One Summer: America, 1927 Read Online Free PDF Page B

fly the Atlantic. It was just at this point, when nothing was going right for anyone, that a gangly young man known as Slim flew in from the west and announced his plan to fly the ocean alone. His name was Charles Lindbergh.
    A most extraordinary summer was about to begin.
     
    fn1 The Vickers Vimy hangs in the Science Museum in London, but few notice it. A monument to Alcock and Brown, at Heathrow Airport, wasn’t erected until thirty-five years after their flight. When I checked out Graham Wallace’s classic account of the trip, The Flight of Alcock & Brown, 14–15 June 1919 , from the London Library, I was the first person in seventeen years to do so.

M AY
     

T HE K ID
     

     
    ‘In the spring of ’27, something bright and alien flashed across the sky.’
     
    F. Scott Fitzgerald, My Lost City

C HAPTER 1
     

     
    TEN DAYS BEFORE he became so famous that crowds would form around any building that contained him and waiters would fight over a corncob left on his dinner plate, no one had heard of Charles Lindbergh. The New York Times had mentioned him once, in the context of the coming Atlantic flights. It had misspelled his name.
    The news that transfixed the nation as spring gave way to summer in 1927 was of a gruesome murder in a modest family home on Long Island, coincidentally quite close to Roosevelt Field, where the Atlantic flyers were now gathering. The newspapers, much excited, called it the Sash Weight Murder Case. The story was this:
    Late on the night of 20 March 1927, as Mr and Mrs Albert Snyder slept side by side in twin beds in their house on 222nd Street in a quiet, middle-class neighbourhood of Queens Village, Mrs Snyder heard noises in the upstairs hallway. Going to investigate, she found a large man – a ‘giant’, she told police – just outside her bedroom door. He was speaking in a foreign accent to another man, whom she could not see. Before Mrs Snyder could react, the giant seized her and beat her so roughly that she was left unconscious for six hours. Then he and his confederate went to Mr Snyder’s bed, strangled the poor man with picture wire and stove inhis head with a sash weight from a window. It was the sash weight that fired the public’s imagination and gave the case its name. The two villains then turned out drawers all over the house and fled with Mrs Snyder’s jewels, but they left a clue to their identity in the form of an Italian-language newspaper on a table downstairs.
     
    The New York Times the next day was fascinated but confused. In a big page-one headline it reported:
     
    A RT E DITOR I S S LAIN IN B ED;
W IFE T IED , H OME S EARCHED;
M OTIVE M YSTIFIES P OLICE
     
    The story noted that a Dr Vincent Juster from St Mary Immaculate Hospital had examined Mrs Snyder and couldn’t find any bump on her that would explain her six hours of unconsciousness. Indeed, he couldn’t find any injuries on her at all. Perhaps, he suggested tentatively, it was the trauma of the event rather than actual injury that accounted for her prolonged collapse.
    Police detectives by this time, however, were more suspicious than confused. For one thing, the Snyder house showed no sign of forced entry, and in any case it was an oddly modest target for murderous jewel thieves. The detectives found it curious, too, that Albert Snyder had slept through a violent scuffle just outside his door. The Snyders’ nine-year-old daughter, Lorraine, in a room across the hall, had also heard nothing. It also seemed strange that burglars would break into a house and evidently pause to read an anarchist newspaper before placing it neatly on a table and proceeding upstairs. Oddest of all, Mrs Snyder’s bed – the one from which she had arisen to investigate the noise in the hallway – was tidily made, as if it had not been slept in. She was unable to account for this, citing her concussion. As the detectives puzzled over these anomalies, one of them idly lifted a corner of the mattress on MrsSnyder’s