I went to the College Park Aviation Museum Friday night (http://www.avialantic.com/collpark.html) to hear a talk by Charles Lindbergh's youngest daughter, Reeve Lindbergh. Absolutely charming woman, and interesting stories about growing up in the Lindbergh house, well-sheltered from a public life.

Reeve Lindbergh is an author of novels, children's books, and this, a family biography, and is in her mid fifties. She also wrote a book about Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman to earn a pilot's license. (In local interest, she also wrote the review of local radio host Diane Rehm's autobiography for the Washington Post.) This lecture was primarily a book tour for "UNDER A WING: A Memoir" by Reeve Lindbergh.

Ms. Lindbergh recalled many stories and answered plenty of questions. There were people in the audience who had met or worked with her father. For example, he worked with new young military pilots in the Pacific to show them how to get extra range out of their planes. One of those pilots was in the audience(!), who stood up and recalled how this was primarily leaning the engines hard and running them very hot. It gave them hundreds of miles of extra range, and they of course blew out the engines on a regular basis. Hey, it gave them 500 extra miles when they needed it! He also said that it doesn't appear in official accounts often, but Lindbergh did go out on an attack flight and did down one Japanese plane.

There was also a man there wheeling an oxygen tank behind him who was the first to fly the EAA exact replica of the Spirit of St. Louis plane which hangs at EAA now. It was apparently a bear to fly!

A woman then stood to tell Ms. Lindbergh that right here locally at Kentmorr airport (http://www.cookstudios.com/dcpilots//directory/airports/3w3.html) is the actual glider that her mother (Anne Morrow Lindbergh) soloed in decades ago, and that the owner is restoring it to the configuration of when she flew it. THEN, the actual guy who owns the glider stood from the other side of the audience to confirm the report!

Reeve mentioned that her father taught all his 5 children about flying. (I don't think any of them fly today, though one grandchild is in ground school, and another has a PPL). Yes, the Lindberghs did such a good job of protecting their children from the public eye (after the kidnapping) that she said people usually aren't aware there were any other children. One of Reeve's favorite stories involved an emergency engine out while her father flew her as a 7 year old. He chose one of the few treeless clearings in the woods they were flying over, and set up for a tight landing in a cow pasture. She watched him coax the plane down by doing a 'falling leaf' stall maneuver, thumping the Aeronca down in such a tight space that the plane had to be dismantled and trucked away a full week later. Not because it was damaged, but because the field was too small for him to take off again! She recalls that on the ride home with the plane still in the cow pasture, "I had found out something about my father that afternoon, just by watching him work his way down through the air...I learned what flying was for him and for the other early aviators, what happened to him in an airplane and why he kept taking us up to try flying ourselves...He could feel its every movement, just as if it were part of his own body. My father wasn't flying the airplane, he was being the airplane. That's how he did it. That's how he had always done it. Now I knew."

One powerful moment Reeve shared involved her mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, still living in New England at 93 years of age. Here's a quote from the dust jacket of her book: "Reeve writes movingly about the night her life and her mother's converged, when Reeve's first son died unexpectedly, and her mother urged Reeve to sit beside her infant's body. And as the two women kept vigil together, Reeve realized that her mother had never had the opportunity to grieve in this way over the loss of her firstborn son", [referring to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping of the 1930s].

Yet another aviation book I've begun to read in the past few months, and it looks very nice. Definitely a unique perspective. Gotta sit a spell and turn the damn computer off so's I can read.

I spoke with Reeve Lindbergh afterwards at the reception & book signing. She runs the Lindbergh Foundation, which also has Neil Armstrong on the board (www.lindberghfoundation.org). They award grants to projects that demonstrate the utilization of technology to benefit nature. An explanation and list of past grants is on the website.

Just a few years before he died, Charles Lindbergh flew a small plane around the New England countryside with Reeve's then-husband, photographer Richard Brown. With Reeve's text, a photo book was published called VIEW FROM ABOVE. Though now out of print, she had a copy with her to use during her talk (along with some of her children's books). There is now a video being produced using these original photos, and with interviews and commentary.

Too much to recall at once. I wish I had taped it! It was a very good night at a really gorgeous aviation museum.

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Jeff Cook