Berta Bergdoll’s 1943 letter to Orville Wright regarding the Bergdoll airplane
On Sunday, November 14, 1943, Grover Bergdoll’s wife, Berta, penned a handwritten letter to Orville Wright asking a unique favor. It’s unknown if she ever got an answer.
Page 1 of Berta Bergdoll’s 1943 letter to Orville Wright. The letterhead indicates she may have written it while at the Hotel Phillips in Kansas City, Missouri, where she typically stayed when visiting her husband, Grover, at the nearby Leavenworth prison. Visits were only allowed on Sundays.
Berta, who married Grover on May 13, 1926 in St. Petersburg, Russia, wrote the letter in ink on stationary from the Hotel Phillips in Kansas City, Missouri. It was on a Sunday, the only day for visiting with Grover in prison nearby in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Berta’s letter is significant because she refers to Grover’s Wright Brothers airplane “which was once his own,” as in someone else’s possession. By the time of this letter, the airplane had been in possession of The Franklin Institute of Philadelphia for nearly ten years. Berta’s oldest son, Alfred Bergdoll wrote that he and his family always believed what they were told by the museum, that their father had given them his airplane. In fact, Berta and Alfred visited the museum in 1938 before Grover had surrendered, and Alfred was allowed to sit in his father’s airplane.
It is not known if Grover Bergdoll said anything to his wife about how The Franklin Institute acquired his airplane.
Page 2 of Berta Bergdoll’s 1943 letter to Orville Wright. Through the blank portion of the page we can see her writing from the front page.
In the letter, Berta is asking Orville Wright if he’ll write to President Roosevelt and the War Department and ask if Grover could get out of prison in time for Thanksgiving and to fly his airplane for a Wright Brothers celebration scheduled that year for December 17, 1943. It was one of many requests Berta made of the President, the First Lady, military officials, politicians, and lawyers to parden or release her husband from prison.
It’s interesting to note that in the letter, Berta said “which was once his own” but she did not say that Grover had given the airplane to anyone. This, of course, adds more mystery to the questionable airplane acquisition by the museum.
Nor does it answer the primary questions. How could a prestigious museum accept an artifact such as the Bergdoll Wright Brothers airplane from a third party without a signed transaction document from the airplane’s owner?
Was it legal for Sheahan and the museum to take an airplane which was subject to property and asset seizure by the federal government (seizure meant that it could not be sold or given to another party, pending resolution of a legal case against its owner)?
And how can the museum change its 90-year story of a written agreement to acquire the airplane to an oral agreement decades after both parties in the alleged agreement, Bergdoll and William Sheahan died?
As I’ve posited in other Blog postings, it’s a question than can only be answered by the courts.