58 Fun Facts About Charles Lindbergh

Which children's author mocked Lindbergh's isolationism in a run of wartime newspaper cartoons?

Dr. Seuss, before the children's classics, drew more than 400 political cartoons for the New York paper PM, and Lindbergh's campaign against entering the war was a favourite target.

Lindbergh's aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis, was named in honour of what?

The city whose backers financed it. Lindbergh was flying the mail from there when he persuaded a group of local businessmen to pay for the attempt, and the plane carried their city's name to Paris.

How much was the Orteig Prize that Lindbergh's flight won?

$25,000. Hotel owner Raymond Orteig put it up in 1919 for five years; nobody even tried in that time, so he renewed the offer, and Lindbergh collected the cheque eight years after it was first posted.

What did Lindbergh struggle against for much of his 33½-hour flight to Paris?

The urge to sleep. He had barely slept the night before, and over the ocean he kept dozing off for seconds at a time and began to hallucinate; the drowsiness lifted only after a full day in the air.

Which British pair had already flown the Atlantic nonstop in 1919, eight years before Lindbergh?

Alcock and Brown. They took off from Newfoundland and ended nose-down in a bog; Lindbergh's New York to Paris route was nearly twice as long, and he flew it alone.

In which state did Lindbergh grow up, on a farm beside the upper Mississippi?

Minnesota was home: born in Detroit, he grew up on the family farm at Little Falls, and during World War I he earned his high-school credits by working it instead of sitting his final exams.

What was the occupation of Lindbergh's father, Charles August Lindbergh?

US congressman: C. A. Lindbergh sat in the House from 1907 to 1917, where he was one of the few members to oppose America entering World War I.

Lindbergh left which university midway through his second year to learn to fly?

Wisconsin: he was studying engineering in Madison, but with his grades sinking he left in 1922 for a flying school in Lincoln, Nebraska, and went up for the first time days after arriving.

As a barnstorming stunt performer in the early 1920s, Lindbergh was billed under what name?

Daredevil Lindbergh was the name on the leaflets: he stood on the wings and hung beneath other pilots' planes before buying an aircraft of his own to fly the stunts himself.

Which war-surplus biplane was the first aircraft Lindbergh owned, bought in 1923?

Curtiss Jenny: he bought the wartime trainer at a Georgia airfield and made his first solo flight in it there, having never flown alone or held a licence.

In which state did Lindbergh graduate first in his class from Army flight school in 1925?

Texas: he trained at Brooks and Kelly Fields in San Antonio, where fewer than one in five of the 104 cadets who started won their wings, and he left as a second lieutenant in the air reserve.

As an airmail pilot in 1926, how did Lindbergh twice save himself when caught aloft at night?

He parachuted out: bad weather and empty fuel tanks left him unable to land on the night run into Chicago, and both times he reached the ground without serious injury.

Which San Diego firm built the Spirit of St. Louis for Lindbergh?

Ryan Airlines quoted $10,580 and 60 days, and Lindbergh moved out to the factory to work on the design beside its chief engineer, Donald Hall.

Which US record did Lindbergh break days before leaving for Paris?

Coast-to-coast speed: the Spirit of St. Louis, built in 60 days, flew San Diego to New York with one stop in under 22 flying hours, as he hurried to get there before rival crews could leave for Paris.

Why did the Spirit of St. Louis have no forward windscreen?

A fuel tank sat in front of the cockpit because Lindbergh did not want to be crushed between tank and engine in a crash; he saw ahead through a periscope or by turning to look out of a side window.

From which Long Island airfield did Lindbergh take off on his flight to Paris?

Roosevelt Field: the plane, heavy with fuel, bounced down a muddy runway and cleared the telephone wires at the far end by only about twenty feet.

What engine powered the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic?

A Wright Whirlwind radial was the plane's only engine: while several rivals trusted three, Lindbergh argued that one saved weight for fuel and meant fewer chances of an engine failing.

To save weight, what was the pilot's seat in the Spirit of St. Louis made of?

Wicker: a light woven chair took the place of a heavy leather seat, part of a purge in which Lindbergh also left out a radio and trimmed the edges off his maps.

What was the first European land Lindbergh saw on his flight?

Dingle Bay, Ireland: unsure at first, he turned towards the nearest point of land, matched the coastline to his chart, then swung back onto his compass course for Paris.

At which Paris airfield did Lindbergh land at the end of his Atlantic flight?

Le Bourget was overrun as he landed: the crowd pulled Lindbergh from the cockpit and carried him above their heads before he could be hurried away to a hangar.

What did the Paris crowd do to Lindbergh's plane after he landed?

Tore pieces off it: souvenir hunters stripped what they could from the plane while others carried its pilot around, until soldiers and police got it under guard.

Which two French war heroes vanished flying from Paris to New York days before Lindbergh's flight?

Nungesser and Coli set off in their biplane L'Oiseau Blanc and were never found, which left the prize open just as Lindbergh was about to fly east from San Diego.

Which polar explorer raced Lindbergh for the Orteig Prize?

Richard Byrd's three-engined Fokker, America, crashed in testing in April 1927, and the little-known Lindbergh took off while the famous explorer still waited on Long Island.

Which president presented Lindbergh with both the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Medal of Honor?

Calvin Coolidge sent a Navy warship to bring Lindbergh and his plane home from Europe, then decorated him in front of a vast crowd in Washington.

Which Agatha Christie novel took its central crime from the Lindbergh baby kidnapping?

Murder on the Orient Express appeared in 1934, before anyone had been arrested for the real crime, and builds its plot on the kidnap and killing of a rich American family's small daughter.

What was the title of Lindbergh's first book, a bestseller written weeks after his Atlantic flight?

We was rushed out that summer and sold some 650,000 copies in its first year, helped by the 48-state tour he was flying as it reached the shops.

Which wealthy family's aeronautics fund sent Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis on a tour of all 48 states?

Guggenheim: Daniel Guggenheim's fund for promoting aeronautics paid for the three-month tour so that Lindbergh could sell the public on commercial air travel.

Which museum displays the original Spirit of St. Louis, donated by Lindbergh in 1928?

National Air and Space Museum, Washington: Lindbergh flew the plane to the capital himself in April 1928 and handed it to the Smithsonian, which has shown it ever since.

Lindbergh met his future wife Anne Morrow in which country, where her father was US ambassador?

Mexico: he flew nonstop from Washington to Mexico City on a goodwill visit, spent Christmas with Ambassador Dwight Morrow's family and married Anne in 1929.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh was the first woman in the United States to earn which licence?

Glider pilot: she went on to fly with her husband as copilot, navigator and radio operator, surveying air routes across the Arctic to Asia.

Which 1955 book by Anne Morrow Lindbergh became one of the decade's bestselling works of non-fiction?

Gift from the Sea was written on a seaside holiday, with each reflection on solitude, marriage and the shape of a woman's life drawn from a shell she picked up on the beach.

Which soon-to-be-withdrawn kind of banknote, used for much of the Lindbergh ransom, led police to the kidnapper?

Gold certificates: once the 1933 recall had made them rare, a filling-station attendant wary of a $10 one wrote the car's licence number on it, and it led police to Hauptmann.

What did the kidnapper leave behind outside the Lindbergh home on the night the baby was taken?

Pieces of a wooden ladder: home-made and split where two sections joined, it became the key exhibit once a wood expert matched one rail to a floorboard in Hauptmann's attic.

Where did a go-between hand over the $50,000 Lindbergh ransom in April 1932?

A cemetery: while Lindbergh waited in a car nearby, the man took the money and handed back a note placing the baby on a boat off the Massachusetts coast, but no such boat was ever found.

What was the trade of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the German immigrant convicted in the Lindbergh kidnapping case?

Carpenter: he was caught two years after the crime with some $14,000 of the ransom money at his home, which he claimed to be holding for a friend who had since died.

Hauptmann was arrested in the Bronx, but which state tried him for the murder of the Lindbergh baby?

New Jersey: the baby was taken and found there, so New York handed Hauptmann over, and reporters and sightseers swamped the small town of Flemington for his trial.

Which retired Bronx schoolteacher acted as go-between with the kidnapper under the alias 'Jafsie'?

John Condon offered in a Bronx newspaper to act as go-between and to add $1,000 of his own to the ransom, and the kidnapper's note accepting him arrived the next day.

What did the so-called 'Lindbergh Law' passed by Congress make a federal crime?

Taking a kidnap victim across state lines became a federal crime in 1932, which gave federal agents the power to pursue kidnappers from one state into the next.

Which gangster offered from prison to help recover the Lindbergh baby?

Al Capone's offer was one of several from the underworld, and Lindbergh took the idea seriously enough to name go-betweens to deal with gangsters on his behalf.

In the 1930s Lindbergh and the surgeon Alexis Carrel built a pump designed to do what?

Keep organs alive outside the body: Lindbergh turned to the problem when his wife's sister was left with a damaged heart that surgeons of the day could not repair.

To which country did the Lindberghs move in December 1935, after the Hauptmann trial?

England: hounded by the press and by threats against their second son, they found refuge in a rented house in the countryside before moving on to an island off France.

Which isolationist organisation did Lindbergh become the star speaker for before Pearl Harbor?

America First Committee rallies made Lindbergh the leading voice for staying out of the war, but the group disbanded within days of the attack on Pearl Harbor and he backed the war effort.

In which city did Lindbergh give his 1941 speech blaming the British and the Jews for pushing America toward war?

Des Moines heard him name the British, Jewish groups and the Roosevelt administration as the forces pressing for war; he was widely denounced as an antisemite, and organisations cut their ties with him.

As a civilian adviser in the Pacific in 1944, Lindbergh shot down a Japanese plane in which fighter?

P-38 Lightning: sent out only to observe, he flew about 50 combat missions and showed the fighter's pilots how to save fuel, greatly stretching their range.

Which president restored Lindbergh's commission and made him a brigadier general?

Dwight Eisenhower made him a brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve, ending thirteen years out of uniform that began when Lindbergh resigned his commission in a public quarrel with Roosevelt.

Lindbergh's 1953 book about his flight won which honour the following year?

The Pulitzer Prize for biography went to The Spirit of St. Louis in 1954, and three years later Hollywood turned the book into a film of the same name.

Who played Lindbergh in Billy Wilder's 1957 film The Spirit of St. Louis?

James Stewart, in his late forties, dieted to pass for the 25-year-old flier in what proved to be the only biographical film Billy Wilder ever made.

What did the public learn about Lindbergh's private life in 2003, almost thirty years after his death?

He had children in Germany: three by the hatmaker Brigitte Hesshaimer, kept so secret that they grew up knowing their father only as 'Careu Kent', and four more by two other women.

Where did Lindbergh die and get buried in 1974?

Maui, Hawaii: he had worked to protect the plants and wildlife of the island's Kipahulu Valley and made his last home there, where he died of cancer and was buried.

Which astronaut helped to found the Lindbergh Foundation in 1977, three years after the flier's death?

Neil Armstrong joined Jimmy Doolittle and other fliers in setting it up to back work that balances technology with the natural world, the cause of Lindbergh's last years.

Lindbergh spent his last years campaigning to save the monkey-eating eagle, now the national bird of which country?

The Philippines: from 1969 he flew out repeatedly for the World Wildlife Fund to press the government to protect the eagle, having written that he would rather have birds than airplanes.

Which Nazi leader presented Lindbergh with a German medal at a Berlin dinner in 1938?

Hermann Göring, head of the German air force, sprang the decoration on him as a surprise, and critics at home held his acceptance of it against him.

Which rocket pioneer did Lindbergh help to win major funding in 1930?

Robert H. Goddard told him that four years of steady money would achieve what might otherwise take a lifetime, and the grants Lindbergh secured moved his rocket tests out to the desert at Roswell.

Which novelist imagined Lindbergh beating Roosevelt to the presidency in The Plot Against America?

Philip Roth's 2004 novel has a President Lindbergh reach an understanding with Hitler while a Jewish family in Newark watches antisemitism spread; HBO filmed it in 2020.

Which future general's father, a state police chief, led the hunt for the Lindbergh baby's kidnapper?

Norman Schwarzkopf, the 1991 Gulf War commander, was the son of the police colonel officially in charge, who let Lindbergh himself steer much of the investigation.

Which airline, formed in a 1930 merger, advertised itself as 'The Lindbergh Line'?

TWA inherited the slogan from Transcontinental Air Transport, which had Lindbergh lay out its transcontinental route and let it use his name in its advertising.

Which bomber's Willow Run production line did Lindbergh troubleshoot for Ford in 1942?

The B-24 Liberator was being built by Ford at its Michigan bomber plant, and Lindbergh, denied a military command, went there as a civilian technical adviser.

What was painted on the Spirit of St. Louis's nose during Lindbergh's goodwill tour abroad?

Flags of the countries visited went onto the engine cowling stop by stop, and they are still there today under a protective varnish that has yellowed the silver nose to gold.