THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING SUSPECT NO. 1. Lise Pearlman

attributed her husband’s “sink or swim” approach to parenthood to his Swedish father, August Lindbergh, who had lost an arm in an accident and kept farming, priding himself for his own “independence and self-reliance.” C.A. taught his son basic survival skills in the wilderness. Growing up among lumbermen, Lindbergh also picked up carpentry skills, which came in handy when left to his own devices. Before he was ten, the resourceful youth had built himself stilts, his own raft, and later, a wagon and a suspension bridge over a nearby creek.

      Living mostly apart from his half-sisters, Charles became protective of his mother, despite her detached approach to motherhood. The bedtime ritual was a handshake, not a kiss. Few people other than her immediate family would ever get to know her well. For her son, she would remain practically the only female with whom he had any close relationship at all until he met his wife. Yet he also found making his mother panic highly entertaining. He would later derive similar pleasure taking advantage of opportunities to badly frighten his wife.

      As a youth, Charles shivered in fear at night, often waking with a loud cry that prompted his mother to invite him to sleep on her bedroom floor. He was plagued by nightmares filled with unseen dangers: a robber with a dagger, a giant snake. Sometimes he seemed to be plummeting “from a tall cliff or building, plunging helplessly downward, nauseated by fear toward ugly death.” His mother understood. Thunderstorms frightened her. Having her son sleep nearby let them both get through harrowing nights.

      By the age of thirteen, Lindbergh had collected a small arsenal at the summer camp. It included his first rifle from Grandfather Land when he was six, another from his father the following year, a shotgun, a pistol, a revolver and a small saluting cannon with blank shells that his mother’s uncle had given him. The weapons gave him a sense of security. Evangeline had by then become so disliked in Little Falls for her superior airs that some local hooligans took to intimidating her on occasion with warning shots. The bullets were fired way over her head as she neared her cottage. Her son then spent considerable time digging a trench by the riverbank, which he concealed with a lengthy mound of dirt in front of it. By the time he made use of his bunker, the mound would be overgrown with grass.

      One day, likely in the late summer of 1915, Lindbergh and a friend hauled his weapons down to the bunker to take revenge on a man and several boys across the river who had just fired rifle shots within several feet of Lindbergh’s raft. The group was celebrating its malicious mischief by singing a song about lynching. Lindbergh was quite familiar with “coon songs,” which were hugely popular when he was growing up. He himself had learned from his mother’s younger brother how to use burnt cork to darken his face like white singers then did while performing their racist sets. But the notion that he was the butt of such nasty humor provoked Lindbergh to paddle as fast as he could to shore to run to get his friend Bill Thompson to join him to seek revenge. Thompson was one of the two boys in the neighborhood whom Lindbergh palled around with. The two of them then hauled Lindbergh’s weapons down to the bunker where they unleashed a barrage of fire that barely missed the heads of his harassers.

      That fall, probably in retaliation, some unknown sniper killed Lindbergh’s pet dog Dingo. In high school, the shy, gangly youth was not well-known or liked by other students. He was mortified when a teacher asked for his homework and he either had not done it or was ridiculed for a poor effort. He often fought with boys in the class who taunted him but could only “burn with slow anger over the sniggers of the girls.” He did so poorly he was in danger of failing and could not bear to consider how demeaning that would be. Lindbergh lucked out. When the United States joined the Great War in Europe, President Wilson created a program for states to offer school credit for teenagers who took care of the family farm. Life-and-death decisions may have been more unnerving for Lindbergh because of his mother’s penchant for naming many of their farm animals. But with help from his father’s elderly tenant, the teenager designed and built sties with raised floors to keep his sows from accidentally killing their offspring. Veterinarians provided advice on how to euthanize disease-ridden, new-born calves by a heavy blow to the soft spot on their heads. Lindbergh corralled lambs that had gone astray, but then learned the harsh reality that bottle-feeding motherless lambs with cow’s milk took time “you haven’t got to give them.” He could see verified before his eyes what his grandfather Land taught him about Darwin’s law — survival of the fittest.

      After grueling workdays, Lindbergh liked to read at night in the kitchen by the light of a kerosene lamp. He scanned headline stories in the Minneapolis Tribune and the Little Falls newspaper and pored over materials on farming. Starting in the winter of 1917, Lindbergh focused on a new serial in Everybody’s Magazine, “Tam o’ the Scoots,” which featured a courageous Royal Flying Corps pilot on the western front.

      Lindbergh had first become fascinated with airplanes when he was twelve and his mother took him to an airfield outside Washington, D.C. Born just a year before the Wright Brothers took their first brief flight, Lindbergh would feel drawn throughout his life to the latest machines that pushed the boundaries of human potential. “Science held the key to the mystery of Life; Science was truth; Science was power.”

      For several years, Lindbergh’s maternal grandmother had come to stay with Evangeline and her grandson for a month each summer at the camp. But when she took sick with cancer, Mrs. Land started living with them year-round so Evangeline could care for her. Lindbergh remembered her later as a “kindly, quiet woman, wonderful with children.”

      With Evangeline and her ailing mother in the two bedrooms, Lindbergh made his bed on the uninsulated porch, burying himself under a pile of blankets. Staring at the starlit sky, Lindbergh remembered to keep his nose exposed, as his father had advised. Otherwise, his habit of pulling the covers over his head might risk tuberculosis — the disease that had cut short the life of his half-sister Lillian. Those winter nights on the below-zero porch helped him develop extraordinary endurance that would later come in handy as a pilot.

      For added warmth, he wore his father’s old winter coat to bed and kept his new dog curled up beside him. The terrier was named Wahgoosh — Chippewa for “fox” — and had quickly become the teenager’s constant companion. One day, Wahgoosh went missing. The teenager located his beloved pet bashed to death with a crowbar and dumped in their well — his second dog lost to violence. By 1918, Lindbergh and his mother had made a number of enemies in their rural community who were likely capable of such cruelty.

      In October of 1918, the sixteen-year-old saw billowing smoke covering the sky “as though a strange and titanic storm were brewing.” More than fifty years later, he recalled it as “a rather terrifying sight.” That gargantuan fire northeast of the farm turned out to be one of the most devastating in Minnesota’s history. For Lindbergh, the experience likely brought back searing memories of watching his family’s home at the same location burn to the ground when he was three and a half.

      After his grandmother Land died of cancer in January 1919, Lindbergh and his mother left Minnesota with its bitter winters for good. Evangeline convinced her son to enroll in an engineering program at Madison, Wisconsin. She obtained a teaching job there, and a cheap apartment for them to share. Lindbergh joined ROTC and became an accomplished marksman. His mother cooked, kept house and ghost-wrote papers for him. Even so, Lindbergh flunked out. He then rode his motorcycle to Nebraska, where he had heard of a chance to apprentice himself at an airline company.

      Soon Lindbergh talked his father into paying for an Army surplus “Jenny” biplane so he could eke out a living giving thrill rides at $5 a pop and performing as a barnstormer. C.A. only agreed to buy the plane on the condition that Lindbergh would fly him around Minnesota for a Senate race. After the political campaign failed, C.A. helped get his son into an Army pilot training program but did not live to see him graduate. That May of 1924, C.A. succumbed to a brain tumor during one last quixotic political campaign for governor. At the time, he and his son were estranged, and C.A. had no idea whether his offspring would make anything of his life.

      3.

      The Orteig Prize

      AFTER Lindbergh graduated flight school in March 1925, he had no luck obtaining an army commission. One reason may have been that Lindbergh was involved just over a week before graduation