With his father out of Congress, in the fall of 1917 Charles began his senior year of high school in Little Falls. His father also returned to Minnesota, but he continued to live under a separate roof. The emotionally needy Evangeline now treated Charles as if he were her husband and confidant rather than her son. At fifteen, he ran the household. The precocious Mr. Fix-It threw himself into both winterizing and mechanizing the farm. He built a well in the basement for which he did all the plumbing himself. He also constructed a concrete duck pond, which he named “Moo Pond” after the Ojibway term for “dirt”—the neatnik was keenly aware that “a duck pond would almost always be dirty”—as well as a suspension bridge out of barbed wire. He began breeding a variety of animals including Guernsey cattle, Shropshire sheep, and Toulouse geese, which he sold in Minneapolis. The small farm became one of the most high-tech affairs in the area. Charles ordered a three-wheeled tractor from LaCrosse, which he assembled himself, and installed a souped-up Empire Milking Machine, which he also marketed to other farmers. Charles preferred managing the farm to attending his classes; only physics and mechanical drawing were of any interest. Unwilling to do any homework, he nearly flunked out. “I was,” he later recalled, “rescued by World War I.” In early 1918, with food in short supply, the principal announced that students could get academic credit for farmwork. That final semester, Charles made only one more trip to school—to pick up his diploma on June 5. After the armistice was signed in November 1918, he gradually turned the farm back over to tenants and started thinking about college. “It was a difficult and rather heartbreaking procedure giving up the stock and machinery,” he later wrote. Like Kinsey, as an adolescent Lindbergh had developed close ties to his farm’s animals and gadgets, but not to his parents or to any other human beings.
In the fall of 1920, Lindbergh jumped on his motorcycle—a twin-cylinder Excelsior—and drove the 350 miles to Madison, Wisconsin. He selected the University of Wisconsin less for its impressive engineering school than for the lakes near campus. As he later explained, “I could not be happy living long away from water.” Psychologically fused with her son, Evangeline could not abide the thought of losing her longtime roommate; she had already taken the train to Madison to find them an apartment. This unusual living arrangement had the neighbors whispering about what had brought the apparently unmarried middle-aged woman and the dashing college student together. Once again, Lindbergh refused to do even the minimum to stay afloat academically. He barely passed most classes, and he failed English. On a freshman essay, “An Ideal Student,” in which he preached the “fundamentals of hygiene,” his instructor gave him an F, commenting, “Again, some excellent touches, but marred by an irritating profusion of mechanical errors. Please arrange for a conference at once.” (He ignored the request.) Extracurricular activities—the ROTC program and the rifle and pistol teams—were all that he cared about. “I was on academic probation when I entered my sophomore year,” he later wrote. “So I decided to leave the university before I received official notification to do so.”
In March 1922, he fled to Lincoln, Nebraska, to begin flying school. Reacting like a jilted lover, his mother was nearly speechless. “Il est très difficile,” she wrote to him in her broken French—though college-educated, she was no foreign language whiz—right after his departure, “de viver [sic] [live] dans cet ‘flat’ mais très necessaire. Il est aussi très difficile d’exprimer mes sentiments so I’ll not try to.” Evangeline, who began inundating (and embarrassing) her son with daily letters, would not let go easily. “There has been no word from you for 2 weeks and 2 days,” she stated a few years later in a missive, in which she threatened a visit unless he wrote back right away, “and you have not written me for 2 weeks and 5 days—exact reckoning.” Only by taking to the air would Lindbergh manage to gain his freedom from his overbearing mother.
For the next couple of years, he eked out a living as a stunt pilot, entertaining the public in more than seven hundred barnstorming flights. In March 1924, to get his hands on higher-performing planes, the technophile enlisted in the U.S. Army. In the flight training program in San Antonio, Texas, Lindbergh was in his element. “Military training,” he later recalled, “taught me precision and the perfection of flying techniques.” Relishing his courses in aerodynamics, meteorology, and bombing methods, the college dropout metamorphosed into a stellar student. “For the first time in my experience,” he later wrote, “school and life became both rationally and emotionally connected.” The following March, Lindbergh graduated first in his class—he had been one of 104 entering students—and received his commission as a second lieutenant in the Air Service Reserve Corps.
But in the Army, “Slim,” as the 145-pound cadet was called, still could not make a friend. His main way to connect with others was to choreograph practical jokes, and he specialized not in the harmless—say, dropping toothpaste into a snoring mouth—but in the sadistic. To unnerve a soldier sleeping in the buff, who boasted about nights with prostitutes in San Antonio’s “Spick Town”—such racist vernacular was common in the 1920s—Lindbergh devised a startling contrapasso. “I suggested,” he noted proudly more than forty years after the fact, “that we paint the penis green.” And he did not stop there. To ensure a rude awakening, Lindbergh also had the erect member lassoed with some string, which he then hooked up to the ceiling while another soldier tugged on it from outside the barracks.
After moving to St. Louis in the fall of 1925 to run airmail routes for the Robertson Aircraft Corporation, this envious virgin, too shy to get anywhere near a nubile woman, was still taunting fellow pilots who pursued sexual adventures. Lindbergh would not allow a roommate, Phil Love, to talk on the phone to his girlfriend—he would make a racket by crashing pots and pans—and every time Love went out on a date, Lindbergh would stick frogs or lizards in his bed. And he almost killed another roommate, Bud Gurney, who, after a night on the town, took a couple of gulps from a water jug into which Lindbergh had poured kerosene. In his last few months in St. Louis, “Slim” lived alone, as no one would dare room with him anymore.
“I’ll organize a flight to Paris!”
Lindbergh later recalled in his memoir that the idea first came to him in September 1926, as he was high up in the moonlit sky, en route from Peoria to Chicago.
Five months earlier, Robertson’s chief pilot had inaugurated its airmail route—the second in the nation—which went from St. Louis to Chicago via Springfield and Peoria. On the afternoon of April 15, 1926, a crowd of a couple hundred had given Lindbergh (along with the two pilots whom he had hired to work under him) a grand send-off, which was widely covered by the press. “We pilots…all felt,” he later wrote, “that we were taking part in an event which pointed the way toward a new and marvelous era.” But within a few months, the monotony of the task—the contract called for five round-trips a week between St. Louis and Chicago—was leaving him feeling apathetic and restless. He and his team had mastered the challenge of boring through the night sky, completing more than 99 percent of their scheduled flights.
As he looked down at the lights on farmhouses on the outskirts of Peoria, Lindbergh kept turning over in his mind the crash in New York a few days earlier of a Paris-bound flight piloted by the Frenchman René Fonck, which had killed two of his three crew members. Fonck’s three-engine Sikorsky biplane, he was certain, had been doomed by its weight. As he approached Ottawa, Illinois—about ninety miles from Chicago—he began fantasizing about a sexy new biplane, the Wright-Bellanca, and its efficiency. “In a Bellanca filled with fuel tanks,” he speculated from the cockpit of his old World War I Army plane, “I could fly on all night like the moon.”
Getting up at daybreak the next morning, Lindbergh flew back to St. Louis. As soon as he returned to his boardinghouse near Lambert Field, located in farmland ten miles northwest of the business district, he thought through the steps that he would have to take to get to Paris. So he took out a pad and began making lists.
For L
indbergh, travel and list making were already intimately connected. A few years earlier, he had compiled an exhaustive set of lists documenting all the trips he had taken as a child, which he then plotted on a massive map of the United States, color-coordinated by his means of transportation. In 1913, he and his mother had boarded the Colon, a second-class boat, which took them to Panama. Besides the train treks to Washington and Detroit (where he visited his grandparents), he also recorded various automobile excursions, such as a forty-day slog with his mother to California—he did the driving—in the Saxon Six in 1916.
For his new venture, he came up with seven lists: “Action,” “Advantages,” “Results,” “Co-operation,” “Equipment,” “Maps,” and “Landmarks.”
The lists reveal the nature of the man, who was all about practicality and efficiency. Each of the numbered points below the headings contained just a few words. “Action” was the longest list, with eight, which included such items as “2. Propaganda” (publicity), “3. Backers,” and “8. Advertising.” Having managed the family farm, the twenty-four-year-old was already well versed in the ways of the business world. Under “Advantages,” after writing that he would promote interest in aviation in both St. Louis and the nation as a whole, he let a bit of his personal passion seep in; in point 5, the lifelong machine lover noted how the flight would “demonstrate perfection of modern equipment.” “Results” was the shortest list, with just two points: “1. Successful completion,” which, as he jotted down, meant “winning $25,000 prize to cover expenses,” and its polar opposite, “2. Complete failure,” about which he chose not to elaborate.
“That…will do for a start,” Lindbergh later wrote of his own reaction to this initial set of lists. “I’ll add to it, improve it, and clarify it as time passes.” Thus would his nervous tic propel him across the Atlantic the following May. Out of his lists of his equipment and flying procedures, which he would constantly check and recheck on this and every other flight he would ever take, would later also come the safety checklist. As Reeve Lindbergh has noted, this legacy of her “obsessively meticulous” father, which has saved the lives of countless pilots, may have been even more important than his historic flight.
A few weeks later, Lindbergh called his first potential backer, Earl A. Thompson, a wealthy St. Louis insurance executive, to whom he had given flying lessons. Offered the choice between a meeting at his office or at his home at 1 Hortense Place, Lindbergh opted for the latter. But after a maid escorted him into the living room, Lindbergh had second thoughts. As he later described the scene, “I don’t seem to fit into a city parlor. It would be easier to talk on the flying field.”
Away from his workplace, which to him felt homier than the magnate’s mansion, Lindbergh lost his self-confidence. Ticking off the items on his “Advantages” list, he mentioned to Thompson that a flight to Paris “would show people what airplanes can do.” While the evening was not a disaster—Thompson remained interested—Lindbergh was unable to pry any cash from him.
But Lindbergh had better luck a few days later with Albert Lambert, the former Olympic golfer and aviation aficionado—Orville Wright had taught him to fly—whom he visited at his office rather than at his Hortense Place home (which was located next door to Thompson’s). Lambert, whose day job was running his family’s pharmaceutical company, promised one thousand dollars. “I feel that my New York–to–Paris flight is emerging from the stage of dreams, Lindbergh thought as he drove back to the field in his secondhand Ford. "I have an organization under way.
Like other obsessives, Lindbergh was clueless about how to handle intimate relationships, but he did develop a knack for networking with the powerful. This lover of propriety also learned how to dress for success. That fall, he shelled out $100 to buy a “traveling outfit,” which consisted of seven sartorial items including a silk scarf and felt hat for which, Lindbergh conceded, he “didn’t have the slightest use.” But the right impression, he realized, “may be as essential for my Paris flight as a plane.” He soon assembled a team of investors that also featured Bill Robertson, his boss; Harry Knight, a stockbroker and the president of the St. Louis Flying Club; and Harold Bixby, a bigwig at the State National Bank and the president of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce. These men all believed in Lindbergh and his lofty aspirations for aviation. Promising that they would handle the finances, they told him to worry only about the technical details of the flight. The man who was used to going it alone was deeply moved. “I went to them hoping only for financial aid,” he later wrote, “and…I…found real partners in the venture.”
With the dollars secured, Lindbergh tried to acquire the Wright-Bellanca that he had long lusted after. Over the next few months, dressed in his elegant new togs, he made three trips to Manhattan to visit with the plane’s Italian-born designer, Giuseppe Bellanca. While Lindbergh was quoted a reasonable price—$15,000—Bellanca’s business partner insisted on “managing the flight to Paris” and selecting the two-man crew. These conditions were deal breakers. Since the Wright-Bellanca was the only off-the-shelf product that could do the trick, Lindbergh was forced to put his own engineering skills to the test. This setback, he soon realized, turned out to have a silver lining. “Every part of [the new plane],” he noted, “can be designed for a single purpose.… I can inspect each detail before it’s covered with fabric.” In the end, he would control everything to do with The Spirit of St. Louis. Lindbergh was not only its pilot, but also its father; the first of his many children would be a machine. And like Pygmalion, he would fall in love with his own creation.
On Tuesday, February 22, 1927, racing against the clock—several other pilots were also finalizing plans to make the first transoceanic flight—Lindbergh boarded a train to San Diego to meet the management team of Ryan Airlines. Soon after his arrival, Lindbergh and Donald Hall, Ryan’s chief engineer, squirreled themselves away in the company’s huge drafting room. As Lindbergh rattled off the requirements for his dream machine, Hall sketched. When asked where to put the cockpits for the pilot and his navigator, Lindbergh responded, “I’ve thought about it a great deal.… I’d rather have extra gasoline than an extra man.” Though surprised, Hall immediately understood that this specification would mean a shorter fuselage. Ryan’s CEO then also got on board, and a deal was consummated. For just $10,580, Lindbergh could expect his plane within two months.
Staying in San Diego, Lindbergh supervised Hall’s every move. He devised a list of three principles to guide the plane’s construction—“efficiency in flight,” “protection in a crack-up,” and “pilot comfort.” He told Hall, “I don’t see why cockpit in the rear doesn’t cover all three.” The conscientious Hall, who would put in eighty-hour weeks (and once worked thirty-six hours straight), would come to depend on Lindbergh’s judgment. The pilot spent part of every day at the Ryan plant, looking over Hall’s shoulder; Lindbergh was also busy compiling and checking the lists in his little black notebook in which he kept track of the maps, weather information—particularly wind currents—and landmarks that he would need to study. In the third week of April, with his plane nearly completed, he purchased the twelve items on his emergency equipment list, including his Armbrust cup, which could convert his breath into drinking water, an air raft, and five cans of Army emergency rations (chocolatelike bars).
Lindbergh then churned out a new series of to-do lists for each of the four cities his plane was to be in—San Diego, St. Louis, New York, and Paris. With his anxiety mounting, these lists had a robotic quality; they referred to items that he was unlikely to forget. Under “N.Y. Take-Off,” he mentioned the need to notify the papers and cable St. Louis and San Diego. “Paris Arrival” also covered just the basics plus a reminder to cable his mother. He had no list for “Paris Take-Off.” “I…concentrated so intensely on the preparation and execution of the flight,” he later wrote, “that I had thought little about what I would do after landing.”
America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation Page 22