{"schemaVersion":"pre.site.v1","id":"8a3ab237-e405-408b-8ced-6ec74c31cc0a","route":"/blog/what-i-found-in-my-grandfathers-archive","site":{"id":"e8ce061a-cd0a-4f89-b61d-e7cf0d4534dc","slug":"flying-over-time","name":"Flying Over Time","canonicalDomain":"flyingovertime.org","currentCampaign":"Spirit100"},"meta":{"title":"What I found in my grandfather's archive","description":"Nova Hall reflects on his grandfather Donald A. Hall Sr.’s archive, his family’s Jewish identity, and the engineering legacy behind the Spirit of St. Louis.","section":"blog","publishedAt":"2026-10-08T03:52:48.238+00:00","updatedAt":"2026-10-08T03:52:48.252703+00:00","canonicalUrl":"https://flyingovertime.org/blog/what-i-found-in-my-grandfathers-archive","seo":{"authorName":"Nova Hall","readingMinutes":3}},"source":{"kind":"supabase","revision":"1a7bd38b-a8a0-413b-8531-6cf56a079f20","version":3,"digest":"02206a1a7f8e1c66f63e7e503e390fdbad8caced4017eafb87cc34eb33605e41"},"navigation":[{"route":"/about","label":"About","order":10},{"route":"/programs","label":"Programs","order":20},{"route":"/events","label":"Events","order":40},{"route":"/contact","label":"Contact","order":50},{"route":"/media","label":"Media","order":60},{"route":"/blog","label":"Blog","order":70}],"blocks":[{"type":"hero","title":"What I found in my grandfather's archive","summary":"By Nova Hall","eyebrow":"Blog","actions":[],"variant":"archive"},{"type":"prose","markdown":"When you dedicate your life to preserving the history of the Spirit of St. Louis, there is an inevitable conversation that happens behind closed doors. Sometimes it is a direct question. Other times, it is a sudden change in tone, a polite decline from a sponsor, or a door quietly closing on our educational mission.\n\n\nIt always comes back to Charles Lindbergh.\n\n\nBecause of Lindbergh’s later political views, his association with the America First movement, and the heavy allegations of anti-Semitism that followed him, people naturally wonder about the men who built his airplane. They wonder about my grandfather, Donald A. Hall Sr., the chief engineer who designed the Spirit in sixty days. They wonder if the bigotry of the pilot was shared by the maker.\n\n\nIt is a completely fair question. And it is one I am uniquely positioned to answer, because I am Jewish.\n\n\nFor the last twenty-eight years, I have lived inside my grandfather’s mind. Thanks to our partners at Bluetail.aero, we have now fully digitized his entire earthly archive. I have read his private letters, his marginalia, his technical notes, and his personal diaries. I have scrutinized every photograph and every engineering log from his time at Ryan Airlines through his years directing patents at Convair.\n\n\nAcross those tens of thousands of documents, I have found no evidence of anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant sentiment, or hate. I found an inventor. I found a man obsessed with lift, drag, and the pure mathematics of flight.\n\n\nMy family’s reality is actually the exact opposite of the prejudices often associated with the 1927 flight. My father married a Jewish woman, my mother. He became incredibly close with her parents in San Diego, and he genuinely fell in love with Jewish customs, weaving them into the fabric of our family.\n\nThe only time I ever encountered anything remotely uncomfortable in our family archives was while going through my father’s vast stamp collection. As a trader, he had acquired some World War II-era Nazi stamps. I kept them, not as historical veneration, but as raw material. I use them in my own contemporary art today, deliberately reversing their original hateful intent and repurposing them to reclaim the narrative.\n\n\nHistory is rarely neat, and it is almost never comfortable. But we do a massive disservice to the future when we allow the political baggage of one man to erase the incredible, collaborative achievements of the people who stood behind him.\n\n\nThe Spirit of St. Louis was not willed into existence by a political ideology. It was built by blue-collar workers, welders, and a brilliant, open-minded engineer in San Diego who simply wanted to solve an impossible math problem. I am proud to be Donald Hall's grandson, and I am proud to use his engineering legacy to inspire the next generation of youth to take flight."}]}