Jon Lindbergh, a deep-sea diver and marine biologist and son of aviator Charles Lindbergh, whose childhood in the 1930s was widely chronicled after the kidnapping and killing of his older brother, died July 29 at his home in Lewisburg, W.Va. He was 88.
When Mr. Lindbergh was born, his father was perhaps the most famous person in the United States, after making a solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927.
The spotlight only grew brighter after March 1, 1932, when 20-month-old Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped from the second floor of the family’s house near Hopewell, N.J. He was the oldest and, at the time, the only child of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
Ransom notes were delivered, and Charles Lindbergh paid $50,000 in an effort to find his son. In May 1932, the boy’s body was discovered less than five miles from the family home. The FBI took charge of the case, which transfixed the nation and was called “the crime of the century.”
In the midst of such clamor, Jon Morrow Lindbergh was born in Manhattan on Aug. 16, 1932. His parents sought to shield him from publicity and harm, but reporters wrote about his “Scotch nursemaid” and even noted his second birthday: “Although no details of Jon’s birthday party were made known it was believed he passed the day as most youngsters of 2 years — oblivious to time.”
At one point, a car in which young Jon was riding was forced off the road by pursuing photographers.
In 1934, a German immigrant carpenter, Bruno Hauptmann, was arrested in the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr. Hauptmann was convicted in 1935 and executed a year later.
By then, the Lindbergh family had fled the United States for the relative anonymity of Europe, living for several years in Britain and on an island off the coast of France. The Lindberghs returned in 1939, ultimately settling in Darien, Conn. Jon Lindbergh became fascinated with boating and the sea.
“When I was a boy of 8, my father showed me how to hold my breath and surface dive,” Mr. Lindbergh told the New York Times in 1983. “I was 14 when my father bought me an 11-foot boat with a 2½ horsepower outboard so I could tend my own lobster pots. I’d sell a few and bring the rest home and we ate them.”
As a student at Stanford University, he lived off campus in a tent and had a taste for adventure. Instead of flying over the earth, he decided to journey beneath it. In 1953, he made headlines by exploring a water-filled California cave, 200 feet underground. He took part in oceanographic expeditions and graduated in 1954 with a degree in marine biology.
He abandoned plans to sail on a raft from California to Hawaii when he entered the Navy, where he was a member of an underwater naval demolitions team. He dabbled with acting in the late 1950s, appearing in a few movies and the television show “Sea Hunt.”
In 1963, Mr. Lindbergh was credited with rescuing two people from a helicopter accident over water. A year later, he and Belgian explorer and writer Robert Sténuit traveled to the Bahamas and set a record by staying on the ocean floor, 430 feet beneath the surface, for 49 hours in an experimental submersible vehicle.
“We got a better feeling of existence at the bottom of the sea, sitting there and watching the fish go by,” Mr. Lindbergh said. “We thought we would run into some sharks, but we didn’t.”
Mr. Lindbergh later joined Ocean Systems, a company involved in underwater research, rescue and salvage projects around the world. In 1966, he worked with military officials to help coordinate a search for a missing hydrogen bomb off the coast of Spain, after the crash of a U.S. B-52 bomber.
He lived for many years in the Puget Sound area near Seattle, where he helped build underwater portions of a wastewater treatment plant. Mr. Lindbergh also developed an interest in aquaculture, or what is sometimes called “fish farming.” He worked to develop commercial salmon fisheries in the United States and Chile, and helped cultivate other aquatic animals and plants.
“The difference between catch fishery with a rod or net and farm fishery is the same as the difference between a hunting economy and an agricultural economy,” he said in 1983. “If you’re hunting, you’re out trying to catch things whose abundance varies depending on a natural cycle. But if you’re growing, you harvest by your own planting, not by a happenstance of nature.”
His marriages to Barbara Robbins and Karen Pryor ended in divorce. In the late 1990s, Mr. Lindbergh moved to West Virginia, where his third wife, Maura Jansen, worked as a veterinarian.
In addition to his wife, survivors include six children from his first marriage; two daughters from his third marriage; two brothers; a sister; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Mr. Lindbergh’s father died in 1974; his mother, a celebrated writer, died in 2001.
In 2002, on the 75th anniversary of his father’s transatlantic flight, Mr. Lindbergh’s son Erik duplicated the feat, flying solo from Long Island to Paris.
“My father taught me how to fly in high school,” Mr. Lindbergh said in 1987, “but I never kept up with it.”
Despite being the nation’s most lauded pilot, Charles Lindbergh “never encouraged me to go into aviation,” his son said. “He said if he’d been born 30 years later, he probably wouldn’t have either.”
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