By Jeffrey Buck

If you didn’t know Charles Lindbergh was born on February 4, 1902 in Detroit, Michigan. Although he spent most of his life outside of the mitten I feel he is still a Detroiter worth noting. His mother was also a teacher at Cass Technical High School. He instantly became famous after his solo non-stop flight from Garden City, New York to Paris France. With fame came devastation though when his infant son was kidnapped and murdered in the 1930s. Lindbergh died at the age of 72 on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

Take a look at the photograph entitled “Heading South: 1929“:

September 18, 1929. “Mr. & Mrs. Lindbergh.” Aviator Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, four months after they married, at Bolling Field en route to South America. Charles, the pioneering aviator, was probably the most famous person in America at the time; Anne would become an accomplished aviator in her own right, as well as one of the best-selling writers of the 20th century. Some three years after this picture was taken, the tragedy of their child’s murder helped define the modern phenomenon of mass-media super-celebrity. From Anne’s February 2001 obituary in the New York Times: “Nothing, not even Lindbergh’s 1927 landing in Paris, had prepared them for the carnival of reporters, photographers, con artists, curiosity-seekers, vandals and crazy people who invaded their lives after their baby was kidnapped. Americans would not experience a similar flood of publicity until the O. J. Simpson murder trial of the 1990s.” National Photo Company Collection glass negative.

Image: Source