugs and alcohol, his behavior so out of control that he had to be committed for several months to the Dayton Asylum for the Insane.
Wilbur undoubtedly knew him, but how well, or whether Haugh had some sort of score to settle with Wilbur, or was under the influence of drugs at the time of the incident, are all unknown. Except for Bishop Wright’s brief diary mention, nothing on the subject is to be found anywhere in the Wright family correspondence or reminiscences. Nor is there much in the way of detail or firsthand description about the devastating after-effect of the accident on Wilbur. The whole episode seems to have been something the family wished to put behind them and remains a dark corner in Wilbur’s life about which too little is known. But clearly it changed the course of his life.
For weeks he suffered excruciating pain in his face and jaw, then had to be fitted with false teeth. Serious digestive complications followed, then heart palpitations and spells of depression that seemed only to lengthen. Everybody grew more and more concerned. All talk of Yale ended. His ailing mother did what she could to care for him, but as her own health kept steadily deteriorating, he began looking after her.
“Such devotion of a son had rarely been equaled,” wrote the Bishop, who would credit Wilbur with lengthening her life at least two years. In the morning she usually felt strong enough to come down, with some help, to the first floor, but at night Wilbur would have to carry her back upstairs.
Brother Lorin seems to have been the only one who disapproved. “What does Will do?” he wrote Katharine from Kansas, where he had gone to seek his fortune. “He ought to be doing something. Is he still cook and chambermaid?”
Wilbur remained a recluse, more or less homebound, for fully three years—three years when he began reading as never before.
The Wright house at 7 Hawthorn Street, the setting of so much of the family’s life, was modest in size and appearance, and located in a comparably modest neighborhood. Like much of Dayton, Hawthorn Street remained unpaved until shortly after the turn of the century, and Number 7, with two linden trees and a stone hitching post in front, was a narrow, white frame structure very like others on the street, except for a decorative, wraparound front porch built by the brothers.
There were seven rooms, three downstairs, four up, all of them small, as was the lot. Only two feet separated the house from Number 5 next door on the north side. To get between the houses required one to turn and walk sideways.
The brothers were well into their twenties before there was running water or plumbing in the house. Weekly baths were accomplished sitting in a tub of hot water on the kitchen floor, with the curtains drawn. An open well and wooden pump, outhouse, and carriage shed were out back. There was no electricity. Meals were cooked on a wood stove. Heat and light were provided by natural gas. House and property had a total value of perhaps $1,800.
The front door opened from the porch into a small, formal front parlor, but most everyone came and went by a side door on the porch that opened into the sitting room. From there the front parlor was to the right, dining room and kitchen to the left. A narrow carpeted stairway led to the bedrooms above.
The first-floor furnishings were all of the inexpensive Victorian variety to be found in homes throughout Ohio, or for that matter nearly everywhere in the country at the time—the lace curtains at the windows in the front parlor, the upholstered wooden rockers and Gilbert clock on the mantelpiece that chimed every hour and half hour, the mirrored oak sideboard in the dining room. High ceilings and the modest scale and simplicity of the furnishings made the rooms considerably less cramped in feeling than they might have been.
The decor upstairs consisted of bare essentials only—beds, bureaus, chamber pots—with the exception of the bookcase and rolltop desk in the Bishop’s cluttered bedroom at the front of the house overlooking the street. Wilbur slept in the room in the middle, Orville and Katharine in the two rooms at back. Since the gas fireplaces downstairs provided the only heat, bedroom doors upstairs had to be kept wide open during cold weather.
With the tracks of the Dayton Western and Union Railroad only blocks away, the sound of train whistles was part of the night in all seasons. The smell of coal smoke in the air was the smell of home.
The Wright family book collection, however, was neither modest nor commonplace. Bishop Wright, a lifelong lover of books, heartily championed the limitless value of reading.
Between formal education at school and informal education at home, it would seem he put more value on the latter. He was never overly concerned about his children’s attendance at school. If one or the other of them chose to miss a day or two for some project or interest he thought worthy, it was all right. And certainly he ranked reading as worthy.
Those works he considered “very serious,” on theology mostly, were in his bedroom, the rest, the majority, proudly in evidence in the sitting room in a tall, glass-fronted bookcase. 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 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 On the Origin of Species, plus two full sets of encyclopedias.