Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  “I am glad, more than glad, that you never get rattled—and always think clearly,” Evangeline wrote Charles after reading about the Davis–Wooster crash, putting on her best face; “seems to me some of the N. Y.–Paris people have already been in too much of a hurry.” The day after he read of the accident, Lindbergh stepped into the cockpit of his plane to begin its tests.

  It felt “strange” settling into the wicker porch chair—with its air cushion—which virtually filled the cabin. The fuel tank before him loomed large, diminishing the instrument panel at eye level—a piece of plywood painted dull black with twenty-one switches, meters, and knobs set therein. Outside the ship, the chief mechanic turned the propeller over several times, contact was made, and the engine kicked in. Lindbergh checked each gauge, opened the throttle, and felt the wheels of the plane pawing at the chocks. He motioned for young Corrigan to duck under the wing and pull them away. The plane began to roll … picking up speed as it taxied.

  Lindbergh had never felt a plane accelerate so fast, leaving the ground in less than one hundred feet. He spiraled upward to two thousand feet, saw that all his instruments were functioning, then flew over the factory, where its creators ran out to look at the results of their labor. Lindbergh saluted them by rocking the wings and headed out over the bay. Later in the day of that twenty-minute test flight, the three dozen Ryan employees lined up in front of the plane, from one wingtip to the other, for a team photograph, Lindbergh among them.

  Over the next ten days, Lindbergh ran the plane through twenty-three test flights, varying in duration from five minutes to a little over an hour. The plane needed only minor adjustments. On May fourth, he performed nine trial runs, testing speed and load, each with a different amount of gasoline, ranging from thirty-eight gallons to three hundred. The day ended before he could attempt the ultimate load; but he knew to quit, if only so that he did not have to put that much stress on his tires, which presumably would never have to endure another landing bearing as much as three hundred gallons remaining in its tanks. “The test flights we have run here have been far above our theoretical performance,” Lindbergh wrote his mother reassuringly. “The cruising range will be well over 4,200 miles and it is easily capable of a flight one third again as long as the present world’s endurance record.”

  Stories had already spread that Lindbergh had been training himself to stay awake by taking long walks in San Diego at night. They were completely false. He did, however, fully intend to fly the first leg of his journey by night, to obtain eight hundred miles of practice in the dark. He made final preparations to take off on Friday, May sixth; but storms and fog drifted in, clouding the entire way from San Diego to St. Louis.

  Suddenly, not even the weather mattered. Out of the blue, on Sunday the eighth, Nungesser and Coli left Paris’s Le Bourget aerodrome in their Levasseur biplane, L’oiseau blanc, headed for New York. They were expected to capture the Orteig Prize by Monday. Lindbergh pulled out his charts of the Pacific.

  Over the weekend, the ebullience ebbed. Despite the bold headlines, nobody had actually sighted The White Bird since it flew over the coast of France. By Sunday Lindbergh realized that the plane must have exhausted its fuel supply, downing Nungesser and Coli somewhere.

  Lindbergh’s backers and friends in St. Louis prepared for his arrival there. They wanted to throw him a banquet and christen his plane; but Lindbergh knew that the Bellanca stood ready in New York to fly to Paris. Sensing the narrowness of this window of opportunity, Lindbergh thought St. Louis could now be but a pit stop. “[I]f I’m to be successful,” he thought, “I can’t waste time on ceremonies.” On Monday, he learned from the Weather Bureau that the inclement front was, at last, moving on. He went to bed early in preparation for a departure the next day.

  On the morning of Tuesday, May tenth, Lindbergh packed a small traveling bag—weight he could afford to carry cross-country—and went to the Ryan factory to say thank-you and good-bye. As he walked out of the factory, one of the Ryan workers shouted, “Send us a wire when you get to Paris.”

  He drove to Dutch Flats, from which he flew his plane to North Island, home of both Army and Navy installations and Rockwell Field—a five-minute hop. A gasoline truck waited to fill his plane. Because Lindbergh did not want to leave until day’s end, he whiled away most of the afternoon with Donald Hall, lunching with officers, even burning off some nervous energy flying a new Navy Hawk fighter. At 3:15 he returned to his plane, surrounded by reporters and photographers. At 3:40 he climbed into his flying suit, knowing he would not be able to get into it once in the air. At five of four, he decided not to wait any longer. Within seconds he was airborne, escorted by two Army observation planes and a Ryan monoplane.

  They went once around North Island, saluted the factory, and headed for St. Louis. The escorts turned back after ninety minutes, leaving Lindbergh to fly into the night that was descending upon the southwestern deserts and Rockies. Except for some engine hacking over Arizona—probably ice forming in the carburetor—the flight proceeded without incident. By sunrise he was entering familiar barnstorming country and was able to deduce that tail winds had pushed him considerably during the night. He landed at Lambert Field at 8:20 Central Standard Time, having flown fifteen hundred miles in fourteen hours and twenty-five minutes, a record for a nonstop flight that distance.

  The Robertson brothers and several of his aviation friends greeted him, gathering round Louie’s lunch shack while Lindbergh ate ham and eggs. Bill Robertson handed Lindbergh his newly arrived transport-pilot’s license, number 69. One of Slim’s former flying students, Father Henry Hussman, pastor of St. Henry’s Church in St. Louis, presented him a silver medal of Our Lady of Loretto, the patroness of aviators. Representatives of the Vacuum Oil Company, makers of Mobiloil “B,” which would be used in the forthcoming flight, assured him that their oil would be ready for him in New York, as would a hotel room and hangar. Knight and Bixby arrived to discuss the options available to him that evening, but Lindbergh first wanted a status report on The White Bird and the Bellanca. As there was no news about either flight—Chamberlin still had not left and Nungesser and Coli had not arrived—Lindbergh told his backers, “I’ll stay as long as you want me to. But I think I ought to go right on to New York. If I don’t, somebody else will beat us to the take-off.”

  Bixby and Knight agreed. Lindbergh retired early—at his former boardinghouse—and left Lambert Field a little after eight the next morning. Seven hours and twenty-two minutes later, he landed in New York at Curtiss Field, outside Mineola on Long Island. He had crossed the entire country in less than twenty-two hours of flying time, another record. Hundreds waited on the field for him.

  Even before the brakeless Spirit of St. Louis had rolled to a stop, it was engulfed by newspaper photographers and reporters. “Why can’t they wait until I taxi to the line and stop my engine?” Lindbergh wondered. “They’d have better pictures, it would save a lot of time, and I wouldn’t have to worry about anyone getting hurt.” A wave of mechanics approached, who instinctively cleared a way for the plane.

  In a mock ceremony, Casey Jones, the Curtiss company’s famous test pilot and airport manager, acted as “mayor” of the field and presented Lindbergh with an old set of office keys. He also provided him a hangar for his plane. Richard Blythe, a partner in the public relations firm of Bruno & Blythe, which had been hired by the Wright Aeronautical Corporation, offered whatever help the flier required. Even before Lindbergh could request a mechanic to examine his engine, Blythe introduced Ken Boedecker and Ed Mulligan, from the Wright organization; the former was one of the company’s field service representatives, the latter had been assigned specifically to Lindbergh’s plane. After posing Lindbergh for photographs, Blythe ushered him into a press conference, at which the questions quickly descended from aviation to “How do you feel about girls?” After the interview, a tabloid reporter told Lindbergh that his editor wanted to pay several thousand dollars for the exclusive rights to his sto
ry.

  A small entourage took Lindbergh to the nearby Garden City Hotel, which would become his base until his departure for Paris. Over supper, he learned the status of the contestants vying for the Orteig Prize. Rumors of a rescue of Nungesser and Coli abounded, but there was still not one confirmed report since France of anybody’s having seen them. Meantime, Richard Byrd’s repaired Fokker—America—was resting in a hangar on Roosevelt Field, an adjacent airport, separated from Curtiss by a steep drop. The Bellanca Columbia waited in another hangar on Curtiss Field, detained by the weather and personnel problems. The plane’s owner, Charles Levine, kept changing his mind as to which two fliers would make the trip.

  The men from Wright had engines in all three ships on the airfields of Hempstead Plains. Their task was to service each of them without showing favoritism toward any pilot. After supper Blythe and Boedecker took Lindbergh back to Curtiss Field, where Mulligan was fine-tuning the Spirit of St. Louis. He and Boedecker worked past midnight, leaving Lindbergh to retire for the night. By then, Lindbergh’s arrival in New York had plainly roused the two other camps into activity.

  But there there would be no takeoffs for Paris the next day or for several after that, as bad weather occluded the entire route across the Atlantic. With each passing hour, the number of people from the press grew, as did the number of rubberneckers hoping to get a glimpse of the “dark horse.” Fortunately, the rivalry among the pilots remained friendly.

  Late that night when Ed Mulligan had inspected Lindbergh’s plane, for example, he had noticed a small crack developing in the spinner cap—the propeller’s noseguard. By the following morning, the Curtiss Company, one of the Wright Corporation’s competitors, was constructing and installing a new one free of charge. Over the next few days, Bellanca and Chamberlin wandered over to see Lindbergh and to wish him luck. Even Commander Byrd paid a call, offering weather information and free use of his runway at Roosevelt Field.

  Lindbergh inspected Byrd’s runway and found it provided “a longer and better take-off run than I expected to find anywhere around New York.” He took the Spirit of St. Louis up for six short flights over the next three days. Back on the ground Lindbergh kept revising his lists of every item that would accompany him—from the breeches he would wear to the paper cups into which he would urinate.

  The media took a shine to Lindbergh, not only because he was physically the most attractive of all the fliers but also because he was the freshest face in town and the only pilot to make the journey alone. He became the “Human Meteor,” the “Flyin’ Fool,” and the “Kid Flyer.” The press did all they could to build him up; and as the wait for Nungesser and Coli dragged on, Lindbergh filled the slot in the front-page headlines. Photographers barged into his Garden City Hotel room trying to snap a picture of him shaving. Reporters in Detroit began to hound his mother. On May thirteenth, she wired her son that she would be arriving in New York the next day.

  “Good Lord!” Lindbergh thought. After months of convincing her of the safety of his trip, the press had smoked her out. Although he secretly blamed them for shaking her confidence, he maintained a facade of friendly indifference while they exploited the story of a gray-haired mother bidding farewell to her all-American boy.

  Lindbergh met Evangeline at the Garden City train station on Saturday morning, May fourteenth. Borrowing a car, he drove her to Curtiss Field, where she watched him make two test flights. His worst fears about her visit were realized when the press hurled insensitive questions at her, playing up the danger of the flight. Still, mother and son posed dutifully for the photographers, though Mrs. Lindbergh drew the line when one of the cameramen asked Evangeline to kiss her son good-bye. “No,” she said with a slightly embarrassed smile. “I wouldn’t mind if we were used to that, but we come of an undemonstrative Nordic race.”

  After a quiet lunch at a restaurant in Hempstead, the Lindberghs returned to the train depot and talked in the car. It had not been much of a visit, just enough to reassure Evangeline that her son “really wanted to go and felt it was the right thing to do.” When her train pulled in they got out and she patted his shoulder. “Well, son,” she said, “good-bye and good luck.” She waved to him from the train window as it pulled away—perhaps, the press suggested, for the last time. Lindbergh was hardly surprised the next day to see one newspaper had a photograph of him kissing his mother, a faked composite picture that substituted their heads onto the bodies of two other people.

  Lindbergh now waited only for the weather to change. Fog blanketed the seaboard up to Canada’s Maritime Provinces. With time on his hands, he went to Manhattan to tie up loose ends. Carrying photographs he had had taken in St. Louis a few months earlier for just this purpose, he went to the New York Passport Agency and filed an application; the agents issued a passport on the spot. While in the city he called on meteorologist Dr. James H. Kimball at the weather bureau atop the Whitehall Building in the Battery. Kimball spread out his latest weather map and explained how all the isobars were conspiring to make the skies impenetrable. Dr. Kimball wished Lindbergh would take a more southerly route, for the ships in the sea lanes could provide more accurate reports.

  With no clearing in sight, Lindbergh became more sociable. He accepted a luncheon invitation to the Oyster Bay home of Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., who wrote Lindbergh several letters of introduction to friends in Europe, including the American Ambassador. Those, he decided, would be the last ounces of functionless weight he would carry, for he had already agreed to take two other pieces of mail—one for Postmaster Conkling of Springfield, the other for his flying friend Gregory Brandeweide, who had helped him lay out the mail route.

  Lindbergh avoided the crowds amassing back at the field as much as possible, but he was happy to make the acquaintance of some of the biggest names in aviation. René Fonck and Tony Fokker stopped by to say hello, as did Charles Lawrance, the president of Wright, and C. M. Keys of Curtiss. Harry Guggenheim, who administered a fund that promoted aviation, made the greatest impression. “I didn’t think Lindbergh had much chance to make it,” Guggenheim later confessed. In fact, he was “indignant with the authorities for letting him go off on this highly doubtful adventure” with so little of “the equipment and aids to navigation available at that time.” But Guggenheim masked his concern, extending only encouragement upon saying good-bye. “When you get back,” he said, “look me up at the Fund’s office.”

  Charles remained jovial, though in his efforts to lessen the tension, his humor reverted to its most juvenile. Ken Boedecker remembered seeing him pour a whole box of rough bran down the back of Franklin Mahoney, who had come east for the takeoff. One day, Dick Blythe tried to take Lindbergh’s mind off the flight for a few hours by taking him to Coney Island. He seemed to lose himself at the amusement park, chuting the chutes, eating hot dogs and popcorn, and listening to the sideshow barkers. “He was happy as a kid turned loose in Coney Island for the first time,” wrote Blythe’s partner, Harry Bruno, until a woman recognized him and shrieked his name. “Get me out of here,” Lindbergh said, and they hightailed it back to Garden City.

  The stack of mail in his hotel helped distract him. There were messages from friends, relatives, and complete strangers as well as requests from scores of people for Lindbergh to carry mail for them, which he was meant to post from Paris. Most expected him to perform this service for free, a few enclosed a dollar. Several theatrical agents—including William Morris himself—asked if they could book him upon completion of his flight on a lecture circuit. The president of the Vitamin Food Company wrote Lindbergh that the “crossing will depend on your clear head, steady nerves and endurance,” and that without “any thought of advertising” he could not resist sending several jars of his product Vegex—a vegetable extract which “can be taken into the plane in a thermos bottle like coffee or … eaten with crackers or bread.” As Evangeline wrote her son upon her safe return to Detroit, “You have upset the country’s equilibrium.”

  The oth
er fliers were as excitable as thoroughbreds waiting in the paddock. Byrd’s business partner, Rodman Wanamaker, was insisting that Byrd run their Fokker through more tests; a disgruntled former member of the Bellanca team was taking formal action against Levine, legally restraining the plane from taking off. More than ever Lindbergh was grateful that he was flying alone and that he was supported by a team in St. Louis who let him be. That week, he called Harry Knight to say that he would probably be ready to leave before completing the sixty-day waiting period for eligibility for the $25,000 prize. “To hell with the money,” Knight told him. “When you’re ready to take off, go ahead.”

  A light rain fell that Thursday, May nineteenth, and all prospects for a departure in the next few days dimmed. With some of his new friends, Lindbergh visited the Wright plant in Paterson, New Jersey. At day’s end, they drove into New York City, where Dick Blythe had arranged for Lindbergh to watch one of the season’s biggest Broadway hits, “Rio Rita,” from backstage. They were driving east on Forty-second Street, when Kenneth Lane, chief airplane engineer for Wright, asked if they should not call Dr. Kimball for the latest weather report.

  They pulled over to an office building so that Blythe could telephone. Lindbergh looked up, only to see the tops of the Manhattan skyline enshrouded in fog. Blythe ran back to the car, however, to announce that there had been a sudden change in the atmosphere—a high pressure area was starting to clear patches of weather over the ocean. Putting Broadway behind them, they headed for the East River and grabbed a bite in the Queensboro Plaza. Lindbergh mentally ran through the final checklist. Thinking ahead, Dick Blythe dashed around the corner to a drugstore, where he bought six sandwiches for Slim’s trip. The weather was still too nasty to move the plane over to Roosevelt Field, but enough preparations could be made during the night to allow for an early morning departure. They could start by pumping the first hundred gallons of gasoline into the plane while it was still in the hangar. Lane said he would oversee that as well as the final inspection of the plane with his colleagues from Wright. And somebody would have to notify Carl Schory, the Secretary of the National Aeronautic Association, who would install the recording barograph—which would mark time and altitude on a revolving paper cylinder—the mandatory documentation of the flight.