Taking a break from operating the flight radio, Anne Lindbergh pilots the Tingmissartoq, as she and her husband, Charles, fly over Sweden. Her suitor had just made the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight and was arguably the most famous man in the world. They had met the year before in Mexico City, where her father was ambassador, while Lindbergh was passing through on a tour of Latin America. On their way to break the record for transcontinental flight in 1930, Anne and Charles Lindbergh pose on an airfield in California. That year Charles and Anne flew from Los Angeles to New York in 14 hours and 23 minutes, breaking the transcontinental speed record. Charles and Anne Lindbergh (right), in the cockpits of their Lockheed Sirius monoplane, prepare to take off from Long Island, New York, for the start of a six-month aerial survey of the North Atlantic in 1933. The media began calling them “the First Couple of the Skies.” Anne gained recognition as an aviator and author in her own right, publishing a series of books that detailed the pair’s adventures in the air. The Wind recounted 10 days of a six-month survey of Atlantic flight routes in 1933, from New York to Africa and then on a perilous 16-hour direct trip to South America. The next year, the president of Smith College granted her an honorary master’s degree, saying she had “proved to an admiring world the compatibility of imagination and practical dexterity; of sensitiveness and fortitude; of modesty and daring; the pride of her college,the glory of her country.” The Lindberghs were treated to tours, parades, and grand receptions on their global circumnavigations. The all-consuming media and public obsession reached a tragic crescendo when, in 1932, their infant son was kidnapped and murdered. He accepted a medal from the Nazi regime and became a vocal opponent of the U.S. entering World War II. In 1955 she released Gift From the Sea, a reflection on women’s lives that was lauded as a feminist manifesto, became a finalist for the National Book Award, and topped best-seller lists for 80 weeks. In recognition of her role as navigator, radio operator, and copilot, Anne Morrow Lindbergh received the National Geographic Society's Hubbard Gold Medal from President Gilbert Grosvenor in 1934. A crisis, she told an audience, was “encroaching on us like a lava flow.” She urged the young students to seek solutions to the degradation that could soon affect the idyllic campus around them. Reversing the trends, she said, “will take a revolution.” After her feats in the air, Anne Morrow Lindbergh became a bestselling author, environmentalist, and feminist figure.
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