Word: lindbergh
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...estranged from Charles's schoolteacher mother. In the strange confraternity of barnstormers, few were really intimate, and none had a home-they met only over coffee in shacks near the local airport, briefly shared rooms in some nearby boardinghouse. In this rough camaraderie of essential strangers, the young Lindbergh was addicted to practical jokes, which for those who lack a sense of real human contact are often a last attempt to communicate. He put snakes in beds, made power dives with passengers given to airsickness. But he never seemed either happy or go-lucky. He cultivated his body...
...worth the cost in weight, which could be better used for extra fuel. Similarly, he decided to fly a Great Circle course rather than follow the ship lanes, where he might be picked up in case of failure. Everyone else had taken or planned to take a navigator along; Lindbergh figured a navigator was equivalent in weight to 50 gallons of gasoline, and he needed the gasoline more than the navigation...
...does one survive Lindbergh's kind of triumph? If he was condemned to a permanent sense of anticlimax, he gave no sign of it. In the aftermath of the flight, Lindbergh earnestly devoted himself to exploiting his fame for the sake of developing aviation. And aviation needed it. In 1927, in all the U.S., fewer than 9,000 people went aloft as passengers on scheduled airlines (compared with 109 million last year). Between accepting medals, he flew the Spirit of St. Louis to every state in the Union, pleading the future of aviation in a high, reedy Midwestern voice...
...this time, Lindbergh had become thoroughly bored with the press and publicity. Time and again, crowds would break through police lines to swarm up to his plane; more than once he swung the plane around to drive them back with the blast of his prop wash. In the four years after his marriage, he embarked on two world-swinging trips to explore aviation routes, the first across Canada and Alaska to Japan and China to dramatize the Great Circle course to the Far East (written up by Anne in North to the Orient), and the second across the North Atlantic...
...time, the tragedy of the Lindbergh baby's kidnaping (in March 1932) blotted out all other concerns, but fanned his hatred of the press. Lindbergh plainly felt that the merciless mob of newspapermen descending on his Hopewell, N.J., farmhouse had scared the kidnapers out of their wits and perhaps panicked them into killing his son. After the long ordeal of the trial, he secretly loaded his family on a freighter and fled to England, where they settled on the estate of Author-Critic Harold Nicolson...