The Town Talk from Alexandria, Louisiana • Page 8

ALEXANDRIA DAILY TOWN TALK, ALEXANDRIA-PINEVILLE, MONDAY JULY 10, 1973 SECTION A-PAGE EIGHT Life on the Mississippi I 1 I ,4" Lindbergh Talks About His Boyhood irhoilse dismount, and paigns, often getting stuck on the unpaved muddy roads. "One rainy evening in the country, he, two other men, and I got on a road that was 'so bad, and we got stuck so often, that we gaveiip trying to reach the town for which we were headed and spent the night on the parlor floor of a roadside farmhouse. The 'farmer could give us only two blankets, but hail, once, the size of hen eggs, Walking to the barn in early winter could tell the approximate temperature by the bite of the air in my nose and the way the snow crunched underfoot; the next sign of cold would be the thickness of ice in the barn water trough." There was a garden, and Charles liked best the sweet corn that his mother cooked. vf 7 i 1 Majestic We used wood sticks nnA ciihu trn tha cnumii onu oiaua uuiu u.v. Little Falls because they were easy to get and cheap.

imnlo ixc "My mother's dishes were simple and wonderfully good. She fried, boiled, baked, and roasted. We usually had meat three times a day, along with vegetables, salads, and fruits. For dessert we had pies (apple, peach, berry, pumpkin, gooseberry), puddings (bread, tapioca, plum), cakes (angel, chocolate), and cookies of various "We made ice cream on occasion in a churn packed with cracked ice and salt. My mother usually baked our bread nerseit wnite, rye, wnite salt rising, and potato bread.

For breakfast she would bake biscuits. It was seldom that we were without homemade jam and cottage cheese." From age 11, Charles drove his father on election cam- iwiMif iiibi 1 itnmniTti Bi Eight-year-old Charles A. Lindbergh (photo at left) is shown with his father, Charles A. Lindbergh then 51, in a photo made about 1910. The senior Lindbergh was an agrarian reform congressman from Minnesota.

At right, the future aviator is motorcycle in Madison, 1921. (UPI Telephoto) i 1 (Editor's Note: Ju May. 1927. an unassuming young man named Charles A. Lindbergh from the American Midwest astonished the world and won its warm acclaim by becoming the first man to fly the Atlantic Ocean solo, piloting a small monoplane, "The Spirit of St.

Louis." He was 25 years old, and only five years away rfrdm the farm along the Mississippi on which he grew up. Now, for the first time, he has written of those boyhood years in a nostalgic reminiscence that might almost have come out of the stories of Mark Twain. The excerpts in the following article are published by special arrangement ith the Minnesota Historical Society.) By H. D.QuIgg UPI Senior Editor Charles A. Lindbergh's mother liked to name things.

He grew up among the white pine groves on the banks of the upper Mississippi with a succession of farm dogs named Sweet. Snider, Breeze, Shep, Tody, Spot, Hunter, Pingo, and Wahgoosh the last' being what the Lindberghs were; told was me tnippewa inaian wora tor fox. Interspersed the canine parade were a tame chipmunk, bhorttail, so called after an encounter with one of the dogs; a three-goose gaggle Hooligan, Fanny, and Matilda and a marvelous machine named Maria. Model Ford "Maria impacted on our farm life in 1912," writes the trian, now 70, who the world knows as an aviator, author, medical technologist, and conservationist. "Pronounced as is the farm corp, Maria was a Ford Model tourabout with standard foot-pedal father bought it partly for campaigning and partly for farm transportation." Charles A.

Lindbergh Sr. was an agrarian political reformer who was congressman from Minnesota from 1907 to 1917. He had a 118-acre farm on the Mississippi and a law office in nearby Little Falls, i "In 1912 learning to drive an automobile was a formidable and extraordinary, experience," the son says in a book of reminiscences, ''more Of '3, stunt than a learned to. drive in 1913 at the age of 11. By 1914 1 was driving most of the time (but) when my father drove, I usually rode the running "I could pick leaves off branches as we passed scoqp up a stone from the road.

I liked the wind on my face and through my Swimming Naked The father taught the boy to love swimming naked in; the river or in Pike Creek close by, at first carrying young Charley on his back by doing the breast stroke. The congressman would ride a bicycle, from office to farm. would turn in on the start whistling the call of the whippoorwlll. This was my signa, t0 start rurmlng with my dog up the Icehouse road to meet him. We would go for a tramp over the "Sometimes we would go down to the river and walk out on log jams, These were often big twice each summer the bateaux and wanigans came through to clear them.

Then the pigs would give exhibV i river Hons of logrolling ana oreaK up 1UK1UU1IJK din uicdlt uu seemingly unbreakable jams." The Huck Finn boyhood by the, river and young manhood of farm managing, animal handling, driving a three-wheel tractor, riding a motorcycle on his sales rounds as a milking-machine agent, and his final nostalgic arrival back at the farm as a barnstormer in his first airplane at the ripe age of 21 are detailed in "Boyhood on the Upper Mississippi." Five Installments The book, subtitled "A Reminiscent Letter," published by the Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, is indeed a letter from Lindbergh. It was sent to the society in five installments in 1969 and 1970, written in pencil and ink from such locales as the split-bamboo floor of a grass hut in Luzon, a plane nearing Hong Kong, and a New York office building into which he had been accidentally locked. Set down in snatched moments for the guidance of the society's staff in restoring the old Lindbergh farm house, witn no original jntention of publication, it is a remarkable recollection of farm life before and during World War I. Lindbergh grew up with guns.

His grandfather gave him a 22-caliber rifle when he was 6, and his father gave him a repeating rifle the next summer. (He was 7 when he shot his first duck). Two years later he got a 12-gauge shotgun that was so heavy he had a hard time holding it to his shoulder. He hunted a lot with his father, as the many pictures in the book attest. In winter the temperature would drop to 30 below, and once hit 40., "Then (walking to whnhl in snnw tnn rippn fnr hirirrlinar frnct unnlH fnrm nn VlVJVUMf IIUU, "UUIU lu.

Ill VII the iront ot my, cap on nostril hairs." Caught in Blizzard Once he got caught at night in a blizzard and lost Prince, a pony, as a result of animal suffered on the trip, even though boy walked much of the way leading his "Storms of one kind or another punctuate my memory of the farm and areas" around it: the blizzards swirling snow against my face; the violent thunderstorms of summer with their lightning flashes and ear-splitting cracks and the sheet lightning making luminous demon forms, of clouds." And Will Disputed for 14 Years! May Finally Be Resolved TRENTON, N.J. (UPI) general moved in court t'6 When Stephan Bihary, a collect the estate, the relatives Ukrainian immigrant, died in objected and the court ordered ,1958, he left an estate of depositions taken in the Soviet $2,176.48 but no will. Union. Since his death his close The first set of documents relatives, all of whom live in failed to meet American the Soviet Union, have been judicial standards. The court trying to collect the estate and refused to release the inheri-have been vigorously opposed tance.

A second set of by the state of New Jersey. depositions was sent, but by Finally after 14 years of this time, the lower court had battling New Jersey law, ruled the case was closed. 'V 1 shown on his Excelsior in a photo made in June of beginning Tuesday in Reykjavik with Boris Spassky, the world champion. Even though thousands of dollars of prize money are on the line, today's championship prize is chicken feed. Rognvald played King Louis for his head.

A woman was the prize in one knightly saga. A king put up his horse, falcon and sword for a maiden and engaged in a game, winner take all. The king lost. He left the game on foot, unarmed and unloved. "Little consolation do you derive from the game of chess for now I own your costly objects!" said his competitor, FAMILY WASH LAUNDRY Beautifully DONE Blackman Laundry And Cleaners was hurt in the crash and the younger Lindbergh later wrote, "Damage to my 'Jenny' was very easily repaired in the field." (UPI Telephoto) Lindbergh's first airplane, "Jenny," which he bought for $500, lies smashed in a field in Glcncoe, Minn.

The crash occurred in 1923 while he was piloting his father, who was campaigning for the U. S. Senate. Neither man we Kepi me suivb uw unit cnoug tost ay warm in spite of ha f-soaked cloines. ine unuoeigu electricity nor telephone.

Kero- Sene Will is ui uiv kerosene lanterns the "Both cave a soft and barn: lovely light-plenty of Ugnt to reaa oy, 3 1 to milk by, to feed by if you kept the chimneys clean. Of course it is not as convenient, but personally I prefer kerosene light to electric." In the fall of 1920, he rode off on his Excelsior motorcycle to enter the University of Wisconsin, at. Madison. In the spring of 1923, he bought his "Jenny" airplane in Georgia, barnstormed to Texas, and then north to Little Falls and landed on the west 40 of the farm. "I felt nostalgia then if I ever felt it in my life, for I knew the farming days I loved so much were over.

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