Original Lindbergh print acquired by local history center

RED OAK — A historical print featuring America’s most famed aviator has returned home to Red Oak.

Thanks to a donation from the Parker-Hanifan Foundation, the Montgomery County History Center recently purchased an original “Lone Eagle” print depicting Charles Lindbergh. The print was used in a 1928 calendar produced by the Murphy Calendar Company in Red Oak.

Lindbergh became an international celebrity in 1927 when he completed the first solo trans-Atlantic flight from Long Island, N.Y., to Paris.

About five months after Lindbergh’s historic flight, Thomas C. Murphy, Promotion Manager for the Murphy Calendar Company, contacted the aviator’s attorney. Lindbergh agreed to allow his image’s use in a special calendar, under the condition that part of the proceeds be donated to the U.S. Air Mail Pilots’ Association, of which Lindbergh was a member.

This calendar would be the only commercial advertising agreement Lindbergh ever signed.
Thomas Murphy’s daughter, Helen Murphy, who still resides in Red Oak, remembers the day her dad went to Omaha to formalize the agreement in September.

“When daddy came home, he honked the horn on his little red Buick all the way down the street,” she said, as he was excited after getting to meet Lindbergh.

An article about the special calendar appeared in the Red Oak Express, and was reprinted Nearly 60 years later, after reading that article, Montgomery County History Center Director Dave McFarland began a quest to find out more about the project with the hope of locating one of the calendars.
What he did find was this print in an art store in Cincinnati, Ohio. Using funds from the Parker Foundation donation, the print was purchased.
Lindbergh had other ties to Iowa after spending most of his childhood in Minnesota.

He landed a damaged Curtis Jenney biplane in Iowa in 1925, and sold it before moving to Texas.

The plane was rediscovered in an Iowa barn nearly 50 years later, and now resides in a Garden City Museum in New York.

McFarland also said Iowa’s ties to aviation history extend beyond Lindbergh. In 1907, the Earhart family moved to Des Moines, and there Amelia attended high school with Helen Murphy’s mother, Marian.

Also, McFarland said many visitors to the History Center are surprised to learn the Clyde Cessna of Cessna Aviation was born in Hawthorn, just west of Red Oak.