Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Charles wanted only to get back to his books, cramming to catch up on the work he missed while he was away. But in the week following C.A.’s death, Evangeline sent him five letters, each full of estate matters. He took time out from studying for one of his hardest exams to state he would rather have his mother than anybody else serve as administrator, but that whatever was decided, “we can not run the whole thing to suit ourselves. [Eva] must be considered and whatever is done must be straight all the way around.” Evangeline agreed, confessing that “in all this I dread nothing so much as that way you have of setting your jaw and gritting your teeth when you are hurt or angry. I can’t bear to hurt you.”

  The probate court appointed the Wells-Dickey Trust Company of Minneapolis administrator of the Lindbergh estate. Most of C.A.’s properties reverted to their mortgagees; and ownership of the farm in Little Falls was divided among the family members—one-third to Evangeline as widow, the remainder divided in thirds, among Charles, Eva, and the late Lillian’s daughter. The house remained vacant while the farmland was rented out. As a result of Eva’s having vented her anger at her stepmother in court, Charles decided to have nothing more to do with her than he had to, steering clear of her for decades.

  C.A.’s legacy to Charles included a lot of stifled anger and sadness. The closest Lindbergh ever got to sorting out those feelings came years later in a recurring dream in which he would see his father with great clarity, and talk with him, and wonder “why we have stayed so long apart when we have had such easy access to each other.”

  Perhaps inspired by his father’s death, Charles became the most forthright personality in his Army class, stalwart and stoical. At the same time, he withdrew even more than he had as a child, when he had found solitude the most effective means of blocking out the marital rancor surrounding him.

  He became a chameleon, able to blend into any environment—to be a part of any group but always apart. In flying school, where almost everybody had a nickname, Charles Lindbergh had a dozen of them—including Slim, Charlie, Carl, “Old Swede,” even one he would later claim the press made up for its banner headlines, Lindy; but nobody became a close friend. He became the practical joker of “the gang”—dumping a fellow cadet’s gear in the middle of the barracks, removing another’s to a rooftop, turning a hose on in the bed of a sound sleeper, putting shaving cream into the open mouth of a snorer, dousing a sergeant’s pillow with skunk “juice”—though sometimes he did not know when to quit, carrying his pranks to immature if not cruel extremes. While one of his bunkmates who often bragged about his brothel activities lay asleep, naked, one afternoon, Lindbergh painted his erect penis green. He proceeded to tie a long string around the large member, which he had somebody outside the barracks pull. Other cadets often moseyed into town for a night cavorting with women; but Charles cuddled up alone with a stray dog he found, a white mongrel he named Booster.

  The military took control of Lindbergh’s mind. In aviation, inexactitude could be fatal; and now he applied the same clarity of thought that was required in the air to his precision of expression on the ground. His syntax sharpened; he took to using a dictionary, improving both his spelling and grammar; even his immature handwriting became more legible. As members of his class steadily fell away, Lindbergh’s final marks for the year gave him a 93.36 average, the second highest in his class.

  At the start of Charles’s new school term, he and the thirty-two other survivors of the Benzine Board graduated to Kelly Field, ten miles away, for “advanced training.” Life at Kelly was an improvement over Brooks on almost every front. “We get better grub, treatment and work here,” he wrote his mother on September 17, 1924. Ground school courses became more advanced as did the planes and maneuvers; the remaining cadets trained in gunnery, photography, and bombing.

  Dangers at Kelly Field increased as well. “They wash a man out here even quicker than at Brooks,” Charles informed Evangeline, often wondering “how many will be left six months from now.” At Kelly, Lindbergh later noted, “we were constantly under observation and our only method of relaxation while flying was when the sky was cloudy and we could get above the clouds.”

  Lindbergh came close to dismissal once, for flying too well. In early 1925 the cadets were sent on a “cross country” trip—a triangular course from Kelly to Gonzales (sixty miles away) to Cuero (another thirty miles), then back home. The cadets left at five-minute intervals. Lindbergh was the third to take off, but he proved to be the first to land at Gonzales, where he checked in with the instructor and proceeded to Cuero. When he arrived at his second check-point, nobody was there, so he carried on, finishing the race ahead of everybody else. Back at Kelly he was severely lectured “on inattention and inability to locate fields and even towns,” for he had obviously landed at the wrong field or was simply lying. To prove his innocence, Lindbergh had to draw a map of the field at which he landed. Upon completing it, word arrived at the operations office that the instructor who was supposed to be checking the pilots in at Cuero had, in fact, got lost that morning and been late in reaching the field himself.

  The cadets spent two weeks at Ellington Field, between Houston and Galveston, where they trained with machine guns. Upon their return to Kelly, the men practiced pursuit, attack observation, bombardment. With the second year of training entering its final months, each cadet specialized in a particular branch. Lindbergh was assigned to pursuit, which required the most versatility. He trained in dog-fighting, ground strafing, and light bombing and spent much of his time flying formations with as many as eight other planes.

  On March 6, 1925—only eight days before graduation from the Air Service Advanced Flying School—Lindbergh was part of one such maneuver at five thousand feet. There were three units of three SE-5’s each, with Lindbergh on the left of the top unit. Their “enemy” was a DH-4B below. “When we nosed down on the DH,” Lindbergh later wrote in his official report, “I attacked from the left and Lieutenant McAllister from the right.” The planes collided, locking together. When separating them appeared hopeless, Lindbergh climbed out to the right side of his then vertical cockpit and jumped backward as far from the ship as he could.

  Just three weeks earlier two Brooks Field cadets crashed and burned; and eight months earlier two other planes had collided in midair over Kelly Field, killing one pilot. Lindbergh was fortunate to follow the course of the other, his parachute functioning perfectly. While falling he was able to see McAllister descend safely and the two planes, one hundred yards off to the side, twirl earthward, bursting into flames upon hitting the ground. An hour later Lindbergh was in the air again.

  Accounts of the crash hit the newspapers from coast to coast. When a man in Detroit commented to Evangeline Lindbergh about her flyboy, “It will not be the last trouble he will have in that game,” she replied, “I have more confidence in him than ever and you may be struck dead by an auto before you get home today.”

  On March 14, 1925, nineteen flying cadets—out of the original group of 104—graduated from the Advanced Flying School at Kelly Field and were commissioned as second lieutenants in the Air Service Reserve Corps. Lindbergh was first in the class. That night the new lieutenants enjoyed a farewell dinner in San Antonio, assembling for the last time. “The gang” decided to remain in contact by circulating a round-robin letter, to which Lindbergh would contribute over the years. Except for rare chance encounters over his lifetime of travels, however, he would only see one or two Army classmates ever again. Lindbergh was already leading a compartmentalized existence, always packing light, carrying few people from one episode of his life to the next.

  During the past year, Lindbergh had simply assumed that he would go on active duty upon graduation from Kelly, but few squadrons needed new pilots just then. He had been offered a year’s contract cotton dusting in Georgia for $2,400, but the pay seemed too low. He went to Love Field in Dallas to buy a Jenny with most of the year’s salary he had squirreled away, but the thousand-dollar price seemed t
oo high.

  Evaluating his flying experiences in the past two years, his mind kept turning to Missouri—the Air Races, the job opportunities, the camaraderie at Lambert Field even when the weather had kept him on the ground. In his few months there he had made enough contacts to feel like “an accepted member of the city’s little group of pilots.” Several of them, in fact, had said a job would always be waiting for him; the young man he considered his closest friend, Bud Gurney, was Missouri-bound; and barnstorming was always good there.

  “St. Louis is a city of winds, and the air above Lambert Field is usually rough,” Lindbergh would later write. Even so—he thought that third week of March 1925—for him, the winds there had always been favorable.

  In Dallas, he boarded the next train north.

  5

  SPIRIT

  “I have felt the godlike power man derives from his

  machines … the immortal viewpoint of higher air.”

  —C.A.L.

  IN LATE MARCH 1925, LIEUTENANT LINDBERGH’S TRAIN crossed into Missouri. Surrounded by eight states—whose borders all but connect the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and the Alleghenies to the Rockies—Missouri combined qualities found in the country at large. Not unlike its recent arrival, it was a mixture of northern industriousness with southern courtesy, eastern diplomacy and western rusticity. Its principal city, on the western bank of the Mississippi, was in other ways even more like Lindbergh.

  St. Louis was named for Louis IX of France, a king so worshipped he was canonized just twenty-five years after his death. Louis had been a Crusader—a beacon in the Dark Ages, a pious traveler renowned for his self-assuredness. Maintaining his faith and vision, he withstood intense physical discomfort in order to reach his holy destination. His spirit would take hold of the Mississippi River’s centralmost city that bears his name, becoming a point of departure for adventurers of unusual zeal. Since 1804, when Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark from St. Louis to survey the Louisiana territory, the city became more than a gateway to the west. It came to symbolize the portal to the future.

  In 1904, St. Louis became the first American city to host the modern Olympic Games; and at a World Exhibition that same year, it enthralled tens of thousands of visitors with a myriad of electric, incandescent lights. Then it settled into a period of quiet contentment. In the 1920s, St. Louis was coming alive again. The city passed an $87 million bond issue for local improvements; business was booming; and Major Albert Bond Lambert, who had commanded a school for balloon pilots during the Great War, bought a former cornfield, which he opened to any aircraft operator free of charge. The one-hundred-seventy-acre clay sod field had no runways, simply a triangular landing space at its center. In winter the cold, the wind, and the frozen grooves in the ground challenged even the best pilots. Since the Air Races in 1923, the field had become the logical intersection for the nation’s air traffic. Lambert announced that he would operate the field at his own expense until the city of St. Louis could take it over.

  Lindbergh moved into a boardinghouse near Lambert Field in Anglum, farm country ten miles to the northwest of the St. Louis business district. No sooner had he unpacked than Frank and William Robertson, wartime fliers who had started their own company, offered him the best aviation job in town—chief pilot for the airmail. But there was a hitch: The Postmaster General had only recently been authorized to contract with civilian companies for the mail service; and the Robertson Aircraft Corporation’s bid for the St. Louis-Chicago route had not yet been accepted. Lindbergh wrote his mother that he would rather fly the mail than try to enlist in the regular army, but he had no idea how long it would take the government to award its routes.

  Until then, Lindbergh became a regular at Lambert Field, creating his own opportunities. He obtained a few flying students and carried passengers on short hops. “I found no trouble getting planes ‘on shares,’” he later wrote. “New possibilities opened up each day.” In an OX-5 Standard, he barnstormed a few weeks in Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa. No matter how silly the work, he took it seriously. There was one flight—recorded in Lindbergh’s papers with the exact location discreetly omitted—during which a man wanted to fly over his hometown and urinate on it … a wish Lindbergh granted.

  In early May 1925, Lindbergh was invited to join Vera May Dunlap’s Flying Circus. Their advertisements said Vera May herself would appear in person “and will positively stand erect on top of the upper wing of the airplane without any visible means of support whatsoever while her pilot loops the loop, defying all laws of gravitation.” Lindbergh quickly learned that the circus was, in fact, run by an Army “washout” and that Vera May was not especially wild about flying. No matter—“Beans” Lindbergh, as he was billed in Carterville, Illinois, managed to divert the public’s attention from Vera May’s failure to appear by performing some daredeviltry of his own, stopping his motor three thousand feet in the air and landing with his engine dead. The most dangerous stunt Vera May and her promoter performed was early the morning after the exhibition, when they skipped town, leaving their hotel bill unpaid.

  Homing to St. Louis, “Beans” picked up more work around Lambert Field. On June second he tested a new commercial four-passenger plane, an OXX-6 Plywood Special. The ship was handling peculiarly, but he was able to put it successfully into a left spin for two complete turns, holding the stick all the way back and the rudder completely in the direction of the spin. But when he reversed the controls, the ship would not obey. As it kept spinning, it dropped fifteen hundred feet. With less than four hundred feet before crashing, Lindbergh rolled over the right side of the cockpit and pulled his rip cord. Falling faster than his abandoned plane, Lindbergh was in grave danger of their catching each other up; and, in fact, the plane did come within twenty-five feet of him. Of greater concern was a strong wind, which was causing him to drift toward a row of high-tension poles. Forced to hasten his descent by partially collapsing his chute, he landed hard in a potato patch, dislocating his shoulder. Lindbergh became the first man known to have his life saved twice by a parachute, which earned him special status in an unofficial fraternity created by the Irvin Parachute Company called the Caterpillar Club.

  Before the end of the day, he was in another plane; and by the end of June he was testing a DH-4 mail plane intended for the airmail run. Of his many barnstorming offers, he chose to fly with a handsome pilot named Orville E. Scott, manager of Lambert Field. Billed now as the “Flying Fool,” Lindbergh had—according to the press releases—earned “the reputation of being one of the best all around stunt fliers in the country. Fearing nothing that’s possible to be accomplished in the air.” In July, he flew in an aerial wedding, carrying a judge into the clouds, alongside another plane with a bride and groom.

  Amid all the wonderful nonsense, Lindbergh scheduled an appointment before a board of examining officers as a first step toward obtaining a Regular Army Commission. During his preliminary oral examination, he realized that he was not as prepared as he should be; and midway through the exam, he asked if he could return at a later date. “The board said they thought I might be able to pass the examinations at that time,” Lindbergh later recalled, “but that they would accede to my request.” Whether it was the increasing interest in his civil flying pursuits or the onerous outline of subjects he would have to pass—including Calculus, a foreign language, English Literature, and Chemistry—Lindbergh never reapplied. After two weeks of Reserve Officer training at Richard Field, Missouri—instructing pilots in Jennies—Lindbergh received an offer from J. Wray Vaughan, president of The Mil-Hi Airways and Flying Circus in Denver—$400 a month.

  “I’d always wanted to fly around mountains,” Lindbergh would later write, “and Denver was within gliding distance of the Rockies. That would give me a chance to explore the air currents around canyons, slopes, and ridges. I could study the effect of turbulence, about which aviators knew so little and speculated so much.” Still waiting on the airmail job, he accepted. Upon arriving at
Humphrey’s Field, outside the city, he discovered that Mil-Hi Airways and Flying Circus was nothing more than Mr. Vaughan and one old Hisso-Standard with a long green dragon painted on either side of the fuselage. Upon closer examination, Lindbergh realized the green dragons were covering the very plane he and H. J. Lynch had flown in the Kansas wheatfield three years earlier.

  Lindbergh hopscotched around eastern Colorado late that summer. “We specialize in Fair and Carnival Exhibition Work, Offering Plane Change in Midair, Wing Walking, Parachute Jumping, Breakaways, Night Fireworks, Smoke Trails, and Deaf Flights,” read Lieutenant Lindbergh’s new business card. From Sugar Beet Day at Wiley to the Watermelon Celebration at Rocky Ford, he and Vaughan performed. In Lamar he flew his first Deaf Flight, a procedure aviators were promoting as a cure for the hard-of-hearing. “The patient,” Lindbergh wrote his mother of the experience, “was a middle-aged man who had been partially deaf for 30 years. I took him up 7,400 ft (he thinks 13,000 ft) and brot him down in a 28 turn spin. He was sure sick and couldn’t hear as well as before but the next day his hearing was noticeably improved and the catarrh he had been troubled with had disappeared. He said he had felt better than he had for a long time.” Lindbergh received fifty dollars for the treatment.

  In October 1925, just as the thrills of barnstorming were becoming routine, the government began awarding the Contract Air Mail routes. Colonial Air Lines received the first, CAM-1, flying between New York and Boston. And Robertson Aircraft Corporation won CAM-2, the Chicago-to-St. Louis run. As promised, Robertson asked Lindbergh to be their chief pilot. Airmail service would not begin until the spring, but he began receiving $200 a month for surveying the route, arranging for landing and emergency fields along the way.