THE DAY THE WRIGHTS DONE ME WRONG

Where were you on the morning of December 17, 1903? If you had been on the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, at 10:30 a.m., this is what you would have seen:

As for yours truly, that’s too long ago to remember exactly where I was on that date, but wherever I was, I was most likely trying to think what I would write about when I learnt to write right….which brings me to my good friends, the Wright Brothers, who owned a bicycle shop right up the pike from me in Dayton, Ohio (about 50 miles as the crow flies).

In those days, a fifty mile trip was no breeze (not even with a breeze, as a crow knows). The Wright Brothers offered to sell me a bicycle cheap, but, though the price was right, I couldn’t find a crow to take me to Dayton, and they wouldn’t deliver it (the bicycle, that is). So I told them to go fly a kite, plain and simple. Next thing I knew, they were off to Kitty Hawk to fly a light plane — almost, if not exactly, what my directive to them directed. So you see, by rights, I’m at least partly responsible for the first heavier-than-air flight in history, though never given credit. After that slight, needless to say, I no longer considered them friends.

There you have it. The Wrights done me wrong, but am I bitter? No way — not this bird. I’m above that kind of pettinest. As you can plainly sees, I’m just….

As they used to say back in the day, “That’s all she wrote.”