First in Flight Read online

  When wrecks occurred beyond the range of the Lyle gun, rescues were made the old-fashioned way. In early days, the lifesavers had to drag the surfboats through the sand to the water themselves; the draft horses later kept at the lifesaving stations for that purpose were renowned for their size and strength. In heavy weather, the lifesavers sometimes had to launch their boat several times before they could get beyond the breakers. After rowing to the wreck, they had to pull swimmers from the water, rescue them from on deck or even in the masts, or escort lifeboats through the surf.

  What was probably the signature rescue of the Outer Banks stations took place during World War I from the Chicamacomico station, on Hatteras Island. On August 16, 1918, the British tanker Mirlo, bearing fifty-two men and a cargo of gasoline, was heading north to Norfolk when it hit a mine laid by a German submarine. Leroy Midgett, stationed in the tower of the Chicamacomico station, saw the explosion and immediately notified the keeper, John Allen Midgett.

  The lifesavers had motorized surfboats by those days, but it still took the Chicamacomico men three launches to reach the open sea. Approaching what was left of the Mirlo, they found three lifeboats afloat and learned that a fourth had overturned near the wreck. Navigating a maze of burning oil amid exploding barrels of gasoline, Captain Midgett and his men made their way to the capsized lifeboat to save its former occupants. They then transferred sailors from the other three lifeboats to their surfboat for the dangerous run into the beach. To get all the men ashore, they had to land and launch several times. The rescue took six hours, but only ten men of the Mirlo were lost, a remarkable feat.

  Ironically, the sailors of the Mirlo, once hysterically grateful at seeing their rescuers, turned salty during their brief residence at the station, reportedly complaining about the accommodations and spitting tobacco juice on the floor.

  The British and American governments later bestowed numerous honors on the Chicamacomico lifesavers.

  The Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills stations were not among the busiest on the Outer Banks. Generally speaking, the farther south—the closer to Cape Hatteras and the infamous Diamond Shoals—the busier the station. The surf is also rougher farther south on the Outer Banks, as the water remains relatively deep near shore. The shoals lying close to shore off the Kitty Hawk–Kill Devil Hills area tend to break up the waves before they hit the beach.

  Latter-day men of the Kill Devil Hills station did participate in what was perhaps the most improbable pair of rescues in the history of the Outer Banks lifesavers. This took place after the Lifesaving Service and the Revenue Cutter Service were combined under the banner of the Coast Guard.

  In December 1927, the Greek tank steamer Kyzikes, formerly the Paraguay, was battered by a storm and began taking on water two hundred miles off the coast. Its crew radioed for help. Six different ships responded to the call but either failed to locate the Kyzikes, lost it in the dark, or were damaged themselves. Finally, with its radio out, four of its crew washed overboard, its engines dead, and its lights inoperable, the Kyzikes ran aground and broke apart a mile north of the Kill Devil Hills station shortly before dawn. A group of sailors made their way to the bow and flashed a distress signal, They were relieved to see a bright light answer promptly. But after additional messages were exchanged, it came to be understood that it was members of the ship’s own crew answering, and from only ten or fifteen feet away; the stern of the ship had broken off cleanly and swung around almost alongside the bow. A gangplank was promptly run between the bow and the stern, and the crew was reunited.

  Shortly after dawn, a couple of men on shore, one a member of the Kill Devil Hills crew, spotted the Kyzikes. The lifesavers assembled on the beach, fired a line to the ship, and eventually rescued twenty-four sailors.

  Less than two years later, in September 1929, the Swedish steamer Carl Gerhard lost its way while traveling down the coast from Nova Scotia to Florida. For five days, the sky was so overcast that the captain could neither take star sightings at night nor see the sun during the day. Neither could he locate any lighthouses on the coast. Finally, just before dawn one morning, the Carl Gerhard bumped a sand bar and then slammed into a partially submerged obstruction—the remains of the Kyzikes, a mile north of Kill Devil Hills. Four crews were quickly summoned, including the men of the Kill Devil Hills station. A line was fired to the ship. Twenty-five living beings rode the breeches buoy to shore that day: twenty-one men, a woman, two dogs, and a cat. The Kyzikes and the Carl Gerhard still lie together today.

  The lifesavers of the Kill Devil Hills station in 1903, as listed in the official payroll records, were Jesse E. Ward, keeper, Robert L. Westcott, William T. “Tom” Beacham, Adam D. Etheridge, John T. Daniels, Willie S. Dough, Benjamin D. Pugh, and Otto C. Ward, substitute. Adam Etheridge had previously been with the Caffeys Inlet station and Bob Westcott with the Oregon Inlet station. Willie Dough was a former fisherman and farmer. John Daniels, a former day laborer, had been a lifesaver for less than two years. He and Adam Etheridge were close friends, being married to half-sisters.

  Men sometimes worked at one station one year and another the next, or worked as a lifesaver one year and at some other occupation the following year. This led to a certain informality in the bestowing of the lifesaver designation and to some confusion in the official records. For example, Benjamin W. “Uncle Benny” O’Neal, one of the witnesses at Wilbur Wright’s failed attempt at powered flight on December 14, 1903, is generally described as a Kill Devil Hills lifesaver, though he does not appear in the 1903 records as such. Likewise, S. J. Payne, said to have witnessed the famous flights through a spyglass from the Kitty Hawk station four miles away, is invariably described as the captain of that station, though it appears that title was officially held by Avery B. L. Tillett.

  Given their service to the Wright brothers and their legacy of heroism on the Outer Banks, it seems fitting that it was a group of lifesavers—accompanied by a teenage boy and a man from Manteo hobnobbing at the station—who were summoned to witness North Carolina’s most famous event. Most of the men at the Kill Devil Hills station were privileged to see either Wilbur’s failed attempt on December 14 or the brothers’ successful flights of December 17, whether in person or from afar.

  To say that the witnesses to the first powered flights were low-key about their involvement with the Wright brothers would be an understatement. Their attitude was epitomized by Bob Westcott, the No. 1 surfman at the Kill Devil Hills Lifesaving Station. On watch at the station on the morning of December 17, 1903, Westcott alternately discharged his duty, scanning the sea for passing ships, and turned his spyglass on the activity at the Wrights’ camp. From a distance of nearly a mile, he could easily identify the men at the site, and he saw all four of the flights.

  Westcott’s involvement was apparently common knowledge at the station, yet no one bothered mentioning it publicly. It was twenty-five years before it came to light in a court case that he had witnessed one of the great events of the century Even Orville Wright, who kept close track of such things, didn’t know to count Westcott among the witnesses until many years after the fact.

  So it was with the other witnesses. Little was ever heard publicly from Willie Dough, Adam Etheridge, and Manteo lumber merchant W. C. Brinkley. John Daniels gave a few interviews in later years, but he certainly didn’t go courting attention. Muskrat trapper Johnny Moore, seventeen years old at the time of the flights, was a figure of note at a few latter-day functions honoring the Wrights mainly because of his reticence. Asked about his memories of the Wrights or his opinion of the state of aviation, he’d issue a gruff comment, be described by the newspapermen present as “bored,” “noncommittal,” “unimpressed,” or “Coolidge-like,” and head back home.

  These, then, were the men present on the famous day.

  Those Who Didn’t

  Others were less modest than the first-flight witnesses. News of the flights was initially met with skepticism or indifference, but over the years, as the impo
rtance of the Wrights’ accomplishment came to be understood, a cast of would-be and could-have-been witnesses started to grow.

  Four of the men who contributed most to the Wright brothers’ efforts were not on hand to witness their triumph.

  Now living at Martins Point, fifteen miles away by horseback, Bill Tate was no longer seen frequently around Kill Devil Hills. Still, the Wrights valued his company. They told him they intended to make an attempt at powered flight on December 17 and invited him to make the trip.

  Upon rising that morning, Tate looked outside. The wind was gusting and the temperature was around the freezing mark. He doubted the Wrights would fly under such conditions and decided to stay home. Reconsidering, he later mounted up and headed south. By his own account, he made it as far as the Kitty Hawk post office when a man—identified in some sources as one of the lifesavers and in others as Johnny Moore—came running up the beach shouting, “They have done it! They have done it! Damned if they ain’t flew!”

  Bill Tate had missed the event. Over the years, he came to regard it as “the greatest regret of my life.” No one was more responsible for the Wrights’ presence on the Outer Banks than Tate.

  The brothers’ relationship with Dan Tate deteriorated through the 1903 season. Dan, a fisherman, had become a fixture in camp over the past couple of years, running errands, helping in the construction and maintenance of the hangars, and assisting at glider launches. Now, he was apparently having misgivings about his role. According to Orville, about two weeks after the Wrights arrived, Dan showed up in camp one morning, announced that the price of fish had gone up, and asked whether the brothers would require his help again that year, and for how long. If so, he wanted his salary increased, and he wanted to be paid weekly.

  The Wrights agreed to up the incentive to seven dollars a week—nearly double the local rate—but that being the case, they wanted to formalize the conditions of Dan’s employment. They stipulated that he be in camp by eight o’clock every morning and that he work a ten-hour day, with an hour of that time allowed for travel to and from home. The Wrights would also provide him dinner.

  This arrangement only worsened matters. All of a sudden, the Wrights found Dan’s carpentry skills lacking. As Orville put it, “Whenever we set him at any work about the building, he would do so much damage with his awkwardness that we found it more profitable to let him sit around.” Having determined it was best for Dan to be sitting around, they came to consider him “spoiled” when he did so.

  The Wrights needed to have someone on hand whenever the weather turned suitable for flying, and they were willing to pay Dan for a good deal of idle time in return for that assurance. In exchange, they expected his uncomplaining help with menial tasks and with flying.

  Dan’s perspective was different. The Wrights’ elder, and a man accustomed to wresting a living from the sea, he suddenly found he was qualified to do nothing better than a maid’s chores—and his employers weren’t even satisfied with the way he did those. Clearly frustrated, he began griping when the Wrights asked him to do the dishes. He also complained when they requested his help out in the dunes.

  They parted company over a minor squabble on Wednesday, October 28. The weather had turned cold, and Wilbur instructed Dan to go to the beach and gather some driftwood for the camp stove. Dan, chafing at more busywork, countered that gathering driftwood wasn’t worth the trouble, since cut wood was available for only three dollars a cord from one of the Baum family. When the Wrights asked that he do as he was told, Dan “took his hat and left for home,” according to Orville. He didn’t come back.

  Dan Tate was never again close to the Wrights. Though no one beside the Wrights themselves knew the feeling of running beside a wing and launching a glider better than Dan, he missed out on the powered machine.

  As did George Spratt. In ill health between the 1902 and 1903 seasons, Spratt recovered well enough to make his third visit to the Outer Banks, arriving on October 23. He was just in time to endure some miserable weather and to witness the Wrights having trouble with their engine. Spratt judged them ill-prepared for powered flight. He even thought they were courting disaster.

  Spratt stayed only two weeks. By the time the Wrights’ propeller shafts were damaged in a test on November 5, he had seen enough. In fact, he was on his way to the boat within two hours of the mishap, taking the damaged shafts with him, to be expressed from Norfolk back to the bicycle shop in Dayton, where Charlie Taylor would set them straight.

  Spratt did contribute indirectly to the powered flights before his departure, by building portions of the junction railroad. The Wrights missed his presence. No one was more welcome in camp.

  It was pure coincidence that Spratt, in Manteo at the beginning of his trip home, bumped into Octave Chanute, who was on the final leg of his journey to witness the Wrights’ experiments. Spratt gave his opinion that the brothers’ chances were poor.

  Chanute’s reaction is puzzling. After visiting Kill Devil Hills, he felt obliged to write Spratt and tell him how promising he felt the Wrights’ work was. And upon learning of the flights of December 17, he sent Spratt an I-told-you-so letter. To the Wrights, however, he was far less encouraging. It was Chanute’s position, after all, that the brothers’ engine was underpowered and that they were cutting their calculations too close.

  Given the rough climate and the Wrights’ slow progress, Chanute stayed on the Outer Banks only a week and missed the flights.

  Chanute was also the conduit by which another outsider nearly came to the Wrights’ camp in 1903. In December 1902, Patrick Alexander, a balloon pilot, a parachute jumper, and a figure inhabiting the fringes of British government, had traveled across the ocean, finagled a letter of introduction from Chanute, and knocked unannounced on the Wrights’ door in Dayton the day before Christmas. That he charmed the Wrights is proven by the fact that they told him he would be welcome on the Outer Banks, though they barely knew him. In fact, the only thing that kept Alexander from witnessing the brothers at work at Kill Devil Hills in 1903 was missing a travel connection with Chanute in Washington. Alexander later carried so much information about the Wrights back to the British government that the brothers came to believe he was a spy.

  A couple of North Carolinians may have come even closer to witnessing the historic flights.

  Mrs. Lillie Swindell, whose first husband was Kill Devil Hills lifesaver Adam Etheridge, told in her later years how, during the late-morning hours on December 17, 1903, she had been standing at her kitchen window in Kitty Hawk, where she had a distant but plain view of the Wrights’ camp. Though the flights took place right in front of her, she didn’t bother to watch for lack of interest.

  And Ora L. Jones, a seventeen-year-old, six-dollar-a-week reporter for the Asheville Citizen, later claimed he was sent all the way across the state to cover the Wrights’ trials.

  Jones had gained favor with his supervisor for a humorous piece ridiculing Samuel Langley’s efforts at powered flight. “The feature I wrote on this prompted my editor to send me … to Kitty Hawk, where he said two other cranks were trying to fly,” he told the Asheville paper in 1964. “He thrilled me by handing me $50 expense money and saying he wanted me to go down there and write some really funny stuff.”

  How a newspaper editor in a North Carolina mountain town came by his knowledge of the Wrights is anyone’s guess.

  “Naturally I expected the Wright brothers to be impressed and appreciative when I told them I had traveled 500 miles just to ‘write them up,’”Jones remembered. “On the contrary they made it painfully clear that they wanted no publicity. They ordered me to get away from Kill Devil Hill and stay away.”

  Jones claimed he watched some of the Wrights’ preparations through a spyglass borrowed from the lifesavers but was huddled by a stove in a boardinghouse a mile from Kill Devil Hills at the time of the flights. He supposedly learned of the brothers’ success on his way back to Asheville.

  Certain aspects of his account—h
ow mosquitoes plagued the Outer Banks in mid-December; how he planned to return to Elizabeth City, across Albemarle Sound, by horse and buggy; how he found lodging so close to uninhabited Kill Devil Hills—make his story suspect. It is also worth noting that his paper carried no news of the Wrights at least through mid-January. But if his account contains any truth at all, if six decades of memory simply obscured some of the details, then Ora L. Jones was easily the closest reporter to the scene of the flights.

  One of the strangest claims of involvement with the Wright brothers came to light in the early 1960s. Frank B. Wood, a Florida octogenarian, and a balloonist, parachutist, and automobile and bicycle racer in his younger days, told a UPI reporter how he had been in Philadelphia in late 1903 when he ran into a friend and fellow thrill seeker, the great Barney Oldfield. According to Wood, Oldfield happened to be on his way to the Outer Banks to ask the Wrights to build him a special-order bicycle, and he invited Wood and perhaps a third man along.

  They started out by automobile and completed their journey by horse and buggy, train, and ferry. Arriving at the Wrights’ camp on December 14, they helped launch the failed attempt at powered flight that day. In fact, Wood described three trials on December 14, the first stretching about 44 feet, the second about 60 feet, and the third about 166 feet.

  Though they departed before the historic flights three days later, it was Oldfield, according to Wood, who made them possible, by instructing the Wrights how to lengthen their elevator lever so the plane would “get more air.”

  Wood’s story was given credence by a second UPI report and an account by the Raleigh News and Observer. Unfortunately, it holds little water. The Wrights made only one attempt at powered flight on December 14. They documented the witnesses to that trial both on paper and on film, and Frank B. Wood and Barney Oldfield were not among them. Barney Oldfield, a brash, cigar-chomping twenty-five-year-old, was the number-one driver on Henry Ford’s racing team. Just six months earlier, he had become the first man to drive an automobile at the speed of a mile a minute. The presence of such a person-age on the Outer Banks would have been worthy of note.