Showing posts with label Ohio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ohio. Show all posts

Monday, July 7, 2025

I Read the Wright Brothers Biography, Because Wilbear Deserves to Know About His People

Flying at Huffman Prairie, 2017

The Wright BrothersThe Wright Brothers by David McCullough
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This deep dive that I took into the early history of aviation was always going to lead me to David McCullough.

If possible, I highly recommend reading an in-depth biography like this AFTER visiting one or more of the places relevant to the subject’s life, because I think it’s even more fun in this case to read about a place I know than to visit a place I’ve read about. I’ve never been to Kitty Hawk (although I super want to someday!), but I’ve been in and around Dayton to see Wright Brother sites like their bicycle shop and printing office, Huffman Prairie, and the family gravesite, and more, in my devoted campaign to earn my beloved Wilbear. You can also visit the mansion they had built for themselves there after they got rich on Wright Flyer contracts, but for their original family home you have to go to Detroit, because Henry Ford bought it and moved it there.

original 1903 Wright Flyer in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

Henry Ford also, by the way, once snookered his way into the shed where a Wright Flyer was being stored and got caught making measurements of it. Nothing ever came out of that, apparently, but it’s still hella suss.

As an only child, and the parent of two children who love each other but lead decidedly individual lives, I’m fascinated by the experience of two siblings (and sometimes three siblings!) who lived their lives so much in each other’s pockets that a single biography suffices for both. They’re like the Sam and Dean Winchester of manned flight! Do you think they ever had a conversation about their relationship or their future, or did they always just automatically pal up in a way that never needed voice put to it?

And they seem to have automatically palled up even in enterprises that only really interested one. The printing business was Orville’s baby, and although Orville complained a lot about Wilbur not investing his soul into it as much as he himself did, there never seemed to be any question of Wilbur popping off to, say, run his own business or get his own job and leave the boring printing stuff to Orville.

Wright brothers' printing office in Dayton

Instead, they seemed content as life partners, living their lives together just as happily--and probably a lot more equitably--as they’d have been with romantic life partners. When their sister Katharine went off to Oberlin and their dad was doing his traveling preacher thing (the only part of the book that I found too much and too boring was Dad’s preacher work--boring to read about, and also irrelevant as neither Wright brother’s life and works seemed otherwise notably informed by religious belief), the brothers seemed to live contentedly together in the family home, each sharing the load in a way that apparently satisfied them both. Here’s an excerpt from a letter Wilbur wrote to Katharine:

“Orville cooks one week and I cook the next. Orville’s week we have bread and meat and gravy and coffee three times a day. My week I give him more variety. You see that by the end of his week there is a big lot of cold meat stored up, so the first half of my week we have bread and butter and “hash” and coffee, and the last half we have bread and butter and eggs and sweet potatoes and coffee.”

I guess they at least had sweet potatoes often enough to prevent scurvy?



Okay, I lied. I did think the part of the book in which the dad is fired from his preacher job because he was unwilling to accept Freemasons was interesting and hilarious. Seriously, what was UP with Freemasonry?!? They really had better be secretly housing the Holy Grail or some similar nonsense to have been worth all of these conspiracy theories.

When I started the book and read about the brothers’ early years, I thought that I was going to like Orville best. He was so mechanical-minded, even more so than his brother! He was always thinking up ideas of cool new stuff to try! Just between us, he was probably on the autism spectrum, and would have meltdowns when overstimulated and then have to go off and be quiet for a while.

But then… I dunno, Wilbur just really grew on me. It started when he was 17 and was hit so hard in the face by a future serial killer that he pretty much dropped out of school and gave up on his dreams to go to Yale and spent the next two years housebound, the full-time caregiver for his mother at the end of her life. How can you not be sympathetic to that much clear trauma?

Much later, his personality really shone through in the letters he wrote home while he was in France attempting to demonstrate the Wright Flyer and make deals with the French for its production. He mostly worked, because dude worked like a dog, but he also saw cathedrals and museums and tried new foods, and wrote about everything in an unaffected way. This is my favorite part of those letters:

“I was a little astonished and disturbed the other evening, when I sat down to dinner to find my soup which was a sort of noodle soup, turning into all sorts of curious forms and even letters of the alphabet. I began to think I had the ‘jim jams.” On close investigation I found that the dough had been run through forms so as to make the different letters of the alphabet and figures, too! It was like looking into the “hell box” of a printing office, and was all the more amusing because every mouthful of soup you take out, brought up a new combination.”


Wilbur Wright ate his first alphabet soup, and found it charming. How could the reader, as well, not be charmed by that?

Wilbur also impressed everyone who met him in France with his unflappable courage in simply going about his own business to demonstrate his flying machine, not letting anyone sway or influence him into flying when he didn’t think the conditions were absolutely perfect. McCullough gently hints that he seemed to worry that Orville wouldn’t do the same when he was demonstrating their flying machine back in America, and indeed, Orville does also hold the record for piloting the first fatal airplane crash…

You can see the original 1905 Wright Flyer in Dayton

Alas, Wilbur died shockingly young, at just 45, and whether it was grief or just his natural self coming through without any curbing force from his older brother, Orville began to impress me less and less as he aged. First, it was just him, his sister Katharine, and their dad in the family mansion, but when their dad died five years later, it was just him and Katharine for the next nine years. One day, though, Katharine told him that she was going to marry an old school chum from Oberlin and long-time friend to the entire family, and they were going to move to his hometown of Kansas City.

And Orville PITCHED A FIT.

This is where I’m so mad at him that I can’t forgive him. You know that woman kept house for all those men for all those years, even though she had a proper full-time job. Back when Orville had that bad plane accident that killed his passenger she’d even taken a leave of absence from her job and gone to nurse him back to health, sitting up all night, every night in his hospital room to make sure he was properly attended. She was as invested in their business as they were, often doing the social work that would usually have been expected of a wife. And when she wants to do ONE THING that is her idea and belongs to her, Orville has a tantrum that frankly makes him seem like an incestuous creep and refuses to speak to her ever again.

Even when he got word two years later that Katharine was dying, he refused to go see her. He eventually changed his mind and arrived at her bedside just before she died, but that is WAY too little, too late. Wilbur would have NEVER!

I don't know why I'm smiling like that in front of the Wright family gravesite, 2025

It’s interesting to me that although the Wrights proved the possibility of powered flight and flew the first airplanes, our airplanes aren’t really descendants of them, but more like cousins. Their major insight of changing the shape of the wing to steer is the key to powered flight, but the way they did it, by physically altering the shape of their airplane wings by sort of twisting the fabric-covered frames, wouldn’t really scale upwards--it was more of a proof of concept. Now we use ailerons.

Other fun facts from the book: the hobble skirt was created in imitation/homage to the first female airplane passenger, who tied a rope around the bottom of her skirt to keep it in place while she flew. While in France, Wilbur switched out his regular Ohio suit jacket for a black leather motorcycle jacket. When Neil Armstrong became the first human to step onto the Moon, he carried a swatch of fabric from that first successful Wright Flyer.


And here's the most special fun fact of all! Back when the Wright brothers were really starting to crack powered flight, nobody "important" believed them. They tried to interest the military numerous times, and kept getting back form letters that clearly indicated their original letters hadn't even been read. Word of mouth was spreading, obviously, because all you had to do was take the trolley over to Huffman Prairie and you could literally SEE them flying, but whenever anyone big and fancy heard about it, they'd dismiss it as rumor or lies or showmanship or whatever. It was part classism, I imagine, and also partly because the Wright brothers at that time, unlike the other people working on powered flight, *didn't* engage in any attention-catching showmanship. They just went about their business inventing powered flight and popping off the occasional letter to the military to see if they wanted to buy some airplanes.

Eventually, it was France who took notice, and France who invited Wilbur over to demonstrate his plane, and the French citizens who flocked to watch his demonstrations and waited patiently until conditions were just right and then LOST THEIR FUCKING MINDS when they saw it was real and praised and publicized Wilbur so hard that the dumb-ass Americans finally took their thumbs out of their butts and looked at what they had right there in their own heartland. 

But before that part, while the Wright brothers were still working out the kinks in their plane and spending every day out at Huffman Prairie, they did collect a small community of superfans among those who'd believed the rumors. One superfan was an old guy who ran the magazine Gleanings in Bee Culture up near Cleveland. He was THE superfan and would drive his literal Model T all the way down to Dayton, stopping every 10 miles to put more water in the radiator or oil in the oil thingy, just to watch the Wright brothers try to get their hunk of machinery off the ground. 

And then he'd go back home and, in the middle of his articles about bees and beekeeping, he'd write little anecdotes about what he'd seen! THIS is the guy who broke the news of sustained, powered human flight. The first story about the first sustained, powered human flight appeared in Gleanings in Bee Culture in 1905

One hundred and six years later, that same magazine, now shortened to just Bee Culture, bought a few of my beeswax candle tutorials, shitty photos and all. I just need to emphasize that I take MUCH better photos now. Bee Culture, I'd be happy to reshoot this particularly obnoxious set for free!

ANYWAY, that's how the Wright brothers and I came to be represented in the same magazine. The end.

P.S. View all my reviews

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Wednesday, June 4, 2025

I Have Reached the Pinnacle of Summer Achievement, for Wilbear Wright is Mine

Oh, Happy Day, for I have achieved the dream that I have dreamed since March 14.

Wilbear Wright is MINE!

To earn Wilbear Wright, you have to visit at least eight sites on the Dayton Aviation Trail.

For me, Sites 1 and 2 were the Wright-Dunbar Interpretive Center and Paul Laurence Dunbar's house.

Site 3 was the graves of Wilbur and Orville Wright.

Sites 4 and 5 were the National Museum of the United States Air Force and the Aviation Hall of Fame.

Sites 6 and 7 were the Butler County Warbirds and the Wright "B" Flyer, Inc.

And Site 8 is Carillon Historical Park, home of an excellent museum about the Wright brothers, including an actual 1905 Wright Flyer in a display that was partly designed by Orville Wright himself!

Also this unrestored part of a 1905 Wright Flyer, which is actually outside the paid part of the park, so you can just go see it whenever you want:


I had to rely on my shitty cell phone camera because the flash on my Canon is even worse, but still, there's so much fascinating detail to see:


The fabric looks like a linen or a cotton--if there was proper signage that said, then I missed it--which is interesting, because the earliest glider that the Wright brothers tested at Kitty Hawk was sateen. Wilbur had to alter it on a local woman's hand-cranked treadle sewing machine because he wasn't able to find the lengths of wood on-site that he needed, and when the brothers were finished with that year's experiments they abandoned their glider, so that same woman scavenged the sateen to sew dresses for her two daughters. 


The stitching was certainly done by machine, probably another hand-operated treadle, and the stitches are VERY tidy--that's what sewing slowly will do for you!

We had come to the park specifically to see the Wright brothers stuff, so were a little baffled at first by the other historical displays. I don't know much about Ohio history other than the Mississippians and the Wright brothers, so we just sort of wandered into old buildings and absorbed random content.

This place had so many animatronics! Well, to my knowledge it actually has TWO animatronics, but two feels like a lot. One of them is this guy, and spoiler alert, yes, he IS related to Ichabod Crane, lol!


We wandered through this old wooden two-story building--


--while learning fun facts like the community's first jail was a literal pit in the ground. I would not want to await trial in a pit!


The buildings were moved to this site, though, so that boarded up well there isn't the pit, I don't think.

You know I have to snoop around every historical vegetable garden I see!


There was a whole building to display a CRAZY flood that the town had on Easter 1913, including this adorable old-timey Weather Channel report:


And there was another whole building full of Wright brothers merch!

The mock-up of the Wright Cycle Company and the print shop was a little weird, since you can see the real versions of both for free about a five-minute drive from here, but I never get tired of looking at these old-timey bicycles with cork hand grips:


Way back at the Wright "B" Flyer, Inc., we overheard a random guy trying to bait the docent into a "gotcha" moment by informing her that in Brazil, they lauded a Brazilian guy for having invented the airplane first. This museum had a whole wall for various pioneers of aviation, including their specific accomplishments, and I'm guessing that guy was talking about this dude:


To be fair, the wording on that display *does* sound a little defensive, so there might be more to the controversy than they're stating. Interesting!

I was genuinely surprised/impressed by how many cool artifacts Carillon Historical Park has scored. Check out some actual fragments of the Wright Flyer II!


AND they've got the camera, THE camera that took the historic photo of the first successful sustained flight:


This guy is my favorite brother. He used to get easily overstimulated and lash out at people, and SAME!


The Wright Flyer III has a terrific gallery all to itself, in which you can walk all the way around the plane and see it at a level that Orville Wright himself specified as the best level to see all the details:


As my older kid and I were standing at the barrier and discussing some detail or other--I will not be convinced that the Wright Flyers do not look backwards, but my kid refuses to agree--all of a sudden out of absolutely nowhere a man started speaking to me from just beside my other shoulder, where there had been literally nobody a second before, and I was so startled that I screamed. 

I turned to him and tried to apologize and tell him he'd just startled me because I hadn't known he was there, but he WOULD NOT STOP INTERRUPTING ME or acknowledge my apology and explanation and instead insisted on talking over me to tell me that if I stood up on the bench at the back of the gallery I could take a picture of the whole plane at once.

For Pete's sake, Dude! But also, he was correct, and I love my photo of the whole plane all at once:


Huzzah to probably our 300th image/recreation of a Wright Flyer at this point! We're earning those Wilbears!


Also, Wilbur Wright's favorite satchel that he apparently took everywhere. I'm obsessed and I want one just like it:


There was an excellent #womensupportingwomen moment in this gallery. My partner and I were sitting on a bench watching early footage of the design and construction of Carillon Park, and in the footage was a video of Orville Wright walking arm-in-arm with Edith Deeds, the wealthy woman who once saw a really cool carillon while she was on vacation and decided that Dayton, Ohio, needed a really cool carillon, too, and if she was going to the trouble to have a carillon built she might as well go to some more trouble and build a whole entire park about it.

ME: "Huh. I wonder when that video was taken?"
PARTNER: "In the early 1950s."
ME: "I thought Orville Wright died in 1948?"

And before my partner could even respond to that--and it would have been in a reasonable manner, because he's not a mansplainer!--a completely random woman looking at a display to our left said, "Orville Wright did die in 1948."

Thank you, Anonymous Woman! She was NOT going to settle for even the smallest chance that my man might double down or act like an ass in the face of my objective correctness. It's also super baller, because whenever I hear a man being vocally incorrect in a museum I just rant about it to my companions while they attempt to get me to rant a little more quietly. 

Should I be confronting more incorrect men?

Anyway, the timeline *is* kind of unclear, because in the Wright Flyer display they make a big deal about the fact that Orville Wright helped with the restoration of the plane for display and then they show him walking with the founder of the park through what looks like some kind of opening ceremony-type festival and THEN they tell you that the museum part of the park opened in 1950 but they kind of elide the fact that by 1950 both Orville Wright and Edith Deeds were dead.

Tangent, but check out this game that Orville Wright patented and sold. It looks bananas, and I want to see it in action. 


On our way out of the park we stopped at the gift shop to collect our very last Dayton Aviation Trail stamp, then have our stamps tallied, and finally receive our very own Wilbear Wright for each of us.

I LOVE HIM. He is ready for adventure, with his little aviation jacket and goggles, and he's the perfect size to pop in my backpack without taking up too much room, so from now on, I'm taking him with me on all my travels. 

Just me and my little old Wilbear, traveling the world and having adventures and counting every Wright Flyer recreation we see!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

P.P.S. I'm currently reading this excellent biography of the Wright brothers, so be prepared for a summer FULL of Wright brothers fun facts!

Tuesday, May 27, 2025

One More Site To Go Until I Earn Wilbear Wright

Local, independent museums are always so delightfully surprising and strange.

As in, I never would have told you that when I planned to hit up Butler County Warbirds, part of the Dayton Aviation Trail, early on a Saturday morning, I would also be visiting one of the best, most interesting, and absolutely most surprising private collections of World War II memorabilia.

But there we have it!

The primary goal of Butler County Warbirds is to preserve, protect, and restore its collection of antique planes and equipment, but the founder also made a small museum out of his own personal collection of military memorabilia, padded out with donations and loans from other collectors. The display is my favorite kind of intense--as in, there's a LOT of stuff, and a lot of it is the kind of everyday item or ephemera that it's more unusual to have had preserved for our present-day benefit. 

World War I gas mask

I remember this one from when the kids and I studied World War I. We engaged in trench warfare and listened to rousing tunes on Spotify!



A newspaper is usually a great example of ephemera you wouldn't normally see preserved, but people actually often saved entire newspapers when there was a big headline. It doesn't make it any less interesting to see, though!


The displays are well-organized chronologically and by theme, but one place where there's room for a research-minded volunteer to contribute is in explanation of provenance, meaning, and context. The volunteer docents had excellent general knowledge but weren't able to speak about specific pieces, so I had to martial my patience and bide my time until I could look everything up at home, ahem.

For instance, check out this INSANE KNIFE!!!



Have you ever seen anything more baller outside of a movie? It's apparently a Skull and Cobra Fighting Knife, and in my enthusiasm I just happened to take a photo that shows that it's also the even rarer "pig nose" variant, so probably made for a Marine with a blade repurposed from another knife. It's interesting that soldiers wanted fighting knives enough to make them for each other when they weren't being issued, but now I'm curious to know if soldiers were really out there knife fighting each other during World War II or what?

I thought it was cool to see a real syringe, but I wish I knew whose Purple Heart that was...


My partner and I had just seen some other examples of painted flying jackets when we were at the National Museum of the Air Force, but I love that this display has several of the pilot's things together:


This display was also pretty wild. The caption for this armband reads "JEWISH ARMBAND VILIJAMPOLE GHETTO":


That location is particularly notable because there was a well-documented underground resistance movement there, but over a year before the end of the war that ghetto was emptied and everyone who lived there was sent to be murdered in concentration camps. 

This page from the Zekelman Holocaust Center has examples of the typical badges that Jews were required to wear in different regions. The one in the photo matches the first example. I'm curious about the stamps on the badge in the photo, though. I've seen stamps on other badges, but I've never learned who did them or why.

Here's another amazing, and also baffling, artifact:


Its caption reads just "CONCENTRATION CAMP ARM BAND JEWISH HOMOSEXUAL," and I have so many questions! Obviously, I want to know where it came from, who wore it, what concentration camp they were confined in, and what happened to them. I'm also curious about how atypical the badge is:


People normally had to make their badges themselves, or obtain them from someone else who had handmade them, and this one is beautifully done. But it doesn't seem to be how they were technically meant to look, and I can't find another one like it. The closest comparison is here, interestingly also part of a private collection.

It's almost physically painful to look at it and not know who had to wear it and what happened to them, much less what happened afterwards that led it to a display case in a tiny museum in Ohio. 

After the Butler County Warbirds--and its Dayton Aviation Trail stamp!--we went to Wright "B" Flyer, Inc., another small non-profit that makes and flies recreations of the Wright airplanes. 

We got to actually climb up and sit inside a working recreation of the Wright B Flyer--


--and an actual Model T, including honking the ooga horn--


--and check out another modernized version of the Wright B Flyer that's still in progress. At this point, I think we've encountered 50 Wright Flyer images, models, and recreations!

Here's a good video that shows what the organization does. Pay a lot of attention to that good footage of wing warping--that's the Wright brothers' biggest innovation!


At some point while touring the Butler County Warbirds planes with two docents, I asked about how people were able to fly these DIY and kit-built literal airplanes. Was the FAA not... concerned? That's when I learned that there is literally such a designation as "experimental airplane," and yes, you CAN get the FAA to come to your backyard shed and certify your experimental airplane so you can tool it around unmonitored airfields!

Y'all. I think I found my mid-life crisis.

My other mid-life crisis plan is to buy land that has genuine prehistoric Native mounds on it and then, just, I don't know... roll around on all my mounds, I guess. While preserving and protecting them, of course.

So obviously, after all this airplane content, we had to 1) pick up Raising Cane's chicken (my favorite fast food place because the menu is so manageable, so PLEASE do not tell me who the company's owners donate money to or what other atrocities they've committed because I promise you I am boycotting enough businesses at it is) and 2) take it to the nearby Miamisburg Mound to eat it:




I did not realize it until we got there, but you can also CLIMB the mound!


So we did!



I find it frustrating when a mound like this doesn't seem to have been professionally studied in contemporary times (this excavation in the 1800s doesn't count, because they're also talking about how the mound definitely contained Nephilim skeletons, sigh), but I'm also horrified whenever I learn that a mound has been taken apart and then put back together just so people can see what's inside, so I guess there's no pleasing me.

When I buy my property with mounds on it, you're not even going to so much as look at them while you've got a garden shovel in your hand or I swear to God I'll bite you.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Thursday, May 22, 2025

Three More Sites To Go Until I Earn Wilbear Wright

 I will never get over how weird it is to say that the National Museum of the United States Air Force is the most underrated museum I've ever visited.

I've been there twice now, and I still haven't seen half the museum.

I was told before I visited the first time that it's better than the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and it IS.

I guess if you're the US Air Force, you've had a good, long while to collect some cool stuff!

What's even better is that the museum actually hosts TWO Dayton Aviation Trail stamps, as they treat the Aviation Hall of Fame inside the museum as a separate site. So my partner and I dutifully saw more early flight exhibitions and Wright flyer reproductions (I think we're up to about 20 at this point, and we'll have hit at least 40 before we're through)--

--and then before you know it, the Wright brothers have their plane business up and running and it's time for World War 1!


Check out Snoopy's plane:


I really like how colorful planes got to be before they were standardized:



I had to text my kids when I came across this poem on display:


I knew I'd required one kid to memorize that poem while the other kid had to memorize Dulce et Decorum Est, but which was which?

It was this one, and she still remembers it!


Fun fact: the big kid had actually had a choice between memorizing "Dulce et Decorum Est" and "Boots," but she thought "Boots" was too scary and she liked shouting "GAS! GAS!" in "Dulce et Decorum Est." 

The museum moves chronologically into World War 2--


logbook from the only American pilot killed in action during the Battle of Britain


--and then the Cold War:

the Mark 6 was the first mass-produced nuclear weapon

I'm so interested in all the Cold War spy stuff, all the normal bits and bobs of luggage with their secret compartments full of mysteries.

Yet another nuclear bomb, because I guess why not keep upgrading them until you're quite sure you can blow the entire planet to smithereens?


Mark 7 nuclear bomb, first produced in 1952

The last years of the Cold War are when my partner and I were impressionable kids, and so, of course, we both have our favorite planes from that time. Mine is the SR-71 Blackbird:


--but because he's a bad boy, I guess, his is the MiG:


But we both have the same favorite Desert Storm plane, the F-117 Nighthawk!



We only had time for a couple of exhibit galleries before we really needed to get back on the road (college move-out appointments do not wait for parents who are distracted by sightseeing!), but on the way out I did spy this cool exhibit of women's flight suits. Yay for strong female role models!



P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!