It was March 1, 1932, a balmy day in Princeton, New Jersey. I was seventeen, a high school student preparing to enter the university, where my father was a professor of military science and tactics.

The telephone rang, and it was an administrator at Princeton, informing my father that Col. Charles Lindbergh had just called to say that his infant son had been kidnapped. Lindbergh had said that his house in nearby Hopewell was full of police and many other people and had asked if the university could lend him ten or twelve cots to accommodate some of them. The administrator had turned to my father for help because he thought that the ROTC program might have some extra cots. This was indeed the case, and my father promised to send them over right away.

An earnest Corporal Boyd, a proficient truck driver but otherwise no competition for Albert Einstein (soon to be resident in Princeton), was directed to load all the available cots into a truck to be delivered to the Lindberghs. If the cots were to arrive in Hopewell that evening instead of Atlantic City or Philadelphia, a more astute presence was indicated. So I found myself in charge of Boyd and the truck and the cots.

Although Hopewell was only eight or ten miles from Princeton, I had never been there. After consulting a map, Boyd and I ventured out along a sparsely populated road into the black night. We arrived at our destination with only one wrong turn, which I assured Boyd was a planned shortcut. The sidewalks were already rolled up and the citizenry presumably snug in their beds, but we found a filling station open and got directions to the Lindbergh house, which was on top of a hill.

Coming around the last bend on the long, winding road, we emerged from the dark into a scene of utter confusion. Portable spotlights had been set up around the perimeter of the front yard, illuminating a swarm of men in various costumes: policemen of several descriptions, reporters with snapbrim fedoras and notebooks, and a considerable number of characters who seemed to have no purpose but to stand and gawk. Someone with an air of authority demanded to know what we wanted, and when we told him, he motioned to us to go into the house through the wide-open door.

We were greeted inside by Lindbergh himself. Although he looked haggard and distraught, he was the soul of courtesy, which I found remarkable under the circumstances. At his direction we began to carry the cots one by one up the stairs to the second floor. At the head of the stairs, in direct view from the landing, was the nursery, with toys spread around. What held me transfixed was the crib. A blanket was pulled back, and the depression made by a tiny body was clearly visible. The window was