Later that day Slim hunted out Churchill and said, "Hey, you, Shorty, let's take a spin and find out if you will ever amount to anything."  The nickname of Shorty seemed appropriate and remained with him all his life.

    "Slim" was a good instructor, insisting on precision, but when lessons were over, he was always jovial and friendly.  He had gained some local reputation for hauling the airmail between St. Louis and Chicago and was reputed to know everything there was to know about handling a plane in the air.

    After six weeks of training, Shorty Churchill was certified and documented as a pilot.  Shorty and Slim were pals and explored St. Louis together and played tricks on the other boys.  Then Shorty decided to go in for aerobatics and Lindbergh agreed to teach him.

    "He poured it on me once," Shorty said.  "He took me up and did all the fancy stuff without telling me what he was going to do -- spins, loops, dives, turns, and all that.  It was a dizzy hour.  When we got to the ground, Slim said, "You still want to be an acrobat?"

    Churchill said, "I told him you're darn tootin' I do."  He also told Lindbergh that he would get even with him some day for that workout up in the air.  Slim just laughed and said, "Any time you're ready, Shorty, any time at all."

    Churchill got even with Slim one day.  "Just before I was to be turned loose, Lindy and I were up about 10,000 feet.  Lindy took his hands and feet off the controls, leaned back in the cockpit and said, "All right, Shorty, this is your chance -- do whatever you want to."

    So Churchill did everything he knew, such as, barrel rolls, Immelman turns, wingovers, and the whole lineup, but Slim just laughed.  Then Churchill threw the plane into a spin and released the controls and told Slim to take it.  He refused, but Churchill was determined to put the monkey on Slim's back.  The spin got tighter, and Churchill thumbed his nose at him.  The ground began to come up fast.  At the last possible second, Slim grabbed the stick and pulled the plane out.  Slim was mad when he got down, but he got over it and they laughed about it many times after that.

    The Battle Creek airfield was one of the stops in the Iowa Fliers' Good Will Tour of 1928, which attracted 13,000 persons to the little town.  Later Lindbergh became famous for crossing the Atlantic from New York to Paris, winning the $25,000 prize.  The night before the start of Lindbergh's flight to Paris, Charlie Chamberlin of Denison, Iowa, and Lindbergh met and studied the weather charts of the Atlantic Ocean that had been prepared for Chamberlin when Chamberlin was prepared and wanted to do the same flight to Paris first, but legal paperwork kept Chamberlin's plane on the ground for awhile. 

    Charles Lindbergh flew his plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, from Sioux City to Battle Creek in 1927, as a courtesy to Charles Churchill, one of his former flight students.  Col. Lindbergh accepted 60 invitations from over 250,000 to "fly over" and "pause" to the large crowd gathered in Battle Creek.  Lindy circled the town with hundreds and hundreds of people below watching in awe as Lindy made several low zooms over the airfield, coming within 50 ft. of the ground.  Lindbergh waved to the crowd as he flew off south eastward.  Lindy's schedule was too tight to stop that day.