One Summer: America, 1927 (44 page)

They were buried in a shared grave in Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery. The gravestone records their names and their dates of birth and death beneath a single word: “Brothers.”

22

The successful flights across the ocean of the
America, Columbia
, and
Spirit of St. Louis
had a galvanizing, if not always entirely realistic, effect on expectations for the future of aviation.

Almost at once people began to dream of ways of converting the summer’s heroics into practical actions. In Paris, Charles Levine briefly attracted the attention of reporters by announcing that he would launch a regular passenger airline service between America and Europe, and would invest $2 million of his own money in the venture. How he would safely convey passengers in both directions when no plane was yet capable of a successful westward crossing was a matter he failed to explain. As with so many Levine schemes, it was quickly forgotten.

Edward R. Armstrong, a Canadian-born engineer, approached the problem from the opposite direction. Rather than try to increase the range and load-carrying capacity of planes, his idea was to cut the distances they needed to fly by arraying floating landing fields—eight in all—at 350-mile intervals across the Atlantic. These “seadromes” would each be 1,100 feet long, weigh 50,000 tons, and be anchored to the ocean floor by steel cables. All would have restaurants, gift shops, lounges, and viewing decks. Some would have hotels. The cost of each platform would
be $6 million. A trip from New York to London, Armstrong calculated, could be done in about thirty hours.

Armstrong formed the Armstrong Seadrome Development Company in 1927 and gradually secured financial backing. On October 22, 1929, he announced plans to begin work in sixty days. Unfortunately, that was the week of the stock market crash and his financing fell apart. Armstrong continued for years to try to get his plan launched, reducing the number of proposed platforms to five and then three as planes became more powerful. Eventually, of course, they were not needed at all and his dream was never realized, but his seadromes did form the basis of modern offshore oil platforms. Armstrong died in 1955.

Two million people a year sailed between Europe and America in the 1920s, so the potential market for air passengers was considerable. From our modern time-harried perspective, ocean crossings look glamorous and romantic, but they were also time-consuming, uncomfortable in bad weather, and sometimes seriously perilous. Fog was a frequent and dreaded danger in the days before radar. Most ships had a long record of unnerving near misses. “There were many more close calls on the Western Ocean than passengers ever heard about,” writes John Maxtone-Graham in
The Only Way to Cross
. Collisions were not uncommon. On July 15 of this summer, just as the
Leviathan
carrying Byrd and his team was sailing nearby, the Holland America liner
Veendam
struck—essentially plowed through—a Norwegian freighter, the
Sagaland
, near Nantucket at 4:40 in the morning. The
Sagaland
sank quickly, with the loss of one life. The
Veendam
escaped serious damage, and no one aboard was reported injured. It was nonetheless a sobering reminder of how dangerous ocean travel could be, for the ships collided in clear weather.

For all these reasons, knocking even a day off the crossing was an appealing proposition, which explains how it was that Clarence Chamberlin accepted an invitation from the United States Lines and on August 1 reboarded the mighty
Leviathan
with the intention of trying to take off from its upper deck in an airplane. A rickety 114-foot-long runway had been erected to facilitate the launch, but whether that would be
enough was anybody’s guess. No plane had ever taken off from a ship at sea, and Chamberlin himself thought his chances of success were only slightly better than even. Shortly before his takeoff someone asked him if he knew how to swim. Chamberlin grinned and admitted that he did not.

Happily, swimming proved unnecessary. In a lull between rainstorms, Chamberlin climbed into a Fokker biplane and shot down the creaking runway and into the void beyond with just enough speed and lift to stay airborne. He circled the ship, gave a casual wave, and headed for Teterboro, New Jersey, where he delivered nine hundred pieces of airmail and posed bashfully for pictures. Inspired by Chamberlin’s example, the owners of the new passenger liner
Île de France
, launched that year, installed a catapult that could fling a six-passenger plane down a shorter runway and into the air, and for a few years passengers who were daring, wealthy, and in a hurry could reach shore a day or so sooner than their fellow passengers.

As August opened, Charles Lindbergh was coming to the end of the second week of his long tour of America. So far he had had just one hitch, but it was quite a serious one. After Boston he had flown on to Portland, Maine, but had been unable to land because of fog. He circled for nearly two hours but then, running low on fuel, he had to look for somewhere safe to land. He grew separated from an escort plane and came down on Old Orchard Beach in Maine. Luckily, a man named Harry Jones offered pleasure flights for tourists from the beach—it is just possible that someone had told Lindbergh about this before he took off, in case he did run into trouble—and Jones had a hangar there with tools, which he was happy to let Lindbergh use.

Almost at once a crowd collected as word got around that Lindy had landed on the beach. People crept up to the hangar and watched him working. “He never looked at the crowd, nor did he betray the slightest consciousness of an audience,” wrote a young woman named Elise White, who was present. By the time Lindbergh finished tinkering with his plane, the crowd had grown so large that he needed a megaphone to
address it. He asked the people to clear a space so that he could depart, but instead they pressed forward to look at the plane more closely “and he threw the megaphone down in disgust,” related a slightly startled White. This was not the Charles Lindbergh that they had read about.

It’s easy to understand Lindbergh’s frustration. His plane was a sensitive instrument and the possibility of some witless gawker damaging it was a real and constant concern. The sight of people pawing his plane or leaning on it or waggling its moving parts was naturally horrifying to Lindbergh. He now essentially fled. Within moments of people coming forward, he was in the plane and proceeding with it onto the beach, trusting that people would scatter as he advanced. Luckily, they did. Lindbergh taxied to the far end of the beach, turned the plane into the wind, and raced forward. “It moved smoothly over the sand and in no distance at all—hardly more than a hundred yards—it was in the air,” wrote White. “He tipped and banked and turned swooping low over the beach then rose like a silver winged bird against the blue sky.” Thirty minutes later he was in Portland and facing new hordes of people whose most earnest desire was to crowd in on him and his beloved craft.

It is impossible to imagine what it must have been like to be Charles Lindbergh in that summer. From the moment he left his room in the morning, he was touched and jostled and bothered. Every person on earth who could get near enough wanted to grasp his hand or clap him on the back. He had no private life anymore. Shirts he sent to the laundry never came back. Chicken bones and napkins from his dinner plate were fought over in kitchens. He could not go for a walk or pop into a bank or drugstore. If he went into a men’s room, people followed. Checks he wrote were rarely cashed; recipients preferred to frame them instead. No part of his life was normal, and there was no prospect that it ever would be again. As Lindbergh was discovering, it was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous.

His tour consisted of sixty-nine overnight stops and thirteen “touch” stops, where Lindbergh landed long enough to greet officials and say a few words, but not otherwise linger. Lindbergh also flew by request over scores of small towns, but only if they agreed to paint their town name
on a rooftop for the benefit of other aviators. In communities where he could not land he dropped leaflets that read:

Greetings. Because of the limited time and the extensive tour of the United States now in progress to encourage popular interest in aeronautics, it is impossible for the
Spirit of St. Louis
to land in your city. This message from the air, however, is sent you to express our sincere appreciation of your interest in the tour and in the promotion and extension of commercial aeronautics in the United States.

It thereupon urged every citizen, as a matter of national urgency, to work for “the establishment of airports and similar facilities,” so that the United States could take “its rightful place” as the world leader in commercial aviation.

From the start his receptions were chaotic. Excited onlookers and even members of the official greeting parties tended to rush forward to greet the plane as it was still taxiing. This was profoundly unnerving to Lindbergh. He had once seen a man sliced in two by a spinning propeller. Because he had no forward visibility, every landing was effectively blind. At least twice—in Kansas City and Portland, Oregon—crowds on the runway forced him to set down on nearby farmland. Elsewhere, batteries of guns fired in salute of his arrival produced drifting smoke that obscured his visibility further. All in all, he faced more dangers flying around America than he ever had on his flight to Paris.

To try to keep to schedules, Lindbergh was often driven at high speed along his parade routes, a matter that dismayed spectators and alarmed Lindbergh since onlookers here, too, were inclined to step into the road for a better look.

An entirely typical day was Lindbergh’s visit to Springfield, Illinois, on August 15, where he arrived in the early afternoon, having flown from Chicago by way of Mooseheart, Aurora, Joliet, and Peoria. In the one hour and forty-one minutes he was on the ground at Springfield, Lindbergh did the following: made a brief speech at the airfield; was presented to a
hundred or so local officials; was invited to admire and review the 106th Illinois Cavalry; was placed in an open-top car for a five-mile dash past fifty thousand cheering people waving flags; laid a wreath at the tomb of Abraham Lincoln; and was taken to the local arsenal, where he was presented with a gold watch and bathed in a succession of rambling, overwrought speeches. Here is a sampling of the florid tribute paid him by Mayor J. Emil Smith:

As he sailed through the silver of that summer dawn, the stars watched with a still delight to see a child of earth so brave riding the air, a comrade of cloud and wind and foaming wave. And as he neared his goal the sun, the sea and the huge unfettered spaces hailed him a victor and chanted to him, “Well done.”

All that made the Springfield stop a little different was its extreme familiarity: this had been one of Lindbergh’s working airfields during his stint as an airmail pilot. Indeed, he had chosen the site of the field just fifteen months earlier.

In conclusion, the mayor announced that they were renaming the airfield Lindbergh Field in his honor—an irony that cannot have been lost on young Charles, since just the previous year the citizens of Springfield had overwhelmingly defeated a bond proposal to build a decent airfield in the town. That they had any field at all was thanks only to the local chamber of commerce, which provided modest funding to give the city the most basic facilities.

After his ceremonies, Lindbergh was rushed back to his waiting plane for an onward flight to St. Louis, where he faced more presentations, more crowds, and yet another evening banquet. Lindbergh was under such constant pressure on the ground that he found the flying between cities the most restful part of his tour, and sometimes introduced long detours into his itineraries to give himself some peace. Where he could—over lakes, for instance, or level ground—he often flew just fifteen feet or so above the surface, which increased the sense of speed and thrill but narrowed his margin for recovery to zero if anything
went wrong. He was given two days a week off, which must have been a blessed relief, but even then he was far from home and constantly in the company of strangers.

Charles Levine was now the only Atlantic flier still in Europe, and he showed no inclination yet to come home. He poked around for the rest of the summer. He traveled to Italy, where he met the pope and declared Mussolini the greatest statesman in the world. Returning to Paris, he made the papers for getting into a fistfight with a fellow American near the Opéra. “I never saw the man before, but he insulted me and I took a crack at him,” Levine said. “I used to be a boxer,” he added significantly. The cause of the outburst was never explained but was rumored to involve a woman.

Levine also announced plans to fly home with Maurice Drouhin, one of the two French pilots whose endurance record Chamberlin and Acosta had beaten in Levine’s plane in April. This would present an interesting challenge since Drouhin spoke no English and Levine no French. Levine several times announced takeoff dates, but each one came and passed. Then abruptly in late August, Levine collected his plane from the hangar at Le Bourget and took off in it. Some hours later, officials at Croydon Aerodrome in London were astonished to see the plane approaching in a decidedly erratic fashion. The
Columbia
was a famous airplane, so they recognized it at once, but it was obvious that whoever was flying it was either incompetent or incapacitated. This was a matter of some alarm: Croydon was a busy airport, with regular passenger flights to Paris and elsewhere, and controllers had only limited means to alert other aircraft to stay back. The
Columbia
circled the airport four times, once almost crashing into the control tower.

Finally, it came in to land at a steep and awkward angle, and hit the ground so hard that it bounced high into the air again before slamming heavily back to earth and rolling to a halt. Out from it stepped a beaming Charles Levine. It was the first time he had ever flown solo. It transpired that he had traveled 130 miles farther than necessary to get there.
Levine said he had just had a whim to go up alone. Soon afterward, however, news reached London that Levine had in fact taken off just ahead of a writ from Drouhin, who was complaining bitterly that Levine owed him 80,000 francs in wages. The hangar manager at Le Bourget also reported that he had never been paid. Levine had evidently also failed to tell his wife that he would be leaving her behind in Paris. (Their marriage did not long outlast the summer.)