Spirit of St. Louis

The Spirit of St. Louis hangs in the museum's Milestones of Flight Gallery. In May of 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew the plane on the first non-stop flight from New York to Paris.

President Kennedy invoked the Spirit of St. Louis in his speech at Rice University to illustrate man's desire to explore ("Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic?").

A nine-year-old in the spring of 1977, I was quite swept up in the 50th anniversary of the Lindbergh flight, eagerly reading the various newspaper and magazine articles commemorating the flight. My grandparents took me to the local airport when a replica of Spirit of St. Louis flew in. The Cradle of Aviation is located near what used to be Roosevelt field, and a museum employee told me that a TGI Fridays now occupies the exact spot from which the Spirit of St. Louis took off.

The Spirit of St. Louis is NASM catalog #A19280021000.