On the junket down the river that day, I sat well out toward the rail, watching Glenn Martin’s first T4M torpedoplane overhead with its new Pratt and Whitney Hornet going through its one-hour, full-throttle endurance trial. It was oppressively hot and I was nervous about that engine; we thought Glenn had cowled it too close, trying to get speed at the cost of cooling. Lindbergh sat inboard near a cabin skylight, surrounded by important personages and looking very boyish. And while I watched the T4M, listening to every engine throb, I found myself beginning to take notice of the conversation in which I had expected to find no interest. The older, more experienced men agreed that Lindbergh had done a swell job so far, but they reminded him that fame was fleeting; if he expected to capitalize on his achievement, he must strike while the iron was hot. Of course he shouldn’t try anything dizzy; his job was to prove how safe aviation is. It seemed likely that he might do a good motion picture, a sort of educational movie. He could act out the early history of the flight: the meeting with his backers, the days spent building his plane with Claude Ryan in San Diego, his trials and tribulations, and finally the take-off and landing at Le Bourget. It could be conservative and refined. To this suggestion Lindbergh replied to the effect that he hated to seem ungrateful, but he had no intention of going into the movies. If he were to go into the movies, someone would try to make a sheik out of him and he didn’t think he would make much of a sheik. At this comment, I moved a little closer to the cabin skylight. His advisors now shifted over to the possibilities of Slim’s becoming interested in the air lines. After all, he’d had experience as a mail pilot and could easily take over something big. Maybe Bill Boeing of Seattle would be interested in taking him on—think of all the publicity it would bring. Lindbergh’s reply to this was again that he disliked appearing ungrateful. It was true he had had some experience in air transport, but he wasn’t too proud of the fact that he had had to parachute from two of his planes and had lost them both. He didn’t know anything much about transportation, and if he went into something he didn’t know about he would likely make a fool of himself. He hoped that from here on he might not make any bigger fool of himself than he had made already. It now began to appear that a lot more sense was coming from the advised than from the advisors; I moved over and sat down near Jerry Land, who grinned proudly at me. Overhead the Martin T4M seemed to be droning along with confidence.