[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 160 (Tuesday, October 17, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1953-E1954]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   TRIBUTE TO IVONETTE WRIGHT MILLER

                                 ______


                           HON. TONY P. HALL

                                of ohio

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, October 17, 1995

  Mr. HALL of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to join the Wright family 
in honoring their beloved Ivonette Wright Miller who passed away this 
month at the age of 99. Mrs. Miller, niece of Orville and Wilbur 
Wright, was the last direct connection of the birth of aviation and was 
instrumental in preserving the Wright heritage.
  Mrs. Miller became the third American woman to fly when, on August 
29, 1911, she rode beside her uncle, Orville, in the Wright B Flyer. 
Mrs. Miller played an important role in the donation of the original 
1903 Wright Flyer to the Smithsonian Institution and in the placement 
of the Wright papers in the Library of Congress and Wright State 
University in Dayton, OH.
  The following are excerpts of remarks made at a memorial service by 
Tom D. Crouch, noted Wright brothers biographer and chairman, of the 
Department of Aeronautics of the National Air and Space Museum.

       It is a very great honor indeed to participate in this 
     celebration of the life of Ivonette Wright Miller. I did not 
     know Mrs. Miller as long as some of you, but we shared a 
     genuine friendship, and I owe her a debt of gratitude of the 
     sort which cannot be repaid. It is a debt that I share with 
     all of those scholars, historians, and just plain Wright 
     enthusiasts whom she assisted over the years, and I will try 
     to speak on their behalf this afternoon.
       When I think of what I most admired about Ivonette Miller, 
     the term ``family values'' comes to mind. My wife Nancy and I 
     were privileged to attend Ivonette and Harold ``Schribze'' 
     Miller's 70th anniversary celebration at Hawthorn Hill in 
     1989. That was a marriage you had to admire, at least I did. 
     The two of them went through a great deal together, and 
     through it all, they remained devoted to one another and to 
     their daughter and her family.
       Of course, Ivonette also defined herself as a member of 
     that extraordinary family into which she was born. ``It was 
     late afternoon, on the eighth day of April in 1896,'' she 
     once wrote: . . . and one could hear the tapping of a 
     typewriter in the upstairs room at 7 Hawthorne Street in 
     Dayton, Ohio, where Bishop Milton Wright did his writing and 
     carried on his duties as a minister for the United 
     Brethren in Christ denomination. . . . When he had 
     finished a letter to [his daughter] Katharine [who was 
     then a sophomore at Oberlin College], he picked up a small 
     notebook in which recorded the events of each day, smiled, 
     and wrote: ``Lorin's have a little girl named Ivonette 
     born near 4:00 this morning.''
       ``So it was,'' Ivonette concluded, ``that I came into this 
     world, innocent of all that was to take place in a lifetime, 
     in the midst of an event which had been a world wide dream as 
     long ago as ancient Greece.'' Orville Wright once remarked on 
     his own good fortune, and that of his brothers and sister, to 
     have been born into a family where children were loved and 
     nurtured, where genuine curiosity and self-confidence were 
     encouraged, and real education prized. That was doubly true 
     of the young Wrights of Ivonette's generation. She and her 
     brothers, sister and cousins were raised in the bosom of an 
     extended family that included not only their own loving 
     parents, but their Wright grandfather, uncles and aunt who 
     lived just around the block.
       ``When I was about seven,'' Ivonette once commented, ``the 
     first flight at Kitty Hawk took place. I'm sure the family 
     was excited by it, but they all went about their daily chores 
     as if nothing significant had occurred.'' Perhaps, but it is 
     not difficult to find traces of the young Ivonette in the 
     records of the invention of the airplane.
       There is no more important or precious manuscript in the 
     history of flight than the small pocket notebook in which 
     Wilbur Wright recorded the results of the flight tests of his 
     1902 glider. The penciled notations that fill the little 
     notebook record the career of the world's first fully 
     controllable airplane. The document is a treasure, not simply 
     of the history of technology, or even American history, but 
     of the history of the world. And on one of the final sheets 
     in the notebook you will find the name Ivonette inscribed 
     twice in childish block printing. ``. . . I was sitting on 
     Uncle Will's lap, as I often did,'' she recalled many years 
     later, ``when he asked me if I could write my name. I was six 
     years old at the time and just learning to write. He probably 
     pulled the notebook out of his pocket (where he usually 
     kept it) and asked me to show him how I could write my 
     name.''

[[Page E 1954]]

       As she grew older, and her Uncles emerged as the first 
     great heros of the 20th century, Ivonette occasionally played 
     a more active role on the public stage. While she was not the 
     first American woman to fly, she did take the sky at an early 
     date. In 1910, her younger sister Leontine wrote to Wilbur 
     and Orville, who were in Europe at the time, asking if she 
     could be the first American girl to fly in the U.S. The next 
     summer, when their cousin Bertha Ellwyn Wright was visiting 
     from Kansas, Orville invited all three young ladies for a 
     flight. The great day was August 29, 1911. Twelve year old 
     Leontine, who had, after all, asked, went first. Their 
     visitor and guest, fourteen year old Bertha, was next. Then 
     it was fifteen year old Ivonette's turn.
       ``We used Captain [Charles DeForrest] Chandler's coat and 
     gloves,'' she explained. ``He was taking flight training at 
     the time.'' ``I wore a small hat with a scarf tied tightly 
     under my chin to keep it on. I climbed over the wires and 
     took my seat on the wing to the right of Uncle Orv. Our feet 
     were braced on a cross-strut--no cockpit. We took off and 
     soon everything on the ground was dwarfed. I remember how 
     squared off the fields looked, just like a patchwork quilt my 
     grandmother used to have. We circled around over the field 
     and after some minutes Uncle Orv pointed to the interurban 
     car approaching in the distance from Springfield. He shouted 
     above the noise of the engine, ``There comes the traction 
     car, shall be try to catch it?'' I nodded. We came down, I 
     slid out under the wires, dropped the coat and gloves off at 
     the hanger for Captain Chandler as I went by and by that time 
     the traction car was slowing to a stop and we joined the 
     passengers boarding it.''
       As one of the last surviving Wrights with vivid personal 
     memories of life in the house at number 7 Hawthorn St. in 
     Dayton, Ohio, Ivonette delighted a great many people with her 
     recollections of her famous uncles. But her notion of the 
     serious responsibilities of family stewardship went well 
     beyond that.
       Ivonette and ``Scribze'' Miller devoted themselves to 
     insuring that the precious historical treasures in their 
     keeping would be presented as gifts to the nation, and that 
     the achievements of Wilbur and Orville Wright would be fully 
     understood and appreciated in an honest and accurate fashion. 
     The Millers, and the other heirs of the Wright estate, played 
     a key role in negotiating the presentation of the 1903 
     airplane to the Smithsonian, by means of an agreement that 
     brought the forty year old dispute between the Wrights and 
     the Institute to a final conclusion.
       Moreover, the Millers took a deep personal interest in 
     placing the Wright Papers in an archive where they would be 
     available to the maximum number of researchers. The bulk of 
     the papers went to the Manuscript Division of the Library of 
     Congress. They insisted that the information in those 
     precious documents be made widely disseminated. The result 
     was the publication, in 1953, of the monumental two-volume 
     set of ``The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright.''
       Ivonette and ``Scribze'' befriended Marvin Wilkes 
     McFarland, the chief editor and leader of the team of 
     scholars who produced the published papers. And Mac was not 
     alone. The Millers befriended two generations of Wright 
     scholars. Their friendship with the great English student of 
     early flight, C.H. Gibbs-Smith, was forged via the mails, and 
     cemented when Charles spent a year in the U.S. as the 
     Smithsonian's first Lindbergh Scholar. Charles dedicated his 
     classic study, ``The Wright Brothers and the Rebirth of 
     European Aviation,'' to: ``Ivonette Miller of Dayton, Ohio, 
     First Lady of the Wright Descendants.''
       I was fortunate to count both Marvin McFarland and C. H. 
     Gibbs-Smith as my mentors. In 1972, I was a twenty-seven year 
     old doctoral candidate writing a dissertation on the early 
     history of flight technology when Mac McFarland suggested 
     that I would find the answers to some of my questions in the 
     books and manuscripts still in the hands of Ivonette and 
     Harold Miller in my hometown of Dayton, Ohio. It was material 
     that the Library of Congress had chosen not to take as part 
     of the Wright Papers.
       Mac gave me Mrs. Miller's telephone number and advised me 
     to call her the next time I was visiting my parents in 
     Dayton. ``They are nice folks,'' he assured me. ``They won't 
     mind.'' When I did make that call, I discovered that Mac had 
     understated both the Miller's hospitality and their capacity 
     to put up with an inquisitive graduate student requesting 
     permission to poke around in the boxes stored in their 
     basement.
       I had never before encountered treasure of this sort 
     outside a public repository. There were great aeronautical 
     books--annotated by the Wright brothers. The manuscripts 
     included volume after volume of a diary kept by their father, 
     Milton Wright, from the middle years of the 19th century 
     until the time of his death in 1916. One box contained 
     Wilbur, Orville and Katharine's report cards, school papers, 
     and early examples of the items printed by the firm of Wright 
     and Wright. Other boxes were stuffed with financial records, 
     and photographs, many of which I had never seen before.
       At the end of that first day, Ivonette invited me to join 
     her in the kitchen for tea and cookies. She was the real 
     treasure. It is difficult to explain what it meant to be 
     sitting there across the table from the woman who had sat on 
     Wilbur's lap and written her name in his notebook; the seven 
     year old who could remember what it was like when the news of 
     success had arrived from Kitty Hawk; the fifteen year old who 
     had donned Charles DeForrest Chandler's leather coat, 
     gloves and helmet to go flying with her Uncle Orv. She was 
     a living link to one of the great moments in American 
     history.
       Over the next decade and a half, I recycled the material in 
     the Miller's basement into a dissertation, two books and a 
     dozen articles. Very early on, I suggested that, while their 
     home was as lovely and as fire-resistant as any in Dayton, 
     they should give some thought to selecting a final home for 
     what amounted to an entirely new set of Wright Papers unknown 
     to researchers. Wisely, they selected Wright State 
     University, then a relatively new institution of higher 
     learning named for the inventors of the airplane. A decade 
     and a half later, that collection has provided the basis for 
     an entire series of books, exhibitions, and educational 
     materials.
       We own Ivonette and Harold Miller, and all of the Wright 
     heirs, our gratitude for their wise stewardship. Thanks to 
     them, the world's first airplane hangs in the place of honor 
     in the world's most visited museum. The priceless record of 
     one of the world's great achievements--the letters, 
     notebooks, photographs and other documents relating to the 
     invention of the airplane--are safely preserved in the 
     greatest manuscript collection in the nation. It was at their 
     insistence that the core documents in that collection were 
     published. They saw to it that another large collection of 
     Wright family materials would be housed in a second great 
     archive in the city that was home to all of them.
       Such a list of achievements scarcely scratches the surface 
     of our debt to Ivonette Wright Miller. She was our personal 
     link to that marvelous family which nurtured the inventors of 
     the airplane. She represented them to a curious world with 
     grace, warmth, and dignity. Her memories helped all of us to 
     see her uncles a bit more clearly and to appreciate their 
     achievement a bit more deeply. The very definition of a 
     gracious soul, she enabled those of us who knew her to touch 
     an important moment in history. She has earned her place of 
     honor and rest with the other members of the Wright family. 
     We will not see her likes again, and those of us whose lives 
     she touched can thank God for the privilege.

                          ____________________