TCR on the Road: Scenes From San Diego's Airport

John Sepulvado, host of KQED's The California Report each weekday, is reporting from the U.S.-Mexico border in Southern California this week. He filed this journal entry after watching a San Diego International Airport crowd protesting President Trump's immigration order on Sunday night.

M

y mom got divorced in the early 1990s and soon after started working six days a week to support me and my three siblings. My grandpa – the son of Irish immigrants – watched the four of us on many Saturdays during my middle school years. A kind, funny and gentle man from a poor family, my grandpa was a master at entertaining us four kids using the least amount of money possible. On many afternoons, that meant loading the four of us into his 1975 Chrysler Cordoba and driving us to Lindbergh Field to watch the planes take off.

My family was not born to the jet-set class, but my grandfather wanted us to know that we could aspire to it should we want more than our bus-stop beginnings. And at Lindbergh Field, in between watching the planes land and take off while we ate Cracker Jacks, we would imagine the places we would go when we were older. We would take turns guessing where the planes were off to. We would try to picture how the food tasted, what the clothes looked like and what kind of music the people listened to.

My grandpa would also tell us stories about Charles Lindbergh, the namesake of San Diego’s airport. Drawing on the great Irish tradition of exaggerating already impressive feats, he painted Lindbergh as a hero of the U.S. who single-handedly flew across the world in a rickety old airplane. The Lindbergh of my grandpa’s telling drank from coconuts in the tropics. He parked his single prop airplane to scale the Himalayas wearing nothing more than his pilot's outfit. He did loop-the-loops over the Great Wall of China, he lassoed the Eiffel Tower. These tall tales did what they were supposed to do -- they captured the attention of his space-age grandchildren and created a hero. He helped us see that the world was bigger than the neighborhood we grew up in, without ever spending a penny on a plane ticket.

Years later, I would be blessed enough to travel the world for peaceful purposes, a luxury my grandfather never had. He had left the country once to fight in Europe. A janitor and taxi driver, he would never be able to afford to leave his two daughters -- one of them special needs – alone, never mind travel overseas. And just as I came to learn that the Eiffel Tower could not be lassoed, and the Himalayas could not be so flippantly scaled, I would read that Charles Lindbergh was not the clear-cut hero my grandfather made him out to be.

Lindbergh was a daring pioneer aviator who found ways to fly even when he couldn't find the money to do so. Indeed, Lindbergh’s feat of crossing the Atlantic by himself, nonstop, undoubtedly belongs as one of the most important stories of human flight, somewhere between Icarus and John Glenn. And it was that act that prompted San Diego to name its airport after him, in the city where the aircraft he flew was built.

But it wasn't just his aviation skills that put Lindbergh in the U.S. history books. Most notably, in the 1930s, Lindbergh praised Hitler's Nazi regime for what he saw as its creation of an orderly society.

"The organized vitality of Germany was what most impressed me," Lindbergh wrote in 1938. "The unceasing activity of the people, and the convinced dictatorial direction to create the new factories, airfields, and research laboratories."

He would be honored by the Third Reich with one of its highest honors, the Service Cross of the German Eagle. The sight of the medal on the American hero, with its bold cross and four swastikas, repulsed many -- and inspired others.

Lindbergh also joined the America First Committee, a nationalist group founded on the idea that the Third Reich was not a threat to America, and indeed, was likely to dominate Europe.

In 1941, speaking in Des Moines, Iowa, Lindbergh went further, accusing Jewish Americans of trying to drive the United States into war with Germany.

"Instead of agitating for war, Jews in this country should be opposing it in every way, for they will be the first to feel its consequences," Lindbergh said. "Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government."

The speech was widely seen as anti-Semitic, and Lindbergh fell from national hero status.

It would be easy today to dismiss the Charles Lindbergh of history as different from the Lindbergh my grandfather made up during those Saturday afternoons at the San Diego airport. But that too would disregard the truth, as Lindbergh did hold some heroic qualities while simultaneously holding despicable beliefs.

Unlike the stories we tell our children, truth is complicated. A person can be brave and bold and still hold horrendously racist beliefs. A person who helped connect the world through aviation could take a hard-line isolationist stand and urge his nation to turn its back on people at their time of greatest need.

These truths seem hard to reconcile as an adult, and suddenly I realize why my grandfather skipped them.

The truth seems difficult to suss out, as I sit in the baggage claim watching protesters demand that immigrants be let into the country.

They have shattered the sterility of the departure terminal.

Join John as he travels along the border from San Diego to Yuma, documenting what “America First” means at the geographic end of America. Listen to The California Report, follow him on Twitter, and read his journal posts here.