One Summer: America, 1927

he lay in silent agony for three days awaiting the arrival of a doctor from St Cloud, forty miles away. When the doctor at last reached him, he took off the arm and sewed up the gaping cavity. It was said that Lindbergh made almost no sound. Remarkably, August Lindbergh recovered and lived another thirty years. Stoicism became the Lindbergh family’s most cultivated trait.
    Charles Lindbergh’s father, who had arrived in America as a Swedish-speaking toddler named Karl August Månsson, grew up into a strapping but cheerless young man named Charles August Lindbergh. Friends and colleagues called him C. A. As a youth, C. A. became adroit at trapping muskrats, whose pelts furriers made into jackets and stoles which they marketed under the more appealing name of ‘Hudson seal’. C. A. made enough from the trade to put himself through the University of Michigan law school. Upon qualifying, he opened a law office in Little Falls, Minnesota, married, produced three daughters, and prospered sufficiently to build a large wooden house on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River about a mile and a half outside town. All was eminently well with his life until the spring of 1898 when his wife died suddenly from surgery to remove an abdominal growth.
    Three years later, C. A. married again – this time a pretty,rather intense young chemistry teacher from Detroit who had recently taken a position at Little Falls High School. Evangeline Lodge Land was unusually well educated for a woman, for the time and for Little Falls. She, too, had graduated from Michigan, but was even more academic than her husband and would later do graduate work at Columbia. Beyond physical attraction – they were both extremely good-looking – the new Mr and Mrs Lindbergh had little in common. C. A. Lindbergh was handsome but severe and measured. His wife was brittle and demanding. On 4 February 1902, they produced another C. A. Lindbergh – this one named Charles August us , with an extra, more classically refined syllable on the second name. From his father Charles inherited a dimpled chin and perpetually tousled hair, from his mother dreaminess, and from both a tendency to be headstrong. He was the only child they would have together. Young Charles – he was never Charlie or anything more relaxed and familiar – grew up in a household that was comfortable and well looked after (the family kept three servants) but lacking in warmth. Both his parents were almost wholly incapable of showing affection. Lindbergh and his mother never hugged. At bedtime, they shook hands. As both boy and man, Charles signed letters to his father ‘Sincerely, C. A. Lindbergh’, as if corresponding with his bank manager.
    Charles was a shy, rather dreamy boy. He made so little impression on Little Falls that when journalists descended on the town in 1927 looking for anecdotes from his boyhood none of his ex-schoolmates could think of any. Lindbergh himself in adulthood said that he had no memories at all of his daily life as a youngster. In his first autobiographical effort, called We , he gave just eighteen lines to his childhood.
    In 1906, when Charles was not quite five, his father was elected to Congress as a Republican, which meant that young Charles divided his time between Little Falls, which he loved, and Washington, which he did not. This gave Charles an eventful but disrupted childhood. He enjoyed experiences that other childrencould only dream of – he played in the grounds of the White House and in the halls of the Capitol building, visited the Panama Canal at the age of eleven, went to school with the sons of Theodore Roosevelt – but he moved around so much that he never really became part of anything.
    As the years passed, his parents grew increasingly estranged. At least once, according to Lindbergh’s biographer A. Scott Berg, his mother held a gun to his father’s head (after learning that he was sleeping with his stenographer), and at least once in fury he struck her. By the time Charles was ten years old, they were living permanently apart, though they kept it secret for the sake of Charles senior’s political career. Charles attended eleven different schools before graduating from high school, and distinguished himself at each by his mediocrity. In the autumn of 1920, he entered the University of Wisconsin, hoping to become an engineer. Charles survived in large part by having his mother write his papers for him, but ultimately even that