The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh by Winston Groom

hunter. He never darkened the doors of a school until he was twelve years old, but when he turned eighteen, his father sent C.A. to the Grove Park Academy, run by a Catholic priest, which prepared him for law school at the University of Michigan, where he graduated in 1883. At last something besides a farmer had come out of the Mansson/Lindbergh family line.
    C.A. hung his shingle in Little Falls, a town of several thousand on the Mississippi River in a part of the state that was thriving with the giant Weyerhaeuser lumber company, McCormick Harvester, and several large sawmills and brickyards, all of which became C.A.’s clients.
    Shortly after moving to Little Falls C.A. married Mary LaFond, with whom he had two daughters. His clientele and prestige continued to increase but in 1898 Mary’s life was lost in childbirth. He soon sent his daughters to boarding school and moved from their substantial home into a hotel room near his office downtown. But there he met, and soon married, Evangeline Lodge Land, who would become the mother of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr.
    She was the beautiful and high-strung twenty-four-year-old daughter of two prominent Detroit families; her mother was one of the Lodges, a family of physicians, and her father was Dr. Charles Henry Land, a cantankerous but famous dentist who invented, among other things, the porcelain jacket crown.
    At first, everything seemed to go swimmingly for the Lindbergh family. Evangeline ensconced herself and baby Charles in the dream house on the Mississippi River that C.A. had built for her. Also in the home were C.A.’s two daughters from his previous marriage, Lillian, fourteen, and Eva, ten, now reunited in the new home. C.A. stayed busier than ever, and domestic life was made comfortable with a cook, housekeeper, and coach driver who doubled as the farmer tending C.A.’s crops, orchards, and livestock.
    Those were bucolic days in the American century, as if from a Currier & Ives engraving. A few automobiles had begun to appear on the streets of Little Falls but most travel was by carriage, wagon, or horse. Baseball was the nation’s pastime, and on Sundays bandstands in local parks were graced with musicians playing brass instruments.
    Charles Lindbergh’s earliest memories were of his toys: lead and tin soldiers and Indians with bows and arrows; a toy steam train with a whistle. And there were views of the Mississippi, clear and fast running and nearly a quarter mile wide at that point. The family had three dogs roaming the premises, including a Great Dane who used to beat Charles about the head with his tail.
    When Charles was three and a half, he vividly remembered, he heard “a sudden shouting—women’s voices. I was picked up quickly and taken across the road to a place behind the barn. I got to a corner of the barn and looked around it to see a huge column of smoke billowing skyward from our house. Then I was taken back and told I mustn’t look.” 2
    By the time the fire was out the house had collapsed into the basement, a charred and total wreck. A saving grace was that the blaze had started upstairs, giving servants and farmhands time to salvage much of the furniture, tableware, and other valuables. At last Charles was taken to the scene, and fifty years later he clearly remembered what he’d seen: a lone chimney with a small red clay Mexican idol on the stone fireplace shelf.
    While the house was being rebuilt, the Lindberghs moved into a hotel in town, which seemed to young Charles a “dreary” place with nothing to do but look out the window at the dirt street below, bustling with people and horses. It was around this time that C.A. decided to run for Congress. In the staunch Republican district the previous congressman was in disgrace from accusations of graft, and C.A. not only had a lily-white reputation, he was known as something of a crusader in matters of public honesty. At this stage of the twentieth century a growing disharmony was taking