One Summer: America, 1927

the great quantities of food and crockery involved – 300 gallons of green turtle soup, 2,000 pounds of fish, 1,500 pounds of Virginia ham, 6,000 pounds of chicken, 125 gallons of peas, 15,000 bread rolls, 2,000 heads of lettuce, 100 gallons of coffee, 800 quarts of ice cream, 12,000 pieces of cake, 300 pounds of butter, 36,000 cups and plates, 50,000 pieces of silver – though it may also be notedthat only rarely did the numbers entirely agree from one publication to the next. Dinner was scheduled to start at seven, but because of the confusion of such a mass of people all searching for the right chairs, it was nine o’clock before everyone was seated and serving could begin. The speeches didn’t start until eleven o’clock – three hours late.
    The increasingly surreal and draining nature of Lindbergh’s life was demonstrated on the evening of 15 June. After a full day of speeches and receptions, he finally got to a performance of Rio Rita , but the audience was so ecstatic to see him that police had to be called in to calm them and the play started more than an hour late. It was nowhere near finished when Lindbergh had to leave to attend a benefit evening for Nungesser and Coli at the new Roxy Theatre. There he sat politely for an hour, before slipping out of a side door and being driven to Mitchel Field, where he pulled on a flying suit over his tuxedo and took off for Washington.
    In Washington, he carefully went over the repairs done to the Spirit of St Louis , climbed into the familiar cockpit and returned with it to New York. At seven thirty in the morning he landed at Mitchel Field, content that he was at last reunited with his beloved ship. After a quick shower and a change of clothes back at the Frazee apartment, he resumed his public engagements on no sleep.
    As it turned out, the plans for Lindbergh on that day were wildly and unrealistically ambitious. He was sent on a long parade through Brooklyn, which included a speech to 200,000 people in Prospect Park, followed by a formal luncheon with a branch of the Knights of Columbus. Then he was to go to Yankee Stadium to meet the Yankees and watch them play the St Louis Browns before speeding back into Manhattan for the presentation of the Orteig Prize at the Hotel Brevoort, followed by yet another formal dinner.
    At Yankee Stadium, three sections of box seats had been freshly painted to receive Lindbergh and his party, and 20,000 fans turnedout to cheer him. Babe Ruth had promised to hit a home run in his honour, but at game time the great aviator was nowhere to be seen. The teams and spectators waited nearly half an hour for Lindbergh to get there, but when word arrived that he was still in Manhattan the umpires started the game without him.
    Baseball seasons unwind slowly and at this stage of proceedings no one had any inkling that this season would prove unusually productive for Ruth or any other Yankees. Just before the season started, Ruth himself told a reporter that he didn’t expect ever to break his 1921 home run record. ‘To do that, you’ve got to start early, and the pitchers have got to pitch to you,’ he said. ‘I don’t start early, and the pitchers haven’t really pitched to me in four seasons.’ As if to prove his point, he left the first game complaining of dizziness and failed to hit with vigour through the first month of the season. By 21 May, the day Lindbergh landed in Paris, Ruth had hit just 9 home runs in thirty-two games.
    Then two things happened. Babe Comes Home went on general release and Ruth suddenly came to life. Goodness knows exactly how the movie galvanized him, but its release coincided neatly and peculiarly with his hitting a lot of home runs – 5 in two days, for one of which, in Philadelphia, the ball was hit so far that it left the park and cleared a two-storey house across the street. By 7 June, Ruth’s total had jumped to 18 – a much more respectable and promising number. Two days later against Chicago at Yankee Stadium, Ruth stole home plate – something that thirty-two-year-old men with paunches didn’t normally do. The season was suddenly getting interesting.
    True to his word, Ruth hit a home run for Lindbergh on Lindbergh Day. It came in the bottom of the first against Tom Zachary, who would yield a rather more momentous home run to Ruth at the end of the season. Lou Gehrig followed Ruth to the plate and hammered a home run to almost exactly the same spot. Lindbergh, alas, never arrived to