Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  He did, however, make two friends freshman year—Richard Plummer and Delos Dudley, son of the university’s assistant librarian. Both were engineering students, who also rode motorcycles. Plummer and Dudley would later recall many hours together on motorcycle trips and watching Lindbergh perform dangerous stunts on his Excelsior down the campus hill into town. Lindbergh later denied these stories as well, remembering his rides on Wisconsin’s country roads as solitary. In time Lindbergh spent less, not more, time with Plummer and Dudley, as they joined fraternities and began dating girls.

  Meantime, Evangeline Lindbergh made the most of her days in Madison. Freed from farm chores, she reveled in the time she found on her hands. She read and substitute-taught Physical Science in one of the local junior high schools. Other residents in their apartment house grew “very curious about our affairs,” Evangeline recalled, and pried at every opportunity, trying to figure out the actual relationship between this very good-looking young man living with this somewhat matronly woman in her forties who claimed to be married but had no husband.

  In fact, C.A. was living most of the year in southern Florida, where he thought he could “make a few thousand by hustling,” as he wrote his daughter Eva. He invested what resources he had into real estate in the remote Miami region. He built himself a crude cottage in the wilds and rented lots to campers. He spent most of his nights sleeping in a tent pitched to the trunk of his Buick, eating meals out of tins. The “overhanging dread” of his letters—constantly crying poverty—were the only jarring notes Evangeline recalled of her days in Madison. Convinced of the future in south Florida real estate, C.A. sank deeper into debt. When his mother—the Minnesota pioneer who had once waited tables in Stockholm—died in April 1921, he also sank into melancholia.

  Charles made plans to visit his father, whom he had not seen in a year—right after fulfilling his summer ROTC obligation. Upon completing freshman year, he rode his Excelsior to Camp Knox, Kentucky, where he commenced six weeks of field artillery training. He bunked with twenty other cadets, and each regulation and command made him feel he had at last found his niche. He delighted in the detailed ritual, enjoying this perpetual quest for precision.

  More than that, after twenty years of living mostly by his own rules under maternal supervision, Charles reveled in martial training—in the comradeship of young men, in the physical challenges, in complying to rules founded on order. At Camp Knox, Lindbergh later recalled with fondness, “I learned to know the imperative note and thrill of the bugle. We rose early, worked hard, slept soundly. The strictness of discipline amazed me, but I enjoyed it, and realized its value in military life.”

  One weekend Lindbergh joined his fellow cadets on a riverboat trip up the Ohio, where the men fell in with some girls. All Lindbergh recalled of the two-day leave was how tired he was, how he dozed off standing up, his head bobbing against the wall of the boat.

  Once Artillery School was completed, Charles left to join his father in Florida. They agreed to meet in Jacksonville. With forty-eight dollars in his pocket, Charles started on this arduous journey—through rural Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia—on July 20, 1921. His motorcycle proved barely a match for the primitive roads. There were frequent stops for repairs or buying new parts, but he pressed on, taking almost no time off except to sleep. He picked up quarts of milk along the way for a dime; and it was not until the third day on the road that he stopped for his first real meal, an egg sandwich. Most nights he slept on the ground, between his Excelsior and a tree, using a towel for a pillow and his coat for cover. If the weather was especially bad or if snakes or mosquitoes seemed too prevalent, he pushed on to the nearest farm and asked to use a corncrib, haystack, or sack of peanuts. He awoke more often than not full of bug bites.

  A little after noon on the eighth day, he arrived in Jacksonville and stopped at the post office to receive word from his father. Their signals had gotten crossed. C.A. had expected his son to arrive by train; and knowing from Evangeline on which date Charles had started for Florida, C.A. waited around in Jacksonville for most of a week. He left to tend to business up north the day before Charles’s arrival.

  Charles tooled around Jacksonville for a few hours before deciding to return home. On August sixth he pulled into Madison—with eight dollars. He took a bath and began to overhaul his Excelsior.

  Awaiting Charles’s return were his second-term grades and a letter from his father. Neither boded well for the young man’s future. Failing Mathematics and Chemistry outweighed his good marks in Shop, Military Drill, and English, thus keeping him on probation. C.A.’s letter was even more distressing: “I am at my rope’s end,” he wrote his son, “for I can sell nothing, am out of funds and the banks are not giving any credit.” He was so deep in debt that he said Charles’s returning to the University seemed problematic. Fifty dollars a month was all the support he could scare up for his son and his wife, and he suggested that they borrow against the farm.

  While C.A. coped with his real estate addiction by heaping new responsibilities onto Charles’s shoulders—deeding over more Little Falls land to him and his mother, the taxes and upkeep with it—Evangeline realized she would have to spend the rest of her life supporting herself. She attended summer school to bone up on her Chemistry, then returned to Detroit to find a full-time teaching job. She told C.A. his latest offer of support was outrageous, that she would not consent to borrowing money against the house. As for their son’s education, she wrote, “If Charles quits now, he will never try again…. It is entirely up to you whether Charles gives up college or continues.”

  Charles was already thinking about dropping out, contemplating a trip to Alaska before settling back down on the farm. On his way to Little Falls to see how he felt about “camp,” he stopped in Minneapolis, where he found his father. C.A. said he would back any decision, though he did warn him against running the farm unless he intended to devote himself to it completely. “That farm,” C.A. added, “nearly broke my financial back.”

  It looked better than he expected, the cattle and crops all healthy. Charles laid a cement floor in the cow barn and visited his Empire milk-machine customers. In his idle moments alone, he hunted crows with his Colt .45 and, inside the house, practiced quick draws with his revolver. “My imagination became a bit too realistic,” Lindbergh later admitted, “and I shot a hole through the kitchen-hallway door—well centered, but at too high a level to support my pride of marksmanship.” Just the prospect of spending the rest of his life stuck there made him restless.

  He returned to Madison—missing the first day of class—with the “desire” to do well in Engineering. But he quickly fell into his old ways. “I have not been a good student,” he wrote years later in reconstructing that time. “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 imagination took him even farther.

  By winter, he was writing to flying schools. Both Nebraska Aircraft Corporation in Lincoln and Ralph C. Diggins School of Aeronautics in Chicago had courses beginning the first week in April. For five hundred dollars the former offered four weeks’ work in the various departments of their factory, another week on the flying field, followed by several weeks’ training in the air. They urged applying early “in view of the fact that we can only enroll fifty students.”

  Lindbergh discussed his pie-in-the-sky plans with a few friends, who tried to persuade him not to abandon his studies by citing wartime figures of a pilot’s life being but a few hours in the air. Even if Lindbergh wanted to heed their advice about the need for a college education, Wisconsin no longer provided him that option.

  In his third semester Lindbergh maintained his high standing in Military Drill and Shop, but he had failed Machine Design, Mathematics, and Physics. On February 2, 1922, two days short of his twentieth birthda
y, Lindbergh was dropped from the university. His adviser wrote a letter to Mrs. Lindbergh with an unusually personal comment: “It seems to me that Carl [sic] is quite immature, and that a boy of his temperament might do better in some less technical course than engineering.” With farming and school behind him, and parental support practically dried up, Lindbergh could see but one course that might elevate his spirits, push him into a profitable career, and allow him to take charge of his future.

  Lift, thrust, control …

  THE CONCEPT OF HUMAN FLIGHT is virtually as old as humankind. Ever since man first walked the earth, he has dreamed of ascending above it. Throughout time and space, across cultures and continents, religions have been founded on man’s ascent to heaven above. But it would take millennia before heavenly aspiration and earthly inspiration conspired to create a conveyance for human flight that harnessed its three essential elements—lift, thrust, and control. Charles Lindbergh had been born at the very moment when the final experiments for that first flight were being performed.

  As each great world civilization came into its own, so too did its contribution to the metamorphosing sciences of aviation—often unwittingly. Centuries before the birth of Christ, the Chinese toyed with the kite. More than a thousand years later and half a world away, windmills sprouted in Europe, from Iberia to the Low Countries, providing energy from a propeller. Renaissance Italians studied birds, in an attempt to replicate their structure in machines with flapping wings—ornithopters.

  During the Age of Reason the French experimented with different gases, inflatable objects, and parachutes. On June 5, 1783, two brothers, Joseph Michel and Jacques Etienne Montgolfier, filled a balloon with hot air and set it soaring six thousand feet. England—birthplace of Newtonian physics and the steam engine—approached aviation during the Industrial Revolution analytically, formulating the science of aerodynamics. Henson and Stringfellow would experiment with flying ships powered by propellers and steam; Sir George Cayley cracked such aeronautical enigmas as camber (the curve in a surface and how it affected lift), empennage (the tail of the flying ship with its pivoting rudder), and dihedrals (the angles formed by two plane surfaces). The Germans, valuing mechanical efficiency, made great strides with their engines through the contributions of Benz and Daimler; they also took the lead in developing dirigibles, powered airships which were designed to be lighter than the air they displaced. In the 1890s another pair of brothers, Gustav and Otto Lilienthal, ushered in a new age in aviation when they abandoned their earlier notions of building an ornithopter for a more efficient display of aviation—fixed-wing gliders.

  Entering the twentieth century, American know-how applied all those elements that began with a pair of wax wings in Crete thousands of years earlier. An engineer named Octave Chanute designed ingeniously trussed biplane gliders. Samuel P. Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, created a man-carrying “Aerodrome,” a gasoline-powered airplane (a term then just coming into use), with a set of wings in the front of the machine and another in the rear. On October 7 and again on December 8, 1903, he catapulted a pilot aloft in the contraption, only to watch it dive into the Potomac River on both occasions.

  That very week aviation’s third extraordinary set of brothers, two industrious boys with a job-printing office and a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, were testing the winds on the outer banks of North Carolina, among the low hills and sandy dunes of Kill Devil Hill and Kitty Hawk. Orville and Wilbur Wright had been obsessed with flight for five years. And at 10:30 on the cold morning of Thursday, December 17, 1903—against a twenty-seven-mile wind—Orville lay prostrate on the bottom wing of their biplane. He warmed up the motor—a four-cylinder, twelve-horsepower engine of their own design—and pulled a wire, which released it from an iron-covered wooden monorail they had laid. Bicycle chains clanked, two propellers whirled, and the machine started to move. Wilbur ran alongside for about forty feet, but then the machine lifted, thrust forward 120 feet, and was under complete control of its pilot—for twelve seconds. By the end of that day the airplane had made several flights, the longest being Wilbur’s, 852 feet in 59 seconds. Within a year the Wright brothers built a new flying machine back in Dayton which flew almost three miles in five minutes. A year after that the Wright Flyer III, which was sophisticated enough to bank and turn and circle, flew more than half an hour, covering almost twenty-five miles.

  The world did not rush in to embrace the Wrights. Other airmen were testing other heavier-than-air machines; many still pursued lighter-than-air conveyances; and a few even fooled with jet propulsion and rocketry. In 1908, the Wrights brought their latest Flyer to France, just outside Le Mans; and on the eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year of the century, Wilbur put their machine through its paces before a group of spectators, stunning them not just with its maneuverability—it could even perform a figure eight—but with the sheer ease of it all. He rang out the year with a seventy-eight-mile flight that lasted two hours and twenty minutes. The Wright brothers were at last hailed as the leaders in aviation.

  Louis Blériot of France was one of their first champions. An engineer, inventor, and pilot, on July 25, 1909, he flew a monoplane from Calais to Dover, England—across the Channel in thirty-seven minutes, capturing a thousand-pound prize. The economic, social, and political implications of that flight were boundless.

  The next year saw aviation meets from Los Angeles to Cairo; Zeppelin airships launched passenger service in Germany; planes became more enclosed, and many incorporated metal into their construction, though they were mostly made of wood, trussed with wire, and covered in linen. In 1911, C. P. Rodgers flew from Long Island, New York, to Long Beach, California—in seven weeks, making more than eighty stops along the way; in 1913 France’s Roland Garros flew nonstop across the Mediterranean …

  When the world went to war in 1914, a few hundred planes took to the air. Their initial function was reconnaissance, but scout aircraft quickly turned into fighters, which would go one-on-one against each other in scrappy “dogfights.” The war forced rapid development of the infant aircraft industry, cramming decades of progress into a few years—all aimed at enhancing speed, strength, and strategy. The most skilful of these knights of the air earned the unofficial rank of “ace”; and many of them became celebrated international heroes—Fonck, Nungesser, and Garros of France, “The Red Baron” von Richtofen of Germany, and the American “Ace of Aces,” Edward V. Rickenbacker. British aviation historian Charles H. Gibbs-Smith calculated that in Britain alone the number of people employed in the aircraft industry between 1914 and 1918 grew from a few hundred to 350,000, building more than 50,000 planes.

  With the world becoming air-minded, commerce took hold of this tried if not always true invention. Accidents, though not frequent, were usually fatal; but if planes could serve in war, surely there was a place for them in peace. As The Ralph C. Diggins School of Aeronautics blared in its sales brochure:

  Commercial Aviation is but THREE years old and it is growing with tremendous speed. Aviation will grow faster than the automobile industry. The experimental stage is past…. every day from stations in many parts of the world planes take off with cargoes of passengers, freight and mail.

  … THINK! DECIDE!! ACT!!!

  At last, Lindbergh did; but he opted against the Diggins School in Chicago in favor of the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation. In addition to training in every aspect of aircraft building, maintenance, and flying, they also offered every “assistance possible on our part” in job placement. “In the past week,” they wrote Lindbergh that winter, “we have furnished $500 per month jobs to three men under our recommendation.”

  Evangeline Lindbergh had followed her son’s interest in aviation as it developed, but C.A. knew nothing of it until Charles had flunked out of college. “My father was greatly concerned about my plans,” Lindbergh remembered years later. “He spoke of the danger of aviation, and told me there would always be a place for me in his business if I wanted it; but
he did not argue against my decision.” To the contrary, he footed the bill—with the understanding that Charles would consider attending the University of Nebraska in Lincoln after completing the flying course. Lindbergh mailed in his $125 deposit.

  He and his mother parted company in Madison in March 1922. She would complete that schoolyear teaching, then take graduate courses in Education at Columbia University in New York. He arrived in Lincoln on April 1, 1922, a Saturday, and checked into the Hotel Savoy. “It looked like a fine and respectable place,” Lindbergh wrote his friend Plummer back in Madison, “1.25 per, clean room and running water.” The bellboy showed him to his room and seemed reluctant to leave until Lindbergh tipped him, fifteen cents. “Five minutes later,” Lindbergh wrote, “I was duly rewarded by having him knock on my door and say, ‘Say boss! Jes let me know if you need a gal to-night.’” Lindbergh wrote his mother instead, observing, “The morals in Lincoln are Ab. 0.”

  Monday his new adventure began, but not exactly as he had envisioned. Between the time Lindbergh had signed up with Nebraska Aircraft and his arrival there, management of the company had changed hands. The new owner was the entrepreneurial Ray Page—known as the “Skipper”—who changed the name of the company to Lincoln Standard Aircraft, stepped up the conversion of “veteran” planes into more modern flying machines, and started Page’s Aerial Pageant on the side. During this period of corporate turnover, the idea of a flying school had fallen between the cracks, and only one student appeared that April. It was the first time Lindbergh had ever made the first day of class.

  He handed over the balance of his tuition and was put right to work dismantling 220 h.p. Hispano-Suiza motors. By the next day he was “doping” wings—applying a varnish to the fabric with which most airplane fuselages and wings were made, thereby waterproofing and strengthening them. He participated in every process of reconditioning the planes, converting the front cockpits to carry two passengers and replacing the engines. “So far I have had work that is not very exciting,” Charles wrote his mother after less than a week on the job, “but interesting to me.”