New Jersey Baby Boomer

Women’s History Month is slipping away, and I don’t want it to finish without giving some attention to another New Jersey woman who made history. Anne Morrow was born in 1906 in Englewood, NJ. Her parents achievements would fill a blog post nicely, but keeping focus on Anne, she was to meet Charles Lindbergh, already an accomplished pilot, when her father invited him to visit in Mexico (her father had been the US Ambassador to Mexico, and eventually a Senator in NJ).

Charles loved Anne’s quiet and thoughtful personality, and would marry her at her parents home in Englewood, NJ, which is actually less than an hours drive from where I live now. Charles’ love and encouragement built Anne’s confidence in herself. Charles taught her to fly, through him, she discovered abilities within herself she never knew she had. It is a rare person who has not heard of Anne and Charles Lindbergh. Ann would go on to be the first woman to receive a glider’s pilot license, and her husband the first to fly from NY to Paris (before they met). They went on to fly together, Anne as Charles’ co-pilot, recording flight routes and playing a great role in the history of flight as they traveled all over the world.

Their first child, Charles Lindbergh III was kidnapped from their then Hopewell, NJ home, and murdered, leading to the famous Lindbergh Trial that lead to so much media coverage that the couple had to leave the country for Europe. There are writings about how the Lindbergh’s were drawn in a bit by the thinking of Nazi Germany at the time, something that Anne would regret in later times.

For Anne, writing was an even greater passion than flying, and her husband, Charles, wrote as well, after the war in order to regain respect of the people who turned against him because of his thinking during the war.

Anne died in 2001 at the age of 94, 27 years after her husband’s death in 1974.