Christopher Potter - The Earth Gazers

CHAPTER ONE

According to family legend, when Charles Lindberghs paternal grandfather, August Lindbergh, lost an arm as the result of an accident at the local sawmill, he asked that it be buried in its own pine coffin. He had apparently addressed his limb in farewell: You have been a good friend to me for fifty years, but you cant be with me any more. So good bye. Good bye, my friend. Even making due allowance for the magnifying, coarsening and mythologizing effects of time, August Lindberghs life was clearly the stuff of legend.

August Lindbergh had once been Ola Mnsson. He was born in Sweden in 1808. Despite the lack of any formal education, he became a parliamentarian known for his brilliant rhetoric. He was a farmer who spoke on behalf of farmers, a liberal who defended womens and childrens rights, and those of Jews. He was for land reform, the lessening of trade restrictions and the expansion of railways. He argued that the Lutheran Churchs sway was too great. He was friendly with the King. He was the director of a bank. At the height of his fame, he was brought down by his enemies on a largely trumped-up charge of embezzlement. Then in his early fifties, Ola Mnsson fled Sweden for America, leaving behind his wife and their seven legitimate children but taking with him his mistress Lovisa a waitress almost 30 years his junior and their illegitimate son, Karl; a gold medal he had been given by his constituents; a gold watch, Lovisas only heirloom; and very little else. In America, as many immigrants did who were starting over, they changed their names. They were now the Lindbergh family: father August, mother Louisa and son Charles August, father of the future aviator. In Minnesota, in typical pioneering fashion, August built his family a log cabin. The gold medal was traded for a plough and August was a farmer once more. There was by now already a second child, and soon a third.

Ola Mnsson c. 1850

It was a couple of years after they had arrived in Minnesota that August accidentally fell against the blade at the sawmill. His arm was mutilated and his chest cut through. His beating heart, as well as part of a lung, could be seen through the wound. The doctor took three days to arrive. There was nothing to be done except cut the arm off at the shoulder, an operation that was performed without anaesthetic. August apparently didnt so much as groan. Soon he was back working on the farm, swinging a scythe he had adapted for one-armed use.

Then, five years after he had abandoned his wife, news came that she had died. August married Louisa. Two of his sons from the first marriage came to join the Lindberghs in Minnesota. And still the family grew. August was to have seven children by each wife, a curious prefiguring of the famous aviators outsized life to come. The log cabin over the years grew to be one of the largest properties in the area.

Charles August Lindbergh trained as a lawyer and became a significant figure in the Little Falls community. He married Mary La Frond in 1887. She died in 1898, a few days before her thirty-first birthday, of complications following what should have been a routine operation. Two children survived the marriage: daughters, Lillian and Eva. A third child, Edith, had died aged 10 months.

Charles Augusts second marriage was to Evangeline Lodge Land, who now became the even more gloriously named Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh. The Lodges and the Lands were patrician families proud of their ancestors, among whom were numbered the first European settlers of America. Lands fought for George III in the American Revolution. Lodges came over in the Mayflower. Evangelines father, Charles Henry Land, was a dentist and inventor of the jacket porcelain crown, patented in 1889. Their only child, Charles, was born in 1902.

Like his father, Charles August was a politician and a farmer. He was a congressman for a decade from 1907. He had demanded regulation of the railroads, changes to the democratic process, conservation measures and various economic reforms. He was one of only 50 representatives who voted against America joining the First World War. In 1918 he tried for the Senate and failed, coming a poor third in the election. He had been followed by mobs during the campaign, arrested on charges of conspiracy, dragged from the podium during one speech, escaped another meeting amid a volley of shots and even hanged in effigy.

Charles August and Evangeline split up when Charles was seven. Charles lived with his mother, but his father visited frequently. His half-sister Eva said that her father and Evangeline were not suited to each other. Evangeline was apparently emotionally volatile, Charles August austere and difficult to know. Eva had been left in the care of her stepmother after the separation but ran away from home aged 14, when her half-brother was five years old. Her father wrote to reassure her: I couldnt live with her, and you dont have to either. In later life Eva said that her stepmother mocked other women in the town to their faces, said she was a cruel and crazy woman.

Looking back from the perspective of his adult self, Charles Lindbergh considered his childhood to have been one of idyllic freedom. His maternal grandfather, Charles Henry Land, gave him a .22-calibre rifle when he was six: Father thought six was young for a rifle, but the next year he gave me a Savage repeater; and the year after that, a Winchester 12-gauge automatic shotgun; and he loaned me the Smith and Weston revolver that hed shot a burglar with. Charles said that his father shot the intruder as he had tried to make his escape, and that there had been blood on the window-ledge to prove it. This half-sister Eva remembered the story differently, as is often the way with family history. She said that her father had not been able to bring himself to fire at the burglar, even though the burglar had been armed. And so out of such competing anecdotes do family legends fight for precedence. During his lifetime Charles would write about his ancestors on a number of occasions, but as his biographer Scott Berg points out, despite his fascination with detail, [Lindbergh] never examined his family history closely enough to see that it included malfeasance, flight from justice, bigamy, illegitimacy, melancholia, manic-depression, alcoholism, grievous generational conflicts, and wanton abandonment of families.

When Charles was ten, his mother took him on a trip to Panama. In that same year, 1912, his father bought a car, the soon to be ubiquitous Model T Ford. Neither parent drove with any confidence, he said. It was years before his father was at all competent, and his mother was always a timid and alarming driver. Charles was the designated driver. No license was needed in those early days of motoring. It seemed dangerous, he wrote, but only at first. By the age of 12, Charles spent the summer exploring Minnesota by car; he gives the distinct impression that he went on his own. He was engrossed as mechanics disassembled and reassembled the engine. A seasoned driver by the age of 14, he bought a Saxon Six and drove his mother across country from their home in Little Falls to California. It took weeks to get there the weather was often atrocious, the going slow and hazardous. And then he drove her back. The car is still used in town parades to this day.

Charles (right) and his father