Free The Bishop's Boys by Tom D. Crouch Page A

answer, but his boys were excellent scholars, just as he argued they would be. 10
    Like his older brothers, Orville started school late. Susan had intended otherwise, enrolling him in kindergarten back in Dayton at the age of five. She walked him to school on the first day, then saw him off, neatly dressed, each morning. Weeks later she discovered that he had stopped attending after that first day. He walked down the block to his friend Ed Sine’s house each morning and returned home on time each afternoon. Home tutoring began shortly after that, and continued until the family moved to Cedar Rapids, where he finally started school in the second grade. 11
    Orville was a good student. That first year in Cedar Rapids he won first prize—a picture of Miss Palmer—for best penmanship in class; he was also moved on to the third reader before the end of the year. To do so, he had to read out a passage from the second reader for visiting school officials. They were amused when Orville literally raced through the required passage, holding the book upside down. Any child who had memorized the text, they decided, deserved promotion. 12
    Eleven-year-old Wilbur was a sixth grader at the Washington School in Cedar Rapids that year. Emma Fordyce, his teacher, who knew Orville as well, remembered Wilbur as being “less communicative” than his little brother and “too dreamy” to get into trouble. Then, as later, history and geography were his favorite subjects. 13
    If Wilbur was quiet, and tended not to volunteer information in class, he was nonetheless already very sure of himself. Back at Garfield School in Dayton he had once been severely reprimanded by a teacher for failing to arrive at the correct answer to an arithmetic problem on the blackboard. A young girl was instructed to help him with the problem; several minutes later the students returned. Wilbur had convinced the girl that he was correct, and together the two of them then convinced the teacher. (Thirty years later, the young girl, now Mrs. D. L. Lorenz, greeted Wilbur when he came to New York to fly for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration.) 14

    Orville Wright was eight in 1878….
    Orville and Reuchlin were on the opposite ends of the educational scale when the family moved to Iowa. Reuch graduated from Coe’s Collegiate Academy in Cedar Rapids in 1878, the year Orv began school. There is some suggestion that he intended to enter the clergy—his high school graduation speech was entitled “The Evidences of Christianity,” and in the fall of 1879 he enrolled at Western College, a Brethren school only ten miles south of Cedar Rapids that turned out many ministers over the years. The next summer Reuch assisted his father in teaching a special Fourth of July Sunday School class at a local church. 15
    Reuchlin did not return to college in the fall of 1880. Instead, he took the state teaching examination on November 2, and taught one term at an elementary school a few miles south of Cedar Rapids. It seems clear that this break in the pattern of his life marked the beginning of a serious rebellion against parental authority.
    Many years later, in 1907, Reuchlin’s nineteen-year-old daughter Helen “declared independence” in a similar fashion and took a job in town. In describing the situation to Wilbur and Orville, Bishop Wright remarked that Reuch was having “about the same experience with her [Helen] that I had with him when he was about the same age, only I managed not to let him break away. After a year or two he became and remains most dutiful.” 16
    Reuchlin’s “rebellion” almost certainly involved the natural desire of a young man to achieve some measure of detachment from the family. Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine’s experience would prove that Milton, on the other hand, was a possessive father reluctant to allow his children to leave home and explore life on their own. Reuch did return home, although time would show that the reconciliation was by no means