Lindbergh picture collection

Charles Augustus Lindbergh (1902 Feb 4 -1974 Aug 26), aviator, author, biologist, and engineer, was the son of Charles August Lindbergh, a lawyer and congressman, and Evangeline Lodge Land, a science teacher whose father was Dr. Charles Land, a dentist and inventor. Born in Detroit, Lindbergh grew up in Little Falls, Minnesota, and Washington, DC. After studying engineering at the University of Wisconsin for three semesters he left in1922 to become an airplane pilot and barnstormer. In 1925 he graduated first in his class from the United States Army Air Service Flying School and became chief pilot of the new airmail line from St. Louis to Chicago.

On May 21, 1927, Lindbergh completed the first non-stop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris and was awarded the first Distinguished Flying Cross and the Congressional Medal of Honor. This feat, followed by the publication of his best-selling book We, great public receptions in Washington and New York, and an air tour making eighty-two stops in forty-eight states followed by one to Latin America in 1927-1928, revolutionized commercial air service. Lindbergh worked with Juan Trippe, Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart, Will Rogers and others to develop a number of airlines, including Pan American Airways and TWA. After his marriage to Anne Spencer Morrow in 1929, the internationally famous couple conducted scientific air explorations that led to the first transoceanic air passenger service. He and Anne had six children: Charles, Jr.; Jon; Land; Scott; Anne; and Reeve, between 1932 and 1945. The tragic kidnapping and murder of their son Charles, Jr., in 1932 was called “The Crime of the Century.”

In the 1930s Lindbergh became a biomedical engineer with Dr. Alexis Carrel at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) and invented the perfusion pump, a prototype of the artificial heart, documented in their book, The Culture of Organs. To protect their son Jon from unwelcome press attention, the Lindberghs moved to England in 1935 and in 1938 to France to live near Carrel. At the request of the American Embassy in Germany Lindbergh made five trips from 1936 to 1938 to evaluate German air power for the United States State Department. The Lindbergh family returned to the United States in 1939. Before and after World War II, he served in the United States Air Force, but resigned to speak out against American intervention and joined the America First Committee in 1941. During the war Lindbergh served as technical consultant for the Ford Motor Company developing the B-24 bomber and for United Aircraft testing fighter planes. He also conducted air altitude flying tests at the Mayo Clinic using himself as a guinea pig and invented the “jump bottle,” to provide oxygen to flyers when they lost consciousness. As a civilian advisor he flew fifty combat missions in the South Pacific in 1944.

After the war Lindbergh served on numerous government advisory committees concerned with aviation training, national security, and space exploration. In 1954 President Eisenhower promoted him to the rank of brigadier general stating that Lindbergh’s work had significantly shortened the war in the Pacific by enabling pilots to reach many targets formerly beyond their range and thereby saving many lives. In the same year he was awarded the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for his autobiography The Spirit of St. Louis. Billy Wilder directed the movie version starring Jimmy Stewart released in 1957.

Thereafter Lindbergh dedicated himself to conservation causes as an officer and spokesman for the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, and other groups. He announced his growing concerns in a series of articles published in Reader’s Digest, one of which included his most famous quote, “I realized that if I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.” He was successful in persuading the Alaska legislature to alter the planned route of the oil pipeline to mitigate its impact on polar bear migration and some countries to limit their whale harvesting. In 1969 he was awarded the Bernard M. Baruch Conservation Prize for 1968. One of his last successful projects was to convince the United States government not to permit America to support supersonic air transportation. For the last thirty years of his life Lindbergh lived in Connecticut, with homes in Switzerland and in Hana, Maui, where he died of lymphoma in 1974. In 1978, his Autobiography of Values was published posthumously.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906 Jun 22 - 2001 Feb 7), author and aviator, was born Anne Spencer Morrow in Englewood, New Jersey, the daughter of Dwight W. Morrow, an investment banker, diplomat, and United States senator and Elizabeth Reeve Cutter, an educator. She had three siblings, Elisabeth, Dwight, Jr., and Constance. She was educated at Miss Chapin's School and Smith College. During her senior year she was introduced to Charles Augustus Lindbergh in December 1927 at the American Embassy in Mexico City where her father was serving as ambassador. They were married in a secret ceremony in May 1929 at her parents’ estate in Englewood, New Jersey. She wanted to become a professional aviator and undertook an intense study of flying, radio theory, Morse code, and navigation, earning a pilot’s license and setting a transcontinental speed record with her husband in 1930 when she was seven months pregnant. Anne Lindbergh was the first woman in the United States to obtain a glider pilot's license

In July 1931, the Lindberghs took off on an extended survey flight for Pan American Airways over the Arctic Circle in Canada to Japan and China. After the tragic kidnapping and murder of her son Charles Jr., in 1932, she took some comfort in narrating her experiences as co-pilot and navigator in her first book, North to the Orient, published in 1935. The memoir went on to win the National Book Award and launch a celebrated career. After the birth of their second son, Jon, they undertook a second air survey expedition through the North Atlantic spending a happy period of time in Greenland where they mapped the mountain ranges and took air samples. They then flew south through Europe to Africa returning across the South Atlantic to Brazil and north to New York. In 1934, the National Geographic Society recognized her forty thousand miles of exploration with its prestigious Hubbard Award. She was the first woman to receive it.

To protect their son Jon from intrusive publicity, the Lindberghs moved to England in 1935 after the kidnapping and murder trial of Bruno Hauptmann. In 1938 they moved to France to be near her husband’s scientific colleague Alexis Carrel. During those years she wrote about their Atlantic expedition, first for National Geographic and in a second best-selling book, Listen! The Wind, published in 1938. In The Wave of the Future (1940), a book-length essay, she tried to interpret their non-interventionist position to the public. During World War II she was kept busy raising four children: Jon, Land, Scott, and Anne. While Charles worked on bomber development at the Ford factory, Anne found some time to study sculpting at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her last child, Reeve, was born in 1945. From the late 1940s through the 1960s, Anne Lindbergh published a large number of articles and poems in literary, women’s, and general magazines on a variety of personal and international issues. She wrote about the importance of balancing personal needs, social expectations, and obligations to family and community in her most popular and enduring work, Gift from the Sea (1955). Next to the Bible it was the non-fiction best seller of the year and sold 430,000 copies. To date, well over eight million copies have been sold, and at least 30,000 copies are sold annually.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh was motivated to write an essay, "The Heron and the Astronaut," after the Lindberghs attended the Apollo 8 launch from the Kennedy Space Center on December 21, 1968, the astronauts' first flight into the orbit of the moon. It was published in 1969 under the title Earth Shine, with her essay on Africa, "Immersion in Life." The Lindberghs built a modest home in Hana, Maui, Hawaii in 1969-1970. Working with the Nature Conservancy, Anne and Charles Lindbergh made substantial contributions toward the purchase of land in the Valley of the Seven Sacred Pools in Maui to extend Haleakala National Park more than 4000 acres from the inland crater to the ocean. After her husband’s death in 1974, she devoted much of her time to editing and publishing five volumes of her diaries and letters covering her life through the end of World War II.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh was enshrined in the National Aviation Hall of Fame July 21, 1979, "for outstanding contributions to aviation by her participation in pioneering flights surveying air routes to the Orient and Europe, and as an extraordinary author encouraging public appreciation of aviation and air travel.” In the 1990s she moved from her home in Connecticut to her daughter Reeve's family farm in Vermont. Reeve Lindbergh dealt with the last seventeen months of her mother's life in the book No More Words, a sensitive and loving memoir of their time together, published in 2001. In 2012, the fourteenth book of her writings was published, Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947-1986, based on her papers in Manuscripts and Archives.