Those ambitions were soon to be dashed because in 1916, after having announced his intention to give up his congressional seat to run for the United States Senate, Charles Lindbergh, Sr. was defeated in the primary. In the next two years the elder Lindbergh increased his opposition to the war and set his eyes on the Minnesota governorship. It was an ugly campaign filled with virulent attacks against Lindbergh, particularly for his stance on the war and for what was perceived to have been antiCatholic sentiments expressed during the previous campaign. He lost the gubernatorial race, and this effectively marked the end of his political career.
During this period, Charles and his mother, along with her brother Charles Land of Detroit, decided to drive to California. In 1916 the roads which existed were hazardous and frequently subject to the whims of the weather. The trip, which was supposed to take two weeks, lasted forty days. Young Charles drove the entire distance himself in a recently purchased Saxon Six.
In California mother and son rented a cottage on Redondo Beach where Charles enrolled in High School. There he was little interested in school, made no new friends, and frequently was truant. He was arrested in California for driving while under age and without any headlights. When his mother appeared at the police station she let it be known that her husband was a Congressman, and when Charles appeared in Court with his mother, he was let go with a warning.
Evangeline received word that her mother was ill with cancer and they quickly returned to Detroit with Charles, underage or not, again driving the entire distance. Eventually Mrs. Land was brought back to the farm in Little Falls where her daughter looked after her until her death in 1919.
In the winter of 191617 Charles and his mother prepared to stay on the farm, a new experience for them. Charles reluctantly reenrolled in school but his heart was not in it. Instead he actively prepared the house for winter habitation by installing storm windows, a wood furnace, a new well and plumbing. His father gave him permission to stock the farm with livestock and he set about this task with relish. He bought cattle, hogs, sheep, chickens and geese. A seventy year old retired lumberjack, Daniel Thompson, lived in the tenants' house and helped with odd jobs.
As he entered his senior year in high school he worried about the final examinations he would have to take to graduate. For the first time the realization that his low grades and lack of academic interest would be detrimental, troubled him. Fortuitously, the high school principal announced that anyone who wanted to work on their farm in lieu of attending school would be given full academic credit. Because of the war effort, and lack of farm laborers, the government had encouraged such a program to maintain food production.
Charles leaped at the opportunity and launched himself full time into the farming effort. The alternative program provided him not only with a chance to work on the farm but also to leave school where he had considered the other students, even those his own age, as "kids." He became a good and dedicated farmer, working from the crack of dawn until late at night, often in subzero weather. He also slept in the cold, preferring a bed on the screened porch piled high with blankets with only his dog as company.
Several years later he would write, "Farm work enabled me to combine my love of earth and animals with my interest in machinery. Each day was an adventure: taming cattle fresh from the range, breaking pasture for more cropland, dynamiting stone islands out of older fields."3
But he also found himself thinking of the future. "If war continued, I would soon become of military age, and soon afterward I would probably be in the Army. If peace came first, I would be faced with problems of college and examinations far more difficult than those I had avoided by farming in the war emergency."4 Neither was a happy prospect.
On November 11, 1918, word came by telephone at a farm auction he was attending that the war was over. Lindbergh continued farming for a few more months until, at his mother's urging, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He was to study engineering. Never happy about this arrangement, he did so only because his parents, and in particular his mother, desired it. He never graduated and except for a few occasions, never again lived on the family farm in Little Falls.
During the one year he did spend in college, he made few friends. His mother secured a teaching job in the Madison area and rented an apartment close to the University where Charles continued to live with her. His academic difficulties continued. Rather than studying, he was much more likely to be found riding around the area on his motorcycle.
He also began to exhibit a tendency towards reckless endeavors. He delighted in racing through the woods and hills surrounding Madison on his motorcycle. When the two other motorcycle owners who were attending the University would join him, he would taunt them if they could not keep up. If they had to push their bikes over difficult terrain, he would turn and drive his motorcycle around them in a circle, all the while challenging their abilities to ride a bike.
Once, when these same acquaintances were standing at the bottom of a steep hill near the home of the college president, they told Lindbergh it was impossible to drive down the hill on a motorcycle at top speed and make the sharp turn at the bottom. Taking this as a challenge, Lindbergh assured them that not only could he do it but he could do it without brakes. When it became readily apparent that Lindbergh was quite serious they attempted, to no avail, to dissuade him.
Lindbergh drove his motorcycle to the top of the hill, put it in gear and, to their horror, drove at top speed down the hill. Approaching the bottom it was evident that he was not slowing, and as he came into the curve they could see he was not using any brakes. Although he leaned into the curve, he crashed into a fence. Bruised and battered, he picked himself up and, to their great discomfort, tried it again, this time successfully.
This was not the only odd behavior he began to regularly display. During a visit back to the farm one afternoon he was wandering through the house with a Colt .45 strapped to his hip. People who knew Lindbergh were aware of his fascination with guns and he often envisioned himself a "fast draw" expert. He regularly practiced shooting during the time he was in college. While going from room to room he would leap through entrance ways, practicing his "quick draw." Something went wrong during one of these quick draws and he shot a hole through the door between the kitchen and the hallway. Fortunately, no one was standing on the other side. Lindbergh's only reaction was disappointment in finding that the hole was too high to have killed the imaginary enemy.
He had returned to the farm that day because he was contemplating how to tell his parents, particularly his mother, that he was going to drop out of college after little more than one year. Had he not decided to leave school the University might well have made the decision for him. Because of his poor grades he had been placed on academic probation and it was only a matter of time before he flunked out.
Other students at the University recall that Lindbergh considered himself above the rules of the college, rebellious towards authority, and generally contradictory in his dealings with others. One classmate recalled Lindbergh complained to him that, "They treat you here as though you were a baby. Presumably a man comes to college because he wants an education. Why, then, all this taking of rolls, daily assignments, checks on your personal life, and so on?"5
He had also begun to think of learning to fly. When he expressed this to his mother she did little herself to dissuade him, although she did write to his father to ask that he discourage Charles from becoming a pilot. The senior Lindbergh sent his son a letter in which he pointed out that insurance companies would not insure pilots, even in peace time, because they considered the profession to have no future.
Charles had written a letter to the Nebraska Aircraft Company in Lincoln which made Lincoln Standard planes. They had advertised that they would give instructions to all potential buyers and Lindbergh wrote to them and said that although he was not yet in the market for a plane he would pay for the instruction. The cost for flight instruction, they wrote back, would be $500.00.
He decided that this was the opportunity he had been waiting for and so informed