One Summer: America, 1927

years without a hit, but then he teamed up with Richard Rodgers and between them they put together the greatest run of successes in the history of musicals: Oklahoma! , Carousel , South Pacific , The King and I , Flower Drum Song and The Sound of Music . Hammerstein died in 1960.
     
    Jacob Ruppert , owner of the New York Yankees, suffered a heartattack in early 1939 and died nine days later at the age of sixty-nine. The world was astonished to find that he had left much of his estate, initially valued at between $40 million and $70 million, to a former showgirl named Helen W. Weyant. Miss Weyant confessed to reporters that she and Ruppert had had a secret friendship for many years, but insisted that it was no more than friendship. In the end, Ruppert’s estate turned out to be worth just $6.5 million – the depression had severely hit his real estate holdings – and he had personal debts of $1 million on top. In order to pay the debts and his estate taxes, it was necessary to sell both the Yankees and the Ruppert brewery.
     
    Also dying in 1939, following a long illness, was Raymond Orteig , the amiable hotelier who launched the Orteig Prize.
     
    Gutzon Borglum didn’t quite live to see Mount Rushmore completed. He died in March 1941, of complications following prostate surgery, just a few months before it was finished. He was seventy-three.
     
    Montagu Norman , governor of the Bank of England and close friend of Benjamin Strong, suffered a bizarre accident in 1944 that brought his career to a close. While visiting his brother on his country estate in Hertfordshire, Norman went for a walk in fading light and appears to have tripped over a cow that was resting on the ground. The startled cow may have kicked Norman in the head in scrambling to its feet. Norman never fully recovered and died in 1950 aged seventy-eight.
     
    Alexis Carrel was pushed out of his role at the Rockefeller Institute because his views were becoming too embarrassing. Carrel returned to France and started an institute that specialized in matters outside the scientific mainstream, including telepathy and water divination. He openly supported the Vichy regime and wouldalmost certainly have been tried as a collaborator but died in 1944 before he could be brought to trial. He was seventy-one. At the Nazi war trials at Nuremberg after the war, Carrel’s Man the Unknown was quoted in defence of Nazi eugenics practices.
     
    Also dying in 1944 were two of Chicago’s leading figures. The first to go was Big Bill Thompson , who died in March at the age of seventy-six. The following month, Kenesaw Mountain Landis took his earthly leave at the age of seventy-eight. Landis had spent most of the later part of his career fighting attempts to let blacks play in the major leagues. That ignoble battle was lost in 1947 when Jackie Robinson, the first black major league baseball player, took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
     
    Lindbergh’s mother, Evangeline Lodge Lindbergh , died in 1954 from Parkinson’s disease at the age of seventy-eight. His widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh , produced five other children apart from the murdered Charles Junior, and became a successful and admired writer, mostly of memoirs. She died in 2001 at the ripe age of ninety-four, the last person of consequence to this story to have lived through that long, extraordinary summer.

Ruth Snyder, housewife . . .
     

. . . and her adulterous lover, Judd Gray, a corset salesman. Their inept ‘sash weight murder’ of her husband Albert Snyder was the tabloid sensation of 1927; they were convicted in a lurid trial and sentenced to death.
     

Charles Lindbergh instantly became the most famous person on the planet when he landed his plane, the
Spirit of St Louis
, at Le Bourget airfield in Paris on 21 May 1927. But as this typical deadpan expression suggests, the experience of fame brought him little joy.
     

Lindbergh’s appearance on the Washington mall on 11 June 1927 attracted the largest crowd in the city’s history to date. Virtually every radio in America coast-to-coast was tuned in to the broadcast event.
     

A less than jubilant Lindbergh ( left ) with the obviously ecstatic British aviator Sir Alan Cobham ( centre ) and the American ambassador Myron Herrick greet the crowd outside the French Aéro-Club in Paris.
     

Wherever he landed, Lindbergh attracted a huge crowd. Here his plane is dangerously mobbed at Croydon Aerodome in Surrey.
     

His ticker-tape parade up