There's More to New Jersey than the Sopranos

32 The Tragic Fall of the Mexican Lindbergh

146 There’s More to New Jersey . . . the grand jury without having his own lawyer. But let us not get carried away by our sympathy. Joe Jackson may have been a nice guy and a simple country boy, but by his own admission to the grand jury, he accepted money from gamblers to take a dive. In our permissive age, there is something noble about the fact that baseball insists that its players perform honestly, and that a man who violated that rule is barred from the Hall of Fame. 32 The Tragic Fall of the Mexican Lindbergh On a July Friday in 1928, an auto mechanic with the appropriate name of John Carr knocked off work early from the garage where he worked in the little Burlington County village of Chatsworth. He picked up his wife and mother in his family car, and drove out eight miles or so from the village to an isolated clearing beside the railroad tracks where local people knew the huckleberries were ready for picking. The three were all alone in the heart of the vast Pine Barrens. As they began picking berries they noticed something odd: the trees overhead seemed to have been smashed, as if by a giant hand. Curiously, cautiously, they ventured into the woods, following the direction of the splintered trees. It was hard to see anything in the dimly lit woods. John Carr was ahead of the others when he suddenly came across the wreckage of an airplane in the underbrush. Nearby, he discovered the body of a man lying face down on the ground. The dead man was wearing a leather flying jacket and slippers. The family drove hurriedly to Willis J. Buzby’s general store in Chatsworth, where Carr phoned the Burlington County chief of detectives , Ellis Parker, in the county courthouse at Mount Holly. (For more The Tragic Fall of the Mexican Lindbergh 147 about Parker, see chapter thirty-five.) Parker directed Detective Arthur Carabine and the acting coroner, John Throckmorton, to drive the twenty-five miles to Chatsworth, where they picked up Carr and headed through the twisty back roads to the wooded crash site. Carabine and Throckmorton inspected the body. The bones were crushed; clutched in the corpse’s right hand was a flashlight. In his pockets they found $175 in cash, a letter in Spanish on the stationery of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, and a telegram from the Weather Bureau in Washington. The address on the telegram confirmed what Detective Carabine suspected the moment he saw the corpse: the man at his feet was none other than the famous Captain Emilio Carranza, known as the Mexican Lindbergh. This was an age when flight was still an adventure, far different from the dreary world of crowded airports and bankrupt airlines. Charles A. Lindbergh was the exemplar of this era, the golden-haired youth who had flown alone across the Atlantic. Six months after his breathtaking flight to Paris, he accepted an invitation from President Plutarco Elias Calles of Mexico to visit that country. The invitation was prompted by the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow, who saw this good-will trip as a way to improve relations between the two countries. Lindbergh may have had his own relations to improve: he had fallen in love with Morrow’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Anne. Lindbergh made his twenty-one-hundred-mile, twenty-seven-hour nonstop flight from Washington to Mexico City in the Spirit of Saint Louis. His visit was an enormous success, and he was saluted by enthusiastic , cheering crowds. The people of Mexico wanted to return the favor, to show that Mexico could be part of this new world of pioneer aviation, and could produce a hero to match Lindbergh. The obvious choice was Mexico’s most famous airman, Emilio Carranza, a twenty-two-year-old captain in the Mexican air corps, accomplished pilot, and the nephew of a former president. A public subscription was taken up to purchase a worthy airplane—a Ryan monoplane, the same type as the Spirit of Saint Louis. The craft was baptized Excelsior. 148 There’s More to New Jersey . . . On June 11, 1928, Carranza took off from Mexico City to attempt a nonstop flight to Washington. His plane was forced down by fog in North Carolina, but he was still welcomed as a hero when he arrived in...