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In this new humility, Lindbergh has rediscovered a reverence for wildlife that traces back to his farm boyhood in Minnesota. He has become a director of the World Wild Life Fund, works at fund raising and even writes his own pulling letters ("Let us not be a generation recorded in future histories as destroying the irreplaceable inheritance of life formed through eons past"). He continues his interest in medicine, spends a lot of his time in a laboratory at the Navy's medical-research center in Bethesda, Md., working on new equipment with patience and precision.
The Frozen Moment
Lindbergh is still almost pathological about guarding his privacy, though age and a receding hairline have made him almost indistinguishable from other commuters in Darien, Conn., where he has lived in recent years. He has five grown children (three sons, two daughters). Occasionally he appears in Washington's Smithsonian Institution and gazes up at the Spirit of St. Louis, dangling there, fragile but painstakingly guarded against rust and oblivion. He is seldom recognized. Yet any associate or friend who talks to a reporter about him is deprived of the light of his countenance. Typically, he refused to have any part in ceremonies celebrating the 40th anniversary of his flight. As a replica of the Spirit rose from Le Bourget, Charles A. Lindbergh was beyond radio contact or telephone in a game preserve in Java, hoping to catch a glimpse of a rare species of rhino.
A difficult man. A gifted man. Probably a great man. But certainly a hero. The usual fate of heroes is to be frozen in history at the moment of their triumph. At 65, Lindbergh may find the 25-year-old boy as awkwardly remote as would any other aging hero facing his youth. Yet it is significant that he was able to move on to do other things, live other lives—to be active, useful and himself. The quiet foreground formed by his recent years renders the memory all the brighter: the memory of the youth with the world's imagination in his hands, showing what man is and can become—on his own.