THE LINDBERGHS—FIRST ROMANCERS OF THE AIR

MILTON MACKAYE

Figures and shapes change and vanish in these unsettled, eventful times, and only the Lindberghs seem eternal. Six years ago, in the era of twenty-dollar champagne, ticker tape and turbulent finance, they swept ofT the ground in the world's first aerial honeymoon. In those roaringly prosperous days, they represented romance to a hundred million people. They still do. The aerial idyll has worn well.

There is something curiously unreal about Charles and Anne, and something matchless. The world has sweat and retched and remade itself during the years of their married life. There have been vast upheavals: old standards and values have lost their authority and meaning; there have been dust and smoke and blood in the market-place. But somehow the Lindberghs remain removed from it all. Tragedy has touched them but not the struggle. Like people in a story book they are timeless, strangers to the new grim savagery, unchanging in the midst of change.

It is the fashion at the moment to avoid sentiment as one avoids leprosy, red flannel drawers, and the works of Myrtle Reed. Yet it is impossible to consider the history of the Lindberghs in the light of anything else than a love story. It has dignity and sweetness and daring. Everything the Lindberghs do, they do—together.

Thirty-odd years ago. the newest scientific discovery provided C. N. and A. M. Williamson with a best selling novel, a novel which was to be found in every summer hammock along with Owen Wister's latest. It was called The Lightning Conductor, and it was a sugary tale with a fresh setting—a motor trip across Europe; hero and heroine wore goggles and linen dusters, and in their spanking Napier they flitted over the landscape at the breathtaking speed of thirty miles an hour. The Lightning Conductor had a great influence on the amorous customs of the times. Immediately the Gibson boys and girls forgot Niagara Falls and the steamship lines. Automobile honeymoons became the fashion, and for a decade no backroad in Europe or America was free from the menace of the passionate bridegroom swooning and swearing at the wheel of a gasoline juggernaut.

Charles A. Lindbergh and Anne Morrow were married in May of 1929. They had done a little flying together previously hut not much. Almost immediately after their marriage they took to the air, and the aerial honeymoon became a reality. For eighteen months, they spent a large part of their time on flying trips. The Lightning Conductor was the love story of the automobile; the Lindbergh romance was the love story of the airplane. The editorial writers in their large way predicted that in a year or so all American couples, if they were bright and enterprising, would he setting up housekeeping in the stratosphere and washing their dishes in rain clouds.

That prediction was wrong. After six years the Lindberghs still remain the only flying couple on this side of the Atlantic, as remarkable in increasing achievement as they were in their first pioneering. The general public has followed their adventuring with avid interest, hut assorted honeymooners have beaten no paths to the hangars, and more marriages are made in heaven than at Croydon or Roosevelt Field.

The Lindberghs are unique in their partnership. The records show that, on extended journeys, they have flown more than 100,000 miles. Short hops and oil-route travel have certainly carried them 25,000 miles further. Roth are licensed pilots, both are radio operators. During long voyages, the Colonel spends most of the time at the controls. He is also tin* navigator (an expert one) and mechanician. Mrs. Lindbergh acts as the radio operator, takes the controls when her husband wants a rest. She is also the poet and diarist of their travels. The Universities have pestered the Colonel with many honorary degrees. This year Smith, her Alma Mater, was hold enough to decorate Anne Lindbergh with a master's degree'.

A record of the Lindbergh travels makes the dashing itinerary of The Lightning Conductor look like a suburban bus schedule. The year 1929 offers an excellent example. Starting in July, the Lindberghs set off for the Pacific Coast on an inspection trip over the routes of the I ranseontinental Air Transport, of which the Colonel was an official. During this slow tour they made an aerial survey of the Pueblo region. After their return East they made plans for another long trip of aerial survey, and in October, accompanied by representatives of the Carnegie Institution, they went to Central America. This trip was occasioned by Colonel Lindbergh's chance discovery of a lost Mayan city while making an earlier flight for Pan-American Airways. For years the archaeologists, armed with machete and quinine, had gone blindly into the lush jungles of Honduras and Yucatan in the search for Mayan ruins. They were guided by nothing more than legends of Indian tribesmen. The airplane proved a remarkable aid to archaeology. The Lindberghs spent five days flying over 1.000 miles of almost impenetrable Mayan territory. They took photographs and acquired information of almost incalculable value about a mysterious and pathless region.

During the first part ol 1930, the Lindberghs made another inspection tour of T.A.T. routes, spent a few weeks on the Pacific Coast and then, on April 20. made a record-breaking flight to New York of fourteen hours, forty-five minutes and thirty-two seconds. On June 22, the first Lindbergh child was born. Six weeks later father, mother, and son flew to North Haven, Maine, the home of Senator Dwight Morrow, Mrs. Lindbergh's father. By the end of 1930, the Lindberghs had flown 50,000 miles together.

June of 1931 saw them again in the air. this time on a most ambitious venture a trip north to the Orient. Mrs. Lindbergh in her recent book has chronicled, with a beauty of phrase worthy of Lmih Dickinson, the story of the trip. It was an exciting and lonely excursion along the rim of the Arctic Sea and finally, after hazardous days, into Kamchatka, Japan and China. When they reached China the Yangtze was in yellow and catastrophic flood, and the Lindberghs aided in relief work by charting the stricken areas from the air and flying drugs and serums to regions inaccessible except from the air. Ibis expedition was brought to an end by two things, the loss of their plane in the silt-thick Yangtze and the death of Mrs. Lindbergh's father. The Lindberghs had travelled 15,000 miles. They returned to the l nited Slates by steamship and crossed the continent by air in a borrowed plane.

During 1932 the Lindberghs flew very little. That was the year of their tragedy. In the early part of 1933 they made another long inspection tour of transcontinental air channels. In July, they set forth on their most ambitious project—a survey of proposed North Atlantic air lines. Their object was not adventure but the assembling of trustworthy data on flying conditions and the practicability of commercial routes across the Atlantic. The journey reads like the chapter headings of an atlas. Whey flew —together—to Labrador, and then across to Greenland where they made repeated flights over the ice cap and over treacherous territories never before surveyed. They went to Iceland and then to Norway. Sweden, Finland, Russia, Denmark. Holland, England, France and Spain. Homeward bound, the Lindberghs hopped from Lisbon to the Azores, to Madeira, to the Canary Islands, to the African coast, to the Cape \ erde Islands, and back to Africa. Then on December 6, they took off for Natal, Brazil, eighteen hundred miles across the South Atlantic. They landed safely. On their return home, they took a casual jaunt up the Amazon River to Manoas. When they returned to the United States on December 19, they had visited twenty-one countries in 198 fix ing hours. During that time, they traversed nearly 30.000 miles of land and sea. Heroes lead inhibited lives. The plaudits which greet them are faggots to build a fine fire under an odd personality. The public hero usually becomes a professional idol. God help him, or an habitual recluse. Lindbergh chose to become a recluse. He hates publicity, and is still so young that he does not recognize its inevitability. It does not please a President to have the newspapers always at his heels but he must accept the situation. Colonel Lindbergh nexer has; his efforts to elude the press have increased the pressure upon him. No wire association, however the Colonel feels about it. can take the chance of being licked on a story about Lindbergh. The Colonel's unwillingness to disclose his plans and his delight in outwitting reporters have resulted in a system of espionage which the papers find necessary and the Lindberghs find hateful and unfair.

Charles and Anne Lindbergh are not only extraordinary in their partnership they are alone. In private life they have no friends of their own age and seek none. Since the tragedy at Hopewell, they have lived with Mrs. Morrow. At the Morrow home in Englewood, they share an apartment over the library and the Colonel is the man of the family. His only cronies are Harry Guggenheim, the aviation enthusiast, and Henry Breckenridge, his lawyer; the rest of his acquaintances are friends of the Morrows. Recently he formed a rather surprising friendship with Harold Nicolson, writer, diplomat and articulate British gentleman who is doing a biography of Senator Morrow. Mutual friends have described a dinner at the Morrow home—Nicolson dominating the conversation with his brilliant reminiscences of Lord Balfour's international jiu-jutsu, and Lindbergh sitting quiet and attentive from sou]) to dessert.

Anne Lindbergh was the daughter of a wealthy Morgan partner, but she and her husband are still as modest in their tastes as Sunday School picnickers. They fix with a bare eighteen pounds of luggage and they hate dressing up. The Colonel despises eveninng clothes, and rarely wears a boiled shirt. He has no small talk, reads little except technical books, and is deprecatory about his achievements because he does not consider himself an educated man. He and his wife essay neither golf nor bridge, are bored by country clubs, play tennis very acquaintances and, their acquaintances say, very badly.

The Lindberghs, after tragedy, adventure, and six years of living together, are still self-contained and essentially unchanged. The Colonel s father was a radical congressman, and a pioneer in economic thinking. Mrs. Lindbergh s father was a conservative of the Coolidge stripe, a scholarly, doubling millionaire. Charles and Anne are separated from this present perspiring world by the fact that they have no interest in economics. Recently, Colonel Lindbergh in a newspaper poll was suggested as a Presidential candidate. He was appalled by the idea, and groaned as the enthusiastic rural provinces were heard from. Lindbergh is not a modest man; he is not even (on occasion) a very kindly or courteous man. but he does gauge accurately his own limitations. He would not accept a Presidential nomination because he realizes that he has no qualifications for the job. Heroes seldom have. Heroes seldom know it.

Lindbergh's rangy figure, vestless. his coat tails ballooning behind him has been a familiar sight for several years in the monastic corridors of Rockefeller Institute. Through the dispensation of Dr. Simon Flexner, the director, Lindbergh has been free to wander and putter at will there. Lindbergh met Dr. Flexner when he made his whirlwind though futile flight to Quebec carrying pneumonia anti-toxin to succor the dying aviator and explorer, Floyd Bennett. The Institute provided the serum. Through Dr. Flexner, Lindbergh became an intimate of the scientists on the staff of Rockefeller Institute and developed a great interest in the work in progress there.

During recent months, working with Dr. Alexis Carrel, one time winner of the Nobel prize, Lindbergh built a device which the headline writers have described as the "mechanical heart . Ibis interesting and unusual apparatus makes it possible for scientists to keep the vital organs of animals alive and functioning after removal from surgically dead subjects. The "heart'' pumps and circulates an artificial, chemically manufactured blood stream through the organs, and also takes care of the function of the lungs by injecting into the bloodstream a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen three times as rich as normal air. The Carrel-Lindbergh machine has been used successful!) in twenty-six experiments with such organs as the kidneys, thyroids, ovaries, spleens and suprarenal glands taken from the bodies of animals one hour after they had been bled to death.

The future puzzles Lindbergh. He is a great flier but most of the great flights have been accomplished. He has ingenuity as an inventor—as witness his work with Dr. Carrel—but he is not a trained engineer. He is interested in business, but he is not a business man.

Charles and Anne Lindbergh face the future, still young despite their world wide fame. They face the future—together.