Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  9

  “WE”

  “I still expected to devote the greater part of my life that was spent

  apart from my family in developing fields of aviation.”

  —C.A.L.

  SUMMERY WEATHER WELCOMED THE MOUETTE AS IT CRUISED up the Long Island Sound; and the honeymooners enjoyed smooth sailing for most of a week, in complete privacy. Their fourth day at sea, the Mouette pulled into the harbor at Block Island for fresh water.

  With the world speculating as to where its most famous newlyweds had disappeared, Charles prepared a disguise for coming ashore. A stubbly beard growing in, he pulled a black-checked cap down over his eyes and wore a pair of dark glasses. While his costume seemed to have deflected attention, his boat did not. When some fishermen on the wharf asked about his large cruiser, he kiddingly told them that he was Lindbergh. Eavesdropping from behind the green curtains in the cabin, Anne delighted in the cleverness of his ruse.

  Within a few days, they reached Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where the press, at last, discovered them. The Lindberghs spent the next four days pushing their way to the coast of Maine as hard as they could. One morning, a reporter in a launch persisted in circling the Mouette, hoping the chop of his boat would make the Lindberghs seasick enough to come topside. They never gave him the satisfaction. After eight hours, Lindbergh decided to get away by gunning the engine, dragging the anchor until they lost the reporter on the open sea.

  Each day filled Anne with wonder as she learned the rules of being Mrs. Lindbergh. Four years younger and in the thrall of her new husband, she went along with his every desire, trying to figure out his periodic inconsistencies. She was more than a little surprised, for example, when they pulled into York Harbor, at the southern tip of Maine, where they found a crowd of reporters and townspeople awaiting them. Charles was unusually cheerful, seeming to enjoy showing Anne off to the crowd. Then the chase resumed, as they headed for the cluster of tiny islands that dotted Penobscot Bay.

  It was Lindbergh’s first visit to the North Haven area, and he adored it on sight—“passing island after island with its deep-green forest and spray-dashed rocks.” They both especially liked one of the wildest of the group—Big Garden Island—which Dwight Morrow had just given his daughter as a wedding present. After a few days of complete peace together, they retraced their route, slipping unnoticed into Room 1802 of the Berkshire Hotel on East Fifty-second Street in Manhattan.

  While their first three weeks of marriage had been far from the splendor they could afford, it had provided the greatest luxury they could find anywhere—time alone. Living on canned goods and ginger ale and a Kellogg’s breakfast food called ZO, Anne had surprised herself with her own resiliency. She had found pleasure in the physical labor of their trip and in the rigors of seamanship. “I think it is perfectly thrilling to navigate—use a parallel rule and the compass rose and find magnetic, true, and compass course—and keep the needle on that number—and actually get there!” she wrote her brother Dwight, still under doctors’ care. “Of course with my usual carelessness at the end of the trip I discovered that I had been counting the wrong lines in the compass rose. Charles made terrific fun of me and said I did it because those lines were ‘prettier.’” Just days short of her twenty-third birthday, Anne sent her mother a glowing report of her honeymoon—explaining that it was “all so natural & not a bit terrifying—not a terrific change or even strange—and—a great deal of fun!”

  No sooner were the Lindberghs back on land than they took to the air. Transcontinental Air Transport had announced the inauguration of its crosscountry service; and as Chairman of TAT’s Technical Committee, Lindbergh insisted on spending the night at each stop so that he could make a final inspection of equipment and personnel. His bride accompanied him on this transcontinental dry run; and with each new city, Anne accustomed herself to the rituals of being the hero’s wife.

  After spending one night in Columbus, the next in Indianapolis, and the next in St. Louis, she realized everywhere they went and probably ever would go, “Charles is Charlemagne”—complete with royal treatment (and giggling telephone operators) to which he no longer even took notice. She could not understand why people now asked for her autograph. To her surprise, she cottoned to all of Charles’s friends, down to the grease-monkeys at the airfields. She was startled to discover Kansas City was in Missouri and that Waynoka, TAT’s port city in Oklahoma, was little more than five paved roads and a hotel. Lindbergh, of course, was the guest of honor at the dedication of the town’s new airfield—the biggest crowd, said one townsman, “since the dedication of the pavement!” Upon arriving in California, Lindbergh authorized TAT to commence its transcontinental service.

  At 6:05 P.M. on July 7, 1929, The Airway Limited left Pennsylvania Station in New York for Port Columbus, Ohio. Several of its passengers would continue westward for the forty-eight-hour air-and-rail trip to Los Angeles, mostly journalists given free tickets. The next morning Charles and Anne Lindbergh went to the Grand Central Air Terminal in Glendale, in the San Fernando Valley. The large trimotored City of Los Angeles, made of corrugated aluminum alloy that looked like tin, shimmered in the summer sun. Five thousand spectators and a band were on hand for the ceremonies. Several dignitaries spoke, including Governor Frank Merriam of California. Then “America’s Sweetheart,” Mary Pickford, stood on a ladder and cracked a bottle of grape juice over the nose of the flower-festooned ship. The Lindberghs posed with Miss Pickford for the newsreel and newspaper photographers, then Charles excused himself.

  A select group of ten, including Anne, boarded what the newsmen were calling “The Tin Goose.” While the copilot revved the engines, Charles Lindbergh came from the cockpit into the cabin and shook hands with each passenger. He would be their pilot that morning. Despite his reassuring grin, some found him looking “tired and tense.” The press was already building public suspense, writing at length how Lindbergh had staked “his name and future on the venture,” noting that “the slightest mishap would be disastrous.”

  Anne became TAT’s unofficial hostess, showing the other passengers that they too could relax in the air. To her family and friends she raved about every detail of the flight—starting with the cool gray-green of the cabin with its green curtains at each window and blue-shaded lights over each of the adjustable green leather chairs. A white-uniformed attendant provided stationery, maps and postcards, and a small aluminum table for each passenger. After two and one-half hours, the plane touched down in Kingman, Arizona, where everyone disembarked and walked under a long awning on rollers, which connected the plane with the “station.” The passengers re-boarded after a fifteen-minute stop and, once in the air, partook in a meal which had been specially prepared by the local Harvey House. The attendant set up each passenger’s table, covering it with a lavender linen tablecloth. They dined off metal plates on cold meats, salad with sliced pineapple, white and brown bread, sliced grapefruit, cake, and hot coffee poured from a large thermos. Less than two hours later, they had crossed the great Southwestern desert and landed in Winslow.

  The City of Los Angeles continued east with a fresh crew and without the Lindberghs. They spent the night in Arizona so that Charles could fly the first passengers on the incoming City of Washington. Amelia Earhart—who had become world-famous the year before, as the first woman to fly the Atlantic (Newfoundland to South Wales, along with pilot Wilmer Stultz and a mechanic)—was among them. The success of the new operation quickly found others willing to pay the cross-country fare of $290.

  Seeing how wearying it was for Anne to wear a public mask, Charles took her to northern California for a weekend alone in a log-cabin camp in a valley of tall redwoods. They canoed and swam in a mountain stream that ran past their door. Anne’s writings from this period were extremely romantic, full of magical images at every turn. “I kicked up golden dust when I opened the gates for C. as we drove through fields and farms today,” she wrote her mother from upstate California after a day o
f simple pleasures. “Maybe it’s just the way we feel, C. and I, when we get off together, alone—all gold, that extra golden bloom over everything!”

  But Anne was quickly learning that time alone with her husband would always be rare. Aviation, like Wall Street, was booming that year; and Lindbergh’s public presence was essential to that industry. Once TAT had completed its foundation line, with hub cities across the country, other airlines in various corners of the nation could connect their routes, creating a web of airlanes that united all the states. The next year, more airlines would span the continent; and Lindbergh would play a part in the growth of all of them, especially as they tried to maintain their footing after that October’s stock market crash.

  With the addition of new routes, each month saw an increase in passengers taking to the air. But more essential to the survival of a new airline was the presence of a United States mailbag. In fact, most companies fortunate enough to secure a mail contract subsisted on that alone. The most influential man in commercial aviation thus became the man who awarded those contracts—Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown.

  A Republican mover and shaker, Brown became an authority on commercial aviation and put that knowledge to both personal and public use. He was blindly ambitious and a visionary who looked out for the public good. With the onset of the Depression, Brown believed the fledgling industry needed a few large, strong companies, not many small, weak ones to see it through hard times and into financial stability. He assumed extraordinary powers, consolidating routes and revoking route certificates at his own discretion.

  Lindbergh shared many of the same views about the business of aviation as Brown. Seeing the need to build a broad airline network as quickly as possible, he regarded Brown’s energetic reforms as enlightened capitalism. Toward that end, Lindbergh had several meetings in California with Jack Maddux, a maverick businessman who had started his own bus line and automobile business in the Southwest. His aviation company had been in operation for two years. In 1929 alone, the Maddux Line flew more than a million miles, linking Los Angeles with San Diego and San Francisco as well as the Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys and Baja California. On November sixteenth, the company would merge with TAT.

  American Airways received one of the two transcontinental air routes Brown put up for bids in the summer of 1930—the southern route—Atlanta to Dallas to Los Angeles. Then, instead of simply awarding the second contract for a more central route to a bidder, Postmaster General Brown chose to form a new company, all but forcing a merger between TAT-Maddux and Western Air Express. He turned the marriage into a ménage à trois, folding the Mellon-controlled Pittsburgh Aviation Industries Company (PAIC) into the deal not only because of its ability to fly the northeastern leg of the route but also to reward a few friends. The new Transcontinental and Western Air—T&WA—would be run by an executive from PAIC named Richard Robbins. The company would gradually drop its ampersand and make increasing use of its motto, “The Lindbergh Line.”

  In September 1929, “The Lindbergh Line” suffered its first major catastrophe when one of the TAT trimotor transports disappeared en route from Albuquerque to Los Angeles. The Lindberghs were about to go to Maine; but Charles explained to Anne that it would seem “brutal” to the public—especially to those related to the passengers on the ship—if it appeared that he had gone off on vacation. Charles tried to answer as many questions as he could about the plane’s disappearance. Then, despite bad weather, he and Anne took a small fast plane, a Lockheed Vega, out West to join the search party. Even if there was little for Lindbergh to do, the gesture of his flying to the rescue—accompanied by his diminutive wife—was essential to the image of both the company and commercial aviation. After the Lindberghs’ arrival in the Southwest, the crashed plane was found on Mount Williams, with no survivors.

  Lindbergh visited two other crash-sites during the next eighteen months. Paul Garber, the Smithsonian’s first curator of the National Air Museum, said that these public displays were practically as important to commercial aviation as his flight to Paris. “It took Lindy’s big smile to get those first passengers into planes, especially after those crashes,” he said. “He made it all look so easy … and safe enough to take his pretty, young wife along with him.”

  The Lindbergh name became part of America’s daily parlance. Even after the public novelty of their marriage had worn off, Charles and Anne performed a succession of newsworthy deeds which kept them in the headlines. The nation found them more glamorous than movie stars because their romantic adventures together were real. Lindbergh allowed a certain amount of professional exploitation, but he refused to answer questions about his personal life, talking about Anne only insofar as she was becoming an increasingly active partner in aviation.

  Over the next year, Charles privately taught Anne to fly, and she studied navigation. “The instructor comes every morning at 10 and we, or I (when C. is at the Lockheed factory) work until lunch,” Anne wrote her mother-in-law. “Then he leaves us problems and we work part of the afternoon. Then he comes back right after supper at 7:30 and we work until we drop asleep…. It is very interesting work in itself and very wonderful to me that you can get your exact position in a few minutes with a watch, a sextant, a few tables (of spherical geometry) & a little addition and subtraction—that is if you can see two stars or the sun & the moon…. Charles makes great fun of me because I can only add and subtract dollars and cents—and get all mixed up with degrees and minutes.” During one of their visits to California, she and her husband took up gliding, and Anne became the first licensed female glider in the country. “Women are just as well-fitted to operate a plane as men,” Lindbergh told one reporter, “and the physical difference between them that may handicap women in other lines of work need not do so when it comes to flying.”

  The preceding year, Lindbergh had returned from his Pan American Airways business in Central America via the Yucatán. In the midst of the Mexican jungle he had noticed the ruins of an ancient temple. When he had reached Washington, he telephoned Dr. Charles G. Abbot, Secretary of the Smithsonian, who informed him that he had seen the recent excavation of the Temple of the Warriors at the great Mayan city of Chichén Itzá. His interest in archaeology whetted, Lindbergh read up on the pre-Columbian civilization; and he met Dr. John C. Merriam, president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who was supervising other excavations of primitive civilizations. Lindbergh suggested that the airplane could be a valuable tool not only in reaching remote places but in providing “the eyes of birds to the minds of men.”

  Dr. Merriam told Lindbergh of two archaeological camps near America’s Four Corners, not far off TWA’s Southwestern route. That summer, Charles and Anne flew from California in an open-cockpit Curtiss Falcon biplane over the Canyon de Chelly, several hundred miles west of the main camp in the area. There they saw a number of small ruins perched so high as to be virtually invisible from the canyon bottom. The Lindberghs made several flights over the long-abandoned community—unmarked on archaeological maps—taking hundreds of photographs of terrain and ruins. They climbed the cliffs and examined the ruins, which, according to the Carnegie Institution’s News Service Bulletin, had “never before been visited by white people.”

  The Bulletin praised the Lindbergh expedition for several reasons. Above all, the airplane allowed an observer to cover in a few hours territory that might require months on the back of an animal. Their photographs also showed “much better than in any other way, topographical features in proximity to the ruins which must have affected in a vital way the life of the inhabitants.” The Lindbergh survey’s impact on archaeology was incalculable. Media coverage of this latest adventure spawned a new interest in both the science and the early civilizations.

  The Lindberghs explored Central and South America that fall as well. When Charles had flown there just before his marriage, he had been surveying and organizing air routes. In September 1929, Lindbergh returned to those waters with his wife, al
ong with Juan and Betty Trippe. Linking the Gulf and Caribbean countries to the United States was an important step in the development of global transportation in and of itself, as they opened passenger and mail service linking the Americas. In just ten days at the end of September, they stopped in Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Nicaragua. “There were mobs of people at every airport,” remembered Juan Trippe.

  Before each takeoff, Lindbergh walked the dirt airfields, testing its hardness. “One of the fields was a sea of mud,” Trippe remembered. “Slim trudged through the mud from one end of the field to another, and after we had taken off, he hung his socks out of the cabin window to dry … but one of them blew away. So at the next stop in Curaçao, there was the usual crowd of well-wishers, the band, and the reviewing stand, and there was Slim greeting all the dignitaries wearing only one sock. But that flight marked the first air mail delivered to South America. It opened up a continent.”

  Lindbergh had been warned that “it would be foolhardy to attempt a flight around the Caribbean, that the weather was too bad and unpredictable, the rain squalls frequent and too heavy to fly through.” But the successful 1929 tour by the Lindberghs and the Trippes paved the way for permanent air routes in that territory. More than that, as Trippe would later recount, “The Caribbean was our first laboratory for overwater flying operations. Lindbergh, from his first Caribbean flight on, was in on virtually every decision of a technical nature that Pan American made, and from the very start he showed an understanding also of the economic and political hurdles that had to be surmounted.”

  Having enjoyed their archaeological sorties in the southwestern United States so much, the Lindberghs concluded their Pan American swing with a visit to the Maya region. With the blessing of Juan Trippe—who encouraged any activity that promoted interest in the skies he serviced—they flew from Nicaragua to Belize. In a Pan American twin-motored amphibian—the S-38—the Lindberghs covered most of the Yucatán peninsula in five days. Accompanied by Dr. A. V. Kidder, they flew from Tikal to Uaxactún in six minutes—what would have been a long day’s journey by mule-train. Over Chichén Itzá, Lindbergh himself took what many still consider the finest photograph of the entire city. They explored the southeasternmost state of Quintana Roo. “The greatest thrills of our five days’ flying came, of course with the finding of groups of Maya ruins indicating the presence of ancient cities,” Dr. Kidder wrote afterward. In less than a week, they discovered as many as six lost sites which might otherwise not have been reached for decades.