Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  By Friday he could barely contain himself, as they hauled out an actual plane, a Lincoln Standard Tourabout. He stood on the airfield all morning—

  watching riggers attach wings and “hook up” ailerons, flippers, and rudder; watching mechanics strain in fuel, drain the sediment bulb, tune up the engine; watching the engineer test cable tautness with his fingers and measure wing droop with his knowing eye.

  The next day, Otto Timm, the company’s chief engineer and stunt flyer, took Lindbergh for his first flight in that very plane. He shared the front cockpit with a sixteen-year-old Nebraskan named Harlan Gurney—Bud, to the gang at the factory, where he served as odd-jobber and mascot. It was Gurney’s first flight as well. When the plane took flight and banked for the first time, Lindbergh felt as though he had lost “all conscious connection with the past,” that he lived “only in the moment in this strange, unmortal space, crowded with beauty, pierced with danger.” Fifteen minutes in the air, and Lindbergh was forever changed.

  Back on the ground he realized he had misunderstood Lincoln. It was not the “jazz town” he had originally suspected but, rather, a sober community, which shuttered up on Sundays. Moving picture theaters closed, a man could not buy a cigar or even ice cream, and just a few miles away two men were arrested for playing quoits. Charles found a boardinghouse at 1429 R Street for twenty dollars a month, only two blocks from the aircraft factory and just as close to the university. He lost interest in his Excelsior, spending all his time at the factory or writing the details of his experience to his mother.

  Evangeline could not get over the change in her son, a euphoria she had never seen in him. And though she had not yet got “reconciled to [his] going up in the air,” she admitted to feeling more secure knowing “that you really are in Lincoln Nebraska & not in Alaska.” She could not help being impressed by the detailed accounts of his finances which he sent to her. His first month in Lincoln—which included such one-time costs as helmet, goggles, a new suit, and three nights at the Savoy—cost a meager $138.50, and that included $5.25 for “Misscelaneous” and $30 for food. Having reached his full height of six feet and two and one-half inches, and weighing little more than 150 pounds with a 30-inch waist, he justly deserved the nickname he picked up at the factory—Slim.

  “I know very well that you are careful,” Evangeline wrote. “But as far as I can see one dollar a day for eats will not get sufficient food for a person of your size & appetite especially when you are working out of doors.” While all the Lindberghs had learned over the years to pinch pennies—Evangeline steamed uncanceled stamps off envelopes for reuse—she made it clear to Charles that money would always be available to him should he need it.

  Lindbergh spent most of April learning about airplanes, inside and out. After observing every factoryman at his craft and getting hands-on construction experience, he was assigned to Ira O. Biffle, reputed to have been “the most hard boiled instructor the army had in the war.” Lindbergh found him more bark than bite, though embittered since the death of a friend in a plane. Lindbergh’s only complaint was that Biff seldom showed up at the field before noon.

  Sharp-sighted and coordinated, with quick reflexes, Lindbergh proved to be a natural pilot. “The actual flying of the ship is easy, also the take-off,” he wrote his friend Plummer back in Wisconsin. “But the landing is Hell.” It was hard at first for Lindbergh to grasp how delicate the controls were, how a half-inch movement of the top of the stick could throw the ship entirely off balance. His only close call came one day in late April when the plane was still on the ground and its old carburetor caught fire. Lindbergh instinctively stuffed his cap into the air intake and extinguished it. By the end of May, he had logged almost eight hours of instruction, and Biff pronounced him ready to solo.

  Unfortunately, Ray Page was at that moment in the process of selling the company’s training plane to Erold G. Bahl, reputedly the best flyer around Lincoln. While Page felt that Lindbergh was perfectly able to fly, he could not risk turning over the airplane without bond in the event of its sustaining any damage. Lindbergh had neither the money for the bond nor, he realized, enough hours in the air to warrant a pilot’s job even if he did solo. Wanting experience, he thought, “Maybe I could get Bahl to take me with him, barnstorming.”

  “Barnstorming” was a theatrical term—applied to touring actors who often literally performed in barns—which aviation, still its novelty stage, appropriated. It usually involved dropping into towns to give informal exhibitions and sightseeing flights, performing death-defying stunts upon arrival to lure the customers and again upon leaving so they felt they had received their money’s worth. Bahl was about to barnstorm through southeastern Nebraska. Lindbergh asked if he could join him as an unpaid assistant. The price was right.

  They left in May. Lindbergh’s job was to clean the plane and a few farmers’ pockets, drumming up business among the small crowds on the prairie. Five dollars bought as many minutes in the air. After a few days Bahl noticed that Lindbergh was luring more money than he expected, so he assumed the young man’s expenses. One day Lindbergh suggested that they might draw a bigger crowd if he stood on one of the wings when they flew into town.

  Bahl and his new wing-walker returned to Lincoln in June. Hard-up for cash and determined to buy his own plane, Lindbergh picked up fifteen dollars a week back at the factory doing odd jobs. He took a room for $2.25 a week.

  Just as he was looking for ways to expand his barnstorming repertoire, one Lt. Charles Hardin blew into town, with his wife Kathryn. They were parachute makers, who gave demonstrations in order to sell their wares. Ray Page put them both to work, in the factory sewing chutes and as part of Page’s Aerial Pageant. After watching Hardin fall off a wing two thousand feet in the air, Lindbergh decided that he had to experience that sensation. From the moment of his decision, he later confessed, “life rose to a higher level, to a sort of exhilarated calmness.” Years later, Lindbergh tried to analyze why he became possessed by the notion of making a jump. All he concluded was that it was the same impulse that drove him to aviation—“a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty.”

  He asked Hardin for instruction, but not in the basic parachute jump. For his first exit from a plane in flight, Lindbergh wanted to try what was known as a “double jump”—in which one chute opens and is discarded, making way for a second one to deliver the jumper to the ground. One June evening, against a clear sky, Lindbergh made his leap from 1,800 feet, and the first chute opened perfectly. After a few seconds, he cut it loose and waited for the second to open. But several seconds passed and he did not feel the tug that should have followed. Because he had never made such a descent before, Lindbergh had no idea that everything was not right until he began to fall headfirst. Another long moment later, the parachute at last blossomed, carrying him safely to earth. For the rest of his life, Lindbergh remembered feeling no panic over what might have happened to him, only how soundly he slept that night. Easier for him than most, with nobody dependent upon him for anything, Lindbergh decided “that if I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary lifetime.”

  Opportunities suddenly flung themselves at Lindbergh. Bahl offered to take him barnstorming in northwestern Nebraska, for pay; Ray Page offered him a job in the factory; and a pilot named H. J. “Cupid” Lynch, who had recently purchased a Lincoln Standard with a Kansas wheat farmer named “Banty” Rogers, wired Lindbergh that he needed a parachute jumper to barnstorm with him through Kansas and Colorado. Meantime, Charles did not neglect to write his mother late that June that he had not forgotten about college, that whatever his future, he would not return to a straight Engineering course. “I would like, however, to take certain courses,” he said, such as calculus, physics, aerodynamics, and structural design.

  Ray Page still owed Lindbergh two hours of flight instruction, his solo flight, and some back wages. Striking a deal with him
and Charlie Hardin, Lindbergh put all that and twenty-five dollars onto the table and was able to walk away with a brand-new Hardin muslin parachute. He stored his motorcycle in the factory basement and boarded a train for Kansas.

  Practically at the end of the line, in Bird City—a few farmhouses in the wheat-filled northwest corner of Kansas—Cupid Lynch and Banty Rogers met Slim Lindbergh at the train that July. The next day Lindbergh put the new parachute through its maiden descent, in order to attract a crowd on the first stop of their summer tour. He and Lynch also took along Rogers’s smooth-haired fox terrier, Booster.

  “This is sure a great life,” Charles wrote his mother, studying in New York that summer. “The states seem small with a plane.” Over the next two months, Booster and the barnstormers flew the big skies and small towns of Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming, with Lindbergh performing as wing-walker, skydiver, and mechanic.

  Through the Rocky Mountains they flew as high as ten thousand feet above sea level. And just as exciting, flying from Colorado Springs to Burlington, Colorado, they “hedge-hopped” the last half hour—flying just two feet from the ground at eighty miles per hour, then “zooming” over fences and buildings, sharply ascending a few hundred feet at a forty-five-degree angle. “That is the most fun in this game,” Charles carried on. By the end of summer, when they reached Montana, his enthusiasm continued to soar. He advertised himself in the Billings Gazette Sun as “Aerial Daredevil Lindbergh”; and he even dragged Booster into the act, putting him in a harness, and letting him fly before the crowds on a rubber mat outside the cockpit, his paws hanging over the cowling. For the first time in his life, the shy farmboy enjoyed being around people.

  “It’s a sociable place, under a wing,” Lindbergh later waxed nostalgic, “and good for business, too.

  People like to come and sit beside you. They start asking questions about flying, and telling about their farms. Pretty soon they begin kidding each other into taking a flight over town. If you help them along a little, they’re the best salesmen you could have.

  Aviation created a brotherhood of casual acquaintances—people constantly coming and going—in which he felt comfortable. Besides the other pilots and mechanics, he discovered that flying introduced him to “the extremes of human character—from bank presidents to tramps; from sheriffs to outlaws; from professors to idiots; from county preachers to town prostitutes.” Indeed, he would write, “Some of the pleasantest hours of my life have been spent in the shade of a wing, waiting for the Nebraska wind to calm when I was learning to fly.”

  Charles barely had a moment to observe the death of his Grandfather Land that August. The pioneering dentist worked right up to his final days, when his heart gave out at the age of seventy-five. For the rest of his life Charles would credit him for bequeathing his passion for science, which in large measure led him to aviation and all the marvels “in each curve of an airfoil, in each angle between strut and wire, in the gap of a spark plug or the color of the exhaust flame.”

  Evangeline returned to Detroit, where she secured a position teaching Chemistry at Cass Technical High School; and at summer’s end she could not help reminding Charles, “You say not one word of college.” She did not want him to close off options in his life for not having a diploma; but she said she was prepared to support whatever he decided. Charles wrote back about the prospects of buying his own airplane. “You know what you want,” Evangeline replied, “—only is a plane a wise investment & has the occupation of pilot any future?”

  Lindbergh considered the question when the barnstorming season ended in October, leaving him in Lewistown, Montana. He knew only that it felt wonderfully like “playing hookey from school” that fall not having to show up for class anywhere. He bought a small boat for two dollars, patched the leaks, and planned to ride the rapids of the Yellowstone River as far as he could get on his return to Lincoln—camping and eating canned food along the way. After two days of rain, and spending as much time bailing as he had paddling, he bartered the vessel for a wagon ride to the nearest town. As he remembered, it was Huntley, Montana, where he bought a train ticket and spent the night sleeping at the station, waiting for the next train to Lincoln. There he decided “that the next spring I would be flying my own ship.”

  Instead of accepting his mother’s offer of assistance, Charles felt drawn toward his father, and with good reason. C. A. Lindbergh had fallen on hard times. Living alone in dollar-a-night hotel rooms and picking up his messages care of General Delivery telegraph offices, he kept homing to the Farmer-Labor movement, then enjoying a moment of electability in Minnesota politics. His countenance had turned woeful—with a weary and slightly crazed look in his eyes—but this politician-errant continued to make speeches and to write. At the end of the year he completed his fourth book, The Economic Pinch, tilting at the same old windmills—trusts and banks and profiteers who fed off the labor of others.

  Because the senior Lindbergh was still an “untamed polar bear,” as Farmer-Labor Congressman Knut Wefald once described him, it was difficult for anybody close to him to classify his behavior as “abnormal.” But C.A. himself was noticing that his body chemistry seemed out of whack—that he could no longer withstand the cold as he used to and that he periodically suffered moments of melancholia. Trying to jumpstart a law practice in the Twin Cities after sustaining heavy losses in land speculation, he often appeared on the streets of Minneapolis in dirty, ragged clothing. Even more peculiar were a series of bleating letters that year from C.A. to Charles.

  “I can’t see any reason why you and I should not be in a little closer touch with each other,” C.A. wrote. “This life at best is not any too beautiful, so we should be palls [sic] as much as possible. You will soon be going out into the world—and you will find it quite different than you expect in many respects. I may be able to be of some help in advising about conditions. You have been lucky to have your mother with you all these years, but she will not be with you so much in the future.”

  Neither, C.A. seemed to be suggesting, would he. At sixty-three he was fighting old age, both reveling in Charles’s youth and slightly resenting it. “He is in splendid condition,” C.A. wrote his estranged wife, “and exercises the most sense of one of his age that I have ever taken notice of.” Still, C.A. wrote his daughter Eva, “he has his ways of fun. If nothing happens he may make a mark some time. He will likely freeze to what he earns, except that he wants to go everywhere.”

  During several visits together that winter, Charles talked to his father about little other than airplanes. By the end of February, C.A. realized that his son’s interest in aviation was no mere infatuation; and after belatedly remembering Charles’s twenty-first birthday, he agreed to become his business partner and underwrite the purchase of a plane. He had heard that good deals could be made at Souther Field, just outside Americus, Georgia, which warehoused war-surplus aircraft. Because that was not far from C.A.’s real estate investments, Charles offered in return to visit the property outside Miami and work on his house there for a few weeks.

  “I leave for Americus to-night,” Charles wrote his father on April 20, 1923—after spending days on his belly among thousands of sandburs, digging a sewer ditch by hand—“and will let you know of results there as soon as I can.” Even before he had located a plane for sale, he drafted letters to Chambers of Commerce, describing how an “aeronautical exhibition, consisting of parachute drop, wing walking and plane stunting” could be an attraction for their local fairs. He dreamed of new stunts—one in which he would hang by his teeth below a speeding plane—all this and more for $150 a day.

  The town of Americus, tucked away in southwestern Georgia, was sleepy country, revived by the World War because of Souther Field and its fourteen active air hangars. After the Armistice, a colorful Georgian named John Wyche bought at government auction 116 planes for sixteen dollars apiece, 525 engines for twenty dollars each, and fourteen thousand propellers for eighty cents a throw. He was selling rec
onstructed planes for $1,000 each.

  The last Army guards had decamped the week Lindbergh arrived, leaving it a “ghost field.” After poking around the empty buildings, he made himself at home in one of the barracks. By day, men came out to work on the planes. As the place was hardly crawling with customers, Lindbergh got his pick from most of the stock, and he got John Wyche to halve his price. He selected a Curtiss JN4-D—a Jenny—a two-place, open tandem-cockpit biplane that had been a popular training plane in the war. He also got a brand-new Curtiss OX-5 engine, an extra twenty-gallon tank, and a complete once-over with a fresh coat of olive drab dope in the exchange. The Jenny could fly an hour on ten gallons of gasoline and one quart of oil, reaching a top speed of seventy miles per hour. Lindbergh lived alone on the field for the two weeks that his plane was being assembled, sometimes sleeping by its side in the hangar.

  There it dawned on him that he had only flown in a Jenny for a few minutes, that he had but eight hours flying time behind him, and that he still had never soloed. “Everybody at Souther Field took for granted that I was an experienced pilot when I arrived alone to buy a plane,” Lindbergh later wrote. “They didn’t ask to see my license, because you didn’t have to have a license to fly an airplane in 1923.”

  The day the chief mechanic announced that Lindbergh’s plane was ready, he felt he had no choice but to “test her out” in front of everybody present. He taxied the Jenny to the farthest corner of the field, opened the throttle, and took off. When the plane was four feet off the ground, the right wing began to drop. Feeling that the machine was beyond his control, Lindbergh suddenly decided it would be better to land from that height than from any higher. He brought the plane down on one wheel and a wing skid. Out of nowhere, a young aviator named Henderson, dressed in standard pilot’s garb of breeches and boots, approached. Overlooking Lindbergh’s obvious embarrassment, he offered to fly with him while his own plane was being assembled. A half-dozen takeoffs and landings together, Lindbergh had the hang of it. Henderson suggested Lindbergh wait until the dying winds of day’s end before re-attempting to solo.