First in Flight Read online

  As it turns out, this aviator, Bennett Severn of New Jersey, was after more than Bill Tate’s friendship. He returned the following spring to marry Bill’s elder daughter, Irene. Bennett Severn eventually gave up barnstorming in the interest of safety, but before he did, Irene grew into as avid an enthusiast as her husband, flying some ten thousand miles with him and becoming the first woman to fly round-trip between New York and Miami.

  The teenager in the boat who directed Bennett Severn to the lighthouse was supposedly Elmer Woodard, Sr., who married Bill’s younger daughter, Pauline. It was a fortuitous meeting of the future sons-in-law of Bill Tate.

  Bill was a tireless supporter of the Wrights and the cause of aviation throughout his life, eventually heading the Kill Devil Hills Memorial Association and the North Carolina branch of the National Aeronautic Association and becoming a member of the North Carolina Aviation Committee. His last wish was that he be present at Kill Devil Hills for the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of flight on December 17, 1953, but he died about six months short of that date, at age eighty-four.

  Bill’s son Elijah, the boy who was judged too heavy to ride a wing during the family trip to Kill Devil Hills that took place in either 1908 or 1911, eventually became a mechanic for Glenn Curtiss’s company, and a pilot as well.

  Orville Wright, 1871–1978

  Orville Wright returned to the Outer Banks in April 1939. As covered in U.S. Air Services magazine, this little-known trip was exactly the kind of private, nostalgic visit described separately by Elmer Woodard, Jr.

  Orville left Dayton in his eight-cylinder Hudson on Friday, April 14, to attend the Gridiron Dinner in Washington, where he sat at Table A, just to the right of President Franklin Roosevelt’s table. On Sunday, he boarded a steamer for Old Point Comfort, Virginia, where he visited Langley Field.

  Tuesday morning, he drove south from Norfolk, picking up Bill Tate at the Long Point Lighthouse in Coinjock before heading to the Outer Banks and Kill Devil Hills.

  There was no separate visitor center at the national memorial in those days, the big monument on top of the dune serving that function. Arvin O. Basnight, the uniformed National Park Service guide on duty that day, was more than a little surprised to recognize Orville Wright trudging unannounced up the dune. It is unclear whether Orville saw the interior of the monument during the dedication ceremony in 1932, but Basnight was under the impression he was giving the great man his first tour that Tuesday in 1939.

  After their visit, Orville and Bill Tate continued south. At Nags Head, they turned west onto the bridge across Roanoke Sound—the first on the Outer Banks, constructed in 1927—and drove to Roanoke Island, where they visited historic Fort Raleigh and Manteo. Orville then returned Tate to his home and made a solo visit to Elizabeth City—which he hadn’t seen since the 1911 glider trip—before heading back to Norfolk for the night.

  This was very likely Orville’s last visit to the Outer Banks.

  In 1942, one of his fondest wishes was granted when the Smithsonian finally came clean about the flight trials of the rebuilt Langley craft, effectively admitting that the Wrights were the first to fly and clearing the way for the installation of the 1903 Flyer in our national museum.

  Of course, wartime Great Britain was in peril just then, and there was concern over whether the Science Museum of London and the Wrights’ aged craft would survive German bombing. Still, it was decided that it was safer to keep the Flyer where it was than to try to ship it home during the war.

  Orville didn’t live to see the day in 1948 when the Flyer was crated up and put aboard the Mauretania for the voyage back across the Atlantic. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, it was transferred to the carrier Palau for the trip to Bayonne, New Jersey. From there, a military honor guard and a motorcycle escort led the Flyer on an overland trip to Washington, where it was finally welcomed at the Smithsonian on December 17, 1948, the forty-fifth anniversary of the famous flights.

  One of the stipulations under which it was given to the museum was that, should the Smithsonian ever recognize another airplane as capable of sustained flight before the Flyer, Orville’s estate could reclaim possession of the craft.

  Orville Wright lived to see nonstop transatlantic flights, reliable commercial air service, early jet propulsion, and rocketry. He also saw the air attack on Pearl Harbor, the heavy World War II bombing of much of Europe, and the leveling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  He was asked during World War II whether he ever regretted his invention. His reply was a classic: “I feel about the airplane much as I do in regard to fire. That is, I regret all the terrible damage caused by fire. But I think it is good for the human race that someone discovered how to start fires, and that it is possible to put fire to thousands of important uses.”

  A practical joker around his family, Orville was extremely humble in his public doings. Once asked to list what he considered the ten most important inventions from the past hundred years, he named things like the linotype machine, radio, the air brake, the telephone, and the telegraph. Conspicuously absent was the airplane.

  He suffered a heart attack in Dayton on October 10, 1947, while running up some stairs to keep an appointment. He was hospitalized for four days. On January 27, 1948, he had another heart attack. He died in the hospital on January 30, at age seventy-seven.

  The airplane would have come about without the Wright brothers, of course.

  Their success with gliders was in no way a product of the period in which they lived. The materials they used had been available for centuries. But for lack of insight, someone might have designed efficient wings and a three-dimensional control system long before they did.

  But powered, sustained flight was impossible before their time. Lightweight engines were just reaching a state of refinement around the turn of the century. In fact, engines soon grew so efficient that, within certain bounds, they could overcome inferior design in other areas. Some of the Wrights’ competitors flew remarkably well with second-rate propellers and wings.

  Author Harry Combs estimates that without the Wright brothers, the airplane would not have been developed for ten to twenty more years, with important—if unknowable—consequences for both world wars. Some experts have questioned whether the Nazis could have been stopped with air power in a more primitive state than it was in the early 1940s.

  There is also room for debate about how the Wrights are to be credited for the development of qualitatively different forms of flight. Most authorities would say that airplanes and rockets are no more similar than the principles of lift and thrust. But in carrying a piece of wing fabric from the Flyer with him during his historic walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong demonstrated the view that the Wrights are at least the spiritual fathers of more advanced forms of travel.

  Gifts among Friends

  The Wright brothers’ work has been commemorated in more ways—large and small, public and private—than can be recounted.

  Among the major literary figures who have written about the Wrights are John Dos Passos and Ogden Nash. One of the best-known tributes is Robert Frost’s poem “Kitty Hawk”—the central poem in his final book, In the Clearing. A depressed, lovelorn Frost wandered his way through the Great Dismal Swamp to Elizabeth City and ultimately to Nags Head as a nineteen-year-old in 1894. Later a supporter of the Wrights, he met Orville in the 1930s. He wrote the poem after a return visit to the Outer Banks in 1953.

  If you prefer screen adaptations, you can take your pick between Michael Moriarty and David Huffman or Stacy and James Keach as the brothers from Dayton in a couple of the film treatments of their story. The Washington Post described Stacy Reach’s cigar-chomping Wilbur Wright as “bullying, petulant and repressed” in the 1971 production Orville and Wilbur. And petulant Wilbur was, admonishing his younger brother, “Orville, if I told you a thousand times, I cannot stand lumps in my gravy!” A few concessions to modernity were made in the show’s flight sequences. For safety’s sake, the Flyer replica, made of metal, w
as tethered to a Jeep and powered by a 750cc Honda engine. The younger crowd would likely prefer the animated television program in which the Wrights had the honor of meeting Charlie Brown and the “Peanuts” gang.

  For a roving advertisement of the Wrights’ accomplishments, it would be hard to top the six million “First in Flight” license plates currently worn by North Carolina vehicles. Though the “First in Flight” campaign may come across as a bit of regional bravado, it started as an act of self-protection. North Carolina license plates put in circulation in the mid-1970s bore the slogan “First in Freedom,” which drew a storm of legal challenges and sent officials scrambling for a motto to replace it. “The matter of Kitty Hawk and First in Flight is a historical fact, a fact that we can prove,” said Henson Barnes, the floor manager for the bill in the state senate that brought the new plate into being in the early 1980s.

  The Wrights’ influence on the Outer Banks runs deep. The fine beaches of Dare County would surely have seen development if Wilbur and Orville had never paid them a visit, but it is equally certain that the Wrights influenced the course of that development.

  Kill Devil Hills, with no permanent population whatsoever when the Wrights first saw it, is now the largest community in the county, approximately 4,200 people living within its corporate limits. Dare County, with the major resort area stretching from Kitty Hawk to Kill Devil Hills to Nags Head as its principal draw, is host to between 100,000 and 140,000 visitors on any given day during peak season. A good many area businesses use the region’s connection to the Wright brothers in their advertising and even in their names.

  The local development that would likely have been of greatest interest to the Wrights is the hang-gliding industry centered around Jockey’s Ridge, just south of Kill Devil Hills. With a height varying from 110 to 140 feet, the big dune at Jockey’s Ridge is the tallest in the eastern United States. Though the dune and its smaller sisters do not offer the advanced challenges of mountain hang gliding, their forgiving landing surface and the strong winds in the area—qualities the Wrights recognized long ago—have made them one of the premier training grounds in the world. An estimated hundred thousand pilots have tried hang gliding at Jockey’s Ridge. Some of the major figures in the sport are regular visitors.

  The state of North Carolina established Jockey’s Ridge State Park in 1975, after a grass-roots effort led by Carolista Fletcher Baum—the granddaughter of novelist Inglis Fletcher—saved the dunes from being bulldozed for development. Today, there is lingering concern over whether the big dune—unanchored, unlike the dune supporting the monument to the Wright brothers at Kill Devil Hills—will migrate beyond the boundaries of the park. Or it may dwindle to nothing, having no source of new sand to replenish what blows away.

  Francis Rogallo, a former NASA engineer, is the man considered the father of modern hang gliding. In the 1960s, during his effort to design a parachute system for the recovery of rockets, he developed what is called the “Rogallo wing” or the “flex wing.” His wing design was tested with hang gliders primarily in California.

  After his retirement, Rogallo moved to Southern Shores, just north of Kitty Hawk. He witnessed and learned of some amazing flying at Jockey’s Ridge. In the early 1980s, Jim Johns of Marina, California, took off from Jockey’s Ridge, circled to heights of a thousand feet on rising air currents, and landed four miles away—at the foot of the monument to the Wright brothers. In altitude and distance, this flight exceeded any gliding the Wrights had ever done by about a factor of twenty-five.

  Francis Rogallo, still busy designing kites and testing them at Jockey’s Ridge during his later years, subsequently offered a cash prize for the first pilot to fly round-trip between the state park and Wright Brothers National Memorial. Not yet claimed, that prize is still on deposit in a bank.

  Mementos of the Wrights are scattered up and down the Outer Banks.

  Fate has been kind to the two lifesaving stations they frequented.

  The former Kitty Hawk station, located at Milepost 4 on N.C. 12 in Kitty Hawk, now houses a well-known restaurant, the Black Pelican Seafood Company. Though the building has been added to and is not as easily recognizable as the second-generation stations that followed four years later, the Wrights would still be able to identify the main dining room as the place where they were welcomed by their first friends among the North Carolina lifesavers.

  It was to the Weather Bureau office housed at this station that Wilbur Wright addressed his initial inquiry about Kitty Hawk. And three and a half years later, it was from this place that Joe Dosher, the recipient of that inquiry, telegraphed the news of the flights.

  Its neighbor, the Kill Devil Hills station, fell into disrepair after it was replaced by a newer structure in the 1930s. In fact, it was in such bad shape when local realtor Doug Twiddy expressed interest in buying it in the mid-1980s that he was advised not to waste his time. Furthermore, he was informed that it wasn’t the original station at all, but rather a boathouse. That opinion was quickly disproved, as Twiddy removed the Coast Guard sign gracing the building and discovered the old U.S. Lifesaving Service sign underneath.

  Restoring the structure was more difficult. First came a change of scenery. Twiddy wanted to use the station as a realty office in Corolla, located thirty miles north at the end of the Outer Banks road, so he arranged to have it moved by flatbed truck in three separate pieces: a wing, the top floor, and the bottom floor. That accomplished, a preservation architect set about returning the building to as near its original state as was possible.

  Today, the station houses Outer Banks Style, a retail store. The building is recognizable to anyone who has seen photographs of the lifesaving stations of the late 1870s.

  Less permanent reminders of the Wright brothers have had varied fates. Some exist only in memory.

  Its usefulness past, the 1900 glider provided material for Bill Tate’s daughters’ dresses—complete with French knots around the collar and bows tied at the back. When worn out, the dresses were casually discarded.

  Wood from the 1900 glider supposedly came into the possession of John Daniels. According to his son, Archie, the family carved it into toothpicks and splinters and gave them out as souvenirs.

  In 1975, ninety-eight-year-old Lillie Swindell of Manteo, formerly of Kitty Hawk, made headlines around North Carolina with the claim that her family had been the final recipient of the world-famous 1903 craft. However, with the Flyer having been held by the Smithsonian for more than a quarter-century, and by a major British museum for many years before that, her story was obviously mistaken. But on closer examination, her basic memory of the events—that the Wrights had given a flying machine to her former husband, first-flight witness Adam Etheridge—rang true. As best as could be determined, it was the 1902 glider she once possessed.

  Mrs. Swindell told how she had given the wing cloth to neighbors for use in making children’s clothes. Some of the wood was used to make quilting frames, and the rest was sent to the attic. Later, she asked Adam Etheridge to move it. When he was slow in doing so, she burned it herself.

  Sometime between the Wrights’ 1908 Outer Banks season and 1912, Margaret Hollowell of Elizabeth City was summering at her family’s cottage in Nags Head when she learned that other vacationers were bringing souvenirs from a deserted camp up the beach. She and a small group of girlfriends took a pony and cart and went to have a look. At the camp, they saw where local residents had stripped away boards from the buildings for use at their own homes. Pieces of flying machines and miscellaneous papers were scattered around the ground.

  Hollowell took a few samples of wood and a stack of papers away with her that day. Back in Elizabeth City, she stored them in her attic, where mice got into the papers over the years.

  It was 1927 before she resolved to do something with them. By that time, about the only papers she could identify were shooting targets initialed “O. W,” “W.W.,” and “Chas.”—the latter for 1908 camper Charlie Furnas. She boxed up every
thing she had and mailed it to Orville Wright in Dayton, asking him to keep what he wanted and to send the rest back, identifying whatever he could.

  A notoriously slow correspondent, Orville was ten years in replying. Two of the pieces of wood were rudder struts from the 1905 powered machine, flown on the Outer Banks in 1908. They would prove useful in a planned reconstruction of that craft, the world’s first practical airplane. The miscellaneous bits Orville sent back became part of the collection at an Elizabeth City museum.

  Over the years, Margaret Hollowell was not the only person to retrieve some priceless artifact from the sand and ship it back to its famous owner. Orville was pleased to receive the packages that came his way, but he made no serious effort to clean out the camp and retrieve what was his. The Wrights attached little sentimental value to their craft, the 1903 Flyer excepted. Each was a means to an end, becoming dispensable as soon as they learned what they could from it.

  Frugal men in small matters, the Wright brothers were generous, even careless, with their possessions of greatest worth. Their camp buildings and the objects within them were left to rot or to be stripped of anything of value.

  In the years since Orville’s last camp in 1911, those haphazard gifts to their Outer Banks friends have been stored in attics, hung on walls, donated to museums, and incorporated into buildings—carved, trampled, resewn, tinkered with, burned, washed away by storms, dispersed by the wind. Mostly, they are part of the sand supporting the great monument to the Wrights.

  Perhaps the best gift the brothers received in return came courtesy of Bill Tate.

  In 1912, he wrote the custodian of the Hall of History in Raleigh,

  I want to put myself on record by saying that we North Carolinians are lacking in civic pride…. If Virginia Dare had been born in Massachusetts instead of North Carolina, a shaft piercing the sky would mark the spot instead of the simple monument that now exists. If Wilbur Wright had begun the assembly of that first 1900 experimental glider which led to man’s conquest of the air on the front yard of some citizen in California, as he began it in my front yard here in North Carolina, tons of printers ink would have been spread over the event, a monument would have marked the spot, and tourists would have come from thousands of miles, just to see and stand on the spot. Verily, we Tar Heels are very much lacking along the lines of the preservation of our epoch-making events of history.