Author Anne Morrow Lindbergh dies at 94
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MONTPELIER, Vt. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the wife of aviator Charles Lindbergh, who became his co-pilot and wrote extensively about their pioneering adventures in flight, died at her rural Vermont home yesterday. She was 94.
Although she wrote 13 published books of memoirs, fiction, poems and essays, she was a painfully shy woman who was thrown into the spotlight immediately after she met Lindbergh in 1927, shortly after his famous trans-Atlantic solo flight.
Mrs. Lindbergh soon became her husband's co-pilot, co-navigator and radio operator. The couple's flights across oceans and around the world fascinated the American public.
In 1932, the already-famous Lindberghs drew worldwide attention when their first child, 20-month-old Charles Jr., was kidnapped and murdered.
In an introduction to her journals, she affectionately recalled her famous fiancé as "a knight in shining armor, with myself as his devoted page."
Charles Lindbergh died in 1974.
From 1929 to 1935, the Lindberghs flew across the United States on tours promoting air travel as a safe and convenient method of transportation.
In 1930, Mrs. Lindbergh became the first American woman to get a glider pilot's license.
On April 20, 1930, the Lindberghs set a transcontinental speed record, flying from Los Angeles to New York in 14 hours and 45 minutes. She was seven months pregnant then. In 1934, she was the first woman to win the National Geographic Society's Hubbard Gold Medal for distinction in exploration, research and discovery.
Mrs. Lindbergh's books, many of them autobiographical, included five volumes of diaries and letters with detailed accounts of the Lindberghs' lives. In "Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead," she wrote of the joy flying gave her: "Flying was a very tangible freedom. In those days, it was beauty, adventure, discovery — the epitome of breaking into new worlds."
In the same book, she wrote of the pain she and her husband felt after the body of their son was discovered 10 weeks after the sleeping baby was kidnapped.
Among her other books were "Gift From the Sea," a 1955 best-selling collection of essays; "The War Within and Without," memoirs covering the years 1939 to 1944, when Charles Lindbergh was criticized as being pro-Nazi; and "Listen! The Wind," chronicling the Lindberghs' 1933 trip to Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia, Russia, Europe, Africa and South America.
Mrs. Lindbergh, who struggled throughout her life to maintain her family's privacy, wrote of her disdain for the media spotlight: "I was quite unprepared for this cops-and-robbers pursuit, an aspect of publicity that has become a common practice with public figures. I felt like an escaped convict. This was not freedom."
She was the daughter of Dwight Whitney Morrow, a banker who later became U.S. ambassador to Mexico and a U.S. senator, and Elizabeth Cutter Morrow, a writer and teacher.