Revealed (37 page)

As a parent myself, I found it almost unbearably painful at times to read about the Lindberghs' ordeal related
to the kidnapping. But I was fascinated by details of other portions of Charles Lindbergh's life.

He had an unusual childhood, and some of the stories about him even before his famous flight make him sound like nearly as much of an American folk hero as Paul Bunyan. Supposedly his father taught Charles to swim by throwing him into the Mississippi River. Charles learned how to drive a car when he was eleven; when he was fourteen and already nearly six feet tall, he drove his mother from their home in Minnesota to Los Angeles. In California, a policeman cited him for driving without a license—but that didn't stop his mother from letting him drive her all the way home afterward. The poor condition of American roads in 1916 meant that the return trip took forty days. Because Charles spent so much of his childhood traveling, it was almost a point of family pride that he never arrived anywhere in time for the start of a new school year.

Missing so much school meant that he didn't do particularly well. When he started college to study engineering at the University of Wisconsin (once again, proudly missing the first day of the term) the combination of his poor grades and his father's financial troubles led him to drop out. He switched to learning to fly instead, and got experience wing walking, parachuting, and barnstorming across the country; flying for the army; and then, when air mail
began, flying mail between St. Louis and Chicago. Being a pilot was still a very dangerous endeavor in the 1920s—in just ten months of flying the mail, he twice had to jump out and let the plane crash without him.

When Lindbergh first heard about the twenty-five-thousand-dollar Orteig Prize being offered for the first nonstop flight between New York City and Paris, he was probably the only person who thought of himself as a potential winner. Outside of his fellow postal pilots, he was virtually unknown in the aviation world. Until he was able to convince city leaders in St. Louis to back his attempt, he had no way of buying or building a plane for the flight. And he had the seemingly crazy idea that one person in a single-engine plane would be able to fly more than thirty hours over the ocean, when just about everyone kept telling him that it would take a team of aviators in a multiengine plane.

When he got to the point of making arrangements for a plane custom-made for the flight, he and the engineer working on the plane had to double-check the distance from New York to Paris. They did this by going to the public library, putting a piece of string against the side of a globe, and calculating accordingly.

They came up with 3,600 miles, which meant that the plane would need space for four hundred gallons of
gasoline. (When I used the twenty-first century method and checked online, the first answer that I got was 3,624 miles—amazingly close. Lindbergh ended up taking four hundred fifty gallons of fuel just to be safe.)

Leading up to his improbable flight, Lindbergh was so obsessed with keeping his plane as light as possible that he cut off unneeded portions of the maps he took with him. He had no way to see out of the front part of the plane, because he wanted that whole space used for storing gasoline. And, as Jonah guesses in this book, Lindbergh's plane was indeed made of cloth over a metal frame; the wings were made of cloth over wood.

Less than a month before Lindbergh planned to take off for Paris, two other pilots intending to make the same attempt were killed during a test flight. A French crew attempting the flight in the opposite direction—Paris to New York—disappeared over the ocean less than two weeks before Lindbergh took off.

But Lindbergh's flight was a success.

When Lindbergh landed in Paris, he'd been in the air for thirty-three and a half hours. Considering that he started the trip after a sleepless night, his main struggle over the ocean was just to stay awake. Many years later he admitted that, about twenty-three hours into the flight, he started seeing “phantoms” in the plane with him, who spoke to
him with human voices. (Presumably they were just the hallucinations of a sleep-deprived brain, rather than time travelers from the future.)

The only food Lindbergh took with him was five sandwiches—his explanation to
Aero Digest
was, “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.” Lindbergh didn't eat any of the sandwiches until he reached France.

An estimated 150,000 people were waiting for him at the airfield in Paris—he really did worry about some of them being injured by the propeller on his plane because they were so close to where he landed. He also soon had to worry about the danger to his plane, as the crowd swarmed the
Spirit of St. Louis
and tore off pieces of it as souvenirs. Lindbergh's first words, arriving in Paris, were, “Are there any mechanics here?”

Lindbergh's feat made him such an instant worldwide celebrity that a group of businessmen even offered him one million dollars to never fly again, because he was viewed as too great of a national treasure to risk his life again.

Lindbergh chose not to accept that money. Instead he became a leading spokesperson for commercial aviation, and continued to fly and explore in numerous locations, even as he also branched out into medical interests and
worked on developing a mechanical heart. After he married, his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, also got her pilot's license, and they took trips together all over the planet. Their flights to particularly remote areas served as a break from the media's relentless interest in their lives. Unlike many celebrities today, the Lindberghs mostly viewed their fame as a burden rather than something to be sought and nurtured.

With the kidnapping of their son, the Lindberghs' fame became a source of tragedy as well.

From the very beginning of the investigation, Lindbergh wanted to know every detail and control every step of the process. Anne Lindbergh wrote that she never once saw him cry over his missing son. But up until the moment that the body was discovered, Lindbergh desperately kept following leads that he had to have known were false.

After the child's body was discovered and identified and autopsied, the Lindberghs chose to have the remains cremated. This became one of the details cited by conspiracy theorists who claimed this “proved” the Lindberghs had something to hide.

An alternate explanation was that they simply did not want their child's grave to become the target for the same kind of media circus and public fixation that had followed every breathless detail of the kidnapping investigation.
Or—even worse—they didn't want anyone trying to dig up their child's remains to prove or disprove yet another crackpot theory.

As portrayed in this book, Anne Lindbergh was pregnant with their second child at the time of the kidnapping. She went into labor the night after Lindbergh spread their first son's ashes over the Atlantic Ocean. Jon Lindbergh was born early the next morning. Charles and Anne Lindbergh would go on to have four more children together: sons Land and Scott and daughters Anne and Reeve.

The family also continued living unconventional lives. Because of concerns about Jon Lindbergh possibly also being kidnapped, they moved away from the United States for a while during the 1930s, settling first in England, then on an isolated island off the coast of France. At the request of the US ambassador to Germany, Charles Lindbergh agreed to visit Berlin and inspect German aviation facilities. Lindbergh made positive comments about his German hosts and, on a subsequent trip to Germany, was given a special honor, the Service Cross of the German Eagle. Later, when Lindbergh spoke out against the United States getting involved in World War II, he was accused of being a Nazi sympathizer. His reputation was tarnished enough that once America did enter the war, his offers of help to the US military were largely rebuffed. Instead
he worked for a time with the Ford Motor Company in connection with one of their factories that was building bombers. From there he became a test pilot, a test subject for extreme conditions for pilots, and a fighter-pilot instructor. Traveling with the status of a technician, he ended up in the war zone in the Pacific in 1944. Although that role should have kept him out of combat, he began flying bombing raids anyway.

After the war Lindbergh continued his travels, at one point even becoming one of the first people to meet a primitive tribe in the Philippines that had supposedly never encountered modern humans. However, his perspective changed toward the end of his life. Rather than constantly embracing scientific advances and improved aviation, he came to believe that scientific progress was often the source of greater problems. He began to speak out much more for environmental causes.

Both Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, became acclaimed and bestselling authors as well as explorers. His account of his flight to Paris,
The Spirit of St. Louis
, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954. Ultimately, their two daughters became authors as well, with Anne Spencer Lindbergh focusing on children's books. Ironically, one of her books,
Three Lives to Live
, became one of my favorite time-travel novels of the 1990s—long before I ever thought about
writing a time-travel book with any connection to the Lindberghs.

The public's view of Charles Lindbergh changed many times over the years, from the simple hero of 1927 to the tragic figure of 1932 to the alleged Nazi sympathizer and antiwar activist of the later 1930s to the environmental activist of the 1960s and early 1970s. His writings include both noble, inspiring words and arguments that sound horribly racist and anti-Semitic to twenty-first-century readers. Even after his death in 1974, his image changed once again, when it was revealed in the early 2000s that he'd secretly had two other families in Germany.

By all accounts, Lindbergh never cared much about what the public thought of him. If the marvels of time travel truly had given him a way to see how his life was going to play out after 1932, he does seem like someone who would have had no regrets about anything he'd done, or was going to do.

But given how desperately he tried to get his son back in 1932, it's also easy to imagine that, if he'd had access to time travel, he would have wanted to use it to do everything he could to retrieve his son.

Wouldn't any parent who lost a child want exactly the same thing?

When I began writing The Missing series, it was a struggle to find much information at all about some of the early missing children of history. With the Lindbergh story, I almost had the opposite problem: So much has already been written by and about Charles and Anne Lindbergh and their family. Of course, some sources were more helpful than others. I began reading
The Spirit of Saint Louis
, Lindbergh's own account of his historic flight, because I felt I had to—but very soon I was drawn in and turning pages as if I were reading a suspense novel and I didn't know how it would end. I am in awe that Lindbergh could make the story of, essentially, sitting still for thirty-three and a half hours into such a riveting tale. And I would recommend the book to anyone who is curious about the flight or about the early days of aviation.

Two biographies of Lindbergh were particularly helpful:
Charles A. Lindbergh: Lone Eagle
by Walter L. Hixson, which is shorter and provided a quick overview; and the in-depth, more comprehensive
Lindbergh
by A. Scott Berg. Helpful websites included
http://www.charleslindbergh.com/
and two sites full of details about the Lindbergh kidnapping: one maintained by the FBI and one by the New Jersey State Police Museum.

When I needed additional information about how three time-traveling thirteen-year-olds landing on Lindbergh's plane truly might affect his flight, I appreciated the help I got from my uncle, retired Air Force Command pilot Jim Greshel. Uncle Jim indulged my hypothetical questions, and even calculated how much fuel Lindbergh's plane would have had to burn by the time the kids arrived to prevent their added weight from turning into a serious problem.

The time-travel issues in this book became very complicated—paradoxes by their very nature are confusing, and I am grateful to editors at Simon & Schuster for asking questions and offering suggestions to make the book more understandable to readers: thanks to David Gale, vice president and editorial director; Navah Wolfe, associate editor; and Karen Sherman, copy editor.

ALSO BY MARGARET PETERSON HADDIX

THE MISSING SERIES

Found

Sent

Sabotaged

Torn

Caught

Risked

THE SHADOW CHILDREN

Among the Hidden

Among the Impostors

Among the Betrayed

Among the Barons

Among the Brave

Among the Enemy

Among the Free

THE PALACE CHRONICLES

Just Ella

Palace of Mirrors

The Girl with 500 Middle Names