Paul E. Garber; Air Curator at Smithsonian

Paul E. Garber, who watched a Wright brother fly and talked Charles A. Lindbergh into donating his Spirit of St. Louis to the Smithsonian Institution even as the plane’s engine was cooling after Lindbergh’s solo transatlantic flight, is dead.

Garber, the first curator of the Smithsonian’s National Air Museum, was 93 when he died Wednesday in Washington.

Since 1920, when he went to work for the Smithsonian, Garber had been the seer behind the insitution’s acquisition of 385 historic planes. The 77 that normally were on display included Lindbergh’s fabled Ryan monoplane; the Curtiss NC-4 that was the first plane to cross the Atlantic in 1919, and the Wright brothers’ Kitty Hawk Flyer, the biplane in which the brothers first flew in 1903.

“The fantastic collection of aircraft, which has made the museum such a national and international attraction, owes its very existence to Paul Garber’s zeal for collecting,” Martin Harwit, director of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, said in a statement.

Garber was 9 years old, he told The Times in a 1990 interview, when he watched Orville Wright demonstrate powered flight in Ft. Meyer, Va. Wright was at the controls of a two-seat Military Flyer, the world’s first military plane, also part of the Smithsonian collection.

Garber had met Lindbergh when they worked for the Airmail Service.

Garber recalled that he drafted a message to Lindbergh as soon as he heard a radio report that the aviator was headed toward France.

“I must have written that cable before Lindbergh had ever flown over New England,” Garber said. The cable was awaiting Lindbergh at the field in Paris after he completed the first solo flight.

Many years later, Lindbergh phoned him to ask if he could visit the Smithsonian and “sit in the Spirit.”

“It was near closing time when Lindbergh arrived,” Garber said.

The two men waited until all the visitors had gone for the day and Garber got a ladder so Lindbergh could climb to where the Spirit was hanging from the ceiling.

“I knew he wanted to be alone with his thoughts, so I went off and sat in a corner.”

Garber’s acquisitions included the Vega that Amelia Earhart flew across the Atlantic before she vanished in the Pacific in 1937. Earhart and her navigator--Fred Noonan--had promised Garber that plane, had they returned.

In 1980, the Silver Hill Museum in nearby Suitland, Md., was renamed in honor of Garber’s 60th anniversary with the Smithsonian.

By then he had started the restoration of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima; a Sopwith Snipe, the first fighter used by the British Royal Air Force, and the German Arado 234, the world’s first operational jet bomber.

“Sometimes,” Garber said toward the end of the interview two years ago, “I can’t believe that I’ve seen all this happen in my lifetime.”