BY KAREN BOSSICK
Lt. Col. Kingman Lambert will make a return trip to share the story-behind-the-story of Charles Lindbergh’s first trans-Atlantic flight on Tuesday.
And this time there will be an association of pilots in the audience to hear him.
Lambert will talk about how his grandfather, Albert Bond Lambert, helped the “Spirit of St. Louis” aviator make history at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 9, at Ketchum’s Community Library.
Lambert, who lived between 1875 and 1946, was the son of the founder of Lambert Pharmaceutical Company, which made Listerine. He competed in the 1900 and 1904 Summer Olympics, winning a silver medal in golf in 1904.
And, following the Olympics, he became an aviator, founding the Aero Club of St. Louis. He purchased his first plane from the Wright Brothers, taking flying lesson from Orville Wright.
In 1925 he purchased a field northwest of St. Louis, developing it into one of the first municipal airports in the nation. Two years later he became one of a handful of backers to pony up money to purchase “The Spirit of St. Louis” for Lindbergh, who was then flying mail between St. Louis and Chicago.
The first-ever solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 spurred interest in commercial aviation at a time most Americans thought it was too dangerous to travel by airplane.