Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Strangely, they found few signs of activity in the other camps back at the airfield. Lindbergh had already had a long day; so after a few hours working with his team on his plane, he returned to the Garden City Hotel. Nothing was definite, as Dr. Kimball had hardly promised clear skies—just enough of an opening for a good airmail pilot to get through. “I’ll be ready at daybreak,” he thought, “and decide then whether or not to start.”

  6

  PERCHANCE TO DREAM

  “How are we to distinguish the difference between

  reality and dream? Dreams result from a relationship

  of atoms. So do our bodies.”

  —C.A.L.

  ALL HE WANTED WAS TO SLEEP, BUT WHEN LINDBERGH REturned to the Garden City Hotel just before midnight, he found it bustling with activity. An army of reporters clattering away at typewriters had appropriated the lobby, and they were all eager to interview him. Lindbergh politely excused himself from their questions, insisting that he had to go to bed. Even a long nap, he felt, would sustain him for the thirty-six-hour ordeal that lay ahead.

  The journalists let him retire in peace, as even the hardest-boiled members of the press no longer attempted to hide their admiration. Lindbergh’s modest manner “won the hearts of every one who came near him”—as Russell Owens phrased it in his next front-page piece for the Times—partly because he stood in such sharp contrast to the rest of the current newsmakers—bootleggers, racketeers, and millionaire playboys. That very day the press carried a story about oilman Harry Sinclair’s jail sentence for his role in the Teapot Dome scandal and another about an anarchistic maniac who dynamited a school, killing forty-two children. Charles Augustus Lindbergh seemed the perfect antidote to toxic times.

  It had rained on the opening of the horse-racing season at nearby Belmont Park that day, but journalists had the derby of the century to write about. Although Lindbergh did not know it, Clarence Chamberlin had received the same optimistic weather report that he had; and Kenneth Boedecker from the Wright Company was preparing the Bellanca Columbia for a morning departure as well. Although there seemed to be no sign of activity from the Byrd stable, it struck Lindbergh that the Fokker, America, hangared at Roosevelt Field, was in pole position. It could roll right onto the runway, while the Spirit of St. Louis would have to be towed there from Curtiss Field.

  Lindbergh’s backers in St. Louis had thoughtfully sent a member of their Chamber of Commerce, a Missouri National Guardsman named George Stumpf, to Long Island to serve as an aide-de-camp. Lindbergh had no duties for him until that moment, when he asked him to see that he was not disturbed until 2:15, at which time he wished to be awakened.

  He was just drifting off when he heard several loud knocks on the door. It was Stumpf. “Slim,” the young man asked, “what am I going to do when you’re gone?”

  “I don’t know,” Lindbergh managed to say politely. “There are plenty of other problems to solve before we have to think about that one.” Now wide awake, he began to consider them all. By 1:40, he realized he would not be getting any sleep that night.

  At 2:30, he was back downstairs, dressed in his flying outfit—Army breeches and boots, a light jacket over his shirt, a blue-and-red diagonally striped tie from Vandervoort’s in St. Louis. Frank Tichenor and Jessie Horsfall, the publisher and editor of Aero Digest, drove him to Curtiss Field. They arrived a little before three in a slow-dripping rain. Through the dark mist Lindbergh saw a crowd of more than five hundred onlookers.

  As the steady drizzle kept him inside, there was nothing to do but recheck all the preparations. He and his instrument specialist realized that it would be difficult to read the compass that had been affixed over the pilot’s wicker chair and that it should somehow have been incorporated into the instrument panel. A young woman in the waiting crowd came to the rescue with a round compact mirror; a man chewing gum provided the adhesive.

  At 4:15, the rain had practically stopped, and weather reports from Massachusetts, Maine, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland all reported clearings. A few members of the press were allowed to sit inside the hangar while Lindbergh ate a sandwich. When he finished, he ordered his plane wheeled outside. When the soaked crowd of faithfuls discerned the tall, lanky figure, it let out a cheer.

  There were no indications of anybody else’s taking off that morning as the tailskid of the Spirit of St. Louis was lifted and lashed to the back of a motor truck and the engine was shrouded in a tarpaulin. With an escort of six Nassau County motorcycle patrolmen, the plane was hauled to Roosevelt Field. By then word had it that Byrd’s backer still believed his plane needed more testing, and the courts were still restraining Chamberlin from taking Levine’s Bellanca. The drizzle persisted as the plane was tugged up a gravel road toward the runway. At one point in the muddy journey, they reached ruts deep enough to damage the plane; the caravan waited until some boards were set down to bridge them. Carefully watching his plane, Lindbergh thought, “It’s more like a funeral procession than the beginning of a flight to Paris.”

  The Spirit of St. Louis was positioned at the western end of the runway at Roosevelt Field, its nose pointing toward Paris. It would have five thousand feet in which to leave the ground and gain enough altitude to clear telephone wires at the end of the field. Were it a less soggy day, Lindbergh would not have questioned his ability to take off. But with a field turned to mire, no headwinds, and air so heavy that it would lower the engine’s r.p.m., the fate of prior overburdened planes raced through his mind.

  A truck carrying barrels of the Spirit of St. Louis’s fuel supply pulled up, and a small bucket brigade formed. Over the next few hours—just yards from where two members of Fonck’s crew had taxied to a fiery death eight months earlier—Ken Lane stood on the engine cowl, slowly pouring gasoline from red five-gallon cans through chamois, filtering the fuel as he filled the plane’s five tanks. An ambulance from the Nassau County Hospital rolled onto the field, down to that point at the runway from which the plane was meant to leave the ground.

  Hundreds were drawn to Roosevelt Field that morning. People on their way to work joined the all-night revelers on their way home. Besides Lindbergh, they could glimpse some of the most important figures in aviation, including rivals Byrd and Chamberlin along with Bernt Balchen, Bert Acosta, René Fonck, and the attractive “lady flyer” Ruth Nichols. The Dutch manufacturer Anthony Fokker was there, as was a recent Yale graduate named Juan Trippe, the managing director of Colonial Air Transport, which held the airmail contract between New York, Hartford, and Boston. As if to prove that he could have made the journey that day, Byrd asked Lindbergh if he might borrow his own runway to make a trial flight in the America. For almost two hours, Byrd put his three-motored Fokker through its paces, cutting in and out of the fog, landing just as Lindbergh’s plane was made ready.

  By 7:30 on the morning of May 20, 1927, each of the Spirit’s tanks was filled to its brim—451 gallons of gasoline, weighing some 2,750 pounds. In addition to the empty plane’s basic weight (including equipment and instruments) of 2,150 pounds, there were 140 pounds (twenty gallons) of oil, Lindbergh’s 170 pounds (fully clothed), and forty miscellaneous pounds, which included his letters of introduction from Colonel Roosevelt and a bank draft arranged by the St. Louis backers from the Equitable Trust Company of New York for 12,755.10 francs, the equivalent of $500. Frank Tichenor of Aero Digest asked if the five sandwiches he was taking were enough. “If I get to Paris,” Lindbergh said, “I won’t need any more, and if I don’t get to Paris, I won’t need any more, either.” One bystander offered Lindbergh a kitten as a mascot, and several others pressed talismans upon him. Several newspapers would report his taking them, but a pilot who had refused to take navigational equipment, had torn unnecessary pages from his notebook, and had trimmed the margins from his maps to save weight was hardly about to stow a cat—to say nothing of rabbits’ feet, wishbones, and horseshoes.

  Unwittingly, however, he did pocket a St. Christopher medal. Lindbergh, in his flyi
ng suit and leather helmet, had just settled in the cockpit, when he suddenly jumped out. He thought he had forgotten his passport. A member of his crew pointed out the small rack behind him, which held his flashlight and papers. For another moment he paused, looked at the leaden sky, then at the bulging wheels of the Spirit sinking into the muddy runway. While he stood there, a woman named Katie Butler, who had come out that morning with a group of Glen Cove schoolteachers, called a policeman over. She removed her St. Christopher from around her neck and whispered some instructions to him. “The officer nodded, took the gift over to the aviator, and put it in his hand,” remembered one of the teachers, who then distinctly saw Lindbergh “accept it distractedly and slip it into his pocket without examining it.”

  At 7:40, Lindbergh reapproached his plane, shook hands with Richard Byrd, and boarded. Ed Mulligan spun the propeller, and Kenneth “Boady” Boedecker twisted the booster magneto, designed to provide a hotter spark. The engine let out a roar, and the chocked airplane tried to buck loose. Lindbergh saw all the gauges before him spin into action, but the tachometer registered only 1,470 r.p.m., thirty revolutions low as a result of the weather.

  Ten minutes passed, while the pilot collected himself, pulling together all his flying experience of the past four years: 7,189 flights, 1,790 hours and ten minutes in the air, thirty-two flights in the Spirit without incident. He knew conditions were less than favorable. The slight tailwind could be dangerous when taking off from west to east; the humid air had the skin of his plane covered in cold sweat; the horizon was veiled in mist; the engine still had not revved up to 1,500 r.p.m.; and the Spirit had never been tested carrying so much weight.

  At 7:51 A.M., Lindbergh buckled his safety belt, stuffed each ear with a wad of cotton, strapped on his wool-lined helmet, and pulled his goggles down over his eyes. Turning to Mulligan and Boedecker, he said, “What do you say—let’s try it.” They went to the blocks, and he nodded. As the wheels were freed, Lindbergh eased his throttle wide open.

  In covering the event for the entire world to see, the Fox Film Corporation employed a brand-new technique for their newsreels, a sound-on-film process which they called “Movietone.” As the engine spluttered louder and louder, several men under each wing pushed on the struts, finally getting the two-ton, winged gasoline tank to move. It picked up speed, but inside the plane Lindbergh felt the stick wobble, assuming none of the outside pressure required to give the plane lift. At last the vehicle was sloshing forward fast enough to leave the men in its muddy wake, as it fishtailed down the runway.

  After more than a thousand feet had passed beneath him, Lindbergh felt play then strength in the stick. At the halfway mark on the runway—the point at which he had to decide whether or not to abort the flight—the Spirit still had not reached flying speed, but he felt “the load shifting from wheels to wings.” Coordinating his hand-on-throttle and foot-on-rudder movements with the view of the approaching telephone lines, which he could see only by leaning out the side windows, Lindbergh felt the plane leave the ground, only to return again. With less than two thousand feet of runway before him, he picked up speed and, now whooshing through puddles, managed to get the plane to jump off the ground again, only to bounce a second time. With less than a thousand feet, he attempted to lift the plane sharply enough to clear the web of wires in front of it.

  At 7:54, the plane was airborne—ten feet above a tractor on the field, over a gully into which he easily could have crashed, and clearing the telephone wires by twenty feet. The cheer of the crowd ripped the air.

  The plane headed toward open country, over a golf course and a line of trees. As if catching its breath, it descended slightly, only to regain altitude and slowly climb ever higher. Its wing dipped and caught a glint of the day’s first sunlight. “God be with him,” said Richard Byrd standing by his plane on the runway. “I think he has a 3-to-1 chance.” Clarence Chamberlin said, “My heart was in my throat,” as he pulled for the plane to get off the ground. “It was a splendid start,” he added, “one of the most thrilling I’ve ever seen. It took guts.” Bert Acosta, who had joined the Byrd team, said he thought Lindbergh was “taking a long chance. You must remember he is alone and has only one motor. If I were inclined to be superstitious, however, I might say that he has a good chance, for he is above all things a lucky flier.” Floyd Bennett, who had accompanied Byrd to the North Pole and recently been injured testing the plane for the New York-to-Paris run, also had second thoughts about flying with only one engine; but, he reminded people, the venture depended at least as much on “whether he can keep awake thirty-six hours.” Over the AP wire from London came news that Lloyd’s was not quoting odds on Lindbergh’s chances, because they believed “the risk is too great.”

  After two minutes in the air the Spirit of St. Louis had ascended to two hundred feet, a height safe enough from which to land if necessary; his airspeed was one hundred miles per hour, and the engine was cruising at 1,750 r.p.m. Past the worry of getting an untested amount of weight off the ground, Lindbergh was able at last to address the next challenge of his journey—navigation. He got his bearings, banking his plane until the needle of his earth-inductor compass reached the center line, 65 degrees, the compass heading for the first segment he had marked on his chart back in San Diego only weeks earlier. He pulled out his map of New York state, to check as often as possible for corresponding landmarks.

  Over the grand estates of Long Island he flew low, watching the haze lift over Connecticut. Only then did Lindbergh notice that he was being pursued by Casey Jones, flying a Curtiss Oriole filled with reporters and photographers. He resented their presence. But upon reaching the Sound, the escort plane dipped its wing and turned back, leaving the next thirty-six hundred miles of sky to Lindbergh alone.

  Within the hour Richard Blythe sent a wire to Evangeline Lindbergh at Cass Technical High School in Detroit: “CHARLES LEFT AT SEVEN FIFTY ONE THIS MORNING AFTER WONDERFUL TAKE OFF HE WAS FEELING RESTED AND VERY FIT HE WILL BE IN PARIS NEXT.” Trying to go about her business as usual, Mrs. Lindbergh asked her principal to make no mention of her son’s trip during school hours. She lunched at a small restaurant on Woodward Avenue, as was her custom; but the mob of well-wishing students, strangers on the street, and the press corps made it impossible for her not to issue a statement. Although she knew Charles would want her to say as little as possible, some of her anxiety surfaced. “Tomorrow, Saturday, a holiday for me,” she said, “will be either the happiest day in my whole life, or the saddest. Saturday afternoon at 3 o’clock I shall begin looking for word from Paris—not before that.” Until then, said Evangeline—hurrying home toward the house at 178 Ashland Avenue that she shared with her brother—“My heart and soul is with my boy on his perilous journey.”

  New Yorkers instinctively congregated in Times Square, where they hoped to find bulletins about Lindbergh’s progress posted on the Broadway side of the Times Square Building. That day alone, the Times received more than six hundred telephone inquiries for information.

  The American Embassy in Paris had earlier indicated that the French government might frown upon an American attempt at the Orteig Prize while Nungesser and Coli were still missing, but that proved to be misinformation. Their Minister of Marine ordered the big air beacon at Cherbourg lighted to guide Captain Lindbergh inland from the French coast. And the Police Commissioner of Aubervilliers met with aviation authorities at nearby Le Bourget to discuss the possibility of providing extra gendarmes to police the main street leading to the small landing field.

  That same day, another attempt at a record-breaking flight commenced. Two members of the Royal Air Force, C. R. Carr and L. S. M. Gillman, took off in a Hawker-Horsley bomber from the Crandley Airdrome outside London bound for Karachi, India, four thousand miles away. The British proudly focused on their own airmen, attempting what was, after all, a longer flight than Lindbergh’s; the Associated Press reported that the general English impression of Lindbergh’s flight was that it was “f
oolhardy.” But after a few sniffs of disdain, they would be won over by the young American’s gallantry, impressed that he was flying alone—over water, which offered little hope of salvation if his plane went down. By day’s end, Lindbergh’s flight, not Carr and Gillman’s, commanded their attention.

  Sixty-five vessels traveled the North Atlantic sea lanes that day, but fewer than twenty were believed to be anywhere near Lindbergh’s route. Shipping Board statisticians said that “because of uncertainty as to the time of sailing or speed of some of the vessels,” none of them could be relied upon for sightings of Lindbergh’s plane. Nonetheless, the captain of the S. S. President Roosevelt, then sailing from Bremen to New York, altered its course to the north so that it might parallel Lindbergh’s; he ordered a searchlight to scan the sky from midnight until dawn.

  The flight’s first great risk, that of his plane being overloaded with fuel, was behind him. There still remained, however, the possibility of engine failure. Although his Wright Whirlwind had thus far performed precisely, it had never been put to so severe a test—thirty-six nonstop hours of operation, probably through a variety of dangerous weather conditions. “The engine had to make 14,472,000 explosions perfectly and smoothly,” noted Lieutenant L. B. Umlauf, aviation engineer for Vacuum Oil. “Even a minor engine problem might bring a sudden and fatal end to a brave and thrilling adventure.”