Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Because of financial pressures, Evangeline’s mother suggested she might teach, thinking her daughter would apply for a position in Detroit. But young Evangeline had other ideas. “How wonderful it would be to go to some mining-town and teach chemistry to the children of miners,” she mused. “And if I had to live on the outskirts of town, to have a great St. Bernard dog to carry my lunch.” A teachers’ agency informed her of an opening in Little Falls, Minnesota.

  Evangeline had never heard of the town; but she was able to locate it on a map, little more than one hundred miles downstream from the Mississippi’s headwaters. And in Captain Willard Glazier’s Down the Great River, she found a thrilling account of his travels along the Mississippi. The description of his momentous visit to Little Falls, where he was greeted by a brass band, clinched Evangeline’s decision.

  She traveled by boat to Duluth, Minnesota, where she caught the only train to Little Falls. It arrived at four o’clock one early-September morning, 1900, offering Miss Land a reception far less festive than Captain Glazier’s. From the depot, she went directly to the nearby Antlers Hotel and moved into a room with a bay window in the third-floor tower overlooking a lumber mill. Later that day, the school superintendent, Joseph Seal, introduced her to C.A. Lindbergh, and they soon began to walk together to their respective workplaces.

  Within weeks of their meeting, Evangeline was writing home to mother about her new friend, “the brightest lawyer in Minnesota.” Before their relationship could get too serious, Mrs. Land wanted details about his reputation and the state of his health; she wondered if so successful an attorney might also be unused to physical labor and effete. “He is about four or five inches taller than I,” Evangeline replied. “He has light hair and blue eyes. He has broad shoulders and a chest that would make you laugh at your own question.” And though he was forty-two to her twenty-four, “He can swim across the Detroit River all day long back and forth as long as you will be willing to watch him when you ask him. He is strong and awkward and well. He hasn’t one unsound tooth. So there.” Furthermore: “He has not one single stain on his reputation. He does not drink, chew or smoke. His greatest fault is that he works too hard.” Beyond that, Evangeline reported that C.A. had two young daughters who were attending private school in Minneapolis and that her presence was suddenly “causing great commotion because I have interested this man whom everybody caters to …”

  Love had not completely blinded Evangeline to the rest of Little Falls, which, after Detroit, seemed pretty hick. Evangeline was homesick; and her job—which paid $55 a month—only exacerbated her feelings. She felt underappreciated and overburdened, carrying a teaching load of Botany, Chemistry, Physical Geography, Physiology, and Physics. She and her principal came to loggerheads that December, when she broke school rules by moving equipment from the unheated attic-laboratory to her classroom. “I shall tell you one thing,” she wrote her mother, “surely that no matter what becomes of me & my friend the lawyer, Little Falls Minnesota shall not see so very much more of this chicken.”

  Dr. Land advised his daughter to resign at the end of the year, thinking she might come home. Mr. Lindbergh advised the same, hoping she might stay. He tried to change her mind about Little Falls by showing her the best of its social scene. He courted her in a two-horse carriage he had hired, and he sometimes kept Evangeline out as late as nine o’clock, so they could ride home in the moonlight. Soon she was writing home that “this town is not such a wild and woolly place as I first thought it.”

  A guilty conscience as much as a hasty heart was driving the stoical lawyer from Little Falls. That autumn he received disturbing reports from the school in Minneapolis to which he had farmed out his children. Miss Olive Adele Evers, headmistress of Stanley Hall, cared for the school’s only boarders, the two young Lindberghs, in a red-brick house next door; and she wrote their father that they were both extremely anxious little girls, potential discipline problems who provoked fights with the other children. More disturbing was that Eva was biting her fingernails down to the quick and Lillian was literally tearing at the skin of her fingers until they bled. “Two more forlorn children never existed,” Eva recalled sixty years after her stay at Stanley Hall. “We suffered extreme homesickness, made father’s visits miserable, and did not really adjust to the abrupt change.” They yearned for a home.

  Evangeline Land was, in fact, only twelve years older than Lillian, closer in age to C.A. Lindbergh’s children than to him; and when he asked her to marry, he never defined how he expected her to play her role of stepmother. Nonetheless, she quit her job and returned to Detroit for Christmas vacation to mull over his proposal. In January their engagement was announced.

  Charles August Lindbergh and Evangeline Lodge Land married in Detroit on March 27, 1901, at her parents’ home. The small parlor there limited the number of guests to closest relatives and a few friends. Because emotional displays made both the bride and groom uncomfortable, they wanted to steal away without being showered with rice. So when Grandmother Lodge had to leave early, Evangeline and C.A. each took her arm to aid her down the steps and into her carriage. Nobody paid any attention when they got in the carriage as well, driving off to her house, where they had already brought their suitcases earlier in the day.

  They journeyed west for a “wedding tour” of ten weeks. They stopped at Pike’s Peak and the Garden of Gods in Colorado before pushing on to California, where they traveled the entire length of the state—from Tijuana in Baja to the Oregon border. By Sacramento, Evangeline was giving in to feeling that marriage could be sheer bliss … until one night, while taking a long walk, she and C.A. found a deserted garden filled with roses. She picked a bouquet of them and carried them back to their hotel room. Only then did C.A. rebuke her for committing “an offence against the law,” insisting that they would have to leave town as soon as possible. Not until the sting of the lecture had worn off did she realize that he had been joking. It was an early glimpse of her new husband’s perverse sense of humor.

  The “happiest part of our trip,” Evangeline Lindbergh would later recall, was spent in The Dalles on the Columbia River in northern Oregon, where they rafted and hiked and camped out, several weeks alone together, at peace with nature. They returned to Minnesota on the Northern Pacific Railroad.

  On the way to California, C.A. had asked Evangeline whether she would prefer to live in the town of Little Falls or on the outskirts, in the country. Whichever, he wanted to give her the house of her choice. When she did not hesitate to choose the latter, he told her about a farm two and one-half miles south of Little Falls, on the western bank of the Mississippi. Upon their return, Evangeline saw a most winning aspect of her husband: He had written ahead to a business associate named Carl Bolander, an architect and builder, who had constructed a temporary camp for the newlyweds—a tar-roofed, two-bedroom shack of pine, with a kitchen and screened-in porch that could double as a dining room, right on the banks of the river at the foot of their new land.

  Most of the Lindberghs’ one hundred twenty acres sat on the bluff, one hundred feet above the riverbank encampment. Pikes Creek and a road running parallel to the river cut through this magnificent woodland, thick with white pines, oak, elm, poplar and linden. They agreed to build Evangeline’s dream house at the edge of the cliff, where the land dropped precipitously into the so-called “valley-by-the-river”—affording a spectacular vista of the Mississippi.

  The three-story house of pine and cedar had double linings of tar paper for extra warmth. Each of the public rooms on the ground floor was finished in fine wood—the den in California redwood, the dining room in quarter-sawed oak, and the living room in birch. All the floors were varnished maple. The second floor had four bedrooms, with a fireplace in the master bedroom. The third floor had servant’s quarters and a billiard room. The house also featured two bathrooms, with water pumped by a gas engine from a well dug seventy feet deep. An oversized furnace that burned either wood or coal heated the hot-water r
adiators.

  Evangeline L. L. Lindbergh, as she now signed her documents, was not the only one to realize her dream that summer. Lillian and Eva were released from Stanley Hall. They returned to Little Falls with open arms, embracing their new mother.

  “It was a very happy summer,” Evangeline remembered of 1901, when the new family shantied along the river. Lillian and Eva slept in a tent; and a maid cooked and cleaned. One day Evangeline, in a freshly ironed gingham dress and feeling good about her country life, slipped on the grass and fell all the way down into the cold river up to her armpits. C.A. stood on the bank and laughed, which infuriated her. But with each day’s progress on the house, Evangeline found ways to overlook her husband’s flintiness and his dry humor.

  She was even warming to Little Falls, delighting in its reputation “for having two saloons for every church and a church for every creed.” C.A.’s office was over one of the saloons. His practice was thriving, and he seemed to derive even more pleasure from his home. That autumn the outside of their house was painted light gray with white trim; and by January the inside was furnished—featuring an upholstered davenport and mahogany bookcase, a piano, Oriental rugs, mahogany-colored drapes, oil lamps, water-color paintings, and a beautiful white and gold china service. “It was wonderfully peaceful and beautiful there,” Evangeline recalled, “—not a building in sight across the river—nor thru the trees in any direction. Evenings we had only the sound of the rushing water, and birds’ songs.”

  And soon to come … a baby’s cry, for Evangeline Lindbergh was entering her ninth month of pregnancy. At the end of January, she went to Detroit, so that her uncle Dr. Edwin Lodge could deliver the baby in her parents’ home. C.A. visited the last week of the month and saw Evangeline comfortably settled into the large front bedroom of the house on West Forest, then left to attend business back home. He planned to return in a few weeks as the due-date approached.

  On the bitter cold night of February third, Evangeline went into labor. Dr. Land sent a telegram to Little Falls, urging C.A. back to Detroit. Uncle Edwin arrived at seven o’clock and went to bed, to rest until the attending nurse summoned him around midnight. He administered no anesthesia. At 1:30 the next morning, the nine-and-one-half-pound child was born.

  For months C.A. had crowed that he knew the “new babe would be a son”; and eager to please, Evangline immediately asked in his absence, “Is it a boy?”

  “It is,” her uncle replied.

  “Are you sure?” she inquired.

  “Dead sure,” he said. “Just look at the size of those feet. He is fine. You ought to have seventeen like him.”

  But he would be her only child—named for his father, with the addition of a syllable to the middle name: Charles Augustus Lindbergh. Soon after the birth, he was bundled up and laid on a chair near an open window, where he breathed in the winter air.

  “Life’s values originate in circumstances over which the individual has no control,” Charles Lindbergh would write seventy years later, after an odyssey that took him to places nobody had ever journeyed before. Then, with a peculiar sense of detachment bordering on the divine, he described the beginning of his strange, singular destiny by adding: “I was born a child of man, in the city of Detroit, on February 4, 1902, of Swedish, English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry.”

  3

  NO PLACE

  LIKE HOME

  “A sound individual is produced by a sound lifestream.”

  —C.A.L.

  RAISED IN VIRTUAL ISOLATION AMONG LINDBERGHS, Lodges, and Lands, it was difficult for Charles Lindbergh ever to recognize that his kin might have differed from other people. He was proud that his family tree abounded with independent thinkers in a broad range of disciplines—most of which he would pursue. But he never perceived that many of his ancestors were prideful to the point of arrogance—rebels so far apart from the rest of society as to be above the law, so evangelical as to appear fanatical, so global in their vision as to be shortsighted. For all his fascination with detail, Lindbergh never examined his family history closely enough to see that it included financial malfeasance, flight from justice, bigamy, illegitimacy, melancholia, manic-depression, alcoholism, grievous generational conflicts, and wanton abandonment of families. But those undercurrents were always there. And so this third-generation Lindbergh was born with a deeply private nature and bred according to the principles of self-reliance—nonconformity and the innate understanding that greatness came at the inevitable price of being misunderstood.

  THE BABY WAS FUSSED OVER from birth. With his long black hair, which quickly turned to golden curls, his bright blue eyes, and the already discernible Lindbergh dimpled chin, the child’s beauty was not lost on anybody—not even the impassive C.A., who arrived in Detroit two days after the delivery and stayed through the weekend. Witnessing mother and baby with her parents prompted emotions he had never felt before. “It is the noblest idea of God and the most beautiful reality in life that ever came to my knowledge,” C.A. wrote his mother-in-law after the experience. He became an attentive husband and even a demonstrative father, for a while.

  When the baby was five weeks old, Charles’s mother took him on his first journey—almost eight hundred miles to Little Falls. There they joined C.A. in their new house on the river—staffed with a cook, a maid, and a coachman who oversaw the farm and lived in a tenant’s house across the road with a half-dozen men who fenced the land and built a large stable.

  From his first three years, Lindbergh would later recall but a handful of stray memories, mostly of life along the Mississippi. He remembered the view of the river from his crib; and the swift-moving current, a quarter mile across, became an endless source of fascination for him. He also remembered his mother, with her hair powdered white, coming into a room downstairs, wringing her hands and crying, “Oh! I’m so nervous, I’m so nervous.” She was, in fact, preparing for a small acting performance which she was presenting that night for some party guests. “I can still see my mother coming into the room and I can still see her washing the powder off her hair after it was all over,” Lindbergh recalled decades later. “I felt that she would be all right again as soon as the powder was washed off, but I was worried about the effect it would have on the fish when it reached the river. I remember being assured by my mother that it would not make the fish nervous too.”

  Evangeline L. L. Lindbergh had good reason to feel nervous. She never fit in with the townsfolk of Little Falls. Unlike most of the other local women, Evangeline was, after all, a city-bred, college-educated woman who had worked outside the home and who was living in a style more grand than C.A. had lived with his first wife. That she was also much younger than he only isolated her even more. “After the marriage,” remembered C.A.’s former sister-in-law, Mrs. Robert Herron, “she kept aloof and never had many friends.” Lindbergh maids regularly gossiped about their mistress’s wild temper and wilder spending habits. Tongues wagged about her fits of rage and willfulness toward C.A. and her constant nagging. In unkind moments, C.A.’s two sisters referred to Evangeline as the “Anvil Chorus,” “A.C.” for short. (Decades later some believed she was the model for Carol Kennicott, the stifled heroine in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, a novel based on the author’s hometown of Sauk Centre, not fifty miles from Little Falls.)

  From the beginning the Lindberghs kept their baby outside as much as possible, even in winter. His first summers were spent in a baby carriage which sported a large green parasol. C.A. had purchased a flock of angora goats to clear the land; and there was a constant battle between whoever was looking after the baby and the animals, who were always butting the carriage trying to eat the parasol. Charles was weaned on goat’s milk and grew up surrounded by animals—cattle, hogs, sheep, chickens, and horses (including a saddle horse and a “bucking bronco”). There were pigeons in the barn, which Charles called “dubs,” and a family of six-toed cats that had to be disposed of because they were excessively fond of the “dubs.” With few childre
n nearby, a succession of dogs became Charles’s playmates.

  The boy’s prosperous surroundings reflected C.A.’s booming business in town. The senior Lindbergh’s legal reputation grew along with his land holdings—which included large parcels on the west side of the river, where he thought Little Falls residences would mushroom next. His passion for land became famous in the county, as did his reputation for buying at the seller’s price and selling at the buyer’s. As often as not, he was willing to carry paper, assuming mortgages and promissory notes along with his land parcels; he was even known to throw money back to buyers who needed an advance on their taxes. While serving on the boards of the two Little Falls banks, he was often quoted as saying, “To make money, in my opinion, is not the sole purpose of a bank.”

  His reputation spread to neighboring counties. “Judges, and other attorneys, told stories about him,” wrote the senior Lindbergh’s friends Lynn and Dora B. Haines, “—not of sharpness and tricks, but of his straight-forward, uncompromising honesty.” Except with his wife, from whom he kept most of his finances as private as his emotions.

  Early Sunday morning, August 6, 1905, C.A., Evangeline, and Grandmother Land took Charles in one of their four carriages for a long drive northwest of town. They stopped at a farm in which C.A. had an interest and returned to an early afternoon fried chicken dinner, after which they all went into the living room. Evangeline was playing piano, and C.A. was playing with Charles, carrying him up and down the room, shouting so loudly that Evangeline could hardly hear her music. In the midst of this ruckus, the cook entered the room and said as calmly as if she were announcing dinner, “Mrs. Lindbergh, the house is on fire.”