“Well, the honors they heaped on Lindy in France and England and Belgium were nothing to what was waiting for him when he got back to the United States. New York turned out, it seemed, to a man. They had a parade miles long, with Lindy the chief attraction, sitting on top of an open car, smiling at the mobs of screaming, shouting people all along the way. It rained ticker tape for hours, and people in offices tore up telephone books and added the bits of paper to the rainstorm. Nobody could do enough for the Colonel.” Bob looked around at the group. “He wasn’t the Captain any more,” he explained. “He was now Colonel Lindbergh. Well, anyway, there were banquets and parties, until Lindy had to leave. St. Louis started where New York left off. After all it was St. Louis where Lindy had found his backers, and naturally they were pretty proud of him there. Slim took it all smiling, just as modest as he’d been from the beginning. There was no fussing him. And the people loved it. Slim was the most talked-about hero the United States has ever adopted. Why, you remember that almost everything from candy-bars to swimming suits were named after him—and a whole lot of new babies, too. All the kids in America were crazy about him, and they all wore aviator’s helmets and made plans to become aviators as soon as they were old enough. It seems that Lindy’s plan was pretty successful. He wanted to get people to talking and thinking about airplanes, and believe me, they didn’t talk or think about much else from the time he set out from Roosevelt field.” “You’d think that he’d be tired and ready for a rest after his flight, and his receptions, but even though he may have been tired, he thought he’d strike while the iron was hot, and follow up his good work, this business of getting people aviation conscious. And I guess, too, he felt that he owed something to the people of the United States for being so kind to him, so Lindy set out on a trip around the country. He stopped at almost every important city, and covered every state in the union. He traveled almost 20,000 miles. And that’s some traveling. Just think if he’d had to travel that distance in a train! He’d be going yet. Well, every place that he stopped gave him three rousing cheers, and then some. You’d think that by that time he’d be pretty tired. If it had been me, I’d have turned around and bitten some of the welcoming committee. But not Lindy. He stuck it out, and smiled at them all. “And after the country-wide tour was over, he took his Mexican and Central American and South American trip. It was this trip that clinched his name of ‘Good Will Ambassador,’ although he’d been one to all of the European countries that he went to. In December, seven months after his famous flight, he pointed the nose of the old Spirit of St. Louis south, and lit out for Mexico City.