HEROES: Lindbergh Landing

For anyone with a sincere desire to keep out of the limelight, the advisability of making a solo flight from the U. S. to Europe is open to question. Whether, having made the first non-stop solo flight from the U. S. to Europe in 1927, Charles Augustus Lindbergh thereby justified the U. S. press in considering that his private life was public property is open to question also. Last week, the sad and puzzling problem of the No. 1 U. S. hero’s relation to the No. 1 U. S. institution of hero-worship was raised once more when, completely unheralded and completely uncommunicative, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Augustus Lindbergh returned from England, where they have lived since 1935, to visit the U. S.

A rumor that Col. Lindbergh intended to come home started a few weeks ago in St. Louis. Major Albert Bond Lambert, one of the backers of the 1927 flight, announced that he had received a letter in which the Colonel said he hoped to be in St. Louis “very soon.” A New York Times reporter named Lauren Lyman, who acted as Colonel Lindbergh’s “go-between” with the press during the Hauptmann trial and later broke the news of the Lindbergh decision to live abroad, has been the newspaper world’s best authority on all Lindbergh activities. Transferred to his paper’s Washington branch, Reporter Lyman had heard nothing about the impending visit and the rumor presently died. Last week, when the U. S. Liner President Harding docked in New York, city editors were under the impression that the only conceivably newsworthy figures on board were the members of a Chechoslovakian Trade-Treaty Commission. Consequently, there were on hand only the run-of-the-mill ship-news reporters, a Fox Movietone Newsreel cameraman, and a Wide World photographer named Kenneth Lucas, assigned to pick up a package and get a shot of the Czechs. Photographer Lucas was on the deck trying to find the Commission when he spied a familiar figure rushing down the third-class gangplank. Recognizing Mrs. Lindbergh, he pursued her onto the dock, contrived to get a few blurred shots before the Colonel and his wife, leaving their baggage to be called for later, got into a car and drove away (see cut).

The fact that the President Harding docked on a Sunday morning gave newspapers time enough to discover at least how one of the world’s most famed individuals had kept the news of his whereabouts a secret for a week. In Weald, Kent, where the Lindberghs’ children, Jon and Land, remained last week, villagers are trained to secrecy about the Lindberghs. They booked passage as Mr. and Mrs. Gregory. Embarking at Southampton, Colonel Lindbergh wore dark glasses, remained unrecognized. For the first 24 hours of the voyage, he and his wife stayed in their cabins. To a steward, sent to invite them to sit at Captain James E. Roberts’ table, the Colonel said: “You undoubtedly recognize me. I am Colonel Lindbergh and I do not want any publicity at all.”

The Lindberghs accepted Captain Roberts’ invitation. Recognized immediately by all the President Harding’-65 cabin-class passengers, they took their meals for the remainder of the crossing with the Captain, a U. S. Naval attache and his wife, and the Very Rev. Dr. Spencer Cecil Carpenter, Dean of Exeter Cathedral, who on landing last week was somewhat bewildered to find himself an object of intense interest to U. S. reporters. Captains of ships at sea have the right to censor radiograms. Captain Roberts gave orders that no message divulging the Lindberghs’ whereabouts was to be transmitted. Mrs. Barney Powell, wife of Fox Movietone’s Far Eastern supervisor, radioed the company to have cameramen meet the boat without giving a reason. The Lindberghs were met by the U. S. Line’s Vice President Basil Harris and its astonished pressagent who helped them get away before the army of reporters arrived just in time to interview less newsworthy figures—including the ship’s photographer who, in a week of constant effort on board, had managed to get only one shot of the Lindberghs taken through a skylight while they were at dinner.

That Colonel Lindbergh had neatly won the first round of his game of hide and seek with the U. S. press by no means indicated that the game was over. Guessing that he had gone from the dock to the Englewood, N. J. home of Mrs. Lindbergh’s mother, Mrs. Dwight Morrow, reporters went there first. They found telephone wires newly strung from the gatekeeper’s lodge to the house, a quarter of a mile away. Whether Colonel Lindbergh was there, how long he planned to stay, why he had come home and all the other questions the press wanted to ask him remained—like the question of when the mutual misunderstanding and suspicion between Colonel Lindbergh and the press would end—unanswered.