Everyone in the house read all the time. Katharine favored the novels of Sir Walter Scott; Orville, Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, while Wilbur—and particularly during his homebound lacuna—read just about everything, but had a particular love of history.
In those interludes when the Bishop was at home, he insisted on time with his books or he could be found at the public library pursuing his love of genealogy. As one who so strongly believed in the importance of family, he could not know enough about those from whom he and his children were descended. He wanted to make them aware of that, too, just as he wanted them to have open and receptive minds and to think for themselves. As said, his was a mind that never slowed down. “He talked very freely to his children on all subjects,” Orville would say, “except money making, a matter to which he gave little consideration.”
Included among the ecclesiastical works on his bedroom shelves were the writings of “The Great Agnostic,” Robert Ingersoll, whom the brothers and Katharine were encouraged to read. “Every mind should be true to itself—should think, investigate and conclude for itself,” wrote Ingersoll. It was the influence of Ingersoll apparently that led the brothers to give up regular attendance at church, a change the Bishop seems to have accepted without protest.
Interestingly, for all the Bishop’s dedication to church work, religion was scarcely ever mentioned in his letters to his children, or in what they wrote to him. No framed religious images or biblical quotations were part of the home decor, with the exception of a color print of Saint Dorothy, hanging to the left of the fireplace in the front parlor, but that was the part of the room where Orville customarily propped his mandolin against the wall, and she was the patron saint of music.
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.”
II.
In early 1889, while still in high school, Orville started his own print shop in the carriage shed behind the house, and apparently with no objections from the Bishop. Interested in printing for some while, Orville had worked for two summers as an apprentice at a local print shop. He designed and built his own press using a discarded tombstone, a buggy spring, and scrap metal. “My father and brother seeing my determination to become a printer, managed after a while to get a small printing press for me,” Orville later explained, and with the help of Wilbur, who was ready to resume life again, he began publishing a newspaper, the West Side News, devoted to the goings-on and interests of their part of Dayton on the west side of the river.
A first edition of four pages appeared on March 1 carrying the advertisements of seventeen local establishments, including F. P. Nipkin’s drugstore, W. A. Lincoln’s Dry Goods (offering “BIG BARGAINS”), Winder’s Grocery, the Cleveland Laundry, and the H. Ruse Feed Store. Orville was listed as publisher. The subscription rate was 45 cents a year, or two weeks for 10 cents.
The editorial content for this and the editions that followed consisted mainly of one short article of general interest along with numerous bits and pieces of local news, these selected by Wilbur apparently. One could read of a freight car breaking down on the Wolf Creek bridge or that the Shakespearean reading by Professor C. L. Loos at the high school was widely appreciated by the large audience present, that the trunk factory of W. I. Denny had burned to the ground, or that George La Rue of South Hawthorn Street had presented his large collection of bird eggs to the public library. Or that Miss Carrie B. Osterday of West Third Street, and G. J. Nicholas and Tula Paisly Street were all sick with typhoid fever. Or that police officers O’Brien, Urmey, and Kitzelman had arrested Ed Kimmel and another boy for stealing chickens.
At the same time one could also find mention of the disastrous flood at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, or the completion of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
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.
Do not wait for the boy to grow up before you begin to treat him as an equal. A proper amount of confidence, and words of encouragement and advice . . . give him to understand that you trust him in many ways, helps to make a man of him long before he is a man in either stature or years. . . .
If a boy finds he can make a few articles with his hands, it tends to make him rely on himself. And the planning that is necessary for the execution of the work is a discipline and an education of great value to him.
By the end of April, with the paper showing some profit, Orville moved the business to a rented space on West Third Street, where the city’s electric trolley ran, and Wilbur, now twenty-two, was prominently listed as editor.
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.
At some point, Dunbar is said to have chalked on the shop wall this quatrain tribute:
Orville Wright is out of sight
In the printing business.
No other mind is half so bright
as his’n is.
In 1893, through the influence of Bishop Wright, a first collection of Dunbar’s poems was published by the United Brethren Church, for which Dunbar himself paid the cost of $125. In another few years, having been discovered by the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells, Dunbar had become a nationally acclaimed poet.
That July of 1889 the paper carried the obituary of Susan Koerner Wright. Which brother wrote it is unknown. Most likely it was a joint effort. She had died at home on July 4, at age fifty-eight, after an eight-year struggle with tuberculosis.
She was of retiring disposition, very timid and averse to making any display in public, hence her true worth and highest qualities were most thoroughly appreciated by her family.
She was buried two days later at Woodland Cemetery, her whole family present. Never afterward was July 4 to be a day of celebration in the family. As the Bishop would write in another July to come: “The Fourth had its Chinese firecrackers . . . [and] Hawthorn Street furnished several displays, but No. 7 was not patriotic. Not a drum was heard, not a flag was [un]furled, and not a firecracker snapped there.”