Readorama: ‘Truman’ author coming to KC with new Wright brothers biography

If anyone would know what traits Harry Truman shared with Orville and Wilbur Wright, it would be David McCullough.

The historian, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1992 biography of the 33rd president, appears in Kansas City on Friday to discuss his new biography of aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright.

“All three didn’t go to college,” McCullough said recently. “All three never stopped reading. Truman used to read Latin for pleasure, which most people would be astonished to know. All three came from humble origins, worked hard and never got too big for their britches.

“All three knew how to take failure, how to be knocked down and get back up again, and all three knew how not to let the ridicule of others defeat them.”

There also were significant Kansas City connections with the Wright brothers.

In 1926, the brothers’ sister Katharine married Henry J. Haskell, Kansas City Star editor and columnist, whom she had met decades before when both had attended Oberlin College in Ohio.

Katharine Wright Haskell moved to Kansas City, where she died in 1929 of complications from pneumonia.

Another connection was Octave Chanute, the engineer who built the Hannibal Bridge, which opened in 1869 and crossed the Missouri River at Kansas City. By the early 1900s he was a champion of the Wrights, exchanging technical correspondence with them and visiting at their Dayton, Ohio, home.

Chanute by then was an elder in engineering circles, known around the world. The Wright brothers were unlettered, had no outside financial backing and worked on their aviation experiments only after they had seen to their responsibilities in operating their Dayton bicycle shop.

When Chanute, exasperated by this, suggested a financial sponsor, the Wrights declined.

“They wanted to work on their own, in their own way, and they didn’t want to report to anybody,” McCullough said.

McCullough thinks one under-appreciated message of the Wright brothers’ story is the utility of a liberal arts education.

“They were extremely well read in history and natural history, ornithology, literature,” McCullough said.

When Wilbur Wright, as a teenager, took a hockey stick in the mouth and lost several teeth, he responded by going into seclusion and reading.

“For a three-year period he concentrating on reading everything,” McCullough said.

The Wright brothers already were bookish: for their sister’s birthday one year, they presented her with a bust of Sir Walter Scott, Scottish novelist, playwright and poet.

“How many people today would do that?” McCullough asked. “Where would you even be able to buy a Sir Walter Scott bust?

“I have no idea. But here are these liberal arts majors, if you will, who are the ones who break this highly technical mystery. I would like to think it’s a reminder to those who are planning to go into technical or scientific fields that liberal arts ought to be part of it.”

The Wright brothers’ achievement also represents a technical triumph accomplished despite significant adversity — a story similar to the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal, epic projects detailed by McCullough in other books.

“I see the Wright brothers book as number three in a trilogy,” he said. “All three efforts take place in that same time period, and all three are about ambitious undertakings in which people could and did lose their lives.”

McCullough reads at 6:30 p.m. Friday at the Central Library, 14 W. 10th St. Seating is limited; an RSVP does not guarantee a seat. For more info, go to KCLibrary.org.

McDougall returns

Jo McDougall, poet and former Leawood resident, has moved back to her native Arkansas.

But she returns Tuesday to read from “In the Home of the Famous Dead,” a volume, published by the University of Arkansas Press, that collects verse ranging back about 30 years.

“Having one’s books collected in one volume is rewarding but also humbling,” McDougall said recently.

“The poems are all on display, jostling against one another.”

That includes those she still likes, McDougall said, as well as others she no longer likes so much.

The selections reflect her earlier life in Arkansas as well as the approximately 20 years she spent in Kansas, living in both Leawood and Pittsburg, where she taught at Pittsburg State University.

“I think it’s a blend of the nuances of southern Gothic and Midwestern stoicism,” she said of her work.

Having a career compilation published is hazardous, McDougall added, in that it suggests she’s done writing. But she will publish a new volume of her verse next year, and on Tuesday McDougall will read from that work as well.

McDougall’s appearance is part of the Thomas Zvi Wilson Reading Series, now in the Oak Park Library, 9500 Bluejacket St., Overland Park.

The reading, which runs from 6 to 8 p.m., also includes area poet Maryfrances Wagner.

This story was originally published June 12, 2015 at 3:00 AM with the headline "Readorama: ‘Truman’ author coming to KC with new Wright brothers biography."