An important part of the family’s education in geography, not to say a continuing stimulant for their curiosity, was supplied by the Bishop in long letters written during his travels, often while on board a train. However far his travels, his love of his country and its splendors remained abundantly evident. Minneapolis and St. Paul were “cities of marvelous growth, in a wonderful wheat-producing country.” He wrote with enthusiasm and amazement. So steep were the grades over the mountains west of Missoula that three locomotives were required, two in front, one behind, he reported to those at home. His world, and consequently theirs, kept growing. “Yesterday, I came down here, starting at 1:40 a.m.,” he reported in a letter mailed from Biggs, California.
You ought to have seen [the] Siskiyou mountains which we crossed yesterday on the cars. We rose pretty high, and to make grades, wound about for miles to get only a few. After a mile’s run we would come back to 200 feet from where we were before, about 175 feet higher up. We [ran] through several tunnels, but none long, the last at the summit being the longest. It is the grandest scenery and highest rapid grade I ever went through.
From wide reading and observations of life, he had acquired what seemed an inexhaustible supply of advice on behavior, habits good and bad, things to beware of in life, goals to strive for. He lectured on dress, cleanliness, economy. At home he preached courage and good character—“good mettle,” as he would say—worthy purpose and perseverance. Providing guidelines he understood to be part of a father’s duty.
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.
He made a point of treating the three of his children at home with equal consideration and affection, praising each for his or her particular talents or contributions to the family. But plainly his favorite was Wilbur, “the apple of his eye,” as Katharine said.
Wilbur had also been the cause of the greatest worry. In his youth he had excelled in everything. He had been a star athlete—in football, skating, and gymnastics especially—and outstanding as a student. In his last full year of high school in Dayton, his grades were in the 90s in everything—algebra, botany, chemistry, English composition, geology, geometry, and Latin. There was talk of his going to Yale.
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.
What exactly happened is hard to determine, but to judge from the little that is known, there is much more to the story. According to an entry in Bishop Wright’s diary written years afterward, in 1913, the “man who threw the bat that struck Wilbur” became one of the most notorious murderers in the history of Ohio, Oliver Crook Haugh, who, in 1906, was executed for the murders of his mother, father, and brother, and was believed to have killed as many as a dozen others besides.
At the time of the hockey incident, Haugh lived just two blocks from the Wrights. He was only fifteen, or three years younger than Wilbur, but as big as a man and known as the neighborhood bully. As would be written in the Dayton Journal following his execution, “Oliver never was without the wish to inflict pain or at least discomfort on others.”
Whether he “threw” the stick at Wilbur accidentally or intentionally is impossible to determine. 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.
Wilbur undoubtedly knew him, but how well, or whether Haugh had some sort of score to settle with Wilbur, or was under the influence of drugs at the time of the incident, are all unknown. Except for Bishop Wright’s brief diary mention, nothing on the subject is to be found anywhere in the Wright family correspondence or reminiscences. Nor is there much in the way of detail or firsthand description about the devastating after-effect of the accident on Wilbur. 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.
For weeks he suffered excruciating pain in his face and jaw, then had to be fitted with false teeth. Serious digestive complications followed, then heart palpitations and spells of depression that seemed only to lengthen. Everybody grew more and more concerned. All talk of Yale ended. His ailing mother did what she could to care for him, but as her own health kept steadily deteriorating, he began looking after her.
“Such devotion of a son had rarely been equaled,” wrote the Bishop, who would credit Wilbur with lengthening her life at least two years. In the morning she usually felt strong enough to come down, with some help, to the first floor, but at night Wilbur would have to carry her back upstairs.