Read Online One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson - Free Book Online Page A

skills, and on a visit to Camp Wood, Texas, Lindbergh decided to do so by taking off from the town’s Main Street – an ambitious challenge since the street’s telephone poles were just forty-six feet apart and his wingspan was forty-four. As he sped down the street, he hit a bump, which caused a wingtip to clip a pole, spinning him sideways and through the front window of a hardware store. How neither he nor any of the spectators were injured is a miracle.
    Barnstorming gave Lindbergh a great deal of practical experience – he made over seven hundred flights in two years – but no technical training. In 1924, he corrected that deficiency by enrolling in a one-year course in the army air reserve, which provided the most advanced and challenging training then available. He finished top of his class – the first time in his life he had done well at anything academic – and emerged with the rank of captain. The achievement was muted somewhat by the fact that it coincided with the death of his father, from a neurological disorder, in May 1924. Because no military posts were available, he took a job as anairmail pilot on the St Louis to Chicago route, where he acquired the sort of resourcefulness that comes with flying cheap and temperamental planes through every possible type of adversity. Thanks to this varied apprenticeship, Lindbergh in the spring of 1927 was a more experienced and proficient flyer – and a vastly more gifted one – than his competitors realized. As events would show, you couldn’t be a better pilot and still be just twenty-five.
     
    In many ways Charles Lindbergh’s greatest achievement in 1927 was not flying the Atlantic but getting a plane built with which to fly the Atlantic. Somehow he managed to persuade nine flinty businessmen in St Louis, among them the eponymous A. B. Lambert, to back him, convincing them that a plane with ‘St Louis’ in its title could do nothing but good for the city’s business prospects. It was an exceedingly dubious proposition. The greater likelihood for his backers was that they would be indelibly associated with the needless death of a young, idealistic flyer, but that thought, if it occurred to them at all, seems not to have troubled them. By late autumn 1926, Lindbergh had a promise of $13,000 of funding from his backers, plus $2,000 of his own – not a lavish bankroll by any means, but with luck, he hoped, enough to get him a single-engine plane capable of crossing an ocean.
    In early February 1927, Lindbergh took a train to New York for a meeting with Charles Levine, owner of the aeroplane Columbia . This was the same plane that would, two months later, set the world endurance record with Chamberlin and Acosta. Chamberlin was present at the February meeting, as was the plane’s brilliant, sweet-tempered designer, Giuseppe Bellanca, though neither said much.
    They met in Levine’s office in the Woolworth Building in Manhattan. Levine listened to Lindbergh’s pitch, then agreed to sell the plane to him for $15,000 – rather a startling thing to do since Chamberlin was, up to that moment, expecting to fly the plane to Paris himself. It was also a very good price for what was unquestionably one of the best planes in the world and the only one capable oftaking Lindbergh to Europe alone. Understandably elated, Lindbergh travelled back to St Louis to draw a cheque and confirm the support of his backers, then returned at once to New York to complete the transaction. On the return visit, as Lindbergh handed over a cashier’s cheque for the full amount of the purchase, Levine casually mentioned that although they were happy to proceed with the deal as agreed, they of course reserved the right to choose the crew.
    Lindbergh could not have been more taken aback. The proposition was ludicrous. He was hardly going to buy a plane so that a pilot of Levine’s choosing could make the flight and receive all the glory. Lindbergh had just discovered, as many others did