"We" : $b The famous flier's own story of his life and his trans-Atlantic flight, together with his views on the future of aviationLindbergh, Charles A. (Charles Augustus)
History
"We" : $b The famous flier's own story of his life and his trans-Atlantic flight, together with his views on the future of aviation
Lindbergh, Charles A. (Charles Augustus)
Aeronautics -- Flights; Air pilots -- Biography; Transatlantic flights
For the evening he managed to escape to the home of a friend where he
got a little much-needed rest, though reporters and business solicitors
still swarmed about him. Saturday morning came the huge city parade
with luncheon and banquet to follow. Sunday he gave an exhibition
flight over the old World’s Fair grounds. Not an hour, scarcely a
waking minute, was he free from demands upon his time and attention.
By this time his mail had exceeded the wildest imagination. It was
estimated that more than 2,000,000 letters and several hundred thousand
telegrams were sent him. He gave out the following statement:
“To the Press: As an air mail pilot I deeply appreciate the sentiment
which actuated my countrymen to welcome me home by ‘air mail,’ and
regret only that I have no way in which to acknowledge individually
every one of the tens of thousands of ‘air mail’ greetings I have
received, for my heart is in the ‘air mail’ service, and I would like
to help keep alive the air-consciousness of America which my good
fortune may have helped to awaken.”
By this time statisticians began to get busy. One official association
estimated that the tremendous increase of interest in flying developed
by Lindbergh’s feat caused publications in the United States to use
25,000 tons of newsprint in addition to their usual consumption.
Roughly 5,000 poems were believed to have been written to commemorate
the first New York to Paris flight. A town was named “Lindbergh.”
Scores of babies were reported christened after the flier. An enormous
impetus was given the use of air mail.
Inspired editorials were written in every part of the civilized world.
The following from the _New York Times_ suitably completes this very
superficial record of the early Lindbergh welcome by mankind:
“Such a man is one in a host. In treating of the psychology of those
who adore Lindbergh it must first be set down that he has the qualities
of heart and head that all of us would like to possess. When he left
Newfoundland behind, the dauntless fellow seemed to have a rendezvous
with Death, but his point of view was that he had an engagement in
Paris. Two gallant Frenchmen had lost their lives, it was believed,
in an attempt to fly across the Atlantic to the United States. An
American, unknown to fame, in whom no one but himself believed, made
the passage smoothly, swiftly and surely, traveling alone and almost
unheralded. From New York to Paris, without a hand to clasp or a face
to look into, was a deed to lose one’s head over. And that’s what
everybody in France, Belgium and England proceeded to do.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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