Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  That afternoon at five he reapproached his Jenny and started the engine. He and his plane were completely alone—except for one old black man who had wandered onto the field, unaware of the significance of the moment. Lindbergh taxied back out and opened the throttle. “No matter how much training you’ve had,” Lindbergh would later state, “your first solo is far different from all other flights. You are completely independent, hopelessly beyond help, entirely responsible, and terribly alone in space.” He climbed to 4,500 feet that evening, taking in what seemed like all of Georgia. He felt as though he would have kept going were it not for the sun slipping behind the horizon. When he landed, his sole witness came up to greet him, in awe. There was something about his “praise and courtesy that gave me confidence,” Lindbergh would recall more than twenty years later, a feeling of elation surpassed only by the fact that he had landed his plane without “cracking up.”

  He spent the next week at Souther Field practicing. Another early aviator, Glenn Messer, remembered watching Lindbergh one of those days. He was impressed—not with any particular aviatic prowess, or even an unusual display of physical ability, but with the fact that “for the next few hours all I saw this young skinny feller do was take that plane up and down, over and over, with nothing stopping him. Taking off and landing dozens of times.”

  While Charles had been in Georgia, Minnesota’s senior Senator, Knute Nelson, died, leaving a vacancy to be filled by special election. Like an old fire-horse hearing the bell, C. A. Lindbergh decided to make one last run for office, going after the Farmer-Labor nomination. He thought Charles and his Jenny might be an effective part of the campaign—modernizing the whistle-stop tour and drawing attention to the candidate. At the very least, he thought Charles would be able to barnstorm in Minnesota “and make some spondulix”—the old-fashioned word, even then, for cash. Charles sent his suitcase home by railway express; and he buckled up an extra shirt, pair of breeches, toothbrush, socks, spark plugs, tools, and assorted equipment into the front cockpit of his plane. He left Souther Field on May 17, 1923, and barnstormed his way north.

  In the seven months since he had taken up aviation, Lindbergh had parlayed a parachute into a promising flying career, complete with his own Jenny. Every day brought greater mastery of his machine. Nights he slept in a hammock he fashioned from some canvas and slung from his upper wing. Enduring heavy rains and floods, extreme winds, and crude airports as well as surviving several muddy emergency landings, Charles joined his father in the middle of his senatorial campaign in Marshall, Minnesota.

  At the first possible moment, he attempted to show C.A. how in a matter of minutes they could saturate an entire town with campaign literature. His father entered the front cockpit carrying hundreds of handbills, which Charles instructed him to throw when he rocked the plane and nodded. “It did not occur to me that he might throw them out all at once,” Charles later recalled of the incident; “but he did, and the thick stack of sheets struck the stabilizer with a thud.” The circulars did no damage … and about as much good—for, as Lindbergh noted, “the distribution of literature in the town wasn’t very broad.”

  A few days later, the candidate and his pilot flew in from Buffalo Lake to Glencoe, landing on a farmer’s field southwest of the town. “In an attempt to take the air again,” reported the Glencoe Enterprise, “one wheel of the plane … dropped into a ditch, causing the nose of the machine to plow into the ground with great force. This up-ended the plane, broke one wing, snapped the tail-steering cables, and otherwise damaged it.” Nobody was hurt. C.A. left by automobile for Litchfield, where he arrived in time to make a scheduled speech that evening. Charles stayed behind until the plane got repaired, trying to figure out the cause of the accident. C.A. later wrote his daughter Eva that he did not want to believe there was a “plot” to get him, but there was no doubt that the plane had been “munked with.”

  During their weeks together, C.A. could not help noticing his son’s immense charm, his quiet way of drawing people toward him. It was more than his looks, C.A. thought—more that people “seemed to think it strange that he would be so plain and unassuming, and kindly…. He does seem like the real stuff,” with “the making of a big man, and these are times we need them. In the line of work he is at I do not suppose there is a chance for a big man, and yet there may be.”

  While Lindbergh wrote up events of this campaign in his autobiographies, he never recorded the results. C.A. ran a distant third, receiving less than twenty percent of the vote and carrying only the eight core counties of his former Congressional district. Afterwards, he returned to his real estate negotiations, constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul, while his son left to barnstorm through Minnesota and northern Iowa.

  Most of the time Charles was alone, though his mother did accompany him for a few days, thoroughly enjoying her place in the front cockpit. “Some weeks I barely made expenses,” Lindbergh recounted, “and on others I carried passengers all week long at five dollars each. On the whole I was able to make a fair profit in addition to meeting expenses and depreciation.”

  And then one morning Lindbergh realized a promise he had made to himself years earlier. “I shall never forget flying the first time over the farm in Minnesota where I grew up as a boy,” Lindbergh wrote an acquaintance more than forty years later—“the new and seemingly god-like perspective it gave to me.”

  He landed near the log buildings on the western reaches of the farm. Their hired man, the old Norwegian, Daniel Thompson, was there to greet him, his axe slung familiarly over his shoulder. “Nay doggone,” he said, looking over the flying machine, “the man that invented these things vas quite a feller!” When Charles asked about the farm, Thompson replied, “All in veeds.” And that was the least of it. A modern dam was about to be built, their valley flooded, trees chopped, and the rapids quelled to a lake. Charles was overcome by nostalgia. “I knew that day,” Lindbergh wrote three decades later, “that childhood was gone. My farm on the Mississippi would become a memory, of which, sometime, I’d tell my children …”

  One evening, while Lindbergh was still barnstorming in southern Minnesota, a car drove up with several young men in it. One of them was a graduate of the Army flying school. After some discussion, he asked Lindbergh why he did not enlist as a flying cadet. “Daredevil Lindbergh”—making a good living off his own plane—was annoyed by the suggestion at first. Then he remembered a group of De Havillands with their 100 h.p. Liberty motors that had landed at Lincoln one day and how he had longed to fly one of them. He realized that flying cadets had access to the most modern and powerful airplanes, not war surplus. Not incidentally, he also “believed every man should be able to take part in defending his country in case of war”; and should there be a war in the future, Lindbergh wanted to be a scout pilot. From his hotel that night he wrote to the Chief of Air Service in Washington. The War Department told him to appear at Chanute Field in Rantoul, Illinois, on January 8, 1924, for his physical and mental examinations. Should he pass, he was told to be prepared to commence his training at Brooks Field, San Antonio, Texas, about March 15, 1924. That left him several months to fly under his own command.

  He barnstormed from Minnesota into Wisconsin just ahead of the oncoming cold weather. Heading toward Illinois, he attended the St. Louis Air Meet, held October 4–6, 1923. Combination trade show, swap meet, county fair, and military parade, it became the biggest aeronautical demonstration in the world to date: 125,000 people witnessed the last day’s events, which included the Pulitzer Trophy Race. Bud Gurney entered the parachute spot landing contest, and Lindbergh agreed to be his pilot. There at Lambert Field, Lindbergh got to see the latest military aircraft, from Army and Navy racers to big bombers. The winner of the Pulitzer races flew a blue Navy Curtiss biplane with a whining D-12 engine and covered a 125-mile course at an average of 243.7 miles per hour, a 37 mile-per-hour improvement over the 1922 winner. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat ran an editorial that said such speed was only possible i
n a military craft and had “no value for commercial purposes,” but few fliers felt the same.

  After the meet, Lindbergh picked up a few flying students (including one referred by an acquaintance from Minnesota, a young airplane manufacturer named Marvin Northrop); and he barnstormed a few Illinois towns. But he kept returning to St. Louis, which was becoming a crossroads for the nation’s fliers. During this time his side of his regular correspondence with his mother became little more than the posting of a blank card every few days, with only its postmark indicating his whereabouts. He was in the middle of another barnstorming tour of the south, flying a Canuck (a slightly modified Jenny) owned by an automobile dealer named Leon Klink, when he was told to report to Brooks Field, just south of San Antonio, by March nineteenth.

  He arrived at Brooks Field on the fifteenth. It was another week before Evangeline Lindbergh learned that her son had enlisted. By then 103 other young men from all corners of the country had joined him.

  In no time the young men learned of the “Benzine Boards”—the review board of officers—which would kick half of them out before they could graduate to advanced training at Kelly Field, where another half of them would fail. Fear of flunking a single test haunted every cadet, because two failing marks automatically washed one out. In the past Lindbergh attended school primarily because it was required; at Brooks— for the first time, he would later note—“I had a clear-cut objective that I was overwhelmingly anxious to attain.”

  Lindbergh scored a 72 on his first exam, in property accounting—barely high enough to pass. With a bad scholastic record behind him and another seventy examinations ahead, he realized he had to change his entire approach to academics. Lindbergh resolved that he “would have to maintain a big margin between my marks and the minimum grade for passing.”

  He studied harder than he ever had before. Taps blew at ten, but Lindbergh often camped in the latrine, where he read under the all-night lights. “The Army schools taught me what I had never learned before,” Lindbergh later noted, “—how to study, even subjects in which I had no interest. For the first time in my experience, school and life became both rationally and emotionally connected.”

  Lindbergh also liked the “shortness and freshness” of the subjects the Army taught. He learned the essentials of aerodynamics, navigation, and meteorology as well as the “responsibilities and proper conduct of an officer, a smattering of military law, of regulations, of organization, of administration” and the operation of machine guns and methods of bombing. Steadily, Lindbergh’s grades ascended into the nineties.

  By April, the class got to fly, with seven cadets assigned to each instructor. Lindbergh felt fortunate in falling under the command of Master Sergeant Bill Winston, reputed to hold the record for flying time in the Army, with close to 3,500 hours. Lindbergh, with more than three hundred hours and seven hundred barnstorming flights, came closer to that mark than almost anybody else on the field. The Army still taught flying with Jennies, although the 90 h.p. OX-5 engines had been replaced by 150 h.p. Hispano-Suizas, and the throttles had been moved from the left side to the right. “Barnstorming had made me a skilful pilot,” he commented years later, “—far more skilful than my Army instructors in selecting and operating from ‘strange fields’ for instances…. Military training taught me precision and the perfection of flying techniques.”

  In the midst of the most engrossing experience of his life, a telegram from Minnesota broke Lindbergh’s concentration. “FATHER IN HOSPITAL BAD BREAKDOWN,” wired Charles’s half-sister, Eva Lindbergh Christie, with whom he not had contact in years. In fact, it was worse than that. C. A. Lindbergh had entered the Colonial Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota—where brothers Charles and William Mayo had established a clinic—because of recurring attacks of the grippe. There he demonstrated a rapid loss of much of his short-term memory and the ability to concentrate. “He seems very weak, & quite thin, repeats a great deal, & asks the same question a number of times,” Eva reported in a follow-up letter to Charles. His head ached, his voice changed, his hands shook, one foot dragged, and he seemed utterly exhausted. Because he had not lost his ability to reason, Eva thought he had suffered a stroke. But then he lost his sense of taste. Eva was additionally anxious because her father’s name was about to be printed on the June primary ballot as a Farmer-Labor candidate for governor.

  On Wednesday, April twenty-third, Eva wired Charles again: “COME TO ROCHESTER FATHER VERY LOW.” Two hours later, a physician concurred in an even more urgent telegram. The Mayo brothers put Dr. A. W. Adson, whom they considered the best brain surgeon in the country, on the case. After numerous nonsurgical tests, he decided to trephine C.A.’s skull. By the next day, Charles had arranged a furlough and boarded a train that would put him in Rochester by Sunday morning. “I may be ‘washed out’ … for going up home,” Charles wrote his friend Leon Klink, who wanted Slim to spend his next furlough barnstorming with him, “but that can’t be helped.”

  Charles arrived to bad news. Dr. Adson had discovered a large, inoperable brain tumor. How much of C.A.’s peculiar behavior in the past year—including his sentimental swings and even a recent premonitory letter to each of his children about his funeral—was the result of the tumor was anybody’s guess. Charles sized up the situation and said he would resign from the Army if it would help C.A. in any way. He went to Minneapolis to withdraw his father’s name from the gubernatorial election; but nothing could be done because C.A. was unable to sign an affidavit.

  Eva graciously informed her stepmother of the graveness of C.A.’s illness, which Evangeline took as her cue to join her son in Rochester. Charles confided to Eva, “I wish she wouldn’t come.” But Evangeline would not be stopped. Dr. Adson told her that C.A.’s case was incurable, that removing the tumor would mean taking one quarter of his brain with it, rendering him completely paralyzed on his right side. Evangeline sat with her husband; and though C.A. could barely speak, it was an emotional encounter for him. Eva fumed that Evangeline must not communicate with C.A. anymore, that he was “upset” over the visit, as evidenced by his crying and a subsequent chill.

  And so the wounds Eva and Evangeline had inflicted upon each other for two decades were ripped open all over again. “It was a disastrous episode,” Eva later recalled, “which Charles handled with courtesy and determination.” Evangeline, for her part, was “glad … in a way” that the “bad time with Eva” occurred, “as it opened Charles’s eyes a bit.” Evangeline kept her distance thereafter.

  Charles, on the other hand, was unmistakably a welcome visitor. Barely able to whisper, the felled sixty-five-year-old asked for his boy, and Charles knelt by his side as he tried to speak. After C.A. uttered only part of a sentence, however, his mind wandered off. Charles remained holding his hand, and C.A.’s “eyes brightened,” Eva observed, “and for a couple of minutes he was himself.”

  By Monday, May fifth, there was nothing to do but make C.A. comfortable until he died. Everybody agreed there was no sense in Charles’s forfeiting all his work in the Army. He returned to San Antonio; and C.A. was moved to a hospital near Eva, in the northwest corner of Minnesota, where he drifted into a coma. On the Saturday afternoon of May 24, 1924, Charles received a telegram at Brooks Field from Eva, which stated: “FATHER PASSED OUT THIS MORNING. SERVICES AT MINN ACCORDING TO HIS WISHES.” Charles immediately wired his mother, as Eva already had.

  C.A.’s daughter planned a service in the First Unitarian Church in Minneapolis for Tuesday afternoon, after which she would take the body to St. Paul for cremation. “Later,” she wrote Charles, “when you can come, you will comply with Father’s wish about throwing his ashes ‘to the wind’ as he wished, somewhere near the old farmstead he cared so much for.” As soon as she could, Eva promised to send Charles their father’s watch. “He wanted you to have it,” she wrote, “and so do I.” Eva would also send the chain that went with it, which she had bought for him. It “represents the 1st money I really earned,” she explained, “and
I’m glad for you to have that too.”

  Evangeline wondered whether she ought to attend the funeral. After a sleepless night, she boarded a train that put her in Minneapolis in time for the service. “It is your father,” she explained to Charles, “& that’s all that counts. I cannot do him any good but my being there again may do some good in the end.” She carried a large spray of gladiolus which she placed on the casket in her son’s name, and she kissed C.A.’s forehead for Charles as well.

  “Boy, just remember your father still lives in you,” Evangeline assured him, “and you have done right by us both. You gave him great pleasure in what you have done, perhaps the greatest satisfaction of his life.” By day’s end Evangeline was glad she had made the trip and that Charles had not—for “it was a day of appeal to the emotions and past affairs and regrets that cannot be made different now.” But her own hurt must have deepened upon reading C.A.’s obituaries. Many of them failed to list her as a survivor, noting only that he left Charles and Eva, and that his wife—referring to Eva’s mother—had died years earlier.

  C.A.’s finances were as messy in death as they had been in life. He left no will and a sheaf of deeds—twenty-three properties, worth a total of $20,000. The rest of his estate—which included stocks, bonds, notes, and personal property—was worth another $5,000. But there were more than $45,000 worth of claims against the estate, mostly in mortgages, which would make any ensuing family feud over administration a pyrrhic victory at best for the winner. And yet Evangeline petitioned through attorneys for appointment as administrator, feeling Eva “has always grabbed all within her reach” and that her “bitterness will make it a hard thing to settle.”