Wed., April 23

Discussed on Wednesday, April 23 was Charles Lindbergh.  Lindbergh during the 1920's in America was a well known celebrity.  He achieved the cult of celebrity that only that actors and actresses in Hollywood had achieved.  Lindbergh's fame sky-rocketed from virtual obscurity to instantaneous world fame as the result of his solo non-stop flight on May 20–21, 1927, made from Roosevelt Field in Garden City on New York's Long Island to Le Bourget Field in Paris, France, a distance of nearly 3,600 statute miles, in the single-seat, single-engine purpose-built Spirit of St. Louis. As a result of this flight, Lindbergh was the first person in history to be in New York one day and Paris the next. Lindbergh, a U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve officer, was also awarded the nation's highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his historic exploit.
Lindbergh will always be remembered for this act of heroism and this accomplishment however Lindbergh had a darker side to his nature.  On the evening of March 1, 1932, 20-month-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., was abducted by an intruder from his crib in the second-story nursery of his family's rural home in East Amwell, New Jersey near the town of Hopewell.  The search for the missing child would consume the American public from that point on.  Becoming the biggest headline of the 1930's aside from the Great Depression.  Although a man was caught and charged with the crime of kidnapping conspiracy theories have popped up throughout the decades citing Lindbergh as involved in the kidnapping plot.
Lindbergh, "often saw his children for only a couple of months a year. He kept track of each child’s infractions, which included such activities as gum-chewing. He insisted that his wife Anne track all her household expenditures, including even 15 cents spent for rubber bands, in account books.
According to a Biography Channel profile on Lindbergh, she was the only woman who he had ever asked out on a date. In Lindbergh's autobiography, he derides womanizing pilots he met as "barnstormers," and Army cadets for their "facile" approach to relationships. Lindbergh wrote that the ideal romance was stable and long term, with a woman with keen intellect, good health, and strong genes. Lindbergh said his experience in breeding animals on our farm had taught me the importance of good heredity."  Landler, Mark. "A Newspaper Reports Lindbergh Fathered 3 Children in Germany" The New York Times August 2, 2003.
Several authors have suggested that Charles Lindbergh was responsible for the kidnapping of his first born child. In 2010, Jim Bahm, author of the book Beneath the Winter Sycamores wrote about the Lindbergh Kidnapping, implied that the baby was physically disabled and Charles Lindbergh wanted to have someone else raise the child in Germany. In Bahm's book, after 10 days, the baby died of pneumonia, and the kidnapping plot blew up in Lindbergh's face.  Other theories exist pointing to different explanations in the kidnapping case.  However many agree that someone close to the Lindbergh family was involved in the kidnapping plot.