He’d soon find out exactly how true that prophecy was.
3
Before there was Lucky Lindy or the Lone Eagle, there was Slim.
Charles A. “Slim” Lindbergh was just another eighteen-year-old on the University of Wisconsin campus without direction—at least, that’s what his professors thought. A tall, lanky kid from Little Falls, Minnesota, he had arrived in Madison in 1920 on his Excelsior motorcycle, late for registration and his first mathematics class.
He picked Wisconsin because it had the best engineering school close to his hometown. His father had been a US Congressman for a decade before returning to his Minnesota farm. His mother, Evangeline, decided to go to Madison with her son and had arrived in town before him. She found them a third-floor apartment blocks from campus on North Mills Street and got a part-time teaching job at Emerson Elementary School on the city’s east side. She initially found Madison “a queer place” and never completely embraced its charms.
“I couldn’t understand why his mother would leave her husband in Minnesota to be with her son in Madison,” Slim’s engineering school friend Delos A. Dudley would later write in his book, My Lindbergh Papers. “However, I asked no questions and no explanations were given.”
Their apartment featured a two-foot by three-foot picture tacked to the back of the entrance door. The picture showed a high-speed train with black smoke pouring out of its stack and “US Mail” displayed on each of its three cars. In the foreground, next to the embankment, was a ditch in which, Dudley remembered, was “a hen running at top speed, pursued by a rooster running at even greater speed. I do not recall if the title of this gaudy picture was ‘The Fast Mail’ or ‘The Fast Male.’”
Delos met Slim through a mutual friend, Dick Plummer, who knew that both young men liked to ride motorcycles. All three were freshmen in the Engineering College. Dick and Delos would ride on Sunday mornings, sharing a rebuilt Harley-Davidson, with one riding perched on the gas tank since there was no buddy seat. Slim brought along his Excelsior.
During the winter, a ski jump was set up at the top of a hill with a landing along frozen Lake Mendota. Slim wanted to take the jump in his motorcycle, but until he could figure out how, the steep, winding road down from the jump back to campus would have to do. It started as a straightaway before a sharp turn onto Park Street.
“Dick and I shuddered,” Delos remembered. “We did our best to talk him out of it, but Slim was adamant. We rode down Park Street to the hill. Dick and I remained at the bottom, stationing ourselves and my bike out of harm’s way. Slim rode up the hill, then out of site [sic], as he rounded the curve.
“Soon Slim and his bike came into view, picking up speed all the way down. He reached the bottom, attempted the turn, but the cycle and Slim hit the curb and both were slammed into the fence.Now neither Dick nor I wished to copy this feat of willpower and grim determination.”
Charles A. Lindbergh became the most famous person in the world when he successfully flew across the Atlantic Ocean. For a short time during his two years at the University of Wisconsin, he lived in an apartment connected to the home of Arthur Koehler’s in-laws. (Courtesy: Library of Congress)
Both rider and cycle were fine. What happened next, though, confounded Delos.
Slim said, “If I had applied power as I hit the turn, I could have made it.”
Dick and I watched in amazement as Slim mounted the cycle and turned up the hill. Dick and I resumed our position of safety. Slim and the cycle came down as fast as before. On reaching the bottom and beginning the turn, Slim put on power. They rounded the curve and straightened up on Park Street. Slim had ridden down the hill, around the sharp corner, and had not touched the brakes.
Lindbergh chose to show neither willpower nor grim determination in his studies, though. He was put on probation after his first semester for poor grades in chemistry and math and for failing English. While he was interested in solving his calculus problems, he had no desire to copy the solutions. “Why should I hand in this paper?” he said to Delos. “The instructor knows the answers.”
More why’s came from his frustration with his English class. “Why should one spend the hours of life on formulae, semi-colons, and our crazy English spelling?” he would later be quoted in the book Lindbergh by Scott Berg.
Lindbergh did excel in one area on campus, as a member of the school rifle and pistol teams. Whether upright or prone, outside or inside, firing .22-caliber rifles or Colt .45-caliber pistols, he regularly shot perfect scores. For fun, he liked to shoot quarters out of a teammate’s hand from fifty feet away.
“[He] was a crack shot,” Delos later remembered. “He established a record for hitting consecutive bull’s eyes. As far as I know, that record was never equaled, not even approached. Lindbergh told me he never drank tea or coffee because caffeine was bad on the nerves, that he had to have steady nerves in order to shoot at his best. I was a good shot too, having been awarded a ‘Qualified Marksman’ medal in the R.O.T.C. However, I could not compete with Lindbergh.”
The team finished the 1921 season ranked as the best in the country, and Lindbergh was its best marksman. But shooting a rifle and pistol would not get him through college, and he was flailing. He didn’t know what came next.
As he and Delos spent a good amount of time in the latter’s basement, building a propeller-driven ice boat made with cast-off airplane parts, conversation turned to possible careers.
“Why don’t you learn to fly an airplane and go into the flying business?” Delos asked.
“After you learn to fly,” Lindbergh said after thinking for a moment or two, “being a pilot would be like driving a car. It wouldn’t be exciting.”
Yet the allure of the air did intrigue him, certainly more so than his classwork. He didn’t think “God made man to fiddle with pencil marks on paper. He gave him earth and air to feel. And now even wings with which to fly.”
Delos found an aviation magazine and sent off for flying school brochures for his friend. He dropped them off at Lindbergh’s apartment. Slim’s mother overheard the conversation, and as Delos was leaving, she said to him, “If Charles goes to a flying school, I will hold you responsible.”
At the start of his sophomore year, Lindbergh resolved to do better, but it wasn’t meant to be. As he would later be quoted in Lindbergh, “I have not been a good student. My mind has been the partner of my body rather than its master. For so long, I can sit and concentrate on work, and then, willy-nilly, my body stands up and walks away—to the shores of Lake Mendota; to the gymnasium swimming pool; to my motorcycle and distant country roads.”
His mother had left during the summer for Detroit and a full-time teaching job. Needing a place to live, Charles moved into an apartment farther away from campus, just across from Vilas Park. The home, at 1803 Vilas Avenue, was connected to 1202 Grant Street. It was owned by Edgar and Marie Smith and had at one point been occupied by their daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter, Ethelyn, Arthur, and Katie Koehler, who now lived only a few blocks away.
On those “walks away,” Lindbergh likely passed Arthur Koehler on the streets of Madison’s near west side. Or perhaps they saw one another when the Koehlers visited their relatives’ home for supper. If they did, it never registered with the scientist.
When Lindbergh left the university on February 2, 1922, he was two days from his twentieth birthday. He wouldn’t return to Madison until five and a half years later, on August 22, 1927, flying his Spirit of St. Louis over forty thousand people who had packed into Camp Randall Stadium to honor him. He would help dedicate the school’s Memorial Union later that day.
What happened in between those two dates would give Slim a couple of new nicknames and make him the most famous man in the world.
Soon after leaving Madison in 1922, Lindbergh went to flying school in Nebraska, quickly becoming a barnstormer, doing daredevil stunts at fairs in
Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming. He’d walk on the wings, parachute down from the plane, and then, since it was a fairly low-budget outfit, he’d be the prime mechanic tasked with keeping the plane in one piece.
Two years after that, he enlisted in the army, graduating from its flight-training school as the best pilot in his class. He was then hired by the Robertson Aircraft Corporation of St. Louis to fly the mail between St. Louis and Chicago.
But delivering the mail didn’t evoke the sensation that Lindbergh sought, even though twice he had to evacuate his plane by parachute. After all, as he had told his friend Delos Dudley years earlier, “After you learn to fly, being a pilot would be like driving a car, it wouldn’t be exciting.”
For years, since before Lindbergh had entered the UW, aeronautics’ Holy Grail had been there for the taking. A New York City hotel owner had offered a prize of $25,000 to any pilot who could make it nonstop from New York to Paris. Many aviators had been killed or injured trying to earn the money. Lindbergh was sure he could do it if he had the right airplane. He convinced nine St. Louis businessmen to finance most of the cost of a plane he helped design. He would chip in $2,000 of his own savings. He placed the order with Ryan Aeronautical Company in San Diego on February 28, 1927, and he remained there for the two months it took to build it.
The plane would be called the Spirit of St. Louis.
Lindbergh felt confident after flying the plane on May 10 and 11 from San Diego to New York City with an overnight stop in St. Louis. That flight took twenty hours and twenty-one minutes, a transcontinental record at the time.
Word quickly spread that this Missouri-based mail pilot just might earn the $25,000 that so many had tried for and failed to achieve since 1919. It was less than two decades since Orville and Wilbur Wright had first conquered the air in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Lindbergh’s mother visited him just before he sought to cross the Atlantic. “For the first time in my life,” she told her son, “I realize that Columbus also had a mother.”
Hundreds turned out at Roosevelt Field in New York on the morning of May 20. Originally called Curtiss Field, the airfield had been renamed in honor of Teddy Roosevelt’s son, Quentin, who died in World War I. At 7:40 am, with 451 gallons of gasoline and five sandwiches, Charles Lindbergh boarded his craft.
He was asked by a reporter if the food would be enough for the journey. “If I get to Paris,” Lindbergh replied, “I won’t need any more, and if I don’t get to Paris, I won’t need any more either.”
Twelve minutes later, at 7:52 am New York time, he took off with the crowd cheering loudly. Lindbergh never heard it over the din of his plane—a din he’d become accustomed to over the next day and 3,600-plus miles.
The world waited anxiously. Even humorist Will Rogers found no reason for humor while Lindbergh’s fate remained unclear. “No attempt at jokes today,” he wrote in his nationally syndicated column. “[Lindbergh] is somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where no lone human being ever ventured before. He is being prayed for to every kind of Supreme Being that had a following. If he is lost it will be the most universally regretted loss we ever had.”
The image of a sole pilot trying to achieve the previously unachievable captured America like nothing else had. “Alone?” asked an editorial in the New York Sun. “Is he alone at whose right side rides Courage, with Skill within the cockpit and Faith upon the left? Does solitude surround the brave when Adventure leads the way and Ambition reads the dials? Is there no company with him for whom the air is cleft by Daring and the darkness is made light by Emprise?”
Lindbergh fought fog, fatigue, and fear, and at 10:21 pm Paris time on May 21, 1927, thirty-three and a half hours after taking off, the Spirit of St. Louis landed at Le Bourget Field. Bedlam ensued.
“Speaking was impossible,” he would recount in his book We, published in 1927. “No words could be heard in the uproar and nobody apparently cared to hear any. I started to climb out of the cockpit, but as soon as one foot appeared through the door I was dragged the rest of the way without assistance on my part. For nearly half an hour I was unable to touch the ground, during which time I was ardently carried around in what seemed to be a very small area, and in every position it is possible to be in. Everyone had the best intentions, but no one seemed to know just what they were.”
He wrote that a French general told him, “It is not only two continents you have united, but the hearts of all men everywhere in admiration of the simple courage of a man who does great things.”
The son of America would quickly be adopted by the world. Theatre audiences in Berlin erupted at the news of his success. An Indian publication outside Bombay proclaimed, “Few things have so deeply stirred the hearts of India. . . . The triumph he has achieved is a matter of glory, not only for his own countrymen, but the entire human race.”
Before traveling back to America a few weeks later by boat, he would meet the president of France in Paris; King Albert in Brussels; King George V, Queen Mary, and the Prince of Wales in London. Hundreds of thousands of residents across Europe strained to see him wherever they could get a glimpse, including those near the Eiffel Tower who looked skyward to watch for the Spirit of St. Louis.
His return to the United States evoked continued chaos. In Washington, President Calvin Coolidge promoted him to colonel in the Army Air Corps Reserves and introduced him to the country on live radio. Lindbergh spoke only 106 words, mainly about cooperation between America and Europe, and yet 30 million people were riveted to every word. He would leave DC with his image on a ten-cent postage stamp, the first time a living American had earned that honor.
New York came next, with multiple parades in different boroughs, each drawing hundreds of thousands of screaming citizens. Then it was back to St. Louis and the same story: hundreds of thousands of people attended a ticker-tape parade, casting phone books into the sky to celebrate the accomplishment. He had received 3.5 million letters, 100,000 telegrams, and 14,000 parcels since landing in Paris.
Over the next three months, Lindbergh would fly his plane to 92 cities in 49 states, give 147 speeches, and ride in 1,290 miles of parades in an effort to promote commercial aviation. He also received $5 million worth of offers, including movie roles, product endorsements, and public appearances. The offer that he immediately accepted, for a fee of $50,000, came from the Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics and is what would take him back to Madison later that summer. His appearance in Wisconsin that August was attended by the governor, the mayor, and even some of the professors who had given him failing grades just a few years earlier.
Arthur Koehler’s first acknowledged brush with Lindbergh would be in the New Orleans Times Picayune newspaper of March 26, 1928, when a picture of the scientist taken at the Southern Pine Association’s thirteenth annual meeting just happened to be next to an article and picture of Lindbergh in Washington. That led to a mention in jest in the Forest Products Laboratory bulletin about a “well-known countenance and a familiar bald head” being spotted next to the famous aviator.
Lindbergh returned to Madison the following spring to accept an honorary degree from the school that had flunked him out. On the same stage, in front of thousands of graduates’ families and onlookers who simply wanted to see Lindy, Arthur Koehler would receive his master’s degree in forestry.
The Lone Eagle remained a worldwide phenomenon. As Fitzhugh Green, who helped put Lindbergh’s accomplishments in perspective in the pilot’s autobiography, wrote:
Whether it was his modesty or his looks or his refusal to be tempted by money or by fame that won him such a following we cannot say. Perhaps the world was ripe for a youth with a winning smile to flash across its horizon and by the brilliance of his achievement momentarily to dim the ugliness of routine business, politics and crime. Many said that his sudden meteor-like appearance from obscurity was an act of Providence. Whatever the reaso
n for it all, the fact remains that there was a definite phenomenon of Lindbergh quite the like of which the world had never seen.
The normally reserved Minnesota farm boy was uncomfortable with the attention. Newspaper stories of his engagement at the end of 1928 to Anne Morrow, the daughter of Ambassador Dwight Morrow, usually included words like seclusion. Charles and Anne’s subsequent marriage and pregnancy made front-pages and radio newscasts worldwide.
Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. was born on June 22, 1930, on his mother’s twenty-fourth birthday. Little Charlie, or the Eaglet to the papers (Young Charles to his family), became the world’s most famous baby, a seven-and-a-half-pound instant celebrity.
“No royal child, for whose arrival a nation waited with anxious interest, ever attracted more public speculation before its birth or was watched more closely afterward,” the United Press wire service reported. “Would it be a boy or a girl? Would he be a flier like his father? Numerologists, astrologers and others wrote articles on the subject. . . .
“The baby’s first picture—his orange juice diet—any change of nurses, all were duly recorded in the press in greater detail than if the youngster had been heir to the throne.”
There were novelties to commemorate the event, of course. Hawkers peddled post cards, songs, and miniature airplanes all adorned with Lindy’s photo. Word that the baby’s first book was to be The Painted Pig, written by his grandmother, Elizabeth Morrow, warranted a special dispatch from the wire services.
The Sixteenth Rail Page 5