REEVE LINDBERGH

You will recall that two weeks ago my hero was inventor Charles Lindbergh, whose non-stop solo flight from New York to Paris on May 20, 1927 brought him world fame. If you missed that piece, you can find it in the archive section and read about this man whom I called a flawed hero.

During the week our good friend Marilyn Cunin sent me “Forward From Here,” a book by Reeve Lindbergh, the youngest of Charles and Anne Lindbergh’s children. She is now 60 years old and lives in Vermont with her second husband, Nat Tripp. Thirty years after her father’s death in 1974, she learned that he had three secret families in Europe, some of whom were living in Germany and some in Switzerland.

At first she was furious at him, but she says that her fury “lasted in full force, for only about a month.” She has forgiven her perfectionist father – “a pain in the ass,” she calls him – and has accepted as her siblings the children he had by other women. She has visited them in Europe and has entertained them in the United States.

According to Penelope Green (a New York Times reporter 4-17-08), when Reeve learned she had a brain tumor a few years ago, she wrote a poem to it:

It may have to go, though it’s shown little malice
But if I can keep it, I’m calling it Alice.

(Alice was an elderly relative she was fond of.) When Reeve woke after the brain tumor surgery her husband said, “Alice doesn’t live here anymore,” and he burst into tears.

Reeve Lindbergh’s honesty, her openness, her sense of humor and fairness, her intellectual curiosity and generous disposition make this book an interesting read.

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