Lucky Lindy in Free Fall

Charles Lindbergh on his Excelsior motorcycle

By Dan Hagen

Eyes ever wandering to the classroom window, Charles Lindbergh frequently got poor grades.

Two days shy of his 20^th birthday, on Feb. 2, 1922, Lindbergh learned that the University of Wisconsin was booting him, his adviser informing his mother than Lindy was “quite immature.”

A taciturn loner, the peripatetic future pilot had already traveled across America’s primitive roads by himself on his Excelsior motorcycle, sleeping on the ground between his bike and a tree unless foul weather, insects or snakes drove him into a corncrib. He lived on quarts of milk he picked up for a dime.

Lindbergh raised a $125 deposit to learn flying and plane maintenance and construction at the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation in Lincoln, and later signed on as an unpaid assistant to a barnstormer just to gain flight experience.

Warming to wing walking, Lindbergh decided he’d try the even more spectacular stunt of leaving the plane in flight.

“Lindbergh wanted to try what was known as a ‘double jump’ — in which one chute opens and is discarded, making way for a second one to deliver the jumper to the ground,” A Scott Berg wrote.

“One June evening, against a clear sky, Lindbergh made his leap from 1,800 feet, and the first chute opened perfectly. After a few seconds, he cut it loose and waited for the second to open. But several seconds passed and he did not feel the tug that should have followed. Because he had never made such a descent before, Lindbergh had no idea that everything was not right until he began to fall headfirst. Another long moment later, the parachute at last blossomed, carrying him safely to earth.

“For the rest of his life, Lindbergh remembered feeling no panic over what might have happened to him, only how soundly he slept that night.

“Easier for him than most, with nobody dependent upon him for anything, Lindbergh decided ‘that if I could fly for 10 years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary lifetime.’”

And at the moment he decided to make that first jump, he recalled, “…life rose to a higher level, to a sort of exhilarated calmness.”

As a former skydiver, I know what Lindbergh meant — everything leading to a moment reduced to sun and blue and rushing air and pure, existential elongation, that “lonely impulse of delight (that) drove to this tumult in the clouds.”

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg