One Summer: America, 1927

Pennsylvania before finally landing at Mitchel Field on Long Island on 23 October. In three months he had flown 22,350 miles, visited 82 cities, delivered 147 speeches, ridden 1,285 miles in parades, and been seen by an estimated 30 million people, about one quarter of the American populace. His last official engagement was a dinner in Manhattan in honour of Raymond Orteig.
    And then – it must have seemed like a miracle – he was free. After five months of unceasing attention, it was all over. Except ofcourse that it wasn’t. It was never going to be over. Lindbergh was now attached to a fame that he could never get away from. He had little idea what he would do next. How he would fill the rest of his life was a problem that would, as it were, fill the rest of his life.
    On 27 October, Lindbergh turned up unexpectedly at Curtiss Field, saying that he had ‘not done much flying lately’ – a curious declaration coming just four days after the finish of a 22,350-mile trip. The Spirit of St Louis was being serviced after the long tour, so Lindbergh asked if he could borrow a plane. The Curtiss ground crew gladly provided one, and Lindbergh spent a blissful hour alone and at peace in the sky.
    Upon landing he found awaiting him the most terrifying experience of the summer. Twenty chorus girls had just arrived at the airfield for a photo shoot. Their visit was entirely coincidental and had nothing to do with him, but they were naturally excited to learn that the world’s most eligible bachelor was just the other side of a hangar door, and they gleefully laid siege to the building, peering through the grimy windows and calling through cracks in the door, beseeching him to come out so that they could tousle his hair and drape themselves over him. Lindbergh seriously looked as if he might die. Seeing his anguish, the airfield manager had a car brought round to the hangar’s back door. Relieved and grateful, Lindbergh leapt in and sped off, narrowly averting an unendurable encounter with twenty cheerfully adoring young women.
    It would probably have done no good to remind Lindbergh that he had just spent the summer meeting presidents and kings, addressing crowds so large that they filled whole landscapes, receiving tributes on a scale never before accorded a human being. At the end of it all the most famous man in the world was, it seems, still just a kid.
     
    A reasonable question to ask, if not such an easy one to answer, is what was it about Charles Lindbergh and his 1927 flight to Paristhat so transfixed the world? In good measure, clearly, it was Lindbergh himself – the fact that he was boyish and wholesome, that he did it alone, that he behaved with such modesty and aplomb in the immediate aftermath of the flight. To this could be added the pure enchantment of knowing that an ocean could now be crossed. The thought that an aeroplane could leave New York and reappear hours later in Paris or Los Angeles or Havana, as if rematerializing from thin air, seemed almost the stuff of science fiction.
    For Americans, there was also the gratifying novelty of coming first at something. It is a little hard to imagine now, but Americans in the 1920s had grown up in a world in which most of the most important things happened in Europe. Now suddenly America was dominant in nearly every field – in popular culture, finance and banking, military might, invention and technology. The centre of gravity for the planet was moving to the other side of the world, and Charles Lindbergh’s flight somehow became the culminating expression of that.
    None of this, of course, explains 100,000 Parisians streaming across the grass at Le Bourget to greet the taxiing Spirit of St Louis , or four million turning out in New York, or all the renamed mountains and beacons and boulevards. All that can be said is that for some unknowable reason Lindbergh’s flight brought the world a moment of sublime, spontaneous, unifying joy on a scale never before seen. Charles Lindbergh would for evermore be the touchstone for that feeling. It was of course an impossible obligation.
     
    Nearly nine decades have passed since the summer of 1927, and not a great deal survives. The airfields of Long Island are long gone. Roosevelt Field closed in 1951. Today it is a 110-acre shopping centre, the biggest in New York State. The spot where Lindbergh and the others took off is marked by a plaque underneath an escalator near the Disney store. A statue called