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He was indeed alone. His father, a lawyer and later an obstreperous Populist Congressman, died when Charles was 21, and long before that had become estranged from Charles's schoolteacher mother. In the strange confraternity of barnstormers, few were really intimate, and none had a home—they met only over coffee in shacks near the local airport, briefly shared rooms in some nearby boardinghouse. In this rough camaraderie of essential strangers, the young Lindbergh was addicted to practical jokes, which for those who lack a sense of real human contact are often a last attempt to communicate. He put snakes in beds, made power dives with passengers given to airsickness. But he never seemed either happy or go-lucky. He cultivated his body as a trust; he not only refused to drink or smoke but also gave up coffee for fear it would spoil his reflexes. He once made up a list of 61 "character factors" in his diary, checked off his score at the end of each day.
And he was not really modest. From the start, he had a sense of being apart, endowed with special purpose. Once he had concluded that somebody could fly nonstop and solo from New York to Paris, he decided that it might as well be he. The whole business of financing and designing his plane seems in retrospect hair-raisingly slapdash. But he knew exactly what he was doing. Examining reports of earlier crashes, he figured that everything had to be subordinated to saving weight; for instance, elaborate equipment for a forced landing, he decided, was not worth the cost in weight, which could be better used for extra fuel. Similarly, he decided to fly a Great Circle course rather than follow the ship lanes, where he might be picked up in case of failure. Everyone else had taken or planned to take a navigator along; Lindbergh figured a navigator was equivalent in weight to 50 gallons of gasoline, and he needed the gasoline more than the navigation.
Medicine & War
After a week of waiting in New York for a stubborn spring storm to lift, he was on his way to see a musical comedy when he learned that the weather was improving. At midnight, he went to bed to try to catch two hours' sleep. He could not sleep, rose at 2:15, and watched his plane being gassed up and trundled into position on the runway at Roosevelt Field (when he finally touched down, he had been without sleep for roughly 54 hours). Several men pushed frantically on the struts to get him started, lumbering through mud puddles. He cleared a tractor (who left a tractor just there?) by 15 feet, the telephone wires by 20, and was off.