When Orville entered the eighth grade, Miss Jennings, who taught grammar, evidently thought she detected something mischievous about him and assigned him to a front seat in her class.
The next year, the same teacher had been promoted to the high school, as a teacher of algebra, and again she put Orville up in front where she could keep an eye on him. Orville’s front seats became a subject for family jests.
Later on in his high school course, Orville was demonstrating a problem in geometry on the blackboard, when his teacher, Miss Wilson, pointed out that though he had the correct answer, he evidently had not followed the textbook.
“I got it out of another book—Wentworth’s geometry,” Orville explained. And he added: “I get a lot of good stuff from Wentworth.”
Instead of complimenting him on having enough interest in the subject to consult another source, the teacher chided him for referring to what she called “a beautiful science” as “stuff.”
Orville had no compunction about telling at meal time of such episodes. He knew he wouldn’t be scolded. It was simply good conversational material and would provoke sympathetic laughter.
The family was interested, too, in the inventiveness of the boys. Lorin had once invented an improvement on a hay-baling machine. Wilbur had designed and built a practical device for folding paper. This was while he had the contract for folding the entire weekly issue of an eight-page church paper. He had found the hand work tedious and got up a machine that could be worked by a foot-treadle.
For a long time the mechanical ability that had aroused the most family admiration, though, was in the mother. Susan Koerner Wright was more than ordinarily resourceful in adapting household tools or utensils to unexpected uses. She was clever at designing clothes, too; and once she had built a sled for the two older boys. As her family used to say, she “could mend anything.”
The mother, however, was not long to be spared to her family. On July 4, 1889, or less than four years after the return to Hawthorne Street, she died. During the latter years of her life, Wilbur was much with his mother, and devoted himself almost constantly to her care, for he too at that time was an invalid, unable to engage in much outdoor activity.
Wilbur’s illness was in consequence of an accident. While playing a game of shinny, on skates, he was hit in the face with a shinny club. The blow knocked out all his upper front teeth. He began to suffer from a heart disorder from which he did not completely recover for several years.