One Summer: America, 1927

not working. They were never quite sure where they were at any point after that. Luckily Europe was a big target and Chamberlin was the world’s most laid-back pilot. It was just a question of going in the right direction, he insisted.
    Chamberlin was about to become – albeit briefly and somewhat tepidly – nearly as famous as Lindbergh. Thirty-three years old in the summer of 1927, he came from Denison, Iowa, a town much like Lindbergh’s Little Falls one state to the north, though slightly more in the mainstream as it was on the Lincoln Highway. Chamberlin’s father ran a jewellery store and repair shop, so the family was comfortable. Growing up in Denison at the same time was a girl named Donna Mullenger, who would later become famous as the actress Donna Reed. Today people in Denison remember her with great fondness. Hardly anyone remembers Clarence Chamberlin.
    Chamberlin’s mother was English and, for reasons unknown,when Clarence was about ten she moved back to England, taking Clarence with her. Chamberlin’s autobiography is wondrously unrevealing on all aspects of his private life – he doesn’t even disclose his wife’s first name; she is simply ‘Mrs Chamberlin’ throughout – and he says nothing of his English interlude other than that he hated it. After about a year, they returned to Denison and family life resumed as before.
    After high school, Clarence attended Iowa State College, as it then was, and acquired a degree in engineering. He learned to fly while serving with the Signal Corps during the First World War. He became a flight instructor and never saw battle – indeed, never left America. Like most pilots, after the war Chamberlin took whatever work he could find. For a time he was an aerial photographer. Several well-known photographs of important events as seen from the air, including Yankee Stadium on its grand opening in 1923, were taken by Chamberlin. Like Lindbergh, he had also crashed a lot of planes – about ten, by his own estimation – and was involved in a fatal crash in an air race in 1925 when a passenger riding with him was killed. Chamberlin didn’t actually know the passenger – it was just a young man who asked if he could go along for the ride. Oddly, Chamberlin seems never to have bothered to learn his identity. In his autobiography, Chamberlin merely records that he himself was knocked unconscious in the crash and learned afterwards ‘that my companion had been killed’. Chamberlin was seriously injured and was told by doctors that he probably wouldn’t walk again, but clearly he proved them wrong. He was, if nothing else, fearless.
     
    Early on the morning of 5 June, passengers on the Cunard liner Mauretania , bound for New York from Cherbourg, were startled to see an aeroplane drop out of the sky and circle the ship just above deck level. The plane was recognized at once as the Columbia . Most of the passengers – who by chance included Raymond Orteig, returning to America from his summer home in France to presentLindbergh with the Orteig Prize the following week – assumed the visit of the Columbia was a kind of salute. The two men aboard waved in a friendly manner. In fact, Chamberlin was trying to find out where he was. He was looking for the ship’s name, to check against a list of sailing times in a copy of the New York Times he was carrying. Knowing how long the ship had been at sea would give him an idea of how much ocean he still had to cross. As it happened, he only just missed dropping down on the Memphis and being able to exchange waves with a presumably bemused Charles Lindbergh. Using the Mauretania ’s wake as a kind of pointer, Chamberlin adjusted his course, rose back into the clouds and carried on towards Europe.
    That was the last anyone heard of him or Levine for many hours, but on the morning of 6 June, after nearly two days in the air, they came down in a field somewhere in north-eastern Germany. Remarkably, neither Chamberlin nor Levine had thought to pack any maps of Europe, so they had no clear idea where they were. They had been in the air for nearly forty-three hours and had flown 3,905 miles, breaking both Lindbergh’s distance and duration records by considerable margins. The first person to greet them was a farmer’s wife who was furious at the damage their plane had done to her cereal crop. Among others to turn up was – by rather extraordinary good luck – an aeroplane mechanic who was home visiting his mother. He