First in Flight Page 25

  In the years after the war, he saw the first financial ease of his life. His fathometer brought him a good income. And in 1928, he finally won a major suit against violators of some of his old radio patents, which netted him a sum reported at anywhere from several hundred thousand dollars to two and a half million. While the award left him comfortable, it barely tapped the value of his many inventions over the course of his lifetime.

  In his later years, with his heart failing, he moved to Bermuda, his wife’s home. For a time, he tried self-treating his heart with electrical stimulation, but his principal interests were experimenting in agriculture and theorizing about ancient civilizations. His principal anthropological writing was a tome called The Deluged Civilization of the Caucasus Isthmus. He died July 22, 1932.

  Today, outside of a couple of state historical markers—one on Roanoke Island and the other near Cape Hatteras—Reginald Fessenden is little remembered around North Carolina. In 1964, the Coastal Carolina Emergency Network issued its first Fessenden Memorial Public Service Award, presented at a performance of the famous Lost Colony outdoor drama in Manteo. In the 1980s, a coastal group tried to generate interest in developing a Fessenden memorial on Hatteras Island, but the effort has yet to bear fruit. Some say the base of the old boiler at his Roanoke Island facility is still visible in Croatan Sound at low tide, but if so, it is difficult to find.

  The Word Men

  The news coverage of the flights of December 17, 1903, remained a source of controversy around Norfolk at least as late as 1928. That December, the Virginian-Pilot ran a series of articles in celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the birth of flight. Included in the series were a couple of pieces by Harry Moore, who told how he had scooped the world with his coverage of the event.

  That brought a response from Keville Glennan, the Virginian-Pilot’s city editor back in 1903 and a part-owner of the paper in 1928. He stated his position in a letter to the editor: “For the purpose of keeping the record straight, I would like to inform you that the credit for the magnificent ‘beat’ which the Virginian-Pilot scored on that occasion does not belong to any individual man—no one person ‘scooped the world’.”

  Having said that, Glennan hastened to cast his vote for Edward Dean, the man who had received the news of the flights from the local Weather Bureau office. Dean, Glennan pointed out, was the first to report the story to the city desk. “And that’s the finish line in news races,” he wrote.

  The following day, the paper started backpedaling, running a statement from the publisher apologizing for “any erroneous impression” the anniversary series might have created and stating that “Mr. Glennan’s description of the event is entirely correct.”

  This did not please Harry Moore, who felt his contribution to the historic scoop was being slighted. A sharp exchange of letters in the Virginian-Pilot followed. Moore went so far as to collect statements from staffers who had been at the paper back in 1903, whose main contribution was to air old grievances against Glennan. “Don’t let anything Glennan has to say worry you in the least,” one former colleague wrote Moore. “I know him of old. He waits 25 years to claim credit for himself and Dean for the hard and excellent work you did on the Wright flight story.” Another former co-worker claimed Glennan had thrown the first-flight story in the wastebasket and had to be persuaded to retrieve it.

  For his part, Edward Dean was the voice of reason, assigning credit as it was most likely due: in three equal parts. Dean claimed that he had been first to report the event, that Moore had supplied the essential details, and that Glennan had written the story.

  Of course, the prize was hardly worth the fight. Harry Moore once met Orville Wright and asked him what he thought of the first-flight story in the Virginian-Pilot. “It was an amazing piece of work,” Orville said. “Though 99 per cent wrong, it did contain one fact that was correct. There had been a flight.”

  The three newsmen went on to varied lives.

  Though Keville Glennan never got closer to an early Wright brothers flight than spying on the telegraph reports of their 1908 Outer Banks season from the men’s room at the Weather Bureau office in Norfolk, he did manage to be present at one of aviation’s great events. On November 14, 1910, Eugene Ely, one of Glenn Curtiss’s pilots, came to Hampton Roads, Virginia, to attempt the first takeoff from the deck of a ship. Glennan was there to cover and snap a photograph of Ely as he left the deck of the USS Birmingham, dipped so low that the plane’s wheels got wet, and then gained altitude and made it to dry land.

  Harry Moore, only nineteen or twenty years old in 1903, was offered a five-year contract by the Norfolk Dispatch when his role in the first-flight story came to light. However, he elected to stay at the Virginian-Pilot. In fact, he stayed so long that he eventually became the paper’s oldest reporter, covering a number of important maritime stories over the course of his career. He attended the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of flight at Kill Devil Hills in 1928, then didn’t attend again until the forty-ninth anniversary in 1952.

  Edward Dean was the most quietly ambitious of the men involved with the first-flight story. He soon moved to a position with the New York Times. Reaching age forty-five and feeling he had yet to accomplish anything of significance, he wrote a pair of books for Harper and Brothers in a two-year span. Still, he considered his career a failure. He wrote Keville Glennan in 1927 saying how he hoped to leave the workaday world and find time to write a great novel. That never came to pass. Crossing a street one night on his way home from work, at about age fifty, he was hit by a truck and killed.

  Byron Newton was the brightest star among the reporters covering the Wrights in the early days.

  Having grown up learning how to plow with oxen in rural New York State, Newton had apparently distanced himself from his roots by the time he arrived on Roanoke Island in 1908 and pronounced the local people “well nigh as ignorant of the modern world as if they lived in the depths of Africa.”

  No one who knew Byron Newton ever doubted he was going places. He was locally famous from the time he began publishing poetry in his teenage years. A skeptic of the Wrights before he saw them fly on the Outer Banks, he was soon a faithful supporter, even becoming, in the view of some, the first newspaper specialist in aviation.

  If Newton’s success wasn’t surprising, his ultimate direction was: big-time politics. In 1912, he served as the director of publicity for Woodrow Wilson’s successful presidential campaign. The following year, he became assistant secretary of the treasury. Beginning in 1917, he served as collector of the port of New York, a demanding job during the World War I years.

  Through all this, Newton never lost his artistic urge, continuing to publish poetry and play the violin.

  He and Alf Drinkwater grew into longtime friends, Newton supposedly visiting the old telegrapher in Manteo for a week every year.

  Another of Drinkwater’s friends was Van Ness Harwood, who came to the Outer Banks to cover Orville Wright’s glider trials in 1911. Harwood eventually moved to Manteo with his wife.

  It is unfortunate that Bruce Salley, the first professional newsman to cover a Wright brothers flight in person, saw the most untimely end of all the journalists who came to the Outer Banks. Salley parlayed his flight stories of 1908 and 1911 into a job with the New York Herald. His promising career was cut short in 1917, when he died of a massive heart attack at age forty-four.

  The Local Folk

  First-flight witnesses Willie Dough, Adam Etheridge, and John Daniels might have been amused to learn of their posthumous reunion in 1974. The occasion was the release of a model kit depicting the historic events of December 17, 1903, manufactured by the Tonka Corporation and distributed through a Smithsonian mail-order catalog. Orville and the Flyer were the feature performers, of course, but the three Kill Devil Hills lifesavers were of a stature equal to Wilbur’s—they were all two-inch-tall figurines. Daniels, who snapped the famous first-flight picture, was to be posed behind a toy camera
and its tiny tripod. The color key indicated that he was to be painted wearing a dark gray hat, a white shirt, a gray jacket, a dark green sweater, dark gray pants, and black shoes. The kit sold for about seventeen dollars.

  John Daniels retired from the Coast Guard in 1918 due to disability. After that, he captained several vessels plying North Carolina’s inland waterways, including the ferry running between Beaufort and Morehead City.

  Often praised for his landmark photograph, Daniels seemed equally proud of his status as the world’s first airplane casualty, having been trapped in the wind-driven Flyer as it cartwheeled across the sand after the fourth powered flight.

  Elizabeth City newspaper editor W. O. Saunders rode Daniels’s ferry in 1927 and opened a conversation with the former lifesaver by saying, “I rather expected to find you piloting an aircraft by this time.”

  “Who, me?” Daniels asked. “No, sir, the only way they’ll ever get me in one of them airplanes again will be to put me in irons and strap me in. I reckon I’m the proudest man in the world to-day because I was the first man ever wrecked in an airplane, but I’ve had all the thrill I ever want in an airplane; I wouldn’t take a million now for that first thrill, but you couldn’t give me a million to risk another.”

  Daniels changed his mind about flying in 1937, when he and Adam Etheridge were invited to attend an air race in Cleveland, Ohio. Though first inclined to make the trip by bus or train, they finally decided to fly, an experience Daniels described as “the most pleasant ride we ever had. Why, when we got about to Pittsburgh, I went sound asleep.”

  Daniels and Etheridge were back on tour in April 1938. Henry Ford had purchased the Wright brothers’ home and bicycle shop and moved them from Dayton to Dearborn, Michigan, where they were to become part of Greenfield Village, Ford’s collection of historic structures associated with noteworthy Americans. The two former lifesavers were guests at the dedication.

  According to a 1970 article in the Eden (N.C.) News, it was on this trip that Daniels was inducted into the Early Birds, an association of old-time aviators. In a departure from his customary silence at public gatherings, Orville Wright supposedly introduced Daniels at the Early Birds banquet by making use of his friend’s favorite subject: “The man is present tonight who rode further in the plane than either of the inventors.”

  As a distant cousin of Josephus Daniels, a longtime Raleigh newspaper publisher and secretary of the United States Navy under Woodrow Wilson, John Daniels could boast another connection with aeronautical history. In 1913, the year he was appointed to his high post, Josephus Daniels became the first cabinet-level official to fly in an airplane. “Daniels, did you want to get yourself killed?” President Wilson supposedly asked him upon learning of his flight. It was also during Josephus Daniels’s tenure, in 1919, that a United States Navy plane made the first flight from America to Europe, starting on Long Island and ending in Plymouth, England, with stops in Nova Scotia, the Azores, and Portugal. This preceded Charles Lindbergh’s solo, nonstop flight by eight years.

  Orville Wright, John Daniels, and Josephus Daniels all died in January 1948, Orville and John Daniels within twenty-four hours of each other.

  Adam Etheridge, John Daniels’s good friend, died in 1940, as did first-flight witness and Manteo resident W. C. Brinkley, a lumber broker in 1903 and a dairy farmer in later years.

  Johnny Moore was the junior member of the first-flight witnesses. He was also the least prepared for the attention that came his way in later years. Though he lived on Colington Island less than a mile from the national memorial honoring the Wright brothers, he often declined invitations to participate in commemorative ceremonies held there, ceremonies well attended by his fellow witnesses.

  That changed in 1948. Orville Wright and John Daniels were dead, leaving Johnny Moore the only man alive who had seen the famous flights. And it just so happened that 1948 was also the year that the Flyer was to be brought back to the United States and installed at the Smithsonian. A witness to the events of December 17, 1903, was desired at the ceremony in Washington, and pressure mounted on Moore to make the trip.

  He finally agreed, bringing his wife, Chloe, with him. And after that, he attended the anniversary ceremonies at the memorial in Kill Devil Hills in 1950 and 1951.

  This brief fame was a mixed blessing to Moore. An unpolished man at events where sophistication was called for, he was as much a curiosity as a figure of respect. He signed autographs, met important people, and received royal treatment in his official capacity, but he also took a few knocks. His offhand comment upon seeing the rebuilt Flyer—widely reported as either “I seen it before,” “I seen it once,” or “I seen it onct”—was taken as a sign of either boredom or backwardness. His reply when asked whether it was true that he really had fourteen children—“Sounds right to me, but I ain’t counted lately”—also received play. A piece in the Washington Evening Star covering the 1951 ceremonies at Kill Devil Hills cruelly introduced him as “rheumy-eyed John Moore” and said he was “undoubtedly the least eloquent of all the speakers who looked back upon the 48th anniversary of the airplane.”

  In an event entirely unconnected to these public doings, Johnny Moore, in ill health, took his own life by shooting himself in the head with a shotgun in February 1952.

  The Raleigh News and Observer eulogized him in a manner befitting a private man who found attention thrust upon him, calling him “the dean of freshwater fishing guides” and noting how “he often told visitors he would charge them nothing if they didn’t catch the legal limit of fish.”

  Alf Drinkwater continued to lead one of the most interesting lives of the North Carolina people associated with the Wright brothers. Forced to retire from his position as a Coast Guard communications official around 1946 because of his age, Drinkwater quickly found other pursuits. He became involved with the Civil Air Patrol, eventually assuming the mantle as that organization’s oldest warrant officer in the entire United States. He worked as a stringer for the Associated Press through the age of eighty-six, undoubtedly becoming one of the senior writers in the business. He also sold real estate and insurance from an office in Manteo, his window displaying the slogan “See Me Before You Buy or Burn.”

  Throughout his life, Drinkwater continued to tell how he had sent the telegraph announcing the first powered flights, a story generally more doubted than believed. But no matter. No one ever questioned his role in transmitting the news of the Wrights’ 1908 Outer Banks season, and that brought him plenty of attention in itself.

  According to accounts in the Greensboro Daily News and the Raleigh News and Observer in the 1940s, future president Herbert Hoover once came to Drinkwater’s home to examine the transcripts prepared by the newsmen who covered the Wrights in 1908. This visit supposedly took place in the early 1920s. In 1945, during a Manteo dinner held in Drinkwater’s honor, some of those transcripts were displayed in glass-topped cases borrowed from Fort Raleigh.

  He also received invitations to attend dedication ceremonies at airports in Charlotte and elsewhere. At the opening of a new Eastern Air Lines passenger terminal at New York International Airport in 1959, he tapped out the official message kicking off the celebration on his old Morse key. When someone asked his opinion of the Big Apple, Drinkwater conceded that it was “mighty big,” but was sure to mention how “you folks … never saw an airplane until 1909.”

  Drinkwater was a noted party host on Roanoke Island. Over the years, he accumulated a number of monikers, among them “the Old Salt of Dare,”“Cap’n Alf,” “Drink of Dare,” and “the Fig Wizard of Roanoke Island.”

  He took great pride in his leisure-time hobby—the cultivation of figs. Shortly after World War II, the British ambassador supposedly visited Drinkwater’s home and liked his fig preserves so well that he took some home to the queen, who wrote the old telegrapher a complimentary letter.

  Drinkwater was a newsman to the end. According to an account in the Raleigh News and Observer, he was sick with can
cer when he awakened at two-thirty one morning in September 1962. Sensing his approaching death, he called his daughter, Dorothy, to his side and asked her to contact well-known Outer Banks publicist Aycock Brown, who was in turn to notify the Associated Press of Drinkwater’s impending event.

  He died three hours later, at age eighty-seven.

  Though their correspondence lagged at times, Orville Wright and Bill Tate seemed to grow closer as the years passed. In one of his final letters, addressed to Tate, Orville expressed his desire to pay one more visit to his oldest North Carolina friend.

  Bill Tate was not quite done nurturing flying men when he joined the United States Bureau of Lighthouses and moved to Coinjock to tend the Long Point Lighthouse in 1915.

  His grandson, Elmer Woodard, Jr., later told an old family story, passed down through the years, about a chance meeting on Currituck Sound. A young man of eighteen or nineteen was bailing his boat on the sound one day in 1917 when he heard a voice calling, “Hello, there!” across the water. He was more than a little surprised to see two men a few hundred yards away rowing a seaplane toward him. It seems the men had been flying through the area that day when they began having trouble with their propeller. They were now looking for a place to go ashore and get repairs.

  They must have been pleased to find an easy solution to their problem in such a remote place. The young boatman turned and pointed toward the Long Point Lighthouse two miles away, telling them they could find a man there who had quite an interest in aviation, someone who had a lot to do with it in the early days.

  True to form, Bill Tate took the men ashore, told them where they could get the parts they needed, and put them on a train.

  One of the aviators soon returned to the lighthouse and his seaplane but showed an inclination to linger at the Tates’ longer than was necessary to make repairs. During his two-week stay, he apparently took Bill up for a flight to inspect the local aids to navigation, sparing him a four-or five-hour job by boat.