The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

by Winston Groom

  His eyelids sagged and he couldn’t stop them. The walls of the temple began to close in and fog enveloped the Spirit of St. Louis. The ocean began to draw him like a siren’s call. He thought about crashing into it, wondering what it would be like. His muscles ached and his legs were cramped. There was barely room to stretch. He had the impression he was going nowhere, just hanging in the air. He needed to get out of the fog.

  Again he considered turning back, but he worried the fog had by now overtaken the coast of Newfoundland. Using instruments of the day, pilots could fly in fog and clouds, but landing on instruments alone remained impossible—Jimmy Doolittle’s fabulous experiment in blind flying was still two years in the future. He might have been able to fly back and jump, if necessary, except Lindbergh carried no parachute because of weight. It was like working a circus high wire without the net. There would be no more questions of jumping or of turning back.

  The fog seemed worse higher up, so Lindbergh nosed down, down, down; at last, at 200 feet, it had dissolved and the sea appeared. The waves were gigantic, sweeping eastward. He dropped down until he could smell the salt spray whipped up by the high wind. A light drizzle flashed past his windows and some of the drops spattered in, splashing on his face, a welcome experience as it helped keep him awake. Everything was staying awake; every second he fought against sleep. The waves were frighteningly high, forty to fifty feet, he estimated, and the howling wind blew their tops off, making huge foamy whitecaps.

  Then, something uncanny happened. In his half consciousness, Lindbergh began to experience the presence of some sort of phantoms in the back of the fuselage. They were “friendly, vapor-like shapes, without substance, able to vanish or appear at will,” he wrote later. At times they were all crowded in behind him; sometimes there were only one or two.

  These spirits, or apparitions, would come forward one at a time to speak to Lindbergh, offering advice on his flight, giving tips on navigation, discussion, reassurance, chitchat. Suddenly Lindbergh wasn’t alone; there were companions here in the little plane clawing its way across the North Atlantic.

  They were familiar, friendly—not strangers. He wasn’t sure when they came aboard. He felt he had known them before and was pleased to have some company.

  Fatigue was the enemy now, more even than faulty navigation or fog. Sleep was death, and Lindbergh knew it. It should be dawn soon and he decided to turn his thoughts toward sunrise, watching for any sign of brightening in the east. It would be easier to stay awake in the daytime, he thought, especially flying into that red ball of fire that would rise out of the ocean. He began counting the minutes as they ticked past. “I never wanted so badly—to sleep,” he said.

  CHARLES AUGUSTUS LINDBERGH JR. was born in Detroit on February 4, 1902, a year before the Wright brothers made their famous flight at Kitty Hawk. He was delivered by Dr. Edwin Lodge, his great-uncle from his mother’s family of prominent physicians. Six weeks later, mother and child journeyed nearly eight hundred miles northwest to the town of Little Falls, Minnesota, where her husband, the baby’s father, had his law practice, his real estate business, and his farm.

  His father, Charles Lindbergh Sr., was a Swede by birth, the bastard son of Ola Mansson, who had once been an important man in Sweden—an eloquent, self-educated farmer who in the 1850s rose to leadership in the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament, and was close friends with the soon-to-be-king Crown Prince Carl XV. But after a series of scandals, including his wife’s discovery of an extramarital affair with a twenty-year-old waitress who birthed his child, a son, and charges of embezzlement, Mansson decided to flee with his mistress, Lovisa, to America. As a parting note, before leaving the witness stand, in an act of breathtaking cheek he wiped his buttocks with one of the prosecution’s evidentiary documents.

  Now in disgrace, he changed his name to August Lindberg* and named the baby Charles August Lindberg. The family settled in a tiny hamlet named Melrose in the deep woods on the edge of the Minnesota lakes region, which, in 1859, constituted the American frontier, complete with tribes of often hostile Indians.

  August Lindbergh carved out a living from the land under the Homestead Act, in turn building a sod hut, a log cabin, and a frame house around it with multiple stories—the aspirational Valhalla for all immigrant Scandinavian farmers. In time he fathered six more children by Lovisa (whose name by then had become anglicized to “Louisa”). In 1870 he became sworn as a U.S. citizen and joined the Republican Party. In 1885 he at long last officially married Louisa.

  Over time August became such a respectable presence in the small village of Melrose that he was selected as town clerk and village recorder, postmaster, justice of the peace, and member of the school board. He instilled in all of his children the firm Scandinavian work ethic, but none more strictly than his new family’s firstborn, Charles August, who grew into the most handsome young man in Stearns County—maybe in all of Minnesota. He stood about six feet tall in the erect posture of a soldier, was slender and well made, with blue eyes and blond hair and a high forehead, patrician nose, and dimpled chin. Early on, Charles, or C.A. as he came to be called, had learned the mysteries of the forest from his father and soon became the Lindbergh family’s designated hunter. He never darkened the doors of a school until he was twelve years old, but when he turned eighteen, his father sent C.A. to the Grove Park Academy, run by a Catholic priest, which prepared him for law school at the University of Michigan, where he graduated in 1883. At last something besides a farmer had come out of the Mansson/Lindbergh family line.

  C.A. hung his shingle in Little Falls, a town of several thousand on the Mississippi River in a part of the state that was thriving with the giant Weyerhaeuser lumber company, McCormick Harvester, and several large sawmills and brickyards, all of which became C.A.’s clients.

  Shortly after moving to Little Falls C.A. married Mary LaFond, with whom he had two daughters. His clientele and prestige continued to increase but in 1898 Mary’s life was lost in childbirth. He soon sent his daughters to boarding school and moved from their substantial home into a hotel room near his office downtown. But there he met, and soon married, Evangeline Lodge Land, who would become the mother of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr.

  She was the beautiful and high-strung twenty-four-year-old daughter of two prominent Detroit families; her mother was one of the Lodges, a family of physicians, and her father was Dr. Charles Henry Land, a cantankerous but famous dentist who invented, among other things, the porcelain jacket crown.

  At first, everything seemed to go swimmingly for the Lindbergh family. Evangeline ensconced herself and baby Charles in the dream house on the Mississippi River that C.A. had built for her. Also in the home were C.A.’s two daughters from his previous marriage, Lillian, fourteen, and Eva, ten, now reunited in the new home. C.A. stayed busier than ever, and domestic life was made comfortable with a cook, housekeeper, and coach driver who doubled as the farmer tending C.A.’s crops, orchards, and livestock.

  Those were bucolic days in the American century, as if from a Currier & Ives engraving. A few automobiles had begun to appear on the streets of Little Falls but most travel was by carriage, wagon, or horse. Baseball was the nation’s pastime, and on Sundays bandstands in local parks were graced with musicians playing brass instruments.

  Charles Lindbergh’s earliest memories were of his toys: lead and tin soldiers and Indians with bows and arrows; a toy steam train with a whistle. And there were views of the Mississippi, clear and fast running and nearly a quarter mile wide at that point. The family had three dogs roaming the premises, including a Great Dane who used to beat Charles about the head with his tail.

  When Charles was three and a half, he vividly remembered, he heard “a sudden shouting—women’s voices. I was picked up quickly and taken across the road to a place behind the barn. I got to a corner of the barn and looked around it to see a huge column of smoke billowing skyward from our house. Then I was taken back and told I mustn’t look.”2

  By the t
ime the fire was out the house had collapsed into the basement, a charred and total wreck. A saving grace was that the blaze had started upstairs, giving servants and farmhands time to salvage much of the furniture, tableware, and other valuables. At last Charles was taken to the scene, and fifty years later he clearly remembered what he’d seen: a lone chimney with a small red clay Mexican idol on the stone fireplace shelf.

  While the house was being rebuilt, the Lindberghs moved into a hotel in town, which seemed to young Charles a “dreary” place with nothing to do but look out the window at the dirt street below, bustling with people and horses. It was around this time that C.A. decided to run for Congress. In the staunch Republican district the previous congressman was in disgrace from accusations of graft, and C.A. not only had a lily-white reputation, he was known as something of a crusader in matters of public honesty. At this stage of the twentieth century a growing disharmony was taking shape between yeoman farmers of the West and the big money of the East, embodied most famously in the perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan and his legendary “Cross of Gold” speech. The farmers of Minnesota’s Sixth District were receptive to C.A.’s bid for Washington; after all, he was one of them and a favorite son to boot.

  The suggestion has been made by at least one historian that there were ulterior motives for C.A.’s decision to run for office, namely, that he wanted to get away from his wife without the scandal of having to divorce her, which in those times likely would have put a quick end to his political career. In any case, beneath all the outward perceptions of homespun harmony, the Lindbergh marriage seethed.

  In fact we now know there was a strain of insanity in Evangeline’s family—her grandmother was possibly schizophrenic† and various other parents or grandparents turned out to be peculiar, dotty, or addicted to alcohol. In that period the appellation “high spirited,” often applied in connection with Evangeline, had several meanings, one of which was “crazy.” Documents suggest that she did not get along well with the other women in Little Falls, perhaps because of the age difference between her and the wives of C.A.’s friends. And there were tales by staff of disharmony at home. Antagonism had also festered between Evangeline and her two stepdaughters, the oldest of whom was only a few years younger than she was. It was also clear that some trouble had occurred between Evangeline and C.A., for he had moved from their bedroom even before the house burned.

  On top of all that, C.A.’s storied business success had turned into a financial house of cards. He had encumbered himself with so many property loans that he was “land poor,” meaning he held property but his cash flow was dried up. Since 1904 the country had been in recession, followed by the Panic of 1907, in which banks collapsed, money suddenly became tight, and real estate values plummeted. Adjusted to today’s values, C.A. held title to more than $5 million worth of real estate but owed more than $1 million of debt on it, plus taxes. There was an immediate need to slash the family budget in half, and the new house on the bluff above the river would suffer a commensurate scaling back.

  After C.A.’s election Evangeline took Charles to Washington to be near his father, but she rented an apartment instead of living with her husband. He had convinced her that divorce would cost him his political office and bring on intolerable financial strain.

  In summers, when Congress was not in session, she either took Charles to visit his grandparents in Detroit or returned to the rebuilt house on the river, which was roughly half the size of the original and so rustically finished that Evangeline called it “the camp.” Gone were the cook, the nurse, the housekeeper, and the coach driver, and Evangeline herself kept both the flower and vegetable gardens. Whatever their living arrangements, C.A. remained in close contact with Evangeline and spent as much time as possible with young Charles, teaching him to swim in the local creeks and in the river and later how to hunt, fish, and live off the land.

  Charles’s favorite spot in the new house was the screened porch overlooking the river, which he appropriated for his bedroom, summer and winter—weather permitting—“in close contact with sun, wind, rain and stars.” He most preferred stormy nights. He kept a succession of dogs, played with the neighboring children, kept collections of rocks, arrowheads, coins, stamps, marbles, baseball trading cards, and most everything else under the sun. He also made himself a pair of stilts with which to startle his mother and others by suddenly appearing at their windows.

  In winters, when Congress was in session, Evangeline would take Charles back to the capital to be near his father, while the two stepdaughters attended first boarding school and then college. On one of these occasions, in 1912, when Charles was ten, Evangeline took him to an air show at Fort Myer in Virginia. There, he witnessed close up a race between an airplane and an automobile around an oval track. “You could see the pilot clearly, out in front,” he wrote years afterward, “pants’ legs flapping, and cap visor pointed backwards to streamline the wind. It was so intense and fascinating that I wanted to fly myself.”

  C.A. would have Evangeline and Charles to lunch in the congressional dining room and arranged for them to sit in the House gallery, especially if he was making a speech. Charles was introduced to a number of political luminaries of the day; he got to shake hands with President Woodrow Wilson and roll Easter eggs on the White House lawn, a tradition that dated back to the administration of Andrew Johnson.

  In public, the Lindberghs presented a congenial family picture, but their private lives were marred by antipathy and harsh words, usually over money. Evangeline resented what C.A. spent on his daughters, believing that it was at her expense; she was unmoved when he explained that it was because they were motherless and had been shipped away from home. How all of this affected Charles is difficult to judge, since he was reticent to speak of it, even much later in life, but it should be understood that he was subjected to the psychological damage of being raised by parents in an unhappy marriage.

  Charles sporadically attended schools in the Washington area, but only for a few months at a time while he and his mother were residing in town. For two sessions, he attended the Sidwell Friends School,‡ a Quaker institution, where among his classmates were Quentin and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of the former president.

  From about the age of ten on, Charles demonstrated an aptitude for complex mechanical projects. For instance, he built a Rube Goldberg–type device for hauling big cakes of river ice from the icehouse by the water’s edge up the hill and into the family icebox in the kitchen pantry. Also as Charles became older he helped Evangeline with the chores, such as splitting and stacking firewood, planting, weeding, and cleaning, as well as the aforementioned ice moving.

  In 1912 C.A. bought a black Ford Model T that they named Maria (with a long i). It was a four-cylinder, folding-top, hand-cranked Tourabout with carbide headlamps and a squeeze rubber-bulb horn, and it represented a major purchase for the Lindbergh family. When C.A. wasn’t using Maria for campaigning it was put to work on the farm.

  Evangeline was rather afraid of the thing and, according to Charles, when she took it into town for groceries she drove it only in low gear, which took a lot of time and strained the engine to the boiling point. In due time Charles was taught to drive Maria, and thus began, like Rickenbacker and Doolittle before him, Lindbergh’s lifelong thrall with the internal combustion engine.

  The roads around Little Falls in 1912 left much to be desired and most of the time a horse was far more useful than an automobile, but during the next few years Charles, who had grown unusually close to his mother, would drive Evangeline and himself on picnic visits to nearby towns and attractions such as the many lakes in the area. Later, Charles would accompany his father on campaign trips, usually doing the driving and distributing campaign literature.

  In 1916, when Charles was fourteen, Maria was sold and a new automobile acquired, a big six-cylinder Saxon with an electric starter, which cost twice as much as a Model T and could outrun a railroad train. At Charles’s suggesti
on C.A. had a portion of the basement converted into a garage, where Charles serviced the Saxon Six, including a complete engine overhaul with new piston rings and valves. He also utilized the garage space to build himself a boat, a twelve-foot flat-bottom skiff that was light enough to carry through the woods.

  Throughout her son’s youth, Evangeline arranged educational trips to broaden his horizons. They motored to Philadelphia, New York, and other cities on the East Coast and in the Middle West. In 1913 one of the congressional committees C.A. sat on planned a visit to the Panama Canal and Charles and Evangeline went along, by ship, to see this marvelous “wonder of the world,” then under construction. There they saw the great steam shovels chewing through the isthmus. In 1916 they traveled from Little Falls to California, with Charles driving on some of the worst roads imaginable. The trip took forty days.

  By 1913 C.A.’s political career had played out. From the day he arrived in Washington C.A. had been a “progressive liberal,” meaning that he sought radical reform of the economic system. These were the years of the Bull Moose Party, of trust busting, and antibanking tirades, to which C.A. Lindbergh was no stranger. He railed on behalf of the farmers of Minnesota against what he called the financial parasites and speculators of the East. He was furious when, two days before Christmas 1913, Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, creating the U.S. central banking system, which C.A. deemed “the worst legislative crime of the ages [that] establishes the greatest trust on earth!”

  As the war raged in Europe and calls came for American intervention, C.A. nearly became unhinged, charging that the whole affair was instigated by the big monied interests, namely, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and other financial giants of the day. He actually issued a bill of impeachment against the five members of the Federal Reserve Board, on grounds of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”