Monthly Archives: June 2012

“Striking Ireland”

Posted on by
Reply

Tomorrow night, I’m going to be on my way to Ireland, retracing (more or less) the flight path of the Spirit of St. Louis 85 years ago, and heading to a conference in Dublin to give a paper on my  Lindbergh research.

On Lindbergh’s 33-hour flight between Paris and New York, there was no more dramatic moment than, in the 28th hour, his sighting of land for the first time:

The southern tip of Ireland! On course; over two hours ahead of schedule; the sun still well up in the sky; the weather clearing!  . . . I spiral lower, looking down on the little village.  There are boats in the harbor, wagons on the stone-fenced roads.  People are running in the streets, looking up and waving.  This is earth again, the earth where I’ve lived and now will live once more.  Here are human beings.  Here’s a human welcome.  Not a single detail is wrong.  I’ve never seen such beauty before–fields so green, people so human, a village so attractive, mountains and rocks so mountainous and rocklike…..

Striking Ireland was like leaving the doors of a theater– phantoms for actors; cloud islands and temples for settings; the ocean behind me, an empty stage.  The flight across is already like a dream.

Lindbergh liked that last passage so much that he chose it as one of the few–very few– excerpts that he read on tape for use in the original exhibits at the Lindbergh Boyhood Home historic site.

From The Spirit of St. Louis (1953)

The photo, by the way, is supposedly the last picture taken of Lindbergh’s plane (with him in it) before photographers (in a chase plane) lost sight of him as he headed out over the Atlantic.

The man in the top hat and 1920s “ballyhoo”

Posted on by
Reply

Today’s a big day in Lindbergh History: Eighty-five years ago, the “conqueror of the Atlantic” was welcomed back to New York by something like a million people lining the streets, amidst showers of confetti and ticker-tape.  In terms of the number of spectators and in volume of paper released onto the parade route, the Lindbergh extravaganza remained unsurpassed in New York history until 1945, and the VJ Day parade marking the end of World War II.

The orchestrator of this pinnacle moment of Lindbergh “ballyhoo” (a great 1920s word) was Grover Whalen, who can be seen sitting in the convertible with Lindbergh in the banner photo on my home page, and in the photo above, although in this one he’s sitting in front of Lindbergh, yielding his waving duties to another top-hatted dignitary, flamboyant New York mayor Jimmy Walker.

Grover Whalen, the glad-handed “official greeter” of the city, seemed instinctively to know when to smile for any camera.  Whalen (who would go on to greater fame as  commissioner and promoter of the New York World’s Fair in 1939-40) held his only-in-New York post from 1919 to 1953, during which time he was said to have engineered no fewer than 86 ticker-tape parades.  Albert Einstein was feted with one in 1921—the only scientist so honored–and the U.S. Olympic Games team rode in one in 1924.  In just one summer–1926–New Yorkers showered the following with tons of tickertape:  a group of Roman Catholic cardinals from the Vatican; Commander Richard E. Byrd, following his North Pole flight; Roald Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth after their own polar exploits; Mrs. Clemington Corson, a Channel swimmer; Miss Gertrude Ederle, the record-breaking Channel swimmer; golfer Bobby Jones on his return from England; boxing champ Gene Tunney on his arrival from Philadelphia; and finally, the “supreme moment,” the arrival of the much heralded Queen Marie of Rumania.  (Laurence Greene, The Era of Wonderful Nonsense, 1939)

Laurence Greene interpreted the “ballyhoo” of the 1920s as a natural journalistic reaction to the end of World War I as a “best-selling story.”  The American press was required to find a story to fill the gap, and so inflated beyond all reason a great many trivial happenings, endowing with “momentary greatness any number of shabby and unimportant persons.”

Lindbergh sits down to write a book, June 1927

Posted on by
1

From the opening of my chapter on Lindbergh’s first book, written in 1927, along with a photo of “Lindbergh’s Room” at the Guggenheim mansion in Sands Point NY, known as “Falaise”:

The “French eclectic” mansion was straight out of a Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler. Built in 1923 on 90 acres on Long Island’s Gold Coast in Sands Point—the real-life stand-in for The Great Gatsby’s “West Egg”—“Falaise” was built for millionaire philanthropist and aviation enthusiast Harry F. Guggenheim and his third wife, Alicia.  In spite of the house’s size and architectural pretensions, many of its spaces are quite intimate.  In fact, “cramped” would not be an inappropriate description of the room into which, in June 1927, the house’s most famous guest, Charles Lindbergh, crammed his 6 foot, 2-inch frame, his feet no doubt reaching over the end of the room’s narrow bed. 

It feels like a dorm room at an old college, fitted out with that bed, a dresser, a mirror, creaky floorboards, no closet to speak of, a hard wooden chair, and a writing table not three feet wide.  This was where Lindbergh–the triumphant hero returned from his epochal transatlantic adventure, tickertape parades and public hysteria temporarily behind him—would sit for three weeks, every day, all day and into the night writing, in longhand, what would become his first book, which his publisher had decided would be called “We”.  

I made the pilgrimage to Falaise not because of its gaudy architecture or its Gatsby associations, but precisely because of its place at the beginning of the “tale of Lindbergh,” or at least quite near that beginning.  It was in this place that the 25-year-old Lindbergh began the transformation, effected through the printed page, from a callow aviator-mechanic to worldly celebrity and memoirist.