The Franklin Institute, a Philadelphia museum dedicated to the study of science, has long said one of its most impressive holdings — a plane built in 1911 by the Wright brothers — was a gift from a man named Grover C. Bergdoll.
The Wright Model B, a two-seater that Bergdoll bought from the brothers, remains one of the best preserved icons of early aviation. The museum’s website details the plane’s rich history and how it was built with inventive flaps and cables.
But it says nothing about the man the museum says was the plane’s donor, a wealthy bon vivant who was utterly despised after dodging the draft for World War I. The scion of a Philadelphia brewing fortune, Bergdoll drove cars and flew planes before the war with an abandon that earned him the nickname “Playboy of the Eastern Seaboard.”
For nearly a century, that plane has been exhibited at the Franklin Institute. But more recently, the circumstances of how it got there have become a point of contention.
The Franklin Institute acquired the plane in 1933, when Bergdoll was living as a fugitive in Germany, to which he had fled after his conviction for desertion. By this time, all of his possessions had been declared the property of the U.S. government. The museum has said in several settings that Bergdoll transferred title by letter while he hid from U.S. authorities overseas.
But recently the museum acknowledged, to the author of a book on Bergdoll and Bergdoll’s family, that it has no letter. Instead, a museum official said, Bergdoll had simply told a museum official verbally that he wanted to give the plane to the museum.
“From your own knowledge of Mr. Bergdoll and his background,” a museum curator, Susannah Carroll, wrote to the author, Timothy W. Lake, “you should understand why neither he nor The Institute would desire to have anything in writing documenting the oral gift. Bergdoll was still a fugitive and his assets had been and continued to be subject to government seizure.”
In recent months, though, Bergdoll’s family has challenged the museum’s account. In an interview, one of Bergdoll’s daughters, Katharina, described the institute’s explanation as inconsistent and said it does not address the fact that the government had placed all her father’s assets under seizure more than a decade earlier.
“Getting a verbal agreement — how was it possible when my father was a fugitive at the time in Germany?” she said. “You could not have reached him. That was the first impossibility. The second: It was technically in the government’s possession at the time. He could not have legally transferred it.”
Family members have now asked the museum to consider returning the plane, or to agree to some other form of compensation. Katharina Bergdoll said she would also like the museum to “own up to the facts of how it was obtained.”
In a statement, the museum did not delve into the specifics of its acquisition but it reiterated that the plane on public display for decades had been a gift; it also questioned the family’s motivation.
“At no time between 1935 and Mr. Bergdoll’s death in 1966 did he, his mother, Emma, or his wife, Berta, ever claim any right to the airplane, dispute the validity of the gift, or request its return,” the statement said.
The institute also forwarded a news article from 1934 that announced the plane had been received as a gift from Bergdoll. “At no time,” the museum said in its statement, “did the government make any attempt to collect the airplane as part of its seizure of Bergdoll’s assets, further legitimizing his gift.”
“We will continue,” the statement said, “to honor Mr. Bergdoll’s legacy by sharing the story of the Wright Brothers and his part in it with the world as he always wanted.”
The Bergdoll family said that, while it believes in the merits of its claim, it is not trying to rehabilitate the reputation of a man who became a figure of national loathing and in the end paid for his behavior. Though there were other so-called slackers, Bergdoll’s draft-dodging drew particular scorn because of his wealth, high profile and demonstrated disinterest in following the rules.
By 1917, when he failed to report for military service, Bergdoll had already taken flying lessons from Orville Wright, bought the plane for $5,000 and made a habit of buzzing buildings and other stunts. His reckless driving, multiple accidents and traffic violations as a teenager earned him the moniker “speed fiend” in the local press, and he served two months in jail after a head-on crash in 1913.
After he disappeared rather than serve in World War I, the government made an example of him, distributing his image on wanted posters across the country. When the man thought to have been drafted because Bergdoll didn’t show was shot to death in a French forest, The New York Times carried news of his death on Page 1: “Died Hero in Battle in Bergdoll’s Place.”
Bergdoll was eventually caught in 1920 when a nationwide manhunt ended with him being found, hiding inside a window seat at his family’s gray stone mansion in Philadelphia. Sentenced to five years in prison, he served just a few weeks before managing a daring escape that transfixed the nation.
First, he convinced authorities to temporarily release him from prison so that he would help them find a so-called pot of gold that he claimed to have buried. Then he had his two U.S. Army escorts join him at a burlesque theater and visit with his mother at the family mansion. She served them breakfast and lunch. The sergeants played pool. Bergdoll escaped while they were distracted, fleeing with his chauffeur to Canada and then to his grandparents’ native Germany.
He settled initially in Eberbach, where a cousin ran a hotel, and then Weinsberg, after he met his wife, in southwest Germany, but often returned secretly to the United States. His escape provoked national outrage, and purported sightings of him — in Mexico, Switzerland and Germany — drew headlines.
In 1921, Bergdoll’s property was seized, under the federal “Trading With the Enemy Act,” on the personal direction of President Warren G. Harding. Bergdoll thwarted two efforts to kidnap him back from Germany including an incident in 1923 when he bit off the thumb of one man and shot another dead.
By 1933, more than two decades after it was built, the plane had become a dilapidated mess and was housed in a building on Bergdoll’s brother’s farm.
In December of that year, several men drove up and removed the plane, Lake said. A museum volunteer, William H. Sheahan, who was an official with the local flying club and had flown with Bergdoll; and C. Townsend Ludington, the assistant director of the museum, arranged for it be renovated.
By 1935, it was installed in the Franklin Institute’s new Beaux-Arts building on Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Franklin’s devotion to science is the museum’s guiding inspiration, and the plane became an exhibit at the museum where not just the objects of aviation but also the specific principles that underlie the physics of flight are displayed.
The explanation for how the plane ended up in the museum has been less precise.
A typewritten document in the museum’s files from the mid-1930s titled “Specifications” says the plane was “Presented: To the Franklin Institute by letter from Bergdoll to William H. Sheahan.”
In 1981, the museum’s director of exhibits co-wrote a book, “Aviation and Pennsylvania,” for the Franklin Institute Press that said, “After a short exchange of letters, Bergdoll, who was in exile in Germany, made a gift of the historic craft for display at The Institute.”
In 2019, Susannah Carroll, the Franklin curator, wrote in an email to Lake, the author of “The Bergdoll Boys,” that she had found a museum catalog card that said “a number of letters were exchanged between Bergdoll, William H. Sheahan, treasurer of the Aero Club of Pennsylvania, and Ludington. Bergdoll, who was in exile in Germany, made a gift of the historic craft, to the Institute, for public display.”
But in a later response, Carroll said she could not locate such letters and had come to doubt they ever existed. Still, she said, there remained “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” that the plane had been a gift.
She pointed out, for example, that in 1943 Berta Bergdoll seemed to acknowledge the transfer in a letter to Orville Wright in which she referred specifically to her husband’s Wright B as a plane “which was once his own.” The museum also cited newspaper accounts that reported Berta Bergdoll had visited the museum in 1938 with her oldest son, Alfred, who sat in the Model B.
But Lake and the Bergdoll family said Bergdoll and his relatives never made a fuss because they believed the museum’s account of a gift and that, by the time Grover Bergdoll returned to America in 1939, reclaiming an old plane was the least of his concerns.
Though museum procurement procedures at the time could be haphazard, Lake, a former Philadelphia television news anchor, said he found it odd that an institution as celebrated as the Franklin would have relied simply on a donor’s word. “How such a prestigious institution could accept the airplane from a third party without a written transfer document from the airplane owner is difficult to understand, even in the 1930s,” he said.
Bergdoll’s wife and children had already emigrated to the United States from Germany by the time he returned, voluntarily and out of money, claiming homesickness, and fleeing the Nazis. Stout, with a black mustache and a German accent, he was arrested on the S.S. Bremen in New York Harbor and served four years at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.
He ultimately recovered 80 percent of the $535,000 in property seized by the government in 1921. After his release in 1944, he moved his family to Virginia, but according to his relatives began years of troubled decline. In 1946, he was charged with attacking his butler. He and Berta divorced in 1960. He died in 1966, at 72, from pneumonia, in a psychiatric hospital.
His daughter, Katharina, said she visited the museum, with her cousin Louis, around 2003 when the Model B was refurbished.
She said she gave no thought at the time to how the plane had gotten there. “I had no idea,” she said. But later she came to have doubts when Lake’s research piqued her interest.
Her niece, Lesley Gamble, a granddaughter of Grover Bergdoll, said that one reason the family had not inquired further about the plane was their relative’s dark past.
“As a granddaughter growing up, when they mentioned that the plane was at the Franklin, I didn’t ask how it got there because it’s a painful history,” she said. “It’s a hard thing to revisit how things were then when my grandfather was on the lam.”
Bergdoll’s final years were less chronicled but also dark. His family described him as an alcoholic with paranoid delusions who went as far as accusing his children of trying to poison him.
“He was largely living in the past in my childhood,” Katharina said. “I don’t think getting an airplane back was foremost in his thoughts.”
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