Life's Values and Lindy

Funny. Charles Lindbergh’s ancestors so often seemed to be stubborn, pioneering, energetic and eccentric loners with a cutting edge/crackpot scientific bent. Are we all that predictable?

Portrait of Lindy by Pam Glew

“Raised in virtual isolation among Lindberghs, Lodges and Lands, it was difficult for Charles Lindbergh ever to recognize that his kin might have differed from other people,” wrote biographer A. Scott Berg.

“He was proud that his family tree abounded with independent thinkers in a broad range of disciplines — most of which he would pursue. But he never perceived that many of his ancestors were prideful to the point of arrogance — rebels so far apart from the rest of society as to be above the law, so evangelical as to appear fanatical, so global in their vision as to be shortsighted.

“For all his fascination with detail, Lindbergh never examined his family history close enough to see that it included financial malfeasance, flight from justice, bigamy, illegitimacy, melancholia, manic-depression, alcoholism, grievous generational conflicts and wanton abandonment of families. But those undercurrents were always there.

“And so this third-generation Lindbergh was born with a deeply private nature and bred according to the principles of self-reliance — nonconformity and the innate understanding that greatness came at the inevitable price of being misunderstood.”

Toward the end of his life, Lindbergh did understand this much about all that: “Life’s values originate in circumstances over which one has no control,” he said.

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg