Page 13 - Leisure Living Magazine Spring 2017

Wilbur Wright And
The Hockey Stick
By Justice Paul Pfeifer, Ohio Supreme Court
Author David McCullough’s latest book – The Wright Brothers – recounts the inspiring story of the brothers from Dayton who conquered the air and ushered in the age of human flight. It’s a story we’re all generally familiar with, but McCullough provides rich detail of the brothers’ lives and times.
One of the most significant stories about the Wrights involved older brother Wilbur who, in high school, was a “star athlete – in football, skat- ing, and gymnastics – and outstanding as a stu- dent.” His future was bright, and there “was talk of his going to Yale.” But that all changed one after- noon in the winter of 1886, his senior year.
Wilbur was playing hockey on a frozen pond beside the Dayton Soldiers’ Home when he was smashed in the face with a stick. Most of his upper front teeth were knocked out. For weeks afterward Wilbur “suffered excruciating pain in his face and jaw, then had to be fitted with false teeth. Seri- ous digestive complications followed, then heart palpitations and spells of depression that seemed only to lengthen.”
For the next three years, Wilbur “remained a re- cluse, more or less homebound.” It took him about seven years to fully recover his health, and “all talk of Yale ended.” But it was during this time – as he read everything he could find – that he became interested in the quest for human flight. And the rest, of course, is his-
father – fills in a piece of the story that wasn’t so well known.
According to Bishop Wright, the boy who bust- ed Wilbur’s face was Oliver Crook Haugh. At the time, Haugh lived two blocks from the Wrights. He was only fifteen – three years younger than Wilbur – but “as big as a man and known as the neighborhood bully.” It was later said of Haugh that he “never was without the wish to inflict pain or at least discomfort on others.”
We’ll never know if Haugh’s hit was an acci- dent or on purpose. But we do know that Haugh was working in a drugstore at the time, and the druggist, in an effort to relieve Haugh “of the pain of rotting teeth, was providing him with a popular cure of the day, ‘Cocaine Toothache Drops.’” Haugh “became so dependent on drugs and alcohol, his behavior so out of control,” Mc- Cullough writes, that he was committed to an asylum for several months.
After Wilbur and Haugh’s incident on the ice, their lives took divergent directions. While Wil- bur and Orville gained everlasting fame with an invention that changed the world, Haugh gained eternal infamy as one of the most notorious mur- derers in the history of Ohio.
Things didn’t start out badly for Haugh. He actually received a medical degree in 1893. But his drug addiction continued to haunt him. When Rob- ert Louis Steven- son published The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886, the book evidently had a pro- found impact on Haugh. He boasted that he was on the verge of discover-
tory.
The story of Wil-
bur’s hockey inju- ry was already well known, and its im- pact on his life was undeniable: had he pursued a more-tra- ditional education, the brothers might never have flown. But McCullough, who had access to the diary of Milton Wright – the boys’
Orville, 34, left, and Wilbur, 38, Wright
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