RECALLING DAYTON’S FAMOUS SONS

In 1911 – by then world famous — Wilbur Wright was asked the secret to success. Simple, he replied: “Choose good parents, and be born in Ohio.” Wilbur’s answer was more than local pride. It was a fair statement of the unusual role Ohio in general and Dayton in particular had played in this nation’s development. When, at the end of the eighteenth century, Americans started spilling over the Appalachians, Ohio was the only adjacent place where slavery had been banned. It therefore drew to it people and groups who intended to place their stamp on the future. It was a fertile ground for small colleges and utopian communities. While the former colonies along the Atlantic still looked back to Europe, Ohio was the first place that looked to the ever-beckoning West. It was, most of all, a vast, relatively underpopulated resource. That disproportion between people and resource put a premium on selfreliance, on improvisation, on inventiveness. Nowhere was more inventive that Dayton. By 1900, the U.S. Patent Office ranked Dayton first in the nation in the number of patents produced relative to population. That was the doing, of course, of Wilbur and Orville Wright. And of Charles Kettering, who with his self-starter made Dayton the center of technical innovation in the burgeoning auto industry. And John H. Patterson at NCR, and others. Dayton was, in short, the “Silicon Valley” that came before Silicon Valley.

That work is the theme of “Grand Eccentrics,” a recently re-released book by former long-time Miami Valley resident Mark Bernstein, published by Orange Frazer Press. Bernstein has written on other Ohio themes. His “John J. Gilligan: The Politics of Principle” is the first biography of the governor who was Ohio’s most important twentieth century Democrat. His “McCulloch of Ohio: For the Republic” is the first biography of the conservative Republican congressman known as “Mr. Civil Rights” for his key role in passage of the 1960s civil rights legislation. Locally, he is also the author of the recently produced 125th anniversary history of Miami Valley Hospital. This excerpt from “Grand Eccentrics” profiles one of those who brought Dayton fame, and does so on Dec. 17, 2017 – the 114th anniversary of the Wrights’ first flight.