The Aviators

by Winston Groom

  It was probably a good thing because Charles’s grades at the Little Falls high school had fallen so low that he himself doubted he could pass the final exams. His schooling had grown spottier over the years, interspersed with the frequent and often lengthy trips that Evangeline had arranged. As luck would have it, the principal announced in the fall of 1917 that, because of the shortage of food, any student who went to work on a farm would “get full academic credit, just as though he had attended his classes and taken examinations.”

  Charles was ecstatic. He spent his days building and mending fences, plowing fields, felling trees, herding livestock, dynamiting rocks, driving the tractor, operating the milking machine and the incubator in the chicken coop, and tending to the thousand and one other “endless tasks that arise from day to day” on a farm. By then he had sprouted to nearly six feet tall and was slim and trim. With his father’s blond mane of hair, his blue eyes, high cheekbones, and dimpled chin, and a magnetic smile, he was on the way to becoming a fitting heir for the title of most handsome man in Minnesota.

  In Washington, C.A. was in the process of committing political suicide. He was so irate at Wilson’s sending “American farm boys” to be killed in the war that he decided his presence was called for in a more influential venue, namely the governorship of Minnesota. As a congressman he had sided with a die-hard minority of politicians to oppose the war, and even after the U.S. entry he continued to preach so vehemently against the “Money Trust” and the evils of war that the press began to portray him as pro-German and disloyal.

  Instead of countering this, C.A. redoubled his antiwar rants. As a gubernatorial candidate C.A. ran on the slate of the Nonpartisan League, a midwestern socialist-isolationist organization, and soon he began to vent socialist bombast along with the antiwar rhetoric in his stump speeches. This led to mobs pelting him with rotten eggs and to insinuations of tar and feathers. The distinguished New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury, who grew up in Minneapolis, wrote: “He was arrested on charges of conspiracy along with the Nonpartisan Leaguers; a rally at Madison, Minnesota, was broken up with fire hoses; he was hanged in effigy in Red Wing, dragged from the speaking platform, threatened with lynching, and he escaped from one town amid a volley of shots.”§

  C.A. lost the election by a wide margin, and following this sorry pass he quit politics for a while and began publishing a magazine that soon failed. For his remaining years C.A. had no real fixed address but moved about in various ventures and misadventures, some involving postwar Florida real estate, the marketing of which even today remains the butt of bitter humor. At one point he told Charles, “You are living in an extraordinary time. Great changes are going to happen. I may not live to see them, but you will.”

  Charles remained on the farm, trying to make a go of it. C.A. had taken the Saxon Six with him when he left, so Charles bought a two-cylinder Excelsior motorcycle that he rode around at breakneck speeds. When purchases needed to be made C.A. “sent what he could, when he could,” but essentially, Charles was on his own, while Evangeline cooked, cleaned, sewed, and relentlessly dunned C.A. for money.

  One day the quiet of the woods around the farm was broken by the sound of a motor. As it came closer Charles recognized it was the drone of an airplane engine. He rushed out to see the machine soaring above the treetops; it was so slow it seemed to hang in the sky and an eternity passed before it flew across the river. “I dreamed often of having a plane of my own,” he said later, “and I searched the newspapers for accounts of aerial combats—articles about Fonck, Mannock, Bishop, Richthofen and Rickenbacker.” Since the beginning of the war Charles had looked forward to a new monthly edition of Everybody’s Magazine for the latest installment of “Tam o’ the Scoots,” the serialized adventures of a fictional scout plane–flying Scotsman on the Western Front. To Lindbergh, these knights of the air were as chivalrous as anything dreamed up by Sir Walter Scott. He decided that when he was old enough he would join the army and become a fighter pilot.3

  On November 11, 1918, the war ended and the troops would be coming home. There was no patriotic need to farm anymore, and the Lindberghs’ operation was barely breaking even as it was. Like many teenagers, Charles was torn as to what direction to take in life, and the end of the war forced decisions upon him. He liked Little Falls but he was aware that there was a bigger world he’d never seen—and he still had dreams of flying. The farming went on for a while longer, but with Evangeline’s urging soon he was planning to go to college to study mechanical engineering. In the end he picked the University of Wisconsin, “more because of its nearby lakes” he wrote, “than because of its high engineering standards.”

  LINDBERGH’S ASSESSMENT OF WHY he chose the University of Wisconsin was telling, for he was not prepared for college in any way whatever. Academic subjects defeated him entirely and by midway through his first semester Lindbergh was placed on probation for failing English and receiving D’s in math and chemistry. He developed a hatred for the rules of English and refused to understand that conformity imposed on the language was what made it manageable.

  Not only was he not much of a student, Lindbergh was a loner who didn’t partake of traditional college life at the dawn of the Jazz Age: beer parties, fraternities, flappers, bathtub gin, pep rallies, bonfires, “On Wisconsin!” and other rah, rah. By all accounts he didn’t even partake of girls; no one ever mentioned seeing him with a female other than his mother, who had moved to Madison and found work teaching as a substitute in the public schools. This in itself seems peculiar, since Lindbergh by now had grown to his full six-foot-two height and resembled, if anything, a lean Greek god.

  One would think the girls would have thrown themselves at him, and maybe they did, but Lindbergh had become strangely stoic when it came to women—an intellectual prude, almost. In his opinion women were silly. It had to be explained to him by a fellow student that the intellectual approach to girls was good only so far; then, Lindbergh’s acquaintance informed him, one should physically seduce them. If not shocked, Lindbergh was at least firm in his convictions. “I could not understand why you should want to overcome resistance until you found a girl you really loved,” he said. Until the end of his life, all through the many years that women swooned at the mere mention of his name, the term ladies’ man (even with respect to his ultimate infidelities) was never applied to Charles Lindbergh.

  He had few friends in college. The lone exceptions were two fellow motorcycle enthusiasts with whom he would tear around the town and the countryside, tormenting residents with the machines’ obnoxious roar. An often told story has Lindbergh becoming a daredevil during this period, risking his neck to make a 90-degree turn at high speed on a dead-end street. The first time he tried it he cracked up; the bike skidded from under him, bounced over a curb, and wound up on a lawn. Lindbergh miraculously was unhurt and upon dusting himself off declared he was going to try it again—which he did until he finally got it right.

  The one college activity Lindbergh seemed to enjoy was army training. He entered Wisconsin’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and discovered—quite strangely, for he was essentially a nonconformist—that he adapted well to military life. As a member of Wisconsin’s rifle and pistol teams he was an expert marksman and in fact won first prize in the competition for the school’s best shooter and received a brand-new Colt .45.

  He barely scraped by his first semester academically and remained on probation. When his freshman year ended he began six weeks of ROTC summer camp at Fort Knox, Kentucky, training for the field artillery.

  After camp he took off for Florida on the Excelsior motorcycle to see his father, but by some failure of communication the two did not connect and Charles toured much of the Southeast the rest of the summer. He arrived back in Madison to be greeted by his grades from the previous semester and a letter from C.A., neither of which carried much promise for his prospects as a student. The grades were awful—including F’s in math and chemistry—and except for good m
arks in shop and ROTC Lindbergh would enter his third and final probationary period in the fall. His father poured more cold water on Lindbergh’s college future by informing Charles that he was broke and could send no more money for tuition.

  C.A. had suggested to Evangeline that they mortgage the house but she wouldn’t hear of it. Charles scraped up enough cash for one more semester but it soon became apparent his heart wasn’t in it. He realized he was failing, letting his parents down, but the more he sat in class the more he realized it was flying that engaged his soul.

  About that time one of Lindbergh’s motorcycle riding friends showed him some literature and brochures that he had requested from flying schools. Lindbergh was most definitely intrigued. The friend had ordered the material only on a lark, he said—not seriously—pointing out the dangers of flying and that the life expectancy of an aviator in war was measured in hours. But Lindbergh saw in this a way out of the “life of drawing boards, meetings, and conformity” he had come to dread. He had never been in a flying machine, but somewhere in the back of his mind, ever since he’d watched the plane race the automobile at ten years old, there was an excitement, a rush of derring-do—his teachers always said his head was in the clouds and didn’t know how right they were.

  IN FEBRUARY 1922, LINDBERGH was informed that he had been dropped from the rolls of the University of Wisconsin for academic deficiency. The feeling was mutual. He put himself and the Excelsior on a railroad train and headed for Lincoln, Nebraska, where the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation and Ray Page’s Flying School awaited him. After trying every argument to dissuade his son from flying, C.A. had somehow been able to cough up the $500 tuition for several weeks of work in the airplane factory, followed by several weeks of actual flying. The school, though, was basically a scam.

  Lindbergh got his first week in the factory, learning beside trained technicians how to recondition army surplus training planes, the famous “flying Jennys,” as they were affectionately known, left over from the First World War. The most significant change the factory made was to replace the Jennys’ 150-horsepower motors with the more powerful 220 Hispano-Suiza engines. Otherwise he found himself doping wing fabric, replacing struts and guys, and all the other tasks associated with converting military aircraft into commercial planes. However, between the time Lindbergh received the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation brochure and his arrival in Lincoln, the company not only had changed its name to Lincoln Standard Aircraft, it also had more or less dropped the idea of a flying school—one reason being that Charles A. Lindbergh was the only student to show up. Nevertheless, Ray Page accepted Lindbergh’s money and put him to work. At the end of the week, Sunday, April 9, 1922, he was given his first plane ride. Well into old age, Lindbergh remembered the exhilaration of every moment, the plane hauled out from the factory the day before, wings not yet attached to the fuselage.

  “I stood on the field all morning,” Lindbergh said, “watching riggers attach wings and ‘hook up’ ailerons, flippers, and rudder; watching mechanics strain in fuel, drain the sediment bulb, tune up the engine, watching the engineer test cable tautness with his fingers and measure wing droop with his knowing eye. Behind every movement, word and detail, one felt the strength of life, the presence of death.”

  The mechanic jerked the propeller and the engine sputtered to life.

  “Wings begin to tremble—the roar becomes deafening—the plane lurches forward—the ground recedes—over treetops—across a ravine like a hawk—a hidden, topsy-turvy stage with height to draw its curtains.”

  Lindbergh wrote these dramatic words in 1952—thirty years after he first took off in an airplane—so it is easy to conclude that the experience of flight left him almost in shock.

  “Trees become bushes; barns, toys as we climb. I live only in the moment in this strange, unmortal place, crowded with beauty, pierced with danger.”

  It was around this time that Lindbergh picked up the nickname “Slim,” apt enough, since there were only 168 pounds on his lanky frame. His flying instructor was Ira “Biff” Biffle, an ex–Army Air Corps man—querulous, salty, profane, cynical. He had apparently seen one too many crack-up or, as Lindbergh put it, “lost the love of his art,” for when Charles looked eagerly for the flying lessons he’d paid for Biffle was generally nowhere to be found.

  In the meantime, Lindbergh hung around the factory, absorbing the hundreds of details necessary to care for a plane, since a pilot in those times also needed to be a mechanic, tailor, carpenter, and rigger. There was always talk of crashes at the factory, of who had died, and why. One of Biffle’s close friends had “spun in” recently, they said. “Slim” Lindbergh had received only eight hours of flying time when Biffle told him he was ready to solo.

  There was a hitch, though. Ray Page refused to let him solo in one of his planes unless he posted a bond to cover the possibility of crash. At that point Lindbergh was down to his last dollars and in May he departed Lincoln Standard Aircraft to become the flunky of a barnstorming pilot named Erold Bahl. At first he was consigned to spin the prop, clean the plane, and repair canvas but soon he graduated to the exalted position of “wing walker,” to please the barnstorming crowds.

  One day a parachute maker appeared in Lincoln to demonstrate his product, which he did by jumping out of a perfectly good airplane from two thousand feet in the air. Lindbergh was so impressed that he had to try it himself. He made the jump next day, a life-changing event, at least for Lindbergh. In fact, he made a “double jump,” in which halfway through the fall he collapses his first chute, free falls to give the crowd a thrill, then opens a second chute. If flying was a daredevil’s avocation, Lindbergh had just become a double daredevil and discovered that he liked it.

  FOR CIVILIAN PILOTS AT THE BEGINNING of the 1920s there were few moneymaking opportunities aside from barnstorming, that is, doing tricks or stunts for money at county fairs or taking passengers up for five dollars a ride. Commercial airlines were still somewhere in the future, even flying the post by airmail was in the future. Lindbergh knew he needed more flying lessons before he could solo. He’d saved up money over the years to buy his own plane and, not wanting to spend it, he bought himself a silk chute and began offering wing walking and parachute jumps and mechanical help to pilots in exchange for lessons.

  Flying, by then, had become an almost mystical experience for Lindbergh, a sort of holy grail, which he explained philosophically—and somewhat arrogantly: “In flying, I tasted the wine of the gods of which [the earthbound] could know nothing. Who valued life more highly, the aviators who spent it on the art they loved, or these misers who doled it out like pennies through their antlike days? I decided that if I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary lifetime.”

  Thus Slim entered the world of barnstorming where, it was said, “if flying was considered dangerous, wing walking and parachuting were regarded as suicidal.” Lindbergh practiced exhaustively, though, and he didn’t consider it daredevil because he’d worked out every technicality beforehand on the theory that “most accidents were caused by errors which could be avoided.”

  Others, however, claimed to be unconvinced. On posters throughout the rural Midwest he was featured prominently as DAREDEVIL LINDBERGH. Exhilarating as it was, however, barnstorming as a daredevil, with its circus-like atmosphere, seemed to be a dead end so far as Lindbergh’s aspirations for becoming a pilot were concerned. He got some flying lessons but, as airplanes were uninsurable in those days, no one would let him use his plane to solo. Then he heard tell from his father that the army had auctioned off a number of surplus war aircraft down in Americus, Georgia, and word was out they could be bought cheap. Upon further investigation, Lindbergh discovered he could purchase a used, twin-seat Jenny with a brand-new eight-cylinder Curtiss OX-5 engine for a mere five hundred dollars.

  In Americus, however, Slim was confronted with an awkward predicament—namely, how to fly the plane off the airfield. He tr
ied taxiing around for a while to get the feel of it. Once, he accidently left the ground and sailed along about four feet above the grass before he managed to bounce down on one wheel. A knot of pilots who happened to be loafing around a hangar witnessed this embarrassing demonstration, and one of them, named Henderson, generously offered to help Lindbergh do some takeoffs and landings. Fortunately the dual controls on the Jenny were still in place, and Slim and Henderson spent the better part of an hour doing takeoffs and touchdowns. Right before sundown, Slim Lindbergh made his first solo flight, and he slept that night under the wing of his airplane, peaceful as a baby.

  LINDBERGH SPENT A WEEK at the Americus field practicing more takeoffs and landings before he felt comfortable enough to fly off on his own. When he did, it was a long, overland hop across Alabama and into Mississippi where, at Meridian, he found his first paying passenger. Slim had landed in a farmer’s field, where he spent the night under the plane, and next day as he was preparing to leave a fat man waddled up and, claiming to have been a pilot during the war, produced a five-dollar bill if Lindbergh would take him for a ride.

  It was a tough haul. First, the OX-5 developed only about 80 or 90 horsepower, which meant the plane was essentially underpowered; secondly, Lindbergh had not accounted for the weight of his passenger, said to have been some three hundred pounds. The plane barely got off the ground on an uphill takeoff but, “in true Jenny style,” escaped a crash and Slim kept his passenger in the air for twenty minutes, chasing a buzzard.

  After that, Lindbergh took off for Texas. It was indeed seat-of-the-pants flying. There were numerous storms. Lindbergh had purchased a compass but failed to install it on the dashboard. The only chart he owned was an oil company map of the entire United States, which naturally contained few ground reference points. He became lost almost immediately and stayed lost until dusk, when he put down in a friendly-looking farm field. The landing went well, but as he was taxiing to a fence corner a large ditch suddenly appeared in front of him.