CLICK ON ANY OF THESE IMAGES FOR A FREE STREAMING SUBSCRIPTION OF HYLAND, a digital lifestyle magazine featuring residential decoration, design, architecture, art, travel, fashion, cuisine, good works and reflections.
Issue link: http://digital.hylandmagazine.com/i/117805
An absentee witness, I have to depend on what other journalists told me to reconstruct what happened on that historic night at the air���eld of Le Bourget. They were not all in agreement with one another nor with the accounts that have been printed since, even including Lindbergh���s. His book The Spirit of St. Louis is perhaps not to be accepted as gospel since it appeared twentysix years after the event, time enough to play tricks with the memory. And, though Lindbergh signed it, I am inclined to wonder in what proportion he wrote it. Having done a good deal of ghostwriting myself, I think I can sense the telltale perfume of the ghostwriter, particularly during a passage in which Lindbergh described his sensations as he was being tossed perilously about by the crowd that was carrying him in triumph from his plane. As far as I can ���nd out, this never happened. The wild night at Le Bourget was a comedy of errors whose unifying characteristic was that nobody, including Lindbergh, had understood in advance the full amplitude of the event���except the public. The professionals��� the diplomats, the airport authorities, the police, the journalists���were taken by surprise. Only the amateurs were sensitive enough to be kindled by the romance of Lindbergh���s oneman exploit. It was the people who began ���ooding toward Le Bourget in a ���rst wave when radio broadcasts announced that Lindbergh had been sighted over Ireland at 4:00 p.m., and when he was reported over England at 6:00 p.m., a second surge swelled the crowd and was still going strong even after Lindbergh had landed and left. HYLAND 4