March 1.
Eighty-three years ago this day, at around 9:00 P.M., someone entered the grounds of a property known as Highfields, in the Sourland Mountains near Hopewell, New Jersey, placed two sections of a strange-looking, homemade, three-stage extension ladder against a brand new white field stone house, and climbed to the top.
Of that much we can be reasonably certain.
Reading in the room below was the most famous man in the world, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, who in 1927 had flown the Atlantic alone, transforming himself, unwittingly and to his regret, into the first modern celebrity. Alone in his study, Lindbergh heard a “crack”—it sounded, he said, like something breaking apart an orange crate—but the night was windy and raw, and he thought nothing of it.