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

first boarding school and then college. On one of these occasions, in 1912, when Charles was ten, Evangeline took him to an air show at Fort Myer in Virginia. There, he witnessed close up a race between an airplane and an automobile around an oval track. “You could see the pilot clearly, out in front,” he wrote years afterward, “pants’ legs flapping, and cap visor pointed backwards to streamline the wind. It was so intense and fascinating that I wanted to fly myself.”
    C.A. would have Evangeline and Charles to lunch in the congressional dining room and arranged for them to sit in the House gallery, especially if he was making a speech. Charles was introduced to a number of political luminaries of the day; he got to shake hands with President Woodrow Wilson and roll Easter eggs on the White House lawn, a tradition that dated back to the administration of Andrew Johnson.
    In public, the Lindberghs presented a congenial family picture, but their private lives were marred by antipathy and harsh words, usually over money. Evangeline resented what C.A. spent on his daughters, believing that it was at her expense; she was unmoved when he explained that it was because they were motherless and had been shipped away from home. How all of this affected Charles is difficult to judge, since he was reticent to speak of it, even much later in life, but it should be understood that he was subjected to the psychological damage of being raised by parents in an unhappy marriage.
    Charles sporadically attended schools in the Washington area, but only for a few months at a time while he and his mother were residing in town. For two sessions, he attended the Sidwell Friends School, ‡ a Quaker institution, where among his classmates were Quentin and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of the former president.
    From about the age of ten on, Charles demonstrated an aptitude for complex mechanical projects. For instance, he built a Rube Goldberg–type device for hauling big cakes of river ice from the icehouse by the water’s edge up the hill and into the family icebox in the kitchen pantry. Also as Charles became older he helped Evangeline with the chores, such as splitting and stacking firewood, planting, weeding, and cleaning, as well as the aforementioned ice moving.
    In 1912 C.A. bought a black Ford Model T that they named Maria (with a long i ). It was a four-cylinder, folding-top, hand-cranked Tourabout with carbide headlamps and a squeeze rubber-bulb horn, and it represented a major purchase for the Lindbergh family. When C.A. wasn’t using Maria for campaigning it was put to work on the farm.
    Evangeline was rather afraid of the thing and, according to Charles, when she took it into town for groceries she drove it only in low gear, which took a lot of time and strained the engine to the boiling point. In due time Charles was taught to drive Maria, and thus began, like Rickenbacker and Doolittle before him, Lindbergh’s lifelong thrall with the internal combustion engine.
    The roads around Little Falls in 1912 left much to be desired and most of the time a horse was far more useful than an automobile, but during the next few years Charles, who had grown unusually close to his mother, would drive Evangeline and himself on picnic visits to nearby towns and attractions such as the many lakes in the area. Later, Charles would accompany his father on campaign trips, usually doing the driving and distributing campaign literature.
    In 1916, when Charles was fourteen, Maria was sold and a new automobile acquired, a big six-cylinder Saxon with an electric starter, which cost twice as much as a Model T and could outrun a railroad train. At Charles’s suggestion C.A. had a portion of the basement converted into a garage, where Charles serviced the Saxon Six, including a complete engine overhaul with new piston rings and valves. He also utilized the garage space to build himself a boat, a twelve-foot flat-bottom skiff that was light enough to carry