THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS (561 pp.]—Charles A. Lindbergh—Scribners ($5).
Few men define their age in a lifetime; Charles Augustus Lindbergh did it in 33½ hours. When The Spirit of St. Louis hopped the Atlantic nonstop from New York to Paris on May 20-21, 1927, the Age of Flight finally came of age. Nowadays, when any weekday finds hundreds of passengers casually making the trans atlantic crossing, the drama is gone. Lind bergh's great and simple epic was that he was the first to fly the Atlantic alone, the first to fly without stop from the U.S. to Europe.*
In The Spirit of St. Louis, a Book-of-the-Month Club choice for September, Airman Lindbergh. 51, gives a full and earnest account of how he planned and piloted his plane to international fame.
Each unassuming page shows why the dizzy decade of Teapot Dome, bathtub gin, flappers, crooners and "It" girls found in him an untarnished symbol of its better self. No Antoine de Saint Exupery, no philosopher of flight, Lindbergh rarely rises to poetic altitudes and sometimes drones on in childhood reveries and me chanical details. But at its exciting best, his book keeps the reader cockpit-close to a rare adventure.
Obscure Mail Pilot. The idea that he could fly the Atlantic came to Lindbergh in his DH4 biplane one moonlit night over Peoria, Ill., while he was flying the mail from St. Louis to Chicago. It is September 1926, and he is not yet 25, but four solid years of barnstorming and army air service have given him an air of quiet confidence that a group of aviation-mind ed St. Louis businessmen cannot resist.
They dig up $15,000 to back his flight; Lindbergh puts in his own life savings of $2,000. There is also a practical incentive: the Orteig Prize of $25,000 for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris, either way.
Finding the right plane is a puzzler; "Rene Fonck, France's World War I ace, has just crashed on the take-off at Roosevelt Field in a trimotored Sikorsky biplane, and two of his crew members have burned to death. Lindbergh distrusts the heavy, intricate, three-engine craft of the day: too much could go wrong. But his backers are cautious; they urge him to go to the renowned Fokker Co. A three-engine plane for such a flight will cost $90,000, the salesman tells him. When Lindbergh mentions a one-engine job, the salesman's voice turns chill: "Mr. Fokker wouldn't consider selling a single-engine plane for a flight over the Atlantic Ocean." Lindbergh finds a plane and price he likes in a Wright-Bellanca, but the company insists on naming the crew. Obscure mail pilots need not apply.
An Odor of Dead Fish. At wit's end by Feb. 3, 1927, Lindbergh dashes off a telegram to an almost unknown San Diego outfit called Ryan Airlines, gets an answer back the next day: "Can build plane . . . Delivery about three months." Lindbergh heads for the coast, finds Ryan Airlines in a dilapidated waterfront building with no flying field, no hangar, no sound of engines—only the pervasive odor of dead fish from a nearby cannery. But the competent chief engineer, Donald Hall, impresses Lindbergh. The order is placed. With five other transatlantic flights poised to go, a race against time begins.