From The Wright Brothers Legacy, a 40th(!) birthday gift from my friend Gary, underneath a photo of Orville Wright and a big St. Bernard:
“Orville was extremely fond of Scipio, the puppy that he found in the baggage room of the Dayton railroad station in 1917. Scipio died in 1928 but when Orville died in 1948, he still carried a picture of Scipio in his wallet.”
Happy Birthday Philip! Thanks for blogging :^)
The big Four-Oh, eh? Sadly, I remember it well.
I grew up in the suburbs of Dayton and one of the spiffiest things I had a chance to do before I left was to be allowed to roam through the Wright archives at Dayton’s Wright State University. You know all those famous b&w photos of Orville and Wilbur on the dunes at Kitty Hawk? Well, all the original glass-plate images are there, plus several dozen more images. Neat stuff. Because I was working with a group marking one of the first-flight anniversaries, I was allowed to acquire negatives of each of the old glass plates. I had a stack of glossies printed for myself and then managed to lose ’em years later during a relocation.
The archive also contains a beer-drinking song allegedly written by the brothers, and a very nice sales brochure put out by the Wrights when they started selling planes out of Dayton. The price, I believe, was $5000.
Congrats on 40. How have you escaped the Sandman?
Happy birthday! And many happy landings with Kyle, Alex and everyone else close to your heart.
Happy birthday! And I do hope that the body parts some say are supposed to fall off once you reach “the big 4-0” remained firmly attached and functional.
I’m not quite 40 yet, but I’ve always been served well by this philosophy: You’re only young once, but you can be immature your whole life.