Jon Morrow Lindbergh (August 16, 1932 – July 29, 2021) was an American underwater diver. He worked as a United States Navy demolition expert and as a commercial diver, and was one of the world's earliest in the 1960s. He was also a pioneer in cave diving, and one of the children of aviators Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
Early life
Lindbergh was born on August 16, 1932, five months after the kidnapping and death of his older brother, Charles Lindbergh Jr.
Jon's parents had discovered the name "Jon" in a book about Scandinavian history.
[ Hertog p. 220] During his mother's pregnancy with him, his parents received large numbers of letters and phone calls threatening his life.
[ Hertog p. 212] In 1935, photographers forced a car in which one of Jon's teachers was driving him home off the road in order to take pictures of him. Jon then began to be protected by a detective with a sawed-off shotgun. The Lindberghs soon decided to leave the United States and traveled to the United Kingdom.
[Berg, pp. 339-341][ Hertog pp. 278-280]
Lindbergh's father tried to teach him how to swim when he was three years old by repeatedly throwing him into the deep end of a swimming pool.[ Hertog p. 377] As a teenager, Lindbergh was allowed to make a solo three-day boat trip.[Milton, p. 426] He also learned to fly before leaving for college, but his father advised him not to pursue aviation as a career.[Berg, p. 504]
Cave diver, U.S. Navy and commercial diver
In March 1953, when Lindbergh was a
marine biology student at Stanford University, he made the first successful cave dive in the United States at
Bower Cave in California. The dive was part of an expedition organized by
speleologist Raymond de Saussure. Lindbergh discovered a hidden chamber inside the cave, confirming Saussure's theory that the nearby swimming spa was fed from such a chamber. Lindbergh returned the next month to photograph the underwater lake from a rubber raft.
Lindbergh also took up mountain climbing and skydiving while in college. After his second year, he moved out of his dormitory into a tent in the foothills of the Coast Range.
As a senior at Stanford, Lindbergh took part in an expedition to
Mount Shasta in California, during which Werner Hopf, a 30-year-old electronics engineer from the Stanford Research Institute, fell and was seriously injured. Hopf died despite the efforts of Lindbergh and his other companions to save him.
Lindbergh graduated from Stanford, where he had been a member of the Navy ROTC, and did postgraduate work at the University of California, San Diego. He served for three years as a frogman with the United States Navy Underwater Demolition Team (UDT), reaching the rank of Lieutenant.
In 1966, as part of a team from Ocean Systems, Inc., Jon Lindbergh participated in the recovery efforts when a hydrogen bomb was lost off the coast of Spain.
Man in Sea project
In June–July 1964, Lindbergh participated in
Edwin Link's second Man in Sea experiment, conducted in the
Berry Islands (a chain in the
Bahamas). Lindbergh's fellow diver for this venture was Robert Sténuit, who had become the world's first
aquanaut in 1962. Sténuit and Lindbergh stayed in Link's SPID habitat (Submersible, Portable, Inflatable Dwelling) for 49 hours underwater at a depth of 432 feet, breathing a helium-oxygen mixture.
[ The Deepest Days (Sténuit), passim]
Personal life
Lindbergh married Barbara Robbins on March 20, 1954, in Northfield, Illinois. They were the parents of six children, including aviator and artist
Erik Lindbergh (born in 1965).
[ Hertog, pp. 439, 489.] His second marriage was to
Karen Pryor,
daughter of author
Philip Wylie; they divorced in 1997. Lindbergh was married to Maura Jansen, with whom he had two daughters.
When his father was dying, Lindbergh took charge of transporting him from New York City to Hawaii to die, and helped build his father's grave.[Berg, pp. 554, 557.]
Lindbergh's elder brother, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the first of six children born to Charles and Anne Lindbergh, died in 1932 in the infamous kidnapping — what many termed at the time "the crime of the century".
He died from renal cancer in Lewisburg, West Virginia, on July 29, 2021, at the age of 88.[ Jon Lindbergh obituary]
