One Summer: America, 1927

passenger could board a DC-3 at 4 p.m. in New York and arrive in Los Angeles for breakfast the next morning. The age of modern air travel had truly begun.
    ‘And this all happened in less than a decade,’ Spencer says, indicating the full range of marvels around us. ‘That’s what Lindbergh’s flight achieved.’
    ‘But wouldn’t it have happened anyway?’ I ask.
    ‘Sure,’ Spencer agrees. ‘But it wouldn’t have happened so fast and it wouldn’t have been so overwhelmingly American.’
     
    Lindbergh’s flight, it has been calculated, spurred as much as $100 million in aviation investments in America. In the mid-1920s, Boeing, a small manufacturer of aeroplanes in Seattle, had so little work that it sometimes built furniture just to keep going. Within a year of Lindbergh’s flight it employed a thousand people. Aviation became to the 1930s what radio was to the 1920s. Lindbergh himself was tireless in his promotion of the industry. Barely had he finished his national tour than Dwight Morrow, newly installed as American ambassador in Mexico, asked him if he would make a goodwill visit to the country. It was an audacious request. Mexico was on the edge of revolution. Bandits had recently attacked a train travelling from Mexico City to Los Angeles and killed several passengers, including a young American schoolteacher named Florence Anderson. Morrow and his wife travelled in armoured vehicles. This was no place in which to have a lost airman come down.
    Lindbergh accepted the invitation without hesitation, however, and immediately laid plans for a tour of Central America and the Caribbean that was nearly as ambitious, and often would prove even more hair-raising, than his trip around America. Remarkably, he would fund the trip himself.
    On 13 December, just six weeks after finishing the US tour, Lindbergh took off from Bolling Field in Washington, DC, bound for Mexico City. The flight, though only two thirds the distance of his Paris trip, was nonetheless epic. Unable to find a good map of Mexico, he flew with one that was little better than a page torn from a high school geography book. So long as he kept to the Gulf Coast, he could hold his bearings, but once he turned inland at Tampico he had nothing to guide him but instinct. The only town he passed was not shown on his map, and the scattered rail lines he encountered didn’t lead him anywhere productive. Eventually, hehappened on a lonely eminence that he took to be Mount Toluca, and realized that he had gone considerably past his target. By the time he turned round and found his way to Valbuena Airfield, he had been in the air for 27 hours and 15 minutes and was hours late.
    When Lindbergh’s plane touched down at 2.30 in the afternoon, a crowd of 150,000 rushed forward in such jubilation that it picked up the plane and carried it to the hangar. Dwight Morrow, who had been waiting on a dais with President Plutarco Calles and an assortment of dignitaries since eight in the morning, was the most relieved man in the western hemisphere.
    For the next two months, Lindbergh toured the region, often flying through wild weather or landing at dangerously inadequate airfields. Everywhere he was greeted by throngs and hailed as a hero. Roads and schools and rivers and cocktails and vast numbers of children were named after him. He visited Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba and the Panama Canal Zone, but he spent Christmas in Mexico City with the Morrows. Also there for the holidays was the Morrows’ daughter Anne. She was a senior at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts – coincidentally, Calvin Coolidge’s home town. Anne was shy, attractive, smart and wonderfully self-contained. Lindbergh was smitten. He had his first girlfriend. Soon they would be engaged. In sixteen months they would be married.
     
    Upon his return to America, Lindbergh almost at once was summoned to heroic action again. An aeroplane flown from Ireland by two Germans and an Irishman had crash-landed in eastern Canada on a remote dot of land called Greenly Island off the coast of Labrador. It was the first successful east-to-west crossing of the Atlantic by plane, but now the airmen were stranded. To their aid flew Floyd Bennett and Bernt Balchen. Bennett, it may be remembered, was the flyer who had nearly been killed in the crash ofRichard Byrd’s