"He never
looked at the crowd nor did he betray
the slightest consciousness of an
audience. he stood looking out to sea,
the surf tumbling in cool green rollers
at his feet and the wind blowing his
hair.
"He picked up
a handful of seaweed and tossed it into
the air to show the direction of the
wind, then walked slowly back to the
hangar.
"It was over
an hour before he ceased tinkering with
the plane in the darkness of the hangar,
and then I saw him signing autographs on
the rear of it."
She wrote that
he had to wait for low tide and for the
sand to harden before he could take off
for his next stop. The police officers
tried to move the crowd away.
"Finally,"
White wrote, "Lindbergh snatched a
megaphone and shouted through it, but
the people surged not away from, but
toward him until he threw the megaphone
down in disgust."
Lindbergh got
the propeller moving. "Brr -- a roar, a
blur. He climbed in. It moved smoothly
over the sand and in no distance at all
-- hardly more than a hundred yards --
it was in the air. He tipped and banked
and turned swooping low over the beach
then rose like a silver winged bird
against the blue sky."
White watched
until the plane was gone from sight, and
made no further comments about the
experience in her diary."
