The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (44 page)

On July 29, 1931, the Lindberghs landed the Sirius at the North Haven, Maine, summer home of the Morrows, and next morning Anne and Charles said goodbye to her parents and to baby Charlie, whom Charles had taken to calling “Buster,” and flew away to Washington, D.C., starting point for their great Arctic air exploration journey, which was expected to take four months.

From Ottawa they flew over “hundreds and hundreds of lakes, absolutely flat, and tall, thin pines,” to Moose Factory, Canada, where they were met after landing on the water by a delegation of Cree Indians and Hudson Bay Company men. They ate moose and raspberries (canned) and slept in a house built about 1650 that reminded them of an Edward Hopper painting, checked in with the Canadian Mounted Police, and flew on to Churchill, finding it “a little snappy, like fall.” Next morning they flew to Baker Lake, refueled at Point Barrow, then on to Aklavik where Anne got her first (and last, before Tokyo) bath in a tin tub, the only one in town.

During a long day after Nome they crossed the Bering Sea and found themselves flying off the northern coast of Siberia; fog was frequently a problem though Lindbergh usually managed to fly beneath it, except when he rose up to give antenna height for Anne’s radio-telegraph messages in which she several times daily tapped out their progress for all the world to note.

Night flying was no problem since there was virtually no night in those latitudes at this time of year, when the North Star was almost directly overhead. They landed in the harbor at Petropavlovsk and were given dinner of pork, beans, radishes, and Russian tea by the head of the local governing committee in a room plastered with posters of Lenin and other Soviet leaders.

On August 29 they landed in Tokyo Bay, but outside Tokyo, and spent the night in the home of a man who raised foxes for a living. At Nemuro the mayor gave them a ceremonial dinner complete with geisha girls to serve and dance. At Tokyo, however, it was different, more like the old days in France, England, and New York. Millions of Japanese mobbed them, shouting “
Banzai! Banzai
,” which means “May you live ten thousand years!”

They stayed in Japan for two weeks, visiting cities, then pushed on to Nanking and “the great expanse of China.” Seeing it from the air, Anne observed that “every bit of ground is cultivated in small, narrow strips, not at all like our Great Plains in the West … here it is almost terrifying; no trees, no wild land, nothing left but narrow backyard strips of fields and mud huts representing thousands of people as far as one can see.”

The Yangtze River was in a dangerous flood stage, inundating an area equal to the size of Lake Superior, and those people who weren’t drowned were starving and in need of medicine. Lindbergh of course volunteered to help and nearly lost the plane. He and two doctors landed at the city of Hinghwa with a bag of vital medicines, which the Chinese thought was food and swam out to one doctor’s sampan, swamped it, and then swam to the plane and began to clamber aboard, tipping the wings dangerously, until Lindbergh took out his revolver and fired into the air, driving them away.

By this time Anne was missing Charlie, writing to her mother, “I dream about the baby every night, almost, and am quite homesick for you. But I want to see Peking before I start home.” She never got the chance.

They were headed to Shanghai when they spotted the big British aircraft carrier
Hermes
anchored in the rushing stream of the Yangtze, dropped down for a look, landed, and were greeted so cordially by Admiral Colin MacLean that they decided to stay for a few days, and Anne became the first woman ever to spend the night aboard the World War I–era warship. At night, MacLean considerately arranged for the ship’s crane to lift the Sirius aboard the carrier to protect it from river currents, thieves, or vandals, which very nearly lost the Sirius and the Lindberghs as well.

When the ship’s crew was attempting to drop the plane back into the water—with Charles and Anne in their cockpits—the Sirius wrenched around against the current while still in the grip of the ship’s crane’s cables and began to turn over. Charles cried, “Jump! Jump quickly!” and the two of them plunged into the Yangtze, quite possibly the most insanitary river on earth. Hampered by their heavy flying suits they floundered around until the ship’s tender came and fished them out, and once aboard the carrier the surgeon plied them with Bovril, a nourishing English tea-like drink, and castor oil, which was about all that was available in those times to ward off the Yangtze’s contaminated organisms.

The accident had caused a wing to be torn off the plane and other damage, but when at last it was dredged out of the rushing river Lindbergh believed it could be repaired in Shanghai and was in the process of arranging to take it there. Anne, somewhat agitated, wrote to her sister Elisabeth, “How long will it take to repair, and
when
will we get home?”

Sooner than she expected, but not in any way she might have wished. On October 5, a telegram came from home saying that her father, Dwight Morrow, by then a U.S. senator from New Jersey, had died of a brain hemorrhage. Anne was of course devastated and Charles immediately canceled the expedition, arranging their immediate passage to America and for the Sirius to be crated and sent to San Francisco.

Pan Am and the other airlines did not adopt Lindbergh’s northern route across the Pacific. Instead they chose the middle Pacific route with the famous Pan Am Clipper service that landed at Midway, Wake Island, and Guam before reaching the Orient.

I
N EARLY
F
EBRUARY 1932
the Lindberghs moved into their new home in Hopewell, near Princeton, New Jersey, a white rambling six-bedroom brick, stone, and slate two-story manor-style house they named Highfields. They had hoped the place, with its extensive grounds and remote location, would give them the privacy they desired. Instead it became a house of horror.

Anne battled a case of ptomaine poisoning most of the winter and stayed at Next Day Hill with her mother. She seemed to gravitate to her family home, and a routine had settled in where she, Charles, and the baby—whom she called her “fat lamb”—would spend their weekdays at Englewood and go down to the Hopewell house on weekends. Betty Gow, the nursemaid, had taken up residence at Next Day Hill and Anne looked after Charlie, the fat lamb, herself. Soon her doctor confirmed that Anne was pregnant again. Charles said he hoped for a girl.

On the weekend of February 27, Charlie came down with a cold. He was still sick on Monday, which dawned cold and rainy, when Anne phoned Betty Gow to tell her they would remain in Hopewell. Charles had gone into his office in New York and phoned to say he was staying over and would be home next day.

On Tuesday, March 1, Anne caught the baby’s cold and asked Betty to come to Hopewell. That afternoon the weather had much improved and so had Charlie, and Anne took a walk around the grounds, then spent the rest of the afternoon with the baby in the living room. About 6:15, after feeding him, Anne and Betty tucked him into his crib and started closing the shutters, but those on the corner of the room were warped and would not close properly. Betty opened the window on the southern side about halfway, observing a custom of the day so as to let in “fresh air,” despite it being the dead of winter with temperatures in the low thirties. Then she turned off the light and closed the door. It was a little after 7:30.

Anne sat at her desk writing and waiting for Charles, who was late and did not arrive until after eight, and the two had dinner about 8:30. Around nine o’clock, Charles heard a heavy noise, a kind of “thud” that sounded as if someone in the kitchen had dropped something—“such as a wooden box or orange crate.”

Charles went upstairs and bathed, then about 9:30 returned to the study to read, sitting beside the fire next to a window that was directly beneath the baby’s nursery windows where the shutters would not close. Charles read and Anne went up and bathed. While Anne bathed, Betty Gow went to check on the baby. It was ten p.m. She went into the bathroom and turned on the light, enough to see but not disturb him. She closed the window but suddenly realized she couldn’t hear him breathing. “I thought that something had happened to him,” she said later, “that perhaps the clothes were over his head. In the half light I saw he wasn’t there and felt all over the bed for him.” She rushed down the hall to the Lindberghs’ bedroom.

“Do you have the baby, Mrs. Lindbergh?”

“No.”

“Then maybe the colonel has him!” Betty said, and bolted down the stairs to the library where Lindbergh was still reading.

“He isn’t in his crib?” Lindbergh asked, alarmed. He dashed upstairs to the nursery and found it empty, with Charlie’s imprint still on the bedclothes. Charles bounded down the passageway to the master bedroom where Anne was standing, bewilderedly; she had been to the nursery, and finding it empty she’d returned to her bedroom. She asked her husband if he had the baby, but Charles brushed past and went to his closet where he kept a rifle and headed back to the nursery. When he arrived, with Anne and Betty at his heels, and finding the crib of course still empty, he turned and said, “Anne, they have stolen our baby.”
³⁷

A
N ALL POINTS BULLETIN
went out from New Jersey state police headquarters notifying police locally and nationwide that the twenty-month-old son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh, wearing a gray sleeping suit, had been kidnapped. That of course alerted the press, which descended on the Lindbergh home like ants on a wounded beetle. It quickly became the “crime of the century” or, in the words of H. L. Mencken, “The biggest news story since the Resurrection.” Within the day photographs of the child, provided by Lindbergh, appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the world. For once, in Lindbergh’s estimation, here was a chance that the press might actually make itself useful.

All through the night, as state police officers arrived, the grounds were searched for clues, more of which were likely destroyed than found. The window of the nursery had been ajar and a white envelope was lying on the sill. Deciding that it might be a ransom note, Charles had not touched it in case there were fingerprints. Outside, he and the butler found footprints beneath the window. Thirty yards from the house officers found three sections of a homemade extension ladder.

An officer who dusted the envelope taken from the windowsill found no fingerprints. He opened it and gave the single sheet of paper inside to Lindbergh. Written in blue ink with odd curlicues, misspellings, and Germanic intonations, the ransom note began “Dear Sir,” demanded $50,000 in various denominations, warned against going to the police, promised contact “after 2–4 days,” and included a strange symbol in the lower right corner consisting of two interlocking circles.

From the note, police deduced that the crime had been committed by someone of Nordic descent who was either agonizingly unskilled at writing or trying to disguise his penmanship.

President Hoover offered the full resources of the U.S. government, including the attorney general’s office, postal inspectors, the Internal Revenue Service, and the military. Congress began working on a bill, later known as the Lindbergh law, making kidnapping a capital crime and allowing the FBI to intervene if a kidnapper went across state lines. Everyone from Boy Scouts to men’s and women’s service clubs offered help. Labor leaders promised to put their members on the lookout. Churches regularly began conducting prayers until the child was found. Moreover there was an enormous outpouring of sympathy from the general public, confirmed by the thousands of letters each day that began to arrive at Highfields. Most of these were merely expressions of sympathy by individuals far and wide, but far too many were from cranks, crackpots, and con men. There were all sorts of clairvoyants, seers, and other oracles, people claiming to have had dreams about the baby’s whereabouts, people who claimed to have seen him, many of these seeking money. And, unfortunately, as the days went by with no news, some elements of the press began publishing made-up stories of the most lurid variety, which was not only unhelpful but infuriating and hurtful to the Lindberghs.

Anne held up well, all things considered, and mostly stayed in her room, out of the way, while Charles read police reports, sat in conferences, and hovered around the command center. It is heartrending, even now, to read her account, reflected in the letters she wrote at the time. On the second day, Anne tried to be upbeat to Evangeline Lindbergh, pointing out that the kidnappers’ “knowledge of the baby’s room, lack of fingerprints, well-fitted ladder, all point to
professionals
, which is rather good, as it means they want only the money and will not maliciously hurt the baby.”

As the days wore on, she tried in quiet desperation to keep up hope and on March 3 was prompted to write Evangeline: “C [Charles] is
marvelous
—calm, clear, alert, and observing. It is dreadful not to be able to do
anything
to help. I want
so
to help.”

And March 5: “We seem to have pretty tangible word that the baby is safe, and
well cared for
… we are progressing toward recovery of the child … at any time I may be routed out of my bed so that a group of detectives can have a conference in the room.”

And March 8: “It is a slow hard game but they all have faith in the ultimate success.”

March 10: “There
really
is definite progress. I feel
much
happier today.”
³⁸

Charles was telling her only in a general way what was actually happening. Police were investigating hundreds of leads daily. On March 5 a genuine ransom note arrived (there had been numerous phony ones). It warned that the Lindberghs would now “have to take the consequences” of going to the police and the press, and now upped the ransom from $50,000 to $70,000. But the note also gave assurances the baby was well cared for and that the kidnappers intended “to send him back in gut health.”