May 18, 2015
“Wilbur would remark that if he were to give a young man advice on how to get ahead in life, he would say, “Pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio.”
May 18, 2015
“It is assumed that young folks know best, and old folks are fogies. It may be so, but old folks may be as right about new fangles as young folks are about fogy ways.
Make business first, pleasure afterward, and that guarded.
All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others.”
May 18, 2015
“But all such plans ended when, playing hockey on a frozen lake beside the Dayton Soldiers’ Home, Wilbur was smashed in the face with a stick, knocking out most of his upper front teeth.”
May 18, 2015
“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”
May 18, 2015
“ 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.”
May 18, 2015
“Wilbur remained a recluse, more or less homebound, for fully three years—three years when he began reading as never before.”
May 18, 2015
“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.”
May 18, 2015
“Years later, a friend told Orville that he and his brother would always stand as an example of how far Americans with no special advantages could advance in the world. “But it isn’t true,” Orville responded emphatically, “to say we had no special advantages . . . the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.”
May 18, 2015
“
Now and then the brothers would include items from other publications that they judged worthy of the readers’ attention, such as one titled “Encourage Your Boy,” reprinted from Architect and Building News.”
May 18, 2015
“A high school friend of Orville’s, Paul Laurence Dunbar, who had been the class poet and the only black student in the school, became a contributor to the West Side News. Later, when Dunbar proposed doing a weekly paper for the black community, Orville and Wilbur printed it on credit, but it lasted only a short time.”
May 18, 2015
“Bicycles had become the sensation of the time, a craze everywhere. (These were no longer the “high wheelers” of the 1870s and ’80s, but the so-called “safety bicycles,” with two wheels the same size.) The bicycle was proclaimed a boon to all mankind, a thing of beauty, good for the spirits, good for health and vitality, indeed one’s whole outlook on life.”
Notes From: David McCullough. “The Wright Brothers.” iBooks.
