Spirit of St Louis

Bill — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:15:38 +0000

One of the first LEGO sets I ever owned was the Spirit of St Louis, a little yellow and black (the original one was silver – see pictures on Wikipedia) airplane set that represented Charles Lindbergh’s plane from the first trans-Atlantic solo flight. It was sold as set # 456 or 661, depending on where in the world you bought it. I was six years old in 1977 when this set came out, and my parents bought it for me. I still have at least some of the parts – all mixed into my LEGO collection, of course…

Why bring this up now? I just recently saw the review on Eurobricks that was posted recently.

One of the unique bits from this set is this special 2×3 brick with stickers. I was very young when I got this, so I don’t remember if I put the sticker on or my parents did – I assume the latter. But 30 years later they still are in great shape! In fact, I had thought the bricks were printed until I saw the Eurobricks review that mentioned they were stickers, and then found my brick and realized that they are in fact stickers. I took pictures of my brick for this blog post:

I think this set stands up pretty well today. Though the color scheme is bogus, as was often the case with LEGO sets from that era, the proportions are about right and it’s quite swooshable. It doesn’t use the fancy curvy pieces that modern sets have, but it doesn’t really need them.

Bill Ward's Brickpile » plane

Spirit of St Louis