Birth of Charles Lindbergh

The American pilot who soared to worldwide fame when he made the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic in 1927 was born Charles Augustus Lindbergh in Detroit. The Lindbergh family, originally Swedish, produced a succession of rugged individualists. The baby’s grandfather had emigrated to the United States in 1859 with his ‘wife’ and baby son, Charles August, leaving his legal wife and their children behind. Changing his name from Ola Mansson to August Lindbergh, he settled in Minnesota near a place called Melrose. There were only two other families there. The Lindberghs built themselves a log cabin, which grew bigger as their farm prospered and more babies arrived.

The eldest son, Charles August, a shrewd character, known laconically as C.A., was a crack shot whose boyhood task was shooting the family’s meat supply with a muzzle-loading shotgun and homemade bullets. After minimal schooling, he spent a year studying law at the University of Michigan, graduated in 1883 and set up in practice in the Minnesota town of Little Falls on the Mississippi. The area was developing fast and C.A. developed with it, becoming the town’s leading lawyer, representing major business companies and investing profitably in the local real estate. His first wife bore him two daughters and died young. In 1901 he married a second time, a science teacher called Evangeline Land, seventeen years his junior and the daughter of a prominent Detroit dentist. She went back to her parents’ home in Detroit for the arrival of their son, who was delivered by her doctor uncle at 1.30 in the morning and weighed nine-and-a-half pounds.

The future aviator was his doting mother’s only child. He grew up in Little Falls and in Washington DC after his father had become a Minnesota congressman in 1906. His parents separated when he was five, but did not divorce, which would have destroyed C.A.’s career. Charles Lindbergh lived with his mother and disliked Washington, city life and politics. He had his first gun at the age of six and started to drive a car, a Model-T Ford, at eleven. Passionate about machinery and uninterested in girls, in 1922 he dropped out of his engineering course at the University of Wisconsin to take flying lessons and join a barnstorming outfit as a stunt pilot, billed as ‘Daredevil Lindbergh’. In 1926 he graduated to airmail pilot, flying the route between St Louis, Missouri and Chicago, and recruited a syndicate of St Louis businessmen to finance an attempt on the $25,000 prize on offer for the first non-stop flight from New York to Paris.

Lindbergh was twenty-five when he made his epic flight in the monoplane Spirit of St Louis. In 1929 he married Anne Morrow, daughter of a future US senator and a kindred spirit, who acted as his navigator, radio operator and co-pilot on many flights. The press dubbed Lindbergh everything from ‘ the Lone Eagle’ to ‘ the Flyin’ Fool’ , but he was too reserved, proud and discriminating to be comfortable as a media hero. ‘I prefer adventure to security,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘freedom to popularity, and conviction to influence.’ He and his wife were pestered incessantly by reporters and admirers, and in 1932 their two-year-old son, another Charles Augustus, was kidnapped from their home in New Jersey and murdered. The crime brought down on the unfortunate parents’ heads an avalanche of sensational and frequently mendacious media coverage that disgusted Lindbergh and no doubt bolstered his right-wing views and contempt for popular opinion. The Lindberghs had five more children and eventually moved to Hawaii, where Charles Lindbergh died in 1974, aged seventy-two.