One Summer: America, 1927

notable about the fight was that only half the tickets were sold.Boxing without Dempsey was not the draw it had been. The promoters lost over $150,000.
     
    In early September, from South America there came an intriguing story. A French engineer named Roger Courteville, while making a journey by car from Rio de Janeiro to Lima – the first coast-to-coast crossing of South America by motorized vehicle, in itself an extraordinary story – announced that en route, along a lonely track in Mato Grosso state, he had come upon the missing English explorer Percy Fawcett, last seen hunting for the fabled lost city of Z in the jungles beyond Fordlandia. At the time of their encounter, Courteville didn’t realize who Fawcett was, so didn’t report his discovery.
    In accounts he later wrote for the New York Times , Courteville said that he was brought up short by the sight of a grey-haired white man, about sixty years old, sitting by a rutted track in the middle of nowhere. ‘He was wearing shorts, a khaki shirt and old thick-soled shoes, which were tied to his stockingless feet by the fibers of swamp plants,’ Courteville reported. ‘His hands were shaking with fever.’ Courteville particularly noted that the man’s bare legs were swarming with mosquitoes. Courteville spoke to him in Portuguese but got no reply, then tried English. He asked the man why he allowed the mosquitoes to browse so freely on his legs.
    ‘They are hungry, the poor devils,’ the man replied flatly in an English accent. That, remarkably, was the extent of their conversation.
    ‘The stranger, after the manner of Englishmen, was unresponsive and disinclined to talk about himself and his affairs,’ Courteville went on. So, amazingly, Courteville got back in his car without making any effort to determine the man’s identity, render assistance, or even to ask what he was doing there. He just drove on and casually reported the encounter to an official in Lima when he got there some months later.
    The official got very excited because Fawcett was the most famous missing man in South America.
    As it turned out, the man Courteville encountered could not have been Fawcett. For one thing, Fawcett was bald and this man had long hair. So who he was and how he had got there were great mysteries. No one knew of any other Englishman who had gone into the jungle and not come out again.
    Courteville’s discovery, even though it wasn’t Fawcett, stirred interest in Fawcett anew. A British-American adventurer named George Miller Dyott announced plans to lead a search party into the 50,000 square miles of tangled wilderness in which Fawcett might reasonably be supposed to be. Supported by ten mules, sixty-four bullocks and a small army of guides and porters, Dyott spent months hacking his way into the interior and nearly died himself, but didn’t find Fawcett or Courteville’s mysterious Englishman or anyone else who wasn’t known to be there already. Then two more people, a Swiss man and a reporter from United Press International, embarked on a separate expedition, but were never heard from again at all. From England, Fawcett’s wife said people should stop their searching. She told reporters that she was in touch with her husband telepathically, and that he was fine and would come out when he was ready. He never did.
     
    On 2 September, en route to Cheyenne, Wyoming, Charles Lindbergh flew over Rapid City High School and the State Game Lodge where the Coolidges had made their home for the summer. President Coolidge came out and waved a handkerchief. Lindbergh dropped special messages at both places. The one at the game lodge was never found.
    Seeing how tired Lindbergh had become, those responsible for his tour instituted a rule that he would provide no more than four and a half hours of personal appearances a day – two and a half hours of parades and speeches by day and two hours of banqueting at night. Everything would have to be compressed to fit into that timetable.
    Newspapers continued to report his progress around thecountry, but with more of a sense of duty than of enthusiasm, and the stories nearly always now appeared on inside pages. Only occasionally did something mildly out of the ordinary happen. In Abilene, Texas, Lindbergh arrived to find that the organizers had fitted his parade vehicle with a throne. Embarrassed at such a display of grandeur, Lindbergh refused to sit in it, and it had to be removed. That was about as interesting as