In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Lxhaptep One "Ifanyone suggested anything, she was gamefor it. Ma421,1927 It took him twenty-seven hours to cross the Atlantic after leaving Roosevelt Field in Long Island. By mid-afternoon, crowds were waiting at Le Bourget airfield northeast of Paris. By the time he was due over southern England, traffic was backed up for more than a mile outside his arrival place. It was nearly 9:00 P.M. when he flew over Cherbourg—by that time, some 150,000 people had gathered to greet him. French, American, British; reporters, well-wishers, cynics. The tiny, droning plane finally appeared as a dot on the horizon, and deafening cheers echoed as The Spirit of St. Louis swooped in for a landing at 10:24. It had taken Charles A. Lindbergh just over thirty-three and a half hours to become the first person to fly nonstop from America to France. At the same moment in Withernsea, on the northeast coast of England , former actress Gladys Kendall had just given birth to her third and last baby, Justine Kay Kendall McCarthy. After having endured two difficult births, Gladys was less than thrilled with this third pregnancy and had tried every homemade remedy she could think of to end it: hot baths, jumping off chairs. But the determined baby was born anyway, weighing in at eleven pounds. All three babies were born in their mother s childhood home, Stanley House, next door to the town's landmark, the lighthouse. Gladys later recalled looking at her newborn daughter and wondering if she would ever ride in an airplane like the newly famous Lucky Lindy. Kay Kendall was the offspring of two very colorful families: the Kendalls (her fathers side) and the Drewerys (her mother's). The Drewerys were as well-known in their own circles as the Kendalls were in London. The family had lived in Withernsea—a small fishing village on the east coast of Yorkshire, about twenty miles from Hull—for as long as anyone 6 The Brief, Madcap Life of Ka4 Kendall could remember. There were Cooks in the family tree, and the Drewerys liked to claim that they were collateral descendants of the famed Captain James Cook. Kay's maternal grandparents were Robert and Lavinia Drewery, both of whom lived to be ninety. Lavinia had been the maid at a local manor: Robert came courting the lady of the house and wound up marrying the maid instead. There was a rumor, though, that Lavinia was more than just a servant—her mother had been a sewing maid at Tranby Croft, the home of Arthur Wilson, where the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) was a frequent guest. It was this home that figured in the notorious gambling trial of 1891, in which Edward was called to testify. Lavinia was the result of an unplanned pregnancy, and her mother was hurriedly married off to a local farmer—there was talk that Lavinia was actually one of Edward's many illegitimate children. "Don't you think we look like the royal family?" Kay would crow to her friends in later years. A fisherman, merchant seaman, and Methodist lay preacher, Robert Drewery was coxswain of the Withernsea Lifeboat Crew. He helped dig the foundation for the 1893 lighthouse that still stands by Kay's birthplace . That lighthouse was much needed, as there were many wrecks per year on the Yorkshire coast. Gladys Kendall later remembered her girlhood being filled with sudden alarms and sea-borne traumas for the family. "The waves were mountains high," she wrote of one storm. "My father and my eldest brother Frank—only fourteen years old—were out in a lifeboat. . . With them were perhaps ten other men, all either fishermen or volunteers. How sickening to see the light of the boat disappear beyond a wave, and then the joy of seeing it come up again on the other side!" Robert Drewery was a well-loved eccentric in town, fond of animals (and of practicing taxidermy on the ones he had shot). He kept a peregrine falcon and a wild fox as pets and was a good enough carpenter to build a new house for his family when it grew too large for its present quarters— Gladys Drewery (born in 1900) was one often children. The new house, Kay's birthplace, had four bedrooms, living room, front room, kitchen, and a beautiful garden backed by a wheat field. Gladys recalled that in her girlhood, "When the wheat had...

Share