Aviator Charles A. Lindbergh was the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, New York to Paris, landing at Le Bourget Aerodrome on May 20, 1927. Ever since then, San Diego has been bedazzled by the daring pilot, naming after him its airport on San Diego Bay, a park near Balboa Avenue west of the 8095, a school in Clairemont Mesa (also named for humanitarian Albert E. Schweitzer), and a street near Otay Valley Regional Park. A new book by Candace Fleming, intended for Young Adults, is The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh. Besides recounting the famous flight that made him a cultural icon, and the horrific kidnapping of the first child born to him and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the book tells how Lindbergh became an acolyte of Nobel Prize winning surgeon Dr. Alexis Carrel, with whom he worked on experiments designed to provide human beings with immortality. Together, Carrel and Lindbergh dreamed of creating a panel of immortals who could devote themselves to eugenics, a field once popular in the United States that held that the human race could be improved through selective breeding of superior people and the sterilization of interior people. It was a “science” that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis turned into their ideology. [Donald H. Harrison]
