February 4

Aviator Charles Lindbergh was born on February 4, 1902, in Detroit and grew up in Minnesota and Washington, D.C. He began flying in 1922 and had a variety of accidents as a barnstormer and a mail carrier. On May 20-21, 1927, he won the $25,000 Orteig Prize for the first non-stop, trans-Atlantic flight between New York and Paris. Numerous aviators had sought the prize, six of whom died in the process. His resulting fame as “Lucky Lindy” was unparalleled. Lindbergh was an ardent, lifelong proponent of eugenics and the superiority of white, Nordic races, often focusing on their ability to produce machines. His questionable association with the Nazi regime is well documented, and he became a close friend of Henry Ford, a vicious anti-Semite who famously admitted, “we only talk about the Jews.” In 2008 his youngest daughter confirmed that he had three secret mistresses in Germany, resulting in seven children.