"Cunning Little Rascal"

Widespread during the past month has been this rumor: Charles Augustus ("Eaglet") Lindbergh Jr., 17-month-old son of the No. 1 U. S. hero, is deaf and so has not learned to talk. Cause of the affliction was supposed to have been the pre-natal drumming of airplane motors in his ears, causing a trauma, while his mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, continued to fly during her pregnancy.*

Last week no less a personage than Clinton Wallace Gilbert, Washington correspondent of the New York Evening Post, came forward for the Lindbergh child to deny this rumor. In the column ("Daily Mirror of Washington") which he usually devotes to the politically great of the land, Pundit Gilbert wrote with unaccustomed feeling and excitement:

"At least a dozen people have asked me if I had heard this story. I have and it is utterly untrue. Members of the Morrow family assure me that the child is a perfectly normal baby, running about and as bright as a button, a cunning little rascal who hears perfectly and says just about as many words as any baby of seventeen months may be expected to say. . . . The parents naturally have tried to keep the youngster out of the newspapers. . . . I have heard stories of nurses of the Lindbergh baby fleeing from cameras when the infant was out for an airing. . . . Publicity, as anyone who has seen its ravages in Washington knows, ruins a good many grown men. How much worse must it be for children! . . . Give the Lindbergh baby a chance! It can't help it that its father and grandfather are famous."

* Two months before her son was born Mrs. Lindbergh accompanied her husband on a record-breaking transcontinental flight (TIME, April 28, 1930).

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