Charles Lindbergh

Charles Lindbergh Poems

Science, freedom, beauty, adventure:
What more could you ask of life?
Aviation combined all the elements I loved.
...

Charles Lindbergh Biography

Charles Augustus Lindbergh (February 4, 1902 – August 26, 1974), nicknamed Slim, Lucky Lindy, and The Lone Eagle, was an American aviator, author, inventor, military officer, explorer, and social activist. As a 25-year-old U.S. Air Mail pilot, Lindbergh emerged suddenly from virtual obscurity to instantaneous world fame as the result of his Orteig Prize-winning solo nonstop flight on May 20–21, 1927, made from the Roosevelt Field[N 1] in Garden City on New York's Long Island to Le Bourget Field in Paris, France, a distance of nearly 3,600 statute miles (5,800 km), in the single-seat, single-engine, purpose-built Ryan monoplane Spirit of St. Louis. As a result of this flight, Lindbergh was the first person in history to be in New York one day and Paris the next. The record setting flight took 33 hours and 30 minutes. Lindbergh, a U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve officer, was also awarded the nation's highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his historic exploit. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Lindbergh used his fame to promote the development of both commercial aviation and Air Mail services in the United States and the Americas. In March 1932, his infant son, Charles, Jr., was kidnapped and murdered in what was soon dubbed the "Crime of the Century". It was described by journalist H. L. Mencken, as "... the biggest story since the resurrection." The kidnapping eventually led to the Lindbergh family's being "driven into voluntary exile" in Europe, to which they sailed in secrecy from New York under assumed names in late December 1935 to "seek a safe, secluded residence away from the tremendous public hysteria" in America. The Lindberghs returned to the United States in April 1939. Before the United States formally entered World War II, Lindbergh had been an outspoken advocate of keeping the U.S. out of the world conflict, as had his father, Congressman Charles August Lindbergh, during World War I. Although Lindbergh was a leader in the antiwar America First movement, he nevertheless strongly supported the war effort after Pearl Harbor and flew 50 combat missions in the Pacific Theater of World War II as a civilian consultant, though President Franklin D. Roosevelt had refused to reinstate his Army Air Corps colonel's commission from which he had resigned in April 1941. In his later years, Lindbergh became a prolific prize-winning author, international explorer, inventor, and environmentalist.)

The Best Poem Of Charles Lindbergh

Untitled

Science, freedom, beauty, adventure:
What more could you ask of life?
Aviation combined all the elements I loved.
There was science in each curve of an airfoil,
in each angle between strut and wire,
in the gap of a spark plug
or the color of the exhaust pipe.
There was freedom in the unlimited horizon,
on the open fields where one landed.
A pilot was surrounded by beauty of earth and sky.
He brushed treetops with the birds,
leapt valleys and rivers,
explored the cloud canyons he had gazed at as a child.
Adventure lay in each puff of the wind.
I began to feel that I lived on a higher plane
than the skeptics of the ground,
one that was richer because of its very association
with the element of danger they dreaded,
because it was free of the earth
to which they were bound.
In flying, I tasted the wine of the gods
of which they could know nothing.
Who valued life more highly,
the aviators who spent it on the art they loved,
or these misers who doled it out,
like pennies through their ant like days?
I decided that if I could fly for ten years
before I was killed in a crash,
it would be a worthwhile trade
for an ordinary lifetime.

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