“Well, Lindy palled around with his old buddies at St. Louis, and carried mail over his old route to Chicago. He broke up his flights with going to New York to get a medal from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation for international peace and understanding, and then he went to Washington to get the Congressional Medal of Honor. And he had to get a new plane, too, from the Mahoney people who made the Spirit of St. Louis. I guess Lindy hated to part from the old bus. It was still in great condition, even though he’d flown 40,000 miles in it. But they wanted to put it in the Smithsonian Institution, and he had to get another.
“It was just about this time, in April of 1928, that Lindbergh had to put his flying to a stiff test. He was in St. Louis when he learned that Floyd Bennett was very sick with pneumonia up in Quebec. Bennett was a great fellow, one of the most popular aviators of his time. He’d flown with Byrd to the North Pole, you remember. And in April, although he was sick, and knew he shouldn’t have gone, he flew up to help Captain Koebl and Major Fitzmaurice and Baron von Huenefeld, who’d flown across the Atlantic, and were forced down off the coast of Labrador. Well, he landed with pneumonia in a Quebec hospital, and they needed some serum in a hurry to save his life. Lindy offered to fly with it, and took off right away for New York. It was 500 miles from New York to Quebec, mostly through fog and snow, and blizzards, but Lindy made it in three hours and thirty-five minutes. The serum didn’t save Floyd Bennett, though. That plucky scout died the day after Lindbergh got there. He’d put up a great fight, but it was no use. The whole country felt gloomy over his death, and Lindy especially so, although he’d done his best to save his pal’s life.
“In June of that year, that is, in 1928, Lindy,—maybe I should call him Charles Augustus Lindbergh, was appointed the chairman of the technical committee of the Transcontinental Air Transport, the company sending planes cross-country. This gave him the chance to be right in on the ground—or rather right in the air—of aviation progress. It wasn’t just an office job, either, because Lindy flew almost as much after his appointment as before.
“In 1929 he kept right on flying. That’s not really news. If Lindy stopped flying, that would be news. But in February of ’29 he flew the first mail from Miami to Colon, in the Panama Canal Zone. This was the inauguration of the Pan-American Airways.
“In February the Morrows announced the engagement of Anne Morrow to Charles Augustus Lindbergh. From then on the reporters and photographers hung around in order to be in at the wedding. But Lindy and Anne fooled them. They were married in April, and nobody knew anything about it. They just got quietly married, and left on their honeymoon in a yacht.
“From then on, whenever Lindy went on a trip, Anne Lindbergh went with him. She’s a great flyer, and helps Lindy fly on long stretches. She pilots while he rests.
“The first long trip they took was in ’29. That was the one through Central America to Belize, in British Honduras. That covered 7,000 miles. But they didn’t stop long at Belize. They’d gone there for a reason. They headed their plane over the Yucatan peninsula, looking for Mayan ruins. You know, the Mayan Indians had a wonderful civilization all built up long before the white men came to Yucatan. They had a huge empire, and big cities with buildings as large as ours. Scientists are always digging around down there to uncover the ruins, so that they can find out about the Indians, and how they lived, and all that. But it’s hard to find the places where the Maya Indians had their cities. The jungle has grown up so thickly all about them that it takes days and months to get to them. And those that aren’t on rivers are almost impossible to get to.
“So Lindy proved once more that the airplane was a help to science, and flew over the old Mayan hang-outs, looking for ruins. He skimmed his plane over the tops of the jungles, so low that it seemed he might almost reach out his hand and grab a branch of one of those giant trees that grow down there, and he flew slowly, too, so that the scientists that were with him could take pictures.
“They found what they were after, three cities that hadn’t ever been discovered before. And it took only four days, where it might have taken a party on foot months to do the same thing. Anne Lindbergh helped pilot the plane, and take pictures, too.
“There weren’t any more exciting flights that year, but early the next year, that is, in 1930, Lindy ordered a new plane. It was a Lockheed-Sirius, a monoplane with a Wasp motor. It had a flattish-looking nose, but it was graceful just the same. It had something new that Lindy had designed himself. That was two covers that could be slid over the cockpits, so that the pilots would be protected in bad weather.