Lindbergh Archives

This past week the mailman delivered a reason to think about my unknown but rapidly approaching expiration date. Thanking me for my four decade membership tenure, EAA offered me a three-figure rebate if I bought a four-figure lifetime membership.

The numbers didn’t work out to my benefit. Weeks away from the conclusion of the first year of my seventh decade of repetitive breathing, I’ll count myself lucky if I’m still breathing 20 years from now. If that happens, family history suggests that something other than aviation will probably capture my daily interest.

And I’m okay with that. Thinking about it further, my aviation interest, which began in 1958 when I was 5, motivated me to participate, which I started in 1976 by earning my private ticket. Since then my participation, subject to more pressing priorities, has been less than continuous, but I’m thankful for every hour in my logbook.

As much as I’d like to add more entries in that log, to have at least one more adventure that involves a stick and rudder, I accept that this possibility diminishes with each day I breathe. And I’m okay with that, too. Preparing for my final days has taken precedence, but my interest in aviation, as it has since I was 5, will sustain me.

Of greater concern is the interest and participation of the generations that follow, and how aviation as an industry will adapt to their demographic nuances. If EAA’s rebate offer is any example, it will not fare well because the baby boomers in charge are making generation-centric decisions that are disconnected from the generations that are succeeding us.

A solo trans-Atlantic flight to Paris is the signature event in the iconic life of Charles Lindbergh, but it was, perhaps, not the most challenging or arduous. A visit to his boyhood home on the bank of the Mississippi River in Little Falls, Minnesota, revealed that in 1916, a 14-year-old Lindbergh spent 40 days on the “road” from Minnesota to California in a Saxon Light Six with his mother, his uncle, and Wahgoosh, his fox terrier. The car, now restored, still resides in its garage at the Minnesota Historical Society site.

My visit came on the last leg of a 16-day, 5,400-mile motorcycle trip to Seattle and back, mostly on the US highway system, which was created in 1926, a year before Lindbergh’s flight to Paris. President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National System of Interstate and Defense Highway System into being in 1956, in part because he was one of 37 officers and 285 enlisted men who manned 81 Army vehicles in the First Transcontinental Motor Train that took three months to cover the distance between Washington, DC, and San Francisco in 1919.

In his Autobiography of Values, Lindbergh says little about the adventure. “There were rainy days in Missouri when mud collected on the Saxon’s wheels until we could not move. Frozen ruts in New Mexico slowed us down to a speed of less than ten miles an hour, as did Arizona sand.”

This was the era when paths that connected towns were marked with different color blazes painted on telegraph poles and fence posts. The prime transcontinental route was the Lincoln Highway, which stretched from New York City to San Francisco and was dedicated in 1913. I wonder, would parents today allow their 14-year-old to make Lindbergh’s trip?

Changing Aviation Interest & Participation

Lindbergh’s Boyhood Adventures Led to Paris