Charles Lindbergh

Charles Lindbergh: Biography, Airplane, Flight, Quotes, Education, Facts (2001)

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Charles Augustus Lindbergh (February 4, 1902 – August 26, 1974), nicknamed Slim, Lucky Lindy, and The Lone Eagle, was an American aviator, author, inventor, military officer, explorer, and social activist. As a 25-year-old U.S. Air Mail pilot, Lindbergh emerged suddenly from virtual obscurity to instantaneous world fame as the result of his Orteig Prize-winning solo nonstop flight on May 20–21, 1927, made from the Roosevelt Field in Garden City on New York's Long Island to Le Bourget Field in Paris, France, a distance of nearly 3,600 statute miles (5,800 km), in the single-seat, single-engine, purpose-built Ryan monoplane Spirit of St. Louis. As a result of this flight, Lindbergh was the first person in history to be in New York one day and Paris the next. The record setting flight took 33 hours and 30 minutes. Lindbergh, a U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve officer, was also awarded the nation's highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his historic exploit. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Lindbergh used his fame to promote the development of both commercial aviation and Air Mail services in the United States and the Americas. In March 1932, his infant son, Charles, Jr., was kidnapped and murdered in what was soon dubbed the "Crime of the Century". It was described by journalist H. L. Mencken, as "... the biggest story since the resurrection." The kidnapping eventually led to the Lindbergh family's being "driven into voluntary exile" in Europe, to which they sailed in secrecy from New York under assumed names in late December 1935 to "seek a safe, secluded residence away from the tremendous public hysteria" in America. The Lindberghs returned to the United States in April 1939. Before the United States formally entered World War II, Lindbergh had been an outspoken advocate of keeping the U.S. out of the world conflict, as had his father, Congressman Charles August Lindbergh, during World War I. Although Lindbergh was a leader in the antiwar America First movement, he nevertheless strongly supported the war effort after Pearl Harbor and flew 50 combat missions in the Pacific Theater of World War II as a civilian consultant, though President Franklin D. Roosevelt had refused to reinstate his Army Air Corps colonel's commission from which he had resigned in April 1941. In his later years, Lindbergh became a prolific prize-winning author, international explorer, inventor, and environmentalist. Verdensberømtheder i København (1939)[205] was a Danish short subject produced by the Dansk Film Co.[206] in which Charles Lindbergh as well as Hollywood actors Robert Taylor, Myrna Loy, and Edward G. Robinson all appeared as themselves. The 1938 Paramount film Men with Wings (Fred MacMurray, Ray Milland) featured a replica of the Spirit of St. Louis fashioned from a Ryan B-1 "Brougham"[207] similar to one presented to Lindbergh by the manufacturer, the Mahoney Aircraft Corporation, shortly after the Spirit was retired in April 1928.[208] The 1942 MGM picture Keeper of the Flame (Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy) features Hepburn as the widow of Robert V. Forrest, a "Lindbergh-like" national hero,[209] who was exposed after his death as a secret fascist intending to use his influence—especially over America's youth—to turn the country into a fascist state and eliminate those he deemed as inferior races. Four years after its 1953 publication, Lindbergh's second book about his flying "partner" served as the basis for the namesake major Hollywood Cinemascope motion picture The Spirit of St. Louis, directed by Billy Wilder and released on April 20, 1957, one month short of the 30th anniversary of the flight to Paris. The Spirit was "portrayed" in the film by three flyable replicas of the Ryan NYP, while Lindbergh was played by veteran American actor and fellow Army aviator James Stewart. [N 9][N 10] In order to accurately depict the transatlantic flight, three replicas at a cost of $1.3 million (equal to more than $11 million in 2013) were made of the Spirit of St. Louis for the various location and studio film units.[210] A similar Ryan Brougham was bought by Stewart and modified with Lindbergh's supervision. Lindbergh has also been the subject of numerous screen, television, and other documentary films over the years, including Charles A. Lindbergh (1927), a UK documentary by De Forest Phonofilm based on Lindbergh's milestone flight, 40,000 Miles with Lindbergh (1928) featuring Charles A. Lindbergh, and The American Experience—Lindbergh: The Shocking, Turbulent Life of America's Lone Eagle (1988) PBS documentary directed by Stephen Ives.[211][212][213] The story of Lindbergh and his association with the former German Nazi Party was featured on the Science Channel TV show, Dark Matters: Twisted But True. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lindbergh