One Summer: America, 1927 (7 page)

From his father Charles inherited a dimpled chin and perpetually tousled hair, from his mother dreaminess, and from both a tendency to be headstrong. He was the only child they would have together. Young Charles—he was never Charlie or anything more relaxed and familiar—grew up in a household that was comfortable and well looked after (the family kept three servants) but lacking in warmth. Both his parents were almost wholly incapable of showing affection. Lindbergh and his mother never hugged. At bedtime, they shook hands. As both boy and man, Charles signed letters to his father, “Sincerely, C. A. Lindbergh,” as if corresponding with his bank manager.

Charles was a shy, rather dreamy boy. He made so little impression on Little Falls that when journalists descended on the town in 1927 looking for anecdotes from his boyhood, none of his ex-schoolmates could think of any. Lindbergh himself in adulthood said that he had no memories at all of his daily life as a youngster. In his first autobiographical effort, called
We
, he gave just eighteen lines to his childhood.

In 1906, when Charles was not quite five, his father was elected to Congress as a Republican, which meant that young Charles divided his time between Little Falls, which he loved, and Washington, which he did not. This gave Charles an eventful but disrupted childhood. He enjoyed experiences that other children could only dream of—he played on the grounds of the White House and in the halls of the Capitol, visited the Panama Canal at the age of eleven, went to school with the sons of Theodore Roosevelt—but he moved around so much that he never really became part of anything.

As the years passed, his parents grew increasingly estranged. At least once, according to Lindbergh’s biographer A. Scott Berg, she held a gun to his head (after learning that he was sleeping with his stenographer), and at least once in fury he struck her. By the time Charles was ten years old, they were living permanently apart, though they kept it secret for the sake of his father’s political career. Charles attended eleven different schools before graduating from high school, and he distinguished himself at each by his mediocrity. In the autumn of 1920, he entered the University of Wisconsin, hoping to become an engineer. Charles survived in large part by having his mother write his papers for him, but ultimately even that wasn’t enough. Halfway through his sophomore year he flunked out and abruptly announced his intention to become an aviator. From his parents’ perspective, this was a mortifying ambition. Flying was poorly paid, wildly unsafe, and unreliable as a career—and nowhere were those three unhappy qualities more evident than in the United States.

In no important area of technology has America ever fallen further behind the rest of the world than it did with aviation in the 1920s. Europe had its first airline in KLM as early as 1919, and others quickly followed. Before the year was out, daily flights were introduced between London and Paris, and soon more than a thousand people a week were flying that route alone. By the mid-1920s it was possible to fly almost anywhere in Europe—from Berlin to Leipzig, from Amsterdam to Brussels, from Paris to distant Constantinople (by way of Prague and Bucharest). By 1927, France had nine airlines operating, British airlines were flying almost a million miles a year, and Germany was safely delivering 151,000 passengers to their destinations. In America as the spring of 1927 dawned, the number of scheduled passenger air services was … none.

Aviation in America was almost wholly unregulated. The country had no system of licensing and no requirements for training. Anyone could buy a plane, in any condition, and legally take up paying passengers. The United States was so slack about flying that it didn’t even keep track of the number of airplane crashes and fatalities. The most authoritative
source, the
Aircraft Year Book
, compiled its figures from newspaper clippings. The anonymous authors of that annual tome were in no doubt that the absence of regulations was holding back progress and causing needless deaths. They wrote: “Since the Armistice, when airplanes were first made generally available and came into hands skilled and unskilled, responsible and irresponsible, it may be conservatively estimated that more than 300 persons have been killed and 500 injured—many of them fatally—in flying accidents which could have been prevented had there been in existence and enforced a statute regulating the operation of commercial aircraft.”

Without airlines to employ them, American aviators had to turn a hand to whatever work they could find—dusting crops, giving rides at county fairs, thrilling spectators with stunts and acrobatics, dragging advertising banners across the skies, taking aerial photographs, and above all carrying mail—the one area in which America was preeminent. Of all the aerial employments, delivering mail was the most economically secure but also the most dangerous: thirty-one of the first forty airmail pilots were killed in crashes, and accidents remained common through the 1920s. Airmail pilots flew in all weather and often at night, but with almost no support in the way of navigational aids. In March 1927, an article in
Scientific American
, under the heading “Invisible Beams Guide Birdmen in Flights Between European Cities,” noted admiringly how pilots in Europe could fix their locations instantly via radio beacons. Lost American pilots, by contrast, had to search for a town and hope that someone had written its name on the roof of a building. In the absence of that—and it was generally absent—pilots had to swoop low to try to read the signs on the local railroad station, often a risky maneuver. For weather reports, they mostly called ahead to railroad agents along the route and asked them to put their head out the door and tell them what they saw.

Such deficiencies marked almost every area of American civil aviation. Until 1924, Detroit, the fourth-largest city in the country, didn’t have an airfield at all. In 1927, San Francisco and Baltimore still didn’t. Lambert Field in St. Louis, one of the most important in the country
because of its position at the heart of the continent, existed only because Major Albert B. Lambert, a flying enthusiast, was willing to support it out of his own pocket. Metropolitan New York had four airfields—three on Long Island and one on Staten Island—but all were privately owned or run by the military, and offered only the most basic facilities. None of them even had a control tower. No American airfield did.

Not until 1925 did America begin at last to address even peripherally its aeronautical shortcomings. The person chiefly responsible for rectifying these deficiencies was Dwight Morrow, a New York banker who knew nothing whatever about flying but was put in charge of the President’s Aircraft Board—a panel charged with investigating the safety and efficiency of American aviation—because he was a friend of Calvin Coolidge. By a rather extraordinary coincidence Morrow would in 1929 become Charles Lindbergh’s father-in-law. Had Morrow been told that before the decade was out his shy, intellectual daughter at Smith College, in Massachusetts, would be marrying an airmail pilot and former stunt flier, we may assume he would have been flabbergasted. Had he been further informed that this pilot would also by then be the world’s most celebrated individual his astonishment would presumably have been immeasurable. In any case, thanks to Morrow’s efforts, the Air Commerce Act was signed into law by President Coolidge on May 20, 1926—coincidentally one year to the day before Lindbergh’s flight. The act brought in some minimal training requirements for pilots and inspection of planes used in interstate commerce, and required the Commerce Department to keep track of fatalities. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

This was the casual and high-risk world in which Charles Lindbergh learned to fly. His first flight—indeed, his first experience of an airplane at close range—was at a flying school in Lincoln, Nebraska, on April 9, 1922, two months after his twentieth birthday. He was instantly smitten. Almost at once he embarked on a brief but perilous career as a stunt performer. Within a week he was wing-walking, and within a month he
was—without any prior training—parachuting from giddy heights to the delight of watching crowds. In the course of these duties he also learned, in an entirely informal way, to fly. He proved to be unusually good at it. Like other young men, Lindbergh was capable of the most riveting foolishness. Part of the job of barnstormers was to impress the locals with their flying skills, and on a visit to Camp Wood, Texas, Lindbergh decided to do so by taking off from the town’s Main Street—an ambitious challenge since the street’s telephone poles were just forty-six feet apart and his wingspan was forty-four feet. As he sped down the street he hit a bump, which caused a wingtip to clip a pole, spinning him sideways and through the front window of a hardware store. That neither he nor any of the spectators were injured was a miracle.

Barnstorming gave Lindbergh a great deal of practical experience—he made over seven hundred flights in two years—but no technical training. In 1924, he corrected that deficiency by enrolling in a one-year course in the army air reserve, which provided the most advanced and challenging training then available. He finished at the top of his class—the first time in his life he had done well at anything academic—and emerged with the rank of captain. The achievement was muted somewhat by the fact that it coincided with the death of his father, from a neurological disorder, in May 1924. After his father’s funeral, and because no military posts were available, he took a job as an airmail pilot on the St. Louis–Chicago route, where he acquired the sort of resourcefulness that comes with flying cheap and temperamental planes through every possible type of adversity. Thanks to this varied apprenticeship, Lindbergh in the spring of 1927 was a more experienced and proficient flier—and a vastly more gifted one—than his competitors realized. As events would show, you couldn’t be a better pilot and still be just twenty-five.

In many ways Charles Lindbergh’s greatest achievement in 1927 was not flying the Atlantic but getting a plane built with which to fly the Atlantic. Somehow he managed to persuade nine flinty businessmen in St. Louis, among them the aforementioned Albert B. Lambert, to back him, convincing
them that a plane with “St. Louis” in its title could do nothing but good for the city’s business prospects. It was an exceedingly dubious proposition. The greater likelihood for his backers was that they would be indelibly associated with the needless death of a young, idealistic flier, but that thought, if it occurred to them at all, seems not to have troubled them. By late autumn 1926, Lindbergh had a promise of $13,000 of funding from his backers, plus $2,000 of his own—not a lavish bankroll by any means, but with luck, he hoped, enough to get him a single-engine plane capable of crossing an ocean.

In early February 1927, Lindbergh took a train to New York for a meeting with Charles A. Levine, owner of the airplane
Columbia
. This was the same plane that would, two months later, set the world endurance record with Chamberlin and Acosta. Chamberlin was present at the February meeting, as was the plane’s brilliant, sweet-tempered designer, Giuseppe Bellanca, though neither said much.

They met in Levine’s office in the Woolworth Building in Manhattan. Levine listened to Lindbergh’s pitch, then agreed to sell the plane to him for $15,000—a rather startling thing to do since Chamberlin was, up to that moment, expecting to fly the plane to Paris himself. It was also a very good price for what was unquestionably one of the best planes in the world and the only one capable of taking Lindbergh to Europe alone. Understandably elated, Lindbergh traveled back to St. Louis to draw a check and confirm the support of his backers, then returned at once to New York to complete the transaction. On the return visit, as Lindbergh handed over a cashier’s check for the full amount of the purchase, Levine casually mentioned that although they were happy to proceed with the deal as agreed, they of course reserved the right to choose the crew.

Lindbergh could not have been more taken aback. The proposition was ludicrous. He was hardly going to buy a plane so that a pilot of Levine’s choosing could make the flight and receive all the glory. Lindbergh had just discovered, as many others would before and after him, that where business was concerned Charles Levine had a genius for causing dismay. Almost everyone who dealt with Levine found reasons to distrust and despise him. Bellanca himself would terminate their relationship
before June was out. Lindbergh took back his check and dolefully made the long, clacketing trip back to St. Louis.

Lindbergh could hardly have been in a less promising situation. In desperation he cabled a tiny company in San Diego, Ryan Airlines, and asked if it could build a plane for an Atlantic flight and, if so, how much it would cost and how long it would take. The reply came quickly and was unexpectedly heartening. Ryan could build the plane in sixty days for $6,000, plus the expense of the engine, which it would install at cost. Ryan, it turned out, needed the work as much as Lindbergh needed the plane.

On February 23, slightly less than three weeks after his twenty-fifth birthday and three months before he would fly to Paris, Lindbergh arrived at the Ryan Airlines factory. There he met the president, B. F. Mahoney, and the chief engineer, Donald Hall, both only slightly older than he was. The airline’s founder, Jubal Claude Ryan, had sold out to Mahoney a few weeks earlier—so recently in fact that they hadn’t had time to change the company name. Donald Hall had also joined the company only a month before, a truly fortunate break because Hall was a gifted and diligent designer—exactly what Lindbergh needed.

Over the next two months the entire Ryan workforce—thirty-five people—labored flat out on Lindbergh’s plane. Hall worked to the point of exhaustion—for thirty-six hours straight at one point. The plane could not have been built so swiftly otherwise, but then the Ryan employees had every reason to work hard. Ryan had no orders and was on the verge of bankruptcy when Lindbergh arrived. It is hard to imagine what the employees thought of this lanky youth from the Midwest hovering over them, questioning their every move in a manner bound to try patience. Lindbergh and Hall, however, got along extremely well, which was the main thing.