The famed aviator’s trans-Atlantic sojourn inspired the flights to the islands that followed.

Fifty years ago, a man was laid to rest on Maui who had perhaps more impact on Hawaiʻi than any other human.

A conservationist, he was buried in a traditional way, in a simple wooden casket placed under rocks in a serene location a few miles past Hana on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was in a graveyard of a church that, like many on Maui, has gone defunct.

Widely lauded and then wildly controversial, Charles Lindbergh was a famed aviator who was the first to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, from the U.S. mainland to Europe. He did it alone, attracting almost unimaginable press attention at the time. Photogenic and enigmatic, he was the Taylor Swift of his day. His marriage to the writer Anne Morrow turned them into the Taylor-and-Travis Kelce of their era.

His biographer, A. Scott Berg, who wrote a fascinating account of the aviator’s life , called Lindbergh “the most celebrated living person to walk the earth, the first modern media superstar.”

Lindbergh’s 33-hour trans-Atlantic flight in May 1927 changed the world forever, marking the dawn of global aviation. It would ultimately mean that ordinary people could travel to remote corners of the world for the price of an air ticket and a few hours in the air, on trips that had formerly taken days or weeks.

Soon untouched distant beaches and pristine mountaintops were opened to international commerce, communication and tourism. New resorts were founded, allowing some to prosper but often forcing the original inhabitants out of their traditional homes, replaced by a new coterie of international elite who came to be called jetsetters. Hawaiʻi was inevitably affected.

Lindbergh was born in 1902 and spent his early childhood in rural Minnesota when it was almost still a frontier area. Lindbergh’s namesake father was elected a U.S. congressman in 1907. A pacifist who opposed the country’s entry into World War I, he lost his seat and never reclaimed his political backing.

Lindbergh grew up almost itinerant, moving from place to place, including Washington, D.C., performing unimpressively in school and then dropping out of the University of Wisconsin. He found his calling in the infancy of the aviation industry, becoming a stunt pilot, an early military aviator and then a pioneer in transporting U.S. mail by air. Footloose by nature, aviation allowed the explorer even more range to ramble.

Most people at the time viewed air travel as so risky it was foolhardy and almost suicidal.

Lindbergh entered a competition for who could successfully complete a nonstop trans-Atlantic flight between New York City and Paris, with a prize of $25,000. Arriving in Europe after an exhausting flight where he grew so tired he began hallucinating a spectral presence on the plane, he triumphantly executed aerial circles around the Eiffel Tower, then using a primitive road map, he aimed the aircraft toward a wide expanse of bright lights, which turned out to be the headlamps of thousands of cars at the airfield. More than 100,000 people had assembled to watch as he landed.

Lindbergh meticulously organized the trip and carried out his flight in a purpose-built aircraft, dubbed the Spirit of St. Louis because it was funded by a pair of Missouri businessmen. Other aviators attempting similar trips had died. Lindbergh’s solo venture was followed breathlessly by millions of people who could track the news through new methods of communication, including radio and newsreels.

Turning To The Pacific

Almost as soon as Lindbergh landed in Paris, the race was on to see who could perform the same feat in the Pacific. Pineapple magnate James D. Dole announced a competition to be the first to fly from Oakland, California, to Hawaiʻi, also offering a $25,000 prize. Others offered similar bounties. More than a dozen aviation teams competed on different terms and under different sponsorships. Some aircraft disappeared in the attempt.

That was the beginning of what has turned into an expansive aviation industry in Hawaiʻi, with some 50,000 flights each year to and from the islands. Aviation now underpins the state’s economy.

Lindbergh’s successes continued. He wrote an autobiography that became a runaway bestseller. He became a leading player in the race to build the aviation industry, an inventor who crafted new airline navigation equipment and an early booster of rocket-ship development. He grew wealthy. With Lindbergh’s staunch support, the U.S. mail system shifted dramatically toward air transport, providing a key base of economic support as the airline industry began to take shape.

The slim and shy aviator traveled the world, feted at each destination, accompanied increasingly by his pretty young wife, writer Anne Morrow, who frequently served as his companion and co-pilot as they visited the world’s most picturesque places. Observing threats to the natural world, they became outspoken conservationists.

Their adventures lightened the nation’s gloom as the country sank into the Great Depression.

The Lindberghs were mobbed by fans and reporters everywhere they went, often resorting to subterfuge to escape detection and seeking homes in obscure locations to conceal their whereabouts. Their notoriety increased when they were struck by tragedy. In 1932, their 20-month-old son, named for his father, was kidnapped from their home in New Jersey. The frantic family paid the $50,000 ransom, but the boy wasn’t returned. His body was found in woods two months after he disappeared.

An immigrant German carpenter, Richard Hauptmann, was charged with the crime, convicted and executed. Amid rising animosity toward Germans and toward immigrants generally at a time of high unemployment, some people questioned whether Hauptmann was the true culprit or only a scapegoat.

Secret Life In Germany

As the decade wore on, Germany and Japan became frighteningly aggressive on different sides of the world. It became increasingly obvious that global conflict was looming and that the United States might be drawn into the hostilities. Lindbergh, like his father, was a pacifist who opposed U.S. entry into the war. But Lindbergh’s America-first rhetoric, which found a wide audience early in the 1930s, increasingly sounded like anti-British and anti-Jewish propaganda. By the time Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, Lindbergh was viewed as an apologist for aggression, particularly by the Germans.

Once war was declared, Lindbergh tried to advance the American war effort. Distrusted by the Roosevelt administration, he did what he could, including personally training pilots heading out for combat duty and engaging in combat missions himself. After the war, Lindbergh assisted the U.S. military in Europe and had redeemed himself sufficiently and proved helpful enough that he was commissioned a brigadier general by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

But questions about Lindbergh’s loyalties surfaced again in 2005, when a German biographer revealed that he had had a secret life in Germany , unknown to his American wife and children, including three mistresses and producing seven children with them, all conceived following the war.

The Move To Maui

Despite his complicated personal life, Lindbergh maintained an active interest in Hawaiʻi and frequently visited the islands. He particularly fell in love with eastern Maui, and in 1969, the Honolulu Star Bulletin ran a front-page news story announcing that Lindbergh intended to build a summer home in Kīpahulu, near Hana. The tortuous Hana Highway connected the area to the outside world but kept it difficult to access, something that appealed to a family seeking to escape the public limelight.

In collaboration with the Nature Conservancy, an advocacy group, Lindbergh became active in an effort to expand Haleakalā National Park to include a new addition of land in the Kīpahulu area. He and other wealthy philanthropists who had come to Maui feared its natural charm would be lost to development if left unprotected. They contributed land and resources to the effort.

“He recognized it was a special place and needed to be preserved, not commercialized,” said Maui historian Jill Engledow, author of “Haleakalā: A History of the Maui Mountain.”

But local Hawaiian families were displaced when government officials and environmentalists set about assembling the land they believed they needed to add to the park. The government condemned land and forced local people to give up properties on which families had ancestral claims. In time, for local people, the park was seen as having a tainted legacy — conservation but also unfair appropriation. Many have benefited from the park’s establishment and expansion, but others have suffered loss.

Lindbergh remained deeply attached to the area for the rest of his life. Though Lindbergh had traveled far and wide, when he realized he was dying of cancer, he traveled as quickly as possible to the place he thought was the most beautiful in the world.

He told his doctor that he would “rather spend two days alive on Maui than two months alive” in New York City, according to Berg, his biographer.

His islands-inspired funeral at Palapala Hoʻomanu Congregational Church was described by Hawaiian journalist Pierre Bowman on Aug. 27, 1974. Lindbergh’s body was carried to the graveyard in the back of a pickup truck. He was dressed in a khaki work shirt and cotton work trousers. His casket was made by “cowboys in Hana,” Bowman wrote. The casket was lowered into the grave, with his family and friends throwing leis atop it. The gravesite was covered, like other nearby graves, with loose, smooth, rounded ili’ili stones, Bowman reported.

A friend told Bowman that Lindbergh had planned his funeral “as carefully as his ’27 trip.”

Bowman’s tribute to Lindbergh’s final passage to the beyond had enough national appeal that it was reprinted in Reader’s Digest.