McFarland Collection of Wright-Findley Correspondence (SC-323)

Katharine Wright was born August 19, 1874, in Dayton, Ohio, the youngest child (and only surviving daughter) of Bishop Milton Wright and Susan (Koerner) Wright, and a younger sister to the Wright Brothers. When Susan Wright died in 1889, Katharine assumed many of the household duties. Katharine graduated from Oberlin College in 1898 and returned to Dayton, where she taught Latin at Steele High School. She was a strong supporter of her brothers’ work in aviation. In September 1908, when Orville was injured in the crash at Fort Myer, Virginia, she rushed to his side, ultimately resigning her teaching position for good. In 1909, she and Orville sailed for Europe to meet Wilbur, as he was making demonstration flights in France. After Wilbur died in 1912 and Bishop Milton Wright died in 1917, it was just Orville and Katharine in the mansion at Hawthorn Hill for several years. It was much to Orville’s dismay and disapproval when Katharine wed a long-time Oberlin friend and widower Harry Haskell in 1926 and moved to Kansas, where he was editor of the Kansas City Star. Katharine died on March 3, 1929, from pneumonia, at age 54.

Earl Nelson Findley was born May 29, 1878, in Xenia, Ohio, which is very near Dayton. He became a journalist with the New York Tribune, and around 1908 he began specializing in aviation reporting. It was actually in New York City that Findley first made the acquaintance of (and obtained an interview with) fellow Miami Valley native Wilbur Wright, during the Hudson-Fulton celebration in 1909. Findley later met Orville and Katharine as well and became one of Orville’s closest, long-time friends, visiting Hawthorn Hill on several occasions. Shortly after serving in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War I, Findley became an editor of the U.S. Air Services magazines, and he became its owner and publisher in 1925. When Findley died on July 11, 1956, Marvin McFarland wrote a piece in memoriam for which included the following: "Earl Findley needs no monument of marble or granite. He built his own by writing, as he would put it, “a column a day” every day for all the 48 years since he first became an aviation writer. Total it up and you get the stupendous sum of more than 5,000,000 words—a lifetime of work in any man’s language. "But Earl wrote more than that because he kept up a voluminous correspondence with friends, personal and professional, everywhere. To him a letter, like a piece for publication, was no cut-and-dried thing. It was something that came from the brain and was revised by the heart… " (Marvin W. McFarland, “In Memoriam: Earl Nelson Findley,” U.S. Air Services (July 1956): 7.)