Put put

The country found its Honeymooning Hero last week, lost him, found him again. He was on a boat.

Five days after Bachelor Charles Augustus Lindbergh, 27, married Spinster Anne Spencer Morrow, 21, a 38-ft. Elco cruiser chugged alongside a small dock in New Harbor, Block Island (R. I). A tall young man, tastefully disguised in smoked glasses and a cap, standing alone at the wheel, shouted for aid in bringing his boat alongside. Capt. Louis Rounds, relaxing nearby, gave him a hand. The tastefully disguised young man was the Honeymooning Hero. His bride hid in the cabin below. Capt. Rounds told the story two days later and newsgatherers sped east.

At Woods Hole, on Cape Cod, they found him. Crowds lined the shores of Cape Cod Canal the next day waiting. Tricky, and famed for his practical-jokingness, their Hero putputted seaward, rounded the cape and anchored at Provincetown, where the press picked him up once more. The Hero turned a spotlight on a rowboat full of reporters who came to inquire, picked up his anchor, and slipped away at midnight. Next day an airplane swooped over Hero's boat, the Mouette* as it putputted eastward with Hero's Wife at the wheel, Hero ducking out of sight.

To conceal his identity, the Hero draped canvas over the word "Mouette" on the cruiser's stern. The Coast Guard announced its right to shoot at anybody who did such a thing. The Mouette reached York Harbor, Me., and one Frank ("Red") Dolan, New York Daily News reporter who had known Lieut. Lindbergh in his pre-hero days at Roosevelt Field, set out for an interview. He reminded the Colonel of the good old days when he liked to pose and asked for just one picture of the Hero's wife, still out of sight below. But the Hero, who, according to Mr. Dolan,* smiled his "freakish, vaudeville smile," had "nothing to say."

Mr. Dolan: Are you going up to North Haven [Morrow summer home] tonight, or will you anchor here in York Harbor?

Hero: Glad to see you.

Mr. Dolan: Where do you expect to live?

Hero: Nothing to say.

Mr. Dolan: Are you going abroad this summer?

Hero: Glad to see you.

Counting "uhhs" and "ohs" the Hero's words totaled 57. Defeated, discouraged, "Red" Dolan went away, wrote home to his paper that Mrs. Lindbergh must have been seasick because she was lying down. The News carried a castigating editorial, titled "Shrinking Lindy." The honeymooners continued eastward.

* Seagull.

* Intrepid Newsman Dolan's life holds many adventures. Recently, with Grace Robinson, sister newsgatherer of the Daily News, he was overtaken by Cambridge constables after breaking into the room of the late Walter Treadwell Huntington, Harvard student found shot to death in a field in Windsor, Conn. Sentenced to three months in the House of Correction by a lower court, they appealed to the Superior Court, paid $20 each for court expenses and were freed.