Word: lindberghs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...years earlier, it could not have been done at all. Ten years later, it had become routine. But at this particular time, all the world could feel that its hopes, for a few excruciating and exhilarating hours, lay in the hands of one young man. And when Charles Lindbergh landed the Spirit of St. Louis on Paris' Le Bourget field, people everywhere-groundlings with a sudden vision of a boundless future-experienced a leap of the heart...
...Charles Lindbergh's flight occurred 40 years ago last week, and no one under 50 can fully appreciate what it meant. It became America's national saga, all the more classic because its hero was to be shadowed by tragedy and did not prove to be free of flaws. "Slim" Lindbergh looked like the original country rube, with cowlick and baggy breeches, and he stirred folk memories; there was about him something of the raggedy fellow at the Sherwood tournament who outshoots the sheriff's best archers...
...Flying Fool," they called him. Where his rivals prepared elaborate rations, Lindbergh bought five sandwiches from a restaurant, remarking: "If I get to Paris, I won't need any more, and if I don't get to Paris, I won't need any more either." When he was dragged from the plane at Le Bourget 33 hours and 30 minutes later, legend insists that he said: "Well, here we are." He was mobbed by the public and feted by the great (he had to borrow a suit to meet the President of France). President Calvin Coolidge sent...
From the start, the legend was slightly askew. Lindbergh was no Flying Fool. Even at 25, he was probably the best knockabout flyer in the U.S. He was chief pilot (of three) for a tiny airline with a newly awarded contract to fly airmail between St. Louis and Chicago. Four times, lost in fog, he had been forced to ditch his plane and jump for his life. Lindbergh had left the University of Wisconsin midway through his sophomore year to take a course in flying, bought his first plane (for $500) a year later, and qualified as a pilot...
...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...