One Summer: America, 1927

tipped and banked and turned swooping low over the beach then rose like a silver winged bird against the blue sky.’ Thirty minutes later he was in Portland and facing new hordes of people whose most earnest desire was to crowd in on him and his beloved craft.
    It is impossible to imagine what it must have been like to be Charles Lindbergh in that summer. From the moment he left his room in the morning, he was touched and jostled and bothered. Every person on earth who could get near enough wanted to grasp his hand or clap him on the back. He had no private life any more. Shirts he sent to the laundry never came back. Chicken bones and napkins from his dinner plate were fought over in kitchens. He could not go for a walk or pop into a bank or chemist’s. If he went into a men’s room, people followed. Cheques he wrote were rarely cashed; recipients preferred to frame them instead. No part of hislife was normal, and there was no prospect that it ever would be again. As Lindbergh was discovering, it was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous.
    His tour consisted of sixty-nine overnight stops and thirteen ‘touch’ stops, where Lindbergh landed long enough to greet officials and say a few words, but did not otherwise linger. He also flew by request over scores of small towns, but only if they agreed to paint their town name on a rooftop for the benefit of other aviators. In communities where he could not land he dropped leaflets that read:
     
Greetings. Because of the limited time and the extensive tour of the United States now in progress to encourage popular interest in aeronautics, it is impossible for the Spirit of St Louis to land in your city. This message from the air, however, is sent you to express our sincere appreciation of your interest in the tour and in the promotion and extension of commercial aeronautics in the United States.
     
    It thereupon urged every citizen, as a matter of national urgency, to work for ‘the establishment of airports and similar facilities’, so that the United States could take ‘its rightful place’ as the world leader in commercial aviation.
    From the start his receptions were chaotic. Excited on lookers and even members of the official greeting parties tended to rush forward to greet the plane as it was still taxiing. This was profoundly unnerving to Lindbergh. He had once seen a man sliced in two by a spinning propeller. Because he had no forward visibility, every landing was effectively blind. At least twice – in Kansas City and Portland, Oregon – he couldn’t land at the intended destination because of crowds on the runway, and had to set down on nearby farmland. Elsewhere, batteries of guns fired in salute of his arrival produced drifting smoke that obscured his visibility further. All in all, he faced more dangers flying around America than he ever had on his flight to Paris.
    To try to keep to schedules, Lindbergh was often driven at high speed along his parade routes, a matter that dismayed spectators and alarmed Lindbergh since onlookers here, too, were inclined to step into the road for a better look.
    An entirely typical day was Lindbergh’s visit to Springfield, Illinois, on 15 August, where he arrived in early afternoon having flown from Chicago by way of Mooseheart, Aurora, Joliet and Peoria. In the one hour and forty-one minutes he was on the ground at Springfield, Lindbergh did the following: made a brief speech at the airfield, was presented to about a hundred local officials, invited to admire and review the 106th Illinois Cavalry and placed in an open-top car for a five-mile dash past 50,000 cheering people waving flags, laid a wreath at the tomb of Abraham Lincoln, and was taken to the local arsenal where he was presented with a gold watch and bathed in a succession of rambling, overwrought speeches. Here is a sampling of the florid tribute paid him by Mayor J. Emil Smith:
     
As he sailed through the silver of that summer dawn, the stars watched with a still delight to see a child of earth so brave riding the air, a comrade of cloud and wind and foaming wave. And as he neared his goal the sun, the sea and the huge unfettered spaces hailed him a victor and chanted to him, ‘Well done.’
     
    All that made the Springfield stop a little different was its extreme familiarity: this had been one of Lindbergh’s working airfields during his stint as an airmail pilot. Indeed, he had chosen the site of the field just fifteen months