Daughter of the Sky


Courage
Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not
Knows no release from little things:
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings.
How can life grant us boon of living, compensate
For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate
Unless we dare
The soul's dominion? Each time we make a choice, we pay
With courage to behold the resistless day,
And count it fair.
-AMELIA EARHART
* Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.


Daughter of the Sky
THE STORY OF AMELIA EARHART
by PAUL L. BRIAND, JR.
DUELL, SLOAN and PEARCE
New York


COPYRIGHT © 1960 by Paul L. BRIAND, JR.
All rights reserved. No part of this book in excess of
five hundred words may be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher.
First edition
E13
885
Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 60-5457
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
VAN REES PRESS • NEW YORK
The author wishes to thank Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., for permis-
sion to quote from the following books: The Fun of It, copyright, 1932, by
Amelia Earhart; Last Flight, by Amelia Earhart, copyright, 1937, by Har-
court, Brace and Company, Inc.; Soaring Wings, copyright, 1939, by George
Palmer Putnam; Wide Margins, by George Palmer Putnam, copyright, 1942,
by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.


C/3-205915
For Margaret, my wife,
who allowed another woman-
Amelia Earhart-into my life.


Contents
Author's Note
Introduction
PART ONE THE FRIENDSHIP FLIGHT
1. Boston Social Worker
2. Girlhood in Kansas
3. Halifax and Trepassey
4. Atchison Tomboy
5. Over the Atlantic
6. Premed at Columbia
7. Land!
8. A Sack of Potatoes
9. In the Public Eye
PART TWO THE WORLD OF FLIGHT
1. Wealth and Independence
2. Vagabond of the Air
3. The Kinner Canary
4. Aviation Editor
5. The First Women's Air Derby
6. Developing Air Lines
7. George Palmer Putnam
8. Marriage
9. Solo Across the Atlantic
10. Other Atlantics
vii


11. Flying in California
12. The Girl and the Machine
13. A Real Heroine
14. Solo from Hawaii to California
15. Nurse's Aide in Toronto
16. Back Home Again
17. Solo from California to Mexico
18. Solo from Mexico to New Jersey
19. Purdue University
105
112
117
120
125
131
PART THREE THE LAST FLIGHT
1. Crack-up in Hawaii
2. New Route, New Preparations
3. Miami to Africa
4. Africa to India
5. India to Australia
6. New Guinea to Howland Island
7. The Disappearance and the Search
8. The Fog of Rumors
9. The Light of Fact: A Mystery Solved?
141
154
160
171
180
190
200
208
211
219
221
Record Flights
Awards and Decorations
Bibliography
A Note About Sources
Acknowledgments
223
227
229
viii


Illustrations
following page 46
Amelia Earhart
AE's parents
AE, the fledgling flier
AE's birthplace
AE after her first solo in an autogiro
Learning to fly
AE and Lady Heath's Avro Avian
AE at Southampton
AE signs her autograph
AE after her transatlantic solo
AE and the Lindberghs
Famous fliers
AE, GP, and the King and Queen of Belgium
AE and President Hoover
The Lockheed Electra
Before taking off for Honolulu, 1937
Fragment of wood possibly associated with AE's last flight
Josephine Blanco Akiyama
AE and Fred Noonan on the last flight





Author's Note
THERE are many women who wish they were men; few
men who wish they were women. Amelia Earhart did not want to
be a man-she was the essence of femininity; but she did want
to do many of the things men can do—and a few of the things
men cannot do. For her, the greatest challenge in the world of
men was the ability to fly, and this ability in AE (as she liked to
be called) was the flowering of an attitude that took root early
in her childhood. Having learned to fly, she was not content, how-
ever, simply to be able to fly; she wanted to be “the first to do,"
to set new records, to prove that women could try things as men
have tried.
Amelia Earhart was one of America's great heroines; her life
was in many ways unique. She was one of a kind, and the fabric
of her life was woven of strands that are rarely produced: she had
an insatiable curiosity about everything in life-ideas, books,
people, places, mechanical things; she loved all kinds of sports
and games, especially those "only for boys”; she fidgeted with an
implacable unrest to experiment, to try new things; she teemed
with a zest for living, paradoxically entwined with a gnawing and
pervasive longing to be alone; and, finally, she brooded with a
fatalism toward death, which she met with a tremendous will
to live.
Of such strands was the fabric made that produced the public
figure acclaimed throughout the world; the woman who suc-
ceeded in such incredible achievements as flying solo across the
Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and then resented the publicity


which they brought; the girl who simply wanted to do because
she wanted to demonstrate the equality of her sex with that of
the opposite in all fields of constructive endeavor. But what she
wanted to do could not be done simply, and in that complexity
lies the mystery of a human soul and the fascination of a woman
who dared the dominion of that soul.
My research into the life of Amelia Earhart led me into a study
of many lives and of the period in which they were lived; it has
also led me thousands of miles across these United States and
occasioned from me hundreds of letters of inquiry. I pored over
books, magazines, and newspapers, and from them gained the
basic story of the woman Alier's life; but it was the people I
interviewed and wrote to, who answered my many and persistent
questions and provided me with their private letters, pictures,
and other memorabilia, who in the last analysis made the writing
of this biography an enjoyable undertaking.
My purpose in choosing the narrative-dramatic-expository tech-
nique of the modern biographer in telling my story was a simple
one: while I used many of the resources of the objective scholar
in gathering and marshaling my materials and in establishing their
accuracy, I tried to show the novelist's interest in background
influences, in hidden motives, in the complex nature of character.
In short, I wanted to translate an intriguing woman out of
aviation terms into human terms.
Paul L. BRIAND, JR.
Captain, USAF
United States Air Force Academy
Colorado
xii


When time has smoothed out somewhat the
rough sorrows of the present, there will be an-
other book-the full story of Amelia Earhart's
life. That's a project for a tomorrow of retrospect.
-GEORGE PALMER PUTNAM, 1937
Introduction * by
Colonel Hilton H. Railey,
United States Army (retired)
ON THE pivot of my casual conversation with George
Palmer Putnam turned the career of Amelia Earhart, her trans-
formation from social worker at a Boston settlement house to a
world figure in aviation.
If it had not been for that conversation with Mr. Putnam the
chances are that Amelia Earhart would still have become a con-
structive factor in the industry to which she was so devoted; and
that she would be alive today.
In the spring of 1928 I dropped in to see Putnam in New York.
He told me that Commander Byrd had recently sold his trimotored
Fokker to "a wealthy woman who plans to fly the Atlantic." He
did not know her name or anything more about it, except that he
believed floats were being fitted to the plane at the East Boston
airport
"It'd be amusing to manage a stunt like that, wouldn't it?” he
remarked. “Find out all you can. Locate the ship. Pump the
pilots.”
In Boston I cornered Wilmer (Bill) Stultz, the pilot, and Lou
Gordon, his copilot and mechanic. Stultz admitted he was getting
ready for a transatlantic flight, but maintained that he knew only
his backer's attorney, David T. Layman.
In New York, some days later, I got in touch with him and
* Reprinted by permission of Colonel Hilton H. Railey and the North
American Newspaper Alliance,
xiii


learned that Mrs. Frederick E. Guest of London and New York,
whose husband had been Secretary of State for Air in Lloyd
George's cabinet, was the mysterious sponsor who had planned
to be the first of her sex to fly the Atlantic. Her family, said Mr.
Layman, was much concerned. Soon it was agreed that if I could
find the "right sort of girl” to take her place Mrs. Guest would
yield.
When I returned to Boston I telephoned Rear Admiral Reginald
K. Belknap, retired.
“I know a young social worker who flies,” he said. "I'm not sure
how many hours she's had, but I do know that she's deeply inter-
ested in aviation and a thoroughly fine person. Call Denison House
and ask for Amelia Earhart.”
Guardedly, when Miss Earhart came on the wire, I inquired
whether she would like to participate in an important but hazard-
ous flight. I had to come out with it because she had declined an
interview until I stated the nature of my business. That afternoon,
accompanied by Miss Marion Perkins, head worker at Denison
House, she appeared at my office.
At sight convinced that she was qualified as a person, if not as
a pilot, I asked forthwith:
“How would you like to be the first woman to fly the Atlantic?"
She asked for details, whatever I was at liberty to tell her. Miss
Earhart had owned several planes and had flown more than five
hundred hours. She said the role of passenger did not appeal to
her much, and hoped that, weather conditions permitting, she
could take her turn at the controls. At that time, however, she was
unable to fly with the aid of instruments alone, and her experi-
ence with trimotored ships had been inconsequential.
In the light of subsequent events, in the tragic shadow of the
last, I quote a letter addressed to me by Miss Earhart on May 2,
1928:
It is very kind of you to keep me informed, as far as you are
able, concerning developments of the contemplated flight. As you
may imagine, my suspense is great indeed.
xiv


Please, however, do not think that I hold you responsible, in
any way, for my own uncertainty. I realize that you are now, and
have been from the first, only the medium of communication be-
tween me and the person, or persons, who are financing the
enterprise. For your own satisfaction may I add, here, that you
have done nothing more than present the facts of the case to me.
I appreciate your forbearance in not trying to “sell” the idea, and
should like you to know that I assume all responsibility for any
risks involved.
Some weeks after Mrs. Guest had retired in Miss Earhart's
favor, my wife, in daily touch with our secret preparations,
broached the subject and, woman to woman, urged her to back
out if she felt the slightest degree uneasy. Her reply was charac-
teristic:
“No, this is the way I look at it: my family's insured, there's
only myself to think about. And when a great adventure's offered
you-you don't refuse it, that's all.”
At Mrs. Guest's request, Mr. Putnam agreed to act as the
"backer” of the flight. It was at Miss Earhart's request, primarily,
that I agreed to see her through the rumpus in Europe. About the
middle of May I set out for London. Mrs. Guest had preceded us.
Stultz and Gordon, the press believed, were Byrd's men, groom-
ing the giant Fokker, named the Friendship by Mrs. Guest, for the
trip to the South Pole.
Toward noon on June 17 the Friendship cracked the ill luck
which had glued her pontoons to the bay at Trepassey, New-
foundland, for more than two weeks. News of the take-off was
flashed to the world.
Early the next morning we heard that the Friendship had
circled the S.S. America, a few hundred miles out, to get her
bearings; silence through the night had meant only that her radio
was out of commission. After some hours I received direct word
from Gordon that they had come down safely at Burry Port,
Wales. I telegraphed them to remain aboard ship until I arrived
by flying boat from Southampton.
XV


That afternoon, landing near the Friendship, I caught a glimpse
of Miss Earhart seated in the doorway of the fuselage.
"Hello!” she said.
After a flight of twenty hours and forty minutes they were all
dog tired, but there was something else in Miss Earhart's ex-
pression-disappointment.
“What's the matter?” I asked. “Aren't you excited?”
“Excited? No. It was a grand experience, but all I did was lie
on my tummy and take pictures of the clouds. We didn't see
much of the ocean. Bill did all the flying-had to. I was just
baggage, like a sack of potatoes.”
“What of it? You're still the first woman to fly the Atlantic and,
what's more, the first woman pilot."
“Oh, well, maybe someday I'll try it alone.”
The next morning we boarded the Friendship and flew to
Southampton, where, for the first time, Miss Earhart met Mrs.
Guest, to whom she owed the position which, thereafter strength-
ened by her own steady hands, she was to turn to such brilliant
account.
As Miss Earhart's escort, I felt increasing pride in her natural
manner, warmed, as it was, by humor and grace. Whether con-
fronted by dozens of cameramen demanding over and over,
“A great big smile, please!” or asked to wave to crowds (a gesture
she used sparingly); whether laying a wreath at the Cenotaph
or before a statue of Edith Cavell; whether sipping tea with the
Prime Minister and Lady Astor at the House of Commons or
talking with Winston Churchill, she remained herself, serious,
forthright, with no bunk in her make-up.
Even in those days I sensed that for all her lack of ostentation
she would yet write drama in the skies; her simplicity would
capture people everywhere, her strength of character would hold
her on her course; in calm pursuit of an end not personal she
would achieve greatness. Above all, she had a quality of imagi-
native daring that was to wing her like an arrow.
Aboard the mayor's boat, Macom, during Miss Earhart's wel-
ccount.
xvi


come in the harbor at New York, Commander Byrd told me that
he needed help in the financing of his projected expedition to the
Antarctic and urged me to join him as soon as I could cut loose
from the Friendship's show. After a day or two I did.
In the years that followed, with pride and sure knowledge of
Amelia Earhart's motivations, but with a tinge of fear as to the
outcome, I watched her gain distinction in aviation.
Genuinely as a tribute to her sex rather than for her own
glorification, she accepted the honors that accrued; for the par-
ticipation of women in aviation, which at all times she strove to
encourage and pace, was the obsession which lured her to her
death.
After she had flown the Atlantic as the first woman passenger,
it was inevitable that she should attempt to fly it alone. Having
done so, having established, seriatim, transcontinental records of
one kind and another, there remained the Pacific.
Long before she mentioned it, I knew that next, and perhaps
fatally, must come her globe-circling adventure. Why–when even
to her it must have seemed a stunt without constructive benefit
to the aeronautical industry-did she attempt that hazardous ex-
pedition?
She had to. She was caught up in the hero racket that com-
pelled her to strive for increasingly dramatic records, bigger and
braver feats that automatically insured the publicity necessary to
the maintenance of her position as the foremost woman pilot in
the world. She was a victim of an era of “hot” aeronautics that
began with Colonel Lindbergh and Admiral Byrd and that shot
scientific” expeditions across continents, oceans, and polar re-
gions by dint of individual exhibition.
Lion?
xvii





PART ONE
THE FRIENDSHIP FLIGHT





In the middle of that afternoon in April, 1928, AE was called
to the telephone.
"I'm too busy to answer just now," she said. "Tell whoever it is
to call back later."
"But he says it's important."
Unwillingly Amelia went to the telephone and picked up the
receiver.
"Hello," the voice said at the other end. “My name is Railey,
Captain Hilton Railey."
"Yes, Captain Railey?” She could not place the name.
"I wonder if I could speak to you on a very important matter?"
His voice was low and strong.
"What could that be?" Amelia answered matter-of-factly.
"You are interested in flying, are you not?"
"Yes, sirl” Her interest quickened.
"Would you like to do something for the cause of aviation?"
"That sounds like a big order.”
"Well, would you?” There was a challenge in Railey's inflection.
Amelia twisted the long string of beads that hung from her
neck. "Yes!” she said.
"It might be hazardous.”
Captain Railey refused to tell over the telephone the exact
nature of the risk involved, and asked Miss Earhart to call at his
office at 80 Federal Street in downtown Boston.
Amelia asked him for references; she wanted to make sure that
this was not somebody's hoax. Railey gave First Army Head-
quarters and the name of Commander Byrd. She was satisfied for
the moment. As an added precaution, Amelia asked Marion
Perkins, the head worker at Denison House, to accompany her
to Railey's office as chaperone and adviser.
Late that afternoon, nearly bursting with curiosity, AE drove
her "yellow peril” faster than usual. She was annoyed at having
to trail even one car through the narrow streets of the city. Miss
Perkins, rigid stolidity beside her, cautioned against speeding
with matronly authority.


The Kissel parked, Amelia tucked her hair under the rarely
worn cloche hat and hurried to Railey's office, but only at the pace
which Marion Perkins' decorum allowed.
Upon meeting Captain Railey, the two women discovered that
he was a civilian who had been a captain in the Army during the
war. He was now the president of a public-relations firm with
offices in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He numbered
among his clients such aviation notables as Richard Byrd, Clar-
ence Chamberlin, Sir Hubert Wilkins, Lincoln Ellsworth, and
Ruth Nichols.
A dark-haired, handsome man, Hilton Railey seated the two
women off to the side of his desk. He was pleased with the ap-
pearance of the humble social worker, who, he had learned, had
a private pilot's license, and had logged more than five hundred
solo hours. What he liked above all was her striking resemblance
to the greatest of American heroes-Charles Lindbergh. Here
before him, if his eyes were not deceiving him, was a "Lady
Lindy.” Like Lindbergh, she was shy and modest. She didn't
know it, but she had been discovered.
“Miss Earhart,” Railey asked, "have you ever heard of Mrs.
Frederick Guest?”
“No, I'm afraid not,” Amelia answered. She sat on the edge of
the chair, her back straight, her legs pressed firmly together.
“A short time ago, Mrs. Guest bought a trimotored Fokker
from Commander Byrd. She wanted to be the first woman to fly
the Atlantic.” Railey looked for initial stirring from the girl.
“However, although she is courageous, she is also a mother, and
her children have talked her out of it.”
Marion Perkins, suspicious as a protective aunt, unbending as
a ramrod, eyed Railey coldly.
Guessing the direction of the interview, Amelia warmed to the
thought crossing her mind. She eased back in the chair. “That's
too bad for her,” she said.
Hilton Railey gave the young woman a hard look; then he stole


a glance at her long, straight legs. AE blushed. “Miss Earhart," he
continued, “Mrs. Guest still wants a woman to be a passenger on
that flight. Would you like to be the first woman to fly across
the Atlantic?"
Amelia flushed in excitement. Despite the hazard involved, she
reasoned, this was a rare opportunity. There were no more than
a dozen women in the country with flying licenses, and that
seemed to be one of the requirements. Perhaps her chances were
good. She made up her mind.
“Yes, sir,” she said finally, “I certainly would.”
Captain Railey rose to shake her hand. He was delighted that
he had found such a charming candidate. “You will have to go
to New York with me," he told her, “to meet the backers of the
flight. Other women fliers are being considered, too.” He paused,
then added, “By the way, Miss Earhart, has anyone ever told
you that you look like Lindbergh?”
In New York, plans for the flight were being completed. George
Palmer Putnam had been commissioned by Mrs. Guest to find
a woman flier to take her place. He had called everyone he knew
who could possibly find a likely candidate.
It had been the intention of the Honorable Mrs. Frederick
Guest of London, formerly Amy Phipps of Pittsburgh, to do for
English-American relations what Charles Lindbergh had done
for French-American relations.
Among the several women who had already been considered
for the flight was Ruth Nichols of Rye, New York, who became
a famous woman flier. In her career she paced AE all the way.
Waiting in New York to interview AE was an all-male jury. It
was composed of George Palmer Putnam, the publisher; David
T. Layman, Jr., Mrs. Guest's attorney; and a brother of Mrs.
Guest, John S. Phipps.
Amelia had never seen such a stern-looking group. After Cap-
tain Railey introduced her to each of them in turn, they began
to question her. Was she willing to fly the Atlantic? Would she


release them from responsibility in the event of disaster? What
was her education? How strong was she? How willing? What
flying experience did she have? What would she do after the
flight? Was she prepared not to be paid, although the two men in
the flight would be?
The demure Boston social worker survived the examination.
Recalling the experience, Amelia said later: "I found myself in
a curious situation. If they did not like me at all or found me
wanting in too many respects, I would be deprived of the trip.
If they liked me too well, they might be loath to drown me. It
was, therefore, necessary for me to maintain an attitude of im-
penetrable mediocrity. Apparently I did, because I was chosen.”
Impenetrable mediocrity to the contrary, the committee dis-
covered in the girl much of what they were looking for. She was
tall and slender and boyish-looking. She was humble and soft-
spoken. The men could not help but agree with Railey: she did
indeed look and act like Charles Lindbergh.
Amelia was thrilled because she had been selected for the
flight. With unbounded enthusiasm she followed the prepara-
tions. It had been decided to make the take-off from Boston
Harbor, for if news of the project should leak out to the press,
then everyone could say that Boston's own Commander Byrd
was preparing another Arctic expedition and that the plane
was his.
By the time AE returned to Denison House much had already
been done. Acting for Mrs. Guest, Commander Byrd had picked
the pilot. He was Wilmer L. "Bill” Stultz, who in turn could
make his choice of mechanics. Stultz decided on Lou “Slim”
Gordon, who was working in Monroe, Louisiana.
In the event of an emergency, Byrd had also chosen an alter-
nate pilot, Lou Gower. Stultz, however, an exceptional pilot,
never had to be replaced, although there were times when he
might have been
The plane, named the Friendship by Mrs. Guest, was brought


Three weeks of waiting for the right weather drew nerves
taut. Because she was so well known about the local airports,
Amelia avoided East Boston and the hangar. She and George
Palmer Putnam (known to everyone as GP) often visited with
the Byrds on Brimmer Street, looking over the vast preparations
for the commander's forthcoming expedition to the Antarctic.
On good days Amelia and either Hilton Railey or GP would
take long drives into the country in the yellow Kissel. Each night
they would eat at a different restaurant specializing in foreign
dishes, and after dinner they would attend one of Boston's
legitimate theaters.
Bill Stultz and Slim Gordon stayed at the Copley-Plaza where
they shared a room. Stultz, the man of action, the rare combina-
tion of great pilot, navigator, instrument flier, and radio operator,
grew more restless with the passing days. A somber melancholy
began to creep into his waiting hours. He turned to brandy to
relieve his boredom and anxiety. His daily intoxication became an
acute concern to Amelia, Putnam, and Railey. Gordon, himself
sick with ptomaine poisoning, nevertheless knew and insisted that
everything would change for the better for both of them if they
ever could get out of Boston and into the air.
Spirits dampened during the long, gray days. When the
weather was favorable in Boston, the mid-Atlantic was forbid-
ding; when the mid-Atlantic was favorable, Boston was shrouded
in fog; when the Atlantic and Boston favorably agreed, the
harbor offered only a peaceful calm that made it impossible
for the heavy plane to take off.
Amelia wrote what she called “Popping off Letters.” One for
her father in Los Angeles, and one for her mother in Medford;
the one was gay and stoically resigned, the other was serious and
somewhat grim. The letter to her father read:
May 20, 1928
Dearest Dad:
Hooray for the last grand adventure! I wish I had
won, but it was worth while anyway. You know that.


I have no faith we'll meet anywhere again, but I
wish we might.
Anyway, good-by and good luck to you.
Affectionately, your doter,
Mill.
To her mother she wrote: “Even though I have lost, the
adventure was worth while. Our family tends to be too secure.
My life has really been very happy, and I didn't mind contem-
plating its end in the midst of it."
Toward the end of May everything seemed ready. But two
attempted take-offs were unsuccessful. Too little wind and too
much fog mutinied against human will and seabound craft.
At three thirty in the morning of still another day the group
left the Copley-Plaza and entered the gray of still another dawn.
Once more sandwiches had been made, thermos bottles filled
with coffee and cocoa, gear readied and packed. Again they
climbed into waiting cars and drove through the wet deserted
streets to T Wharf and clambered aboard the tugboat Sadie Ross.
They chugged once more out to the Jeffrey Yacht Club in East
Boston, and out to the anchored plane. The Friendship seemed
a desultory bird, its golden wings and red body bubbled over
with morning dew. It was Sunday, the third of June.
The fog was not too thick. The wind was reasonably right,
blowing in from the southeast and churning up waves that
pounded the pontoons and splashed over the outboard motors.
There were no good-bys; there had been too many before.
Slim Gordon took the tarpaulin covers off the three motors. Bill
checked the radio and the cockpit instruments. Slim, jumping
from pontoon to pontoon, cranked the motors, and then climbed
into the copilot's seat.
The plane started to taxi out of the harbor. Amelia stood
between the two large tanks in the cabin and glued her eyes
on the air-speed indicator. Lou Gower crouched in the aft end
of the plane, hoping the added weight of his body would help
bring up the nose of the plane for take-off. The attempt failed.
10


was
A five-gallon can of gasoline was cast overboard, but that did
not help. The plane was still too heavy. Lou Gower had hoped
to go as far as Newfoundland, but realizing the inevitable, he
gathered his gear and signaled for a boat from the tug. He wished
the crew good luck and left the plane.
The Friendship taxied again down the harbor, propellers whir-
ring in the spray, pontoons cutting the whitecaps. The tug trailed
the plane in the churning wake of foam.
Inside the Fokker Amelia watched the air-speed needle while
they tried for the take-off. The hand on the instrument moved
slowly-to thirty, to forty, then beyond the necessary fifty to
fifty-five, and finally to sixty. The three motors roared and snarled
and strained. The pontoons rose on the steps, then quickly lifted
from the sea. At last they were off.
Amelia glanced at her watch; it was 6:30 A.M. She looked out
the window in the side door. Boston and the tugs and fishing
boats began to disappear in the fog as the plane climbed to
cruising altitude. The sun broke over the rim of the harbor. They
were on their way straight up the New England coast, bound for
Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.
As official recorder for the flight, AE pulled out her stenogra-
pher's pad that served as a logbook. She sat on a water can
and wrote:
96 miles out (1 hour). 7:30. 2,500 ft. Bill shows me on the
map that we are near Cash's Ledge. We cannot see anything
(if there is anything to see), as the haze makes visibility
poor. The sun is blinding in the cockpit and will be, for a
couple of hours. Bill is crouching in the hatchway taking
sights.
One hour and fifteen minutes later they sighted Nova Scotia
and Fear Island. The plane dropped to 2,000 feet for a closer
look. The haze had lessened. White gulls flew over the clustered
houses on the green land and headed out over the waves rocking
a lone dory on the shore. A rocky ledge ruffled the edge of the


island. Pubnico Harbor was directly below. The Friendship,
motors humming sweetly, had averaged 114 mph since it left
Boston.
Amelia changed her seat to a gas can and looked down through
the hatchway. A green dappled shore came into view. The plane
raced fast-scudding clouds and churned through the reappearing
haze. Bored with nothing more to see, AE now lay on the floor
of the fuselage and pulled up the fur collar of her oversized
leather flying suit. She felt snug and warm. Beside her along
the bulkhead the gas cans squeaked against the heavy tie ropes.
"Having a squeaking good time,” Amelia said to herself, and
remembered those other squeaking good times she once had
in Atchison, Kansas.
2. Girlhood in Kansas
Grandfather Otis stood in front of the fireplace in the long
living room of his home. He clasped his hands behind his back
and rocked back and forth, his black, square-toed, handmade
shoes squeaking on the hard wood floor. He was a big, thick-
chested man, and even in retirement he was still every inch the
judge he had been before his two granddaughters were born.
His wife Amelia sat in the rocking chair, darning a black knee
stocking. The chair creaked as it rocked, keeping involuntary
time with the heel-and-toe swaying of the thick black shoes.
Two little girls, their daughter Amy's only children, sat on the
stiff horsehair sofa and exchanged knowing looks. The older girl,
Amelia, who was named after her grandmother, bent over and
whispered into her sister Muriel's ear. “A squeaking good time!”
They giggled. They wished they had shoes that squeaked, too.
The girls loved their grandfather because he often entertained
them with stories about his early days in Kansas. Judge Otis had
12


been one of the first settlers of Atchison. Shortly after the Civil
War, when he graduated from the University of Michigan, he
came by overland stage from Kalamazoo to Chicago, took a
flatboat to St. Louis, then went up the Missouri River and de-
barked at Atchison to make his home. He built a large two-
story brick-and-frame house on a site overlooking the river, and
added a big barn and woodshed. The work completed, he sent for
his bride, who had been staying with her Quaker family in
Philadelphia.
Amelia Otis found the country nearly savage. The railroad
tracks going into Atchison were lined with buffalo bones, and
the so-called "friendly” Indians scared her half to death. They
were too friendly. Whenever she went shopping in town, the
curious Indians fingered her dress and poked into her shopping
basket. Grandfather Otis chuckled when he told this story about
his wife, for she would always remind him that she had preferred
the civilization of Philadelphia and the society of Friends.
The Earhart girls enjoyed their grandfather but he never re-
placed their father, who, it seemed, was always away on a busi-
ness trip. One of Amelia's earliest memories of her childhood was
waiting for her father to come home for the weekend, to see what
presents he would bring and, best of all, to play with him during
the day and to listen to his stories at night. He had bought them
a baseball and bat and also a basketball, and had shown them
how to play with them, despite the protests of some of the
neighborhood mothers.
At bedtime for the girls, instead of sending them upstairs to
their room, he would sit in the straight-backed chair by the
fireplace, cross the long legs of his slender frame, and tell them
stories of his family and boyhood.
Edwin S. Earhart had been born a few miles from Atchison, the
youngest of twelve children. His father David and his mother
Mary had labored many long hours on the tough Kansas sod,
only to encounter crop failure, drought, dust storms, and grass-
hopper plagues. David Earhart had been a missionary minister
13


turned around and went back to Halifax. They did not want to
run the risk of blind Aying.
At the Dartmouth Hotel in Halifax difficulties with the press
began. Publicity about the flight was now inescapable, for it had
been announced in the Boston newspapers that the aviators were
on their way to cross the Atlantic. The three fliers found no
chance to take much-needed rest.
At midnight two reporters and a cameraman were still trying
to talk Bill and Slim into posing for a picture, and at five thirty
the next morning the newsmen were waiting when the three
travelers came down for breakfast. Before, during, and after the
meal interviews and pictures were requested and begged. More
reporters and cameramen awaited them at the dock. The fliers
had to wait until 100 gallons of gas, which had been ordered two
hours earlier, were brought by tug out to the plane and poured
into the tanks.
At 9:45 A.M. they took off from a calm sea. Visibility was good
and they cruised at 2,000 feet. The sharp rocks and ledges shone
dark and bright along the coast beneath the left wing. The 200
miles of fog predicted the night before never materialized, but
a thin haze did. At eleven forty-five they were off Cape Canso,
the Atlantic tip of Nova Scotia.
Amelia and Slim, happy at the smooth progress of the flight,
dived into the sandwiches prepared by the Copley-Plaza. AE
munched hungrily and moved over to the side window. She
wrinkled her brow as she looked over the scalloped sea. Between
bites Slim smiled at the strange sight of Amelia in the oversized
flying suit which she had borrowed from Army Major Woolley
in Boston.
At 12:15 P.M. they cruised at 3,200 feet at 100 mph. A thick
bank of fog rolled in from the Atlantic on the right. At twelve
fifty they sighted Newfoundland; at two fifty, Saint Mary's Bay.
Curling masses of fog began to form over the warm earth below.
Trepassey, their destination, came into view far below; it looked
16


like an open beak of land. Bill glided and circled down, and
landed the Fokker smoothly.
While the plane taxied, Amelia crawled into the cockpit to
take pictures of the reception committee. A dozen small boats
had come out and were circling the plane, each trying to claim
the distinction of being the first to rope the plane and secure
it to a mooring.
Slim Gordon had gone out to one of the pontoons. He waved
an arm and screamed warnings in vain above the noise of the
motors: one of the welcomers threw a rope and nearly knocked
him into the water. Stultz at the controls cursed, worried lest
the boats get too close to the propellers and entangle a rope
in them.
It was impossible to get the idea across that the plane could
get to its mooring under its own power, until a Paramount
cameraman caught the idea and cleared the way through the
boats. Amelia joyfully snapped pictures of the marine rodeo.
She had an entertaining half-hour.
The stop at Trepassey became a nightmare of delay and frustra-
tion. Day after day angry winds churned the bay, making it
impossible to load gasoline into the tanks. For fifteen days, from
the fifth of June, sea and wind, together and separately, conspired
to test the patience of the fliers. On June 7 they tried three times
to take off and failed. A pontoon sprung a leak and an oil tank
cracked. Slim patiently repaired both. The fret of anticipation
grew worse by the hour.
At Devereux House, where they stayed, the travelers sought
diversion by playing rummy and chopping wood, reading tele-
grams and scanning maps and weather reports, hiking and fish-
ing. The local food became a topic of conversation. Slim, fear-
ful that he would come down with another case of ptomaine
poisoning, dieted mainly on candy bars, and soon exhausted the
entire stock of the little neighborhood store. Amelia and Bill
braved canned rabbit and boiled lamb, and the inevitable vege-
tables of potatoes, turnips, and cabbage. The austerity of the land
17


forced a simple fare, but the warmth and friendliness of the
Devereux family and the many visitors contrasted with the cruelty
of the land and climate.
Apparently untroubled and indefatigable, Bill Stultz would get
up before the others in the morning and go eeling, trouting, or
exploring; at night he would pick out tunes on the guitar to
entertain the others. Job-like, they all tried to ignore the smother-
ing fog, the howling winds, and the hurtling sea, but the strain
was telling in wrinkles of concern on all their faces. To dull
the sharpened edge of his anxiety, Bill took to drinking heavily.
His melancholy had returned. AE was worried about it; Slim,
evidently, was unconcerned, knowing that Bill would stop drink-
ing once he was back in the air, as he had in Boston.
On June 12 they tried desperately for four hours to take off,
but the heaviness of the receding tide sprayed and silenced the
outboard motors. The plane seemed heavy and unwieldy. Every
item of unnecessary equipment was unloaded-camera, coats,
bags, cushions-but still the salt spray continued to kill the motors.
They were too discouraged to speak.
The next day they arose at six o'clock. They unloaded 300
pounds of fuel and tried for take-off, but the left motor cut out.
More days of waiting plagued them until the motor was repaired,
but one reassuring message had reached them. The Southern
Cross, a trimotored Fokker, like the Friendship except for pon-
toons, had crossed the Pacific from San Francisco.
Back at the Devereux home, they decided to do something
about their clothes. Amelia, who had only the clothes she was
wearing, bought a green-checked Mother Hubbard for ninety
cents and a pair of tan hose, then borrowed a pair of shoes, a
skirt, and a slip, so that she could wash everything from the
skin out. Bill and Slim felt the same crawling need for cleanli-
ness. They borrowed clothes, and had their suits cleaned and
pressed and their shirts laundered. Bill splurged and bought a
new tie and new Trepassey socks.
Finally, a slight break in the weather came on Sunday morning,
18


June 17. At eleven o'clock, after three tries in a heavy sea, the
take-off was successful. Bill Stultz, unfortunately, had to be all
but carried on the plane by Amelia and Gordon, but again he
called upon hidden reserves of airmanship, as in Boston, and
piloted the Friendship as if nothing had ever happened.
Amelia worried lest there would be a recurrence of drinking
during the long over-water flight. Her fears were intensified when
she found a bottle hidden in the rear of the plane. She debated
the discovery for a few moments, but soon acted: she dropped
the bottle into the ocean. As it happened, her concern was un-
founded. Stultz never came back to look for his stimulant;
flying, it appeared, was for him stimulant enough.
The Friendship wobbled through the fog, one engine still
spluttering from the sea spray on take-off, climbed to 3,000 feet,
and leveled off to cruise for a while. More wisps of fog flitted by.
Bill nosed the plane higher, out of the fog, but into a sudden
snowstorm. Lighter by 2,000 pounds, because of the excess
baggage and fuel that had been removed at Trepassey, three
tons of aircraft now flew through the air, shaking violently in
the buffeting of the storm.
Bill pointed the nose down; the motors roared wide open. At
3,000 feet they bucked a head wind and a lashing rain; the
plane bumped and lurched in the downdrafts and updrafts. The
air speed was steady at 106 mph. Suddenly a clear sky, sun shin-
ing, and blue sea broke as far as Amelia could see; then, omi-
nously, mountainous peaks of clouds towered dead ahead. The
plane upended and hurtled headlong in a steep dive. Amelia
braced herself against the forward bulkhead and waited for the
plane to right itself.
SS


visits as educational as classes in school. He also took the girls
along whenever he went on a fishing jaunt. For such things as
a lunar eclipse he would let them stay up late at night. And
Amelia never forgot the one occasion in 1910 when she saw
Halley's comet.
“Anything unusual is educational,” Amy Earhart said, support-
ing her husband's views. And the girls, dressed in their dark-blue
flannel suits and their “shocking” full-pleated bloomers, collected
the unusual and did the unusual. They added toads and spiders
and chameleons to the collection of Indian arrowheads. They
cooked and baked at the oven outside, and Amelia, forever the
experimenter, once tried to make the manna she read about in
the story of Moses. She was convinced that it was a cross between
a popover and angel-food cake. Whenever she was asked why she
wanted to do such things, her answer was always the same: "Be-
cause I want to!” The reply may have been unsatisfactory, but she
used it all her life-for her ungirl-like interest in house painting,
working metal, taking mechanical gadgets apart and putting them
together again, and flying an airplane around the world. These
were the things she wanted to do.
But nothing was more enjoyable than the new flat sleds with
steel runners that Mr. Earhart bought the girls for Christmas,
1905, when Amelia was a round-faced, towheaded girl of seven.
As soon as she heard that the hill nearby was covered with
snow, she rushed out to try her new sled-a "belly whopper,"
she called it. When Amelia and Muriel reached the slope, the
other neighborhood girls were sitting on their old-style upright
sleds with wooden runners. Amelia noted that her sled was
much more practical; it was a sled you could steer this way
and that. She made a running start and thumped onto the sled.
Down the steep slope of the hill she swooped, blinking, her wet
eyes whipped by the icy wind, feeling the cold rush into her
nostrils. Suddenly a junkman's cart labored out of a side street at
the bottom of the hill. Amelia shouted to the driver, but he did
not hear. The horse, plodding carefully across the icy patches on
22


the road, had blinders on and could not see her. It was impossible
for Amelia to stop and too dangerous for her to go off the side
of the road into the ditch. With presence of mind born of neces-
sity, she coasted on straight, then carefully guided the sled by
the steering bar up front, and shot through the underside of the
horse, between his front and back legs. The tomboy way to
sled had saved her life.
Despite the disapproval of his mother-in-law, Mr. Earhart
continued to give his girls what they wanted to play with, and
they wanted to play with footballs, baseballs, and basketballs.
Amelia loved strenuous games and she tried them all. She
rebelled at the idea that they were not proper exercise for girls.
That made her nearly as mad as some of the stories she read:
the heroes were always boys. “Exercise of all kinds gave me in-
tense pleasure,” she said later in her life, after she had become
an accomplished equestrienne. “I might have been more skillful
and graceful if I had learned the correct form in athletics. I
could not get any instruction, so I just played and acquired a
lot of bad habits.” She had always wanted to ride a horse, and
she would climb onto the back of any nag that stopped in front
of her house for a delivery. The most fun was riding the heavy-
footed sorrel that pulled the butcher's wagon. He bucked with
devilish determination for no reason at all, and Amelia was
often unseated.
Her favorite horse was a neighbor's mare named Nellie. Nellie's
owner kept her in a small, hot, confining shed near the Otis
property. Whenever Nellie, tormented by flies, would kick her
heels at the sides of the shed, her owner would beat her with
a buggy whip. Amelia hated the neighbor for his cruelty, and
often tried to calm the horse with cubes of sugar before Nellie's
clattering and banging aroused her master.
One day, in the summer of 1906, Amelia and Muriel watched
the neighbor saddle and mount Nellie. The girls glared as the
rider reined his horse in tight. They followed horse and rider
as they moved into the street. Suddenly Nellie reared and bucked
23


with his feet on a crossbar. Just behind the man was a motor with
a big wooden propeller. The tail looked like a large box kite.
An assistant spun the propeller. The motor sputtered. Slowly the
plane rolled over the ground on its small wheels; then it moved
faster. All of a sudden it rose into the air.
A woman who was standing beside Amelia took her arm and
said, “Look, dear. It flies!” But Amelia was more interested in
the ridiculous paper hat she was wearing, which looked like
an inverted peach basket and had cost fifteen cents.
5. Over the Atlantic
AE shook her head and looked out the small square window
in the side door of the Friendship. She wondered what the im-
plications were of her nine-year-old disinterest in that early air-
plane. Certainly now, as she had for many years, she hated hats
and loved airplanes. Why the exact opposite in attraction re-
pulsion, why the substitution in meaningful symbols, why the
clean and clear-cut reversal? She did not trouble herself for the
answers; she took out her log and made some quick entries:
140 mph. 3,600 feet. Mist and fog, white from the afternoon
sun churn in the props. 4:15 P.M. It is cold in the cabin and
colder outside. Bill Stultz has picked up XHY Rexmore, a
British ship, which gives him a bearing-48 North, 39 West,
20:45 GMT. The HXY has promised to give New York the
Friendship’s position.
Amelia knelt beside the chart table, drinking in the color from
the sun splashing on the mist, fog, and clouds. Cloud peaks
tinted pink from the setting sun towered in the distance; their
hollows were gray and black. The mist on the arc of the props
25


combined with the sun into three bright rainbows. The pink
exhausts from the three motors matched the pink of the cloud
peaks. The plane sank in the fog to 4,000 feet. They were 1,096
miles out from Trepassey.
It was night. Cloud, mist, and fog combined. Ten o'clock.
Amelia tried to write in the dark by using the thumb of her
left hand as the starting point of a line. The words were uneven
on the logbook but distinct:
How marvelous is a machine and the mind that made it. I
am thoroughly occidental in this worship. Bill sits up alone.
Every muscle and nerve alert. Many hours to go. Marvelous
also. I've driven all day and night and know what staying
alert means.
Bill climbed to get over the fog and roughness. Five thousand
feet. There was another mountain of fog to climb. Six thousand
feet. The north star was reflected in the wing tip. Three fifteen
A.M. More mountains of fog had to be scaled. Bill gave the plane
all she had. Nine thousand feet. Ten thousand feet. Since Trepas-
sey the Friendship had been in the air thirteen hours and fifteen
minutes, despite the four-hour advance in clock time. Periodically,
Slim Gordon focused a flashlight on the compass so Bill could
take a reading
Stultz had to fly his plane now completely by instruments. He
decided to go down through the fog. He began slowly, then
more quickly, down to 5,000 feet. Amelia's ears hurt from the
rapid descent. Water streamed on the windows. The left motor
started to cough, then the other two. Bill opened the throttles
wide, trying to clear the cylinders.
Three thousand feet. The left motor still sputtered. Slim took
over the controls, while Bill came back to try the radio. It was
dead. Everlasting clouds were everywhere. It began to get lighter
as the day dawned. The plane came down through an opening
in the clouds. Everything in the cabin slid forward, Amelia with
it. She thumped against the forward bulkhead. That sensation
26


again. She grinned, then smiled broadly. The story of her life
could be given in forward slides. The roller coaster, the belly
whopper, the Columbia dome. It seemed that she had always
been coming down from altitude, after seeking the highest point
of woodshed, street, or building and exulting to the thrill of quick
descent.
6. Premed at Columbia
Amelia studied hard and long at Columbia. She had enrolled
in the fall of 1919, when she was twenty-one, as a premedical
student. After having been a nurse's aide in Toronto during
the war, she decided to try medicine as a possible profession.
She took all the courses ending in “ology," and chemistry and
physics; and she treated herself to a luxury course in French
literature.
Marian Stabler, a close friend at the time, was amazed at the
number of credit hours that AE was carrying. “This course she
was taking,” Miss Stabler writes, “was really a three-man job,
with the full quota at Barnard, and listening courses elsewhere.
Apparently Columbia and Barnard didn't compare notes, as she
wouldn't have been permitted to carry a load like that if anyone
had known. She could only manage it because there was little
homework or preparation in the science courses."
But Amelia found time to give free rein to her exploratory
nature. As she had adventured into the caves along the shores
of the Missouri River below the Otis house, so now she had to
investigate every nook of the underground passageways at Colum-
bia. She would go down the steps to the basement of Hamilton
Hall, enter through a heavy door, follow the maze of steam
pipes wherever they led, and, happily surprised, come out at
Schermerhorn Hall on the other side of the campus.


One Thursday evening at about eight o'clock in the summer of
1920 Amelia, seeking unusual diversion on the one night off
she allowed herself during the week, decided to climb to the top
of the Columbia library dome. Somehow she had managed to
borrow the key that would admit her up the winding stairs.
Impatient to be off, she ran up the long, wide steps in front
of Low Library. She brushed past the bronze statue of Alma
Mater and puffed up more steps to the library door.
Once inside, she walked past the check-out desk and around
to the northwest flight of stairs. She climbed the steps to the
fourth floor, and came out on one side of the rotunda. There
before her on the north parapet were the more than life-size
statues of Euripides, Demosthenes, Sophocles, and Augustus
Caesar. She turned to the door and unlocked it.
She took the steps of the spiral staircase two at a time. She
pushed open the door and entered onto the narrow walkway at
the base of the dome. Gripping the railing that went around the
top, she took a deep breath. The view was marvelous, but not
so good as it could be at the very top. She now crawled on her
hands and knees up the smooth rounded arches to the peak.
Sitting there and looking out over the city which was veiled
in the half light of dusk, she felt a warm excitement spread
through her body; then suddenly coupled to the warmth, as she
caught sight of Alma Mater far below, a quick chill pierced the
base of her spine. She grinned: this same mixture of feelings
had gripped her before. She had them as a girl when she first
tried the roller coaster and when she had coasted down the
hill on the belly whopper and nearly hit the junkman's horse. And
in Toronto, when she thrilled to the sight of the pilots taking
off in the snow and was suddenly seized with fear. It was a
question of which feeling would overcome the other.
As before, she waited for the warmth to overtake the chill;
then calmly she drank in the view of New York at night as lights
turned on against the enveloping darkness. To the left on Amster-
dam Avenue was an angel perched against the sky on the highest
28


point of the cathedral of St. John the Divine. Trumpet raised,
the angel sounded a flourish of unheard celestial music to un-
hearing earthly ears below.
To the right, Broadway stretched downtown into the night
as far as she could see. She swung around on the peak and looked
up the Hudson to the dock at 125th Street. The ferry was on
its way across to New Jersey.
The ferry made her think of Sundays when she liked to ride
across the river and go for hikes along the Palisades. It was as
much fun as Atchison had been. Now Atchison was all over.
Grandfather and Grandmother Otis had died and the property
had been sold. Amelia's father and mother were now living in
California; they had been urging her to come out there so they
could be together. Mr. Earhart had left the railroad and gone into
private practice, first in Kansas where he was eventually raised
to a judgeship, and now in Los Angeles where with a partner he
had opened a law office. “Dear Parallelepipedon,” her father's
last letter had begun. Perhaps the big word for a solid of six
sides was both a description and a prediction. In later life she
looked on herself as having been successively student, nurse,
teacher, social worker, clothes designer, and ultimately flier.
She would like to see California, she mused. Columbia had
been interesting, but she didn't feel that she really wanted to be
a doctor, after all. She had liked the courses as such, and the
lab work. And she had enjoyed feeding orange juice to the white
mice and dissecting the cockroaches. But visions of the practical
application of medicine, the actual dressing of wounds and the
sewing of stitches, sickened her.
For a few more minutes she sat on the top of the dome and
breathed deeply of the clear night air. Then she slid down to
the walkway, opened the door, and clattered down the metal
spiral staircase.
Back outside, she stopped at the statue of Alma Mater and for
no reason climbed into her lap. That it was an irrational thing
to do, she readily admitted, but she liked to do silly things once
29


in a while. She decided to walk for a few blocks down Broadway.
She turned the corner at 116th Street. Campus couples were
walking arm in arm up Broadway and down the side streets to
Riverside Drive. She walked in long, even strides, moving with
the easy, unconscious grace of the natural athlete.
“The girl in brown who walks alone.” She remembered the
inscription under her picture in the high-school yearbook. She
had cried over it when she had shown it to her mother; the tag
line had been unkind but true.
She blinked her eyes quickly at the memory. She could not
be like those other girls who clung to boys as if they were gods
or something. It was worth it to be different and go it alone and
do what one wanted to do.
7. Land!
“Going it alone,” Amelia repeated the phrase to herself, alone
in the passenger compartment of the Friendship, a lone woman,
the first woman in history on a transatlantic flight. She looked
up and forward to the two men flying the plane. Bill was nosing
down again, and Lou was gazing intently out his side window.
AE walked carefully up to the cockpit. Twenty-five hundred
feet. Eight fifty A.M. Lou Gordon pointed out to the right. Two
ships!
One of them was the S. S. America. Lou took over the controls
as Bill Stultz went back to try to make radio contact with the
ships; but the radio failed to operate. How could he get a
position?
The Friendship dropped down and circled the America. Bill
scribbled a note. Amelia attached it to an orange, put both in a
paper bag, and aimed through the opened hatchway for the deck
of the America. The combination of speed, movement of the
30


ship, wind, and lightness of the bag made the bombing a failure.
A second attempt failed.
An alternative plan was suggested: should they try to land
near the ship, get a position report by voice, then try to take
off again? The rough sea would make a landing difficult, a take-
off impossible. Bill tried again, but in vain, to receive a message
on the radio. What to do?
They decided to trust their earlier course determination, and
turn back to retrace the twelve-mile detour they had made to
circle the America. They had to trust their own original judg-
ment. They had only one hour of fuel left.
At this low point of desperation Lou Gordon, smiling as if
there were nothing to be alarmed about, came back for a sand-
wich. He tore off the wrapper-another ham sandwich-and
crawled back to the cockpit. Amelia liked his easy manner. She
looked out: the cloud ceiling was low and the visibility limited.
Bill headed the plane down to 500 feet.
Suddenly a fishing vessel came into view, then a fleet of them.
The fliers happily noticed that the course of the boats paralleled
the course of the Friendship. The gasoline tanks were emptying
fast. Amelia guessed that there must be land near, but where?
She scanned the horizon, hoping.
Then a nebulous blue shadow appeared through the fog. Was
it another mirage of fog, a deceptive cloud formation? Slim
Gordon studied the shape, then threw his sandwich out the
window and screamed.
“Land!”
Bill Stultz smiled. He had brought the Friendship across the
Atlantic. To Ireland or England, he did not know which, but
he had found land.
Soon several islands appeared, then a coast line. Bill worked
the plane in close and cruised along the coast, looking for a
good place to bring the Fokker down. There was not much fuel
left. He decided to land. Circling a factory town, he chose a
31


stretch of water beyond it. He landed beautifully, and taxied to
a buoy a short distance away.
They had been in the air for twenty fretful hours and forty
exciting minutes. Now they safely rode the waves at Burry Port,
Wales, looking for a stir of recognition from the earth they had
so defiantly left.
8. A Sack of Potatoes
Three thousand miles from home and only a half mile from
the Welsh shore, the Friendship lay anchored to a heavy buoy,
secure in the swift-moving tide. Amelia stood in the square open
doorway of the fuselage, gripped the side, and looked out. She
saw three men working on the railroad along the shore; she
waved her hand in greeting. The men looked up, walked down
the shore, cast an unbelieving glance at the big seaplane, then
turned their backs and went back to work. Carmarthenshire of
South Wales was unimpressed.
Time passed. The Friendship strained at the rope Lou Gordon
had used to fasten the plane to the buoy. It started to rain. Sheets
of water hit and spread over the Fokker. Pilot, copilot, and
passenger stared out from the doorway, frantically waved their
arms, cupped their hands, and hollered in vain. Slim crawled
out again onto one of the pontoons, and screamed at the top
of his lungs. Gray smoke swirled from the factory stacks of the
town, his only answer.
Amelia took out a white towel from the crew's common duffel
bag and waved it at the shore. A man near the railroad took
off his coat, playfully waved back, put it on again, and returned
to his work.
An hour went by. Finally, a boatload of policemen rowed out
32


to the anchored plane. Other boats, full of the now curious,
followed.
The chief of the policemen spoke first. “You be wantin'
somethin'?” he asked.
“We've just come from America,” the fliers answered.
"Have ye now?” The chief was indulgent if not credulous.
“Well, we wish ye welcome, I'm sure.” The policemen rowed
back to shore, apparently to make arrangements for the sudden
visitors.
Several hours passed before the crew could disembark from
the Friendship. Rowboats and sailboats came out to meet the
plane. The few railroad workers were now convinced that some-
thing momentous had happened; they quickly passed the word,
and the curious began to gather, in hundreds, then thousands.
The rain stopped, and the three fliers were put into a boat and
brought to shore. AE, kerchief and helmet off, her hair in small
tightly curled locks, her face bright in a wide smile, was the
center of attention. She was besieged by autograph hounds
before she could get a foot out of the boat. A boatload of people
drew up alongside, and someone reached out a hand and pulled
both boats together. They wanted the fliers' autographs now,
all kinds of people: a handsome dark-haired man in a gray
homburg; a woman in a tweed coat and a cloche hat; a boy in
a cap and short pants; policemen, functionaries, workers.
The public acclaim had begun. To Amelia's despair, the clamor
of the crowds failed to distinguish her as a mere female passenger.
She looked for Bill and Lou, the men who had done what every-
body was praising her for. It was their show, not hers. Despite
her smile, she felt miserable. She did not like to be taken for
what she was not: she hated phony heroines. At last three police-
men escorted her through the crowd into a factory building.
The wife of the factory foreman brought tea for the three
fliers. Amelia, despite the tumult outside the factory, maintained
her composure and grinned. “Now I know I'm in Britain,” she
said cheerfully, raising her cup and saluting the hostess. In
33


answer to the cheering crowd outside, AE went three times to
the window and waved. She was beginning to feel the need for
the man who had agreed to manage the publicity.
Hilton H. Railey had crossed the Atlantic earlier by boat. He
was waiting for them in Southampton, where they were supposed
to land. When he heard that they had arrived safely at Burry
Port, he left Southampton immediately by flying boat to join them.
Captain Railey went into action as soon as he saw his charges.
Seeing that they were tired and worn from the long flight, he
whisked them off to a nearby hotel and locked the doors to
all well-wishers. He settled Stultz and Gordon in one room and
Amelia in another.
AE sank into a deep chair, threw one trousered leg over the
arm of the chair, and stretched the other leg out straight. She
raised her arms high and yawned wearily.
Railey thought Amelia looked dissatisfied. “What's the matter?”
he asked. “Aren't you excited?”
Her answer came slowly. “Excited? No.” Amelia took her leg
off from the arm of the chair and sat up straight. “It was a
wonderful experience, but all I did was lie on the floor of the
fuselage and take pictures of the clouds. We didn't see much of
the ocean. Bill did all the flying-had to. I was just baggage," she
said, "like a sack of potatoes.”
“What of it?” Railey replied quickly. "You're still the first
woman to fly the Atlantic, and, what's more, the first woman pilot
to do it.”
Amelia was not convinced. “Oh, well,” she said, "maybe some-
day I'll try it alone.”


9. In the Public Eye
The next morning they flew the Friendship out from Burry
Port to Southampton. For the first time during the trip AE sat
at the controls and did some of the flying. During the letdown for
landing Bill Stultz took over. In the harbor, boats of all descrip-
tions dotted the water. There was not enough space among them
to bring the plane in. A green light flashed from a launch moving
farther out. Bill followed the signal and eased the Friendship
onto the water.
In the launch Amelia looked back at the big plane. It was the
last that any of them saw of the Friendship. The plane was sold
and later it crashed on a flight to South America.
Among the welcomers at Southampton was Mrs. Frederick
E. Guest, the sponsor of the flight, and the woman whom AE had
replaced as passenger. It was the first meeting for the two. Mrs.
Guest took Amelia by one arm, Hilton Railey took her by the
other. Sponsor and manager would see the young woman flier
through acclaim she could not believe existed in a country famous
for its restraint.
The lady mayor of Southampton, Mrs. Foster Welch, greeted
her enthusiastically. "Well, now," said the mayor, the long gold
chain of office about her neck, “I'm going out to the States myself
next year, and it gives me pleasure to see you here, for when
I get out there I'll feel that at least I know someone!”
Amelia was delighted, and smiled broadly at the footman
who attended the mayor and whose mien was so serious behind
a long waxed mustache.
From the tumult that was Southampton Amelia was taken to
London by Hubert Scott Pain, director of Imperial Airways.
They rode in his Rolls-Royce, which was the same color as her
35


"yellow peril” back in Boston. Amelia was still wearing her heavy
flying suit, her only wardrobe, and one brightly colored scarf. Her
other scarf had been snatched by an eager souvenir hunter. As
they drove along they were met on the road by people returning
home from the Ascot races; the racing fans, having heard about
the flight, waved at the famed woman flier. AE smiled and raised
her hand. She was anxious to get to London and out of her
flying clothes. Having but a toothbrush and comb, she looked
forward to a whole new outfit.
Rolling into Winchester, the Rolls passed the cathedral. Amelia
asked if they might stop. She wanted to see the famed resting
place of Canute, the shrine of William of Wykeham who built
Windsor Castle, and the place where Alfred the Great was
crowned and buried. She might not come by this way again,
she explained.
AE went inside. The stillness of the cathedral came over her
like a cloak. Here the followers of William the Conqueror had
built a monument in thankfulness to God. Amelia walked silently
through the church, stopping occasionally to admire the interior.
She loved the skill and zeal, but not the faith, that marked this
marble prayer of arches, like hands joined and raised.
She planned to stay in London for only a short time, but she
remained for two weeks. With Hilton Railey as her escort, she
was caught up in a succession of teas, parties, exhibitions, testi-
monials, and visits. She met hundreds of people, all of them
full of compliments for what she had done. As in Wales, she
felt embarrassed: it was Stultz and Gordon who deserved the
praise, not she.
Captain Railey was proud of his charge. At every occasion she
was gracious, charming, modest. He never agreed with Amelia
when after a compliment from him she insisted that she was
plain and unattractive. For whenever he escorted her from Mrs.
Guest's Park Lane home she was quietly triumphant, tall and
lovely in a straight-lined, long-waisted black dress, with match-
ing coat and cloche hat, gloves, and pointed silver-buckled shoes.
36


One of the high points of the London visit was the meeting
with Lady Astor. Amelia found her American-born hostess both
“gracious and brilliant.” Lady Astor was not particularly im-
pressed by Amelia's transatlantic flight. “I'm not interested in you
a bit because you crossed the Atlantic by air,” she said frankly.
"I want to hear about your settlement work.”
AE was pleased to find someone who treated her as other than
the false celebrity she considered herself to be. She spent the rest
of the day with Lady Astor discussing Denison House in Boston
and its model in London, Toynbee Hall.
Inevitably, like all visitors to London, Amelia watched the
changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace; then, later, she saw
a Tattoo at Aldershot, where RAF fliers performed in the air
while the soldiers went through their maneuvers on the ground.
Amelia wished she were in one of the planes, with the men
in the sky. At a flying exhibition she would much rather be a
performer than a spectator.
During an interview with newspaper reporters, AE was asked:
“Should you like to meet the Prince of Wales?"
Before Amelia could say a word, an American official answered
for her: “That depends on His Highness' wishes.”
The published account of the interview made AE laugh for
many years to come. “Wal, I sure am glad to be here,” she was
quoted as saying, “and gosh, I sure hope I'll meet the Prince of
Wales.” If there were a reason for not having met the prince,
Amelia chuckled, it was the implied nasal twang in that news-
paper story.
At a luncheon given in her honor by the Air League of the
British Empire, AE met Lady Mary Heath, the famous woman
aviator who had flown from Cape Town, Africa, to London.
Lady Heath made the flight in a small light plane called an Avian.
Amelia decided she would like to have a plane like it. One
early morning she stole from Mrs. Guest's home and took a
taxi out to Croydon Airport. She had made a date to go up with
an English pilot in Lady Heath's little two-seater Avian. While
37


airplane crash one quarter of a mile short of the runway at
Roosevelt Field, New York.
AE walked the lonely upper deck and fussed with her thoughts.
She stopped at the railing and looked down at Lady Heath's
Avian tied down on the fantail of the ship. Up the metal ladder
from the deck below came the clatter of feet. It was her good
friend and manager Captain Railey.
“Hilton,” she said to him, “I dread all the things coming up-
the business I suspect GP has been promoting in New York in my
behalf.” She paused. “I'm not the type.”
Railey smiled half-seriously. “Ticker tape, receptions, dinners,"
he said. “At least that.”
"You don't have to tell me what's in store for me," she answered.
"I know." Her forehead wrinkled; she continued: “But why? All I
contributed to the Friendship flight-apart from the fact that
accidentally I happen to be the first woman to fly across, or rather
to be flown across, the North Atlantic-was to lie on the floor of
the fuselage like a sack of potatoes and admire the lovely clouds
we were flying over. That's all I did, Hilton.”
Captain Railey did not interrupt Amelia, now fierce in working
out her own thoughts. He watched her long fingers grip the
railing and turn white as they tightly turned back and forth
around the wood.
Amelia looked out over the waves; then she swung around
quickly. “But someday,” she said strongly, “I will have to do it
alone, if only to vindicate myself. I'm a false heroine now, and
that makes me feel very guilty. Someday I will redeem my self-
respect. I can't live without it.”
Hilton Railey understood. She did not want to be the symbol
of something she was not. Now she would have to spend the
next few years becoming what she was already in the eyes of
the press and the public–a woman flier who deserved the ac-
claim she had received.
Amelia looked again at the Avro Avian below. The fuselage
was covered with medals and mementoes to which was added:
39


"To Amelia Earhart from Mary Heath. Always think with your
stick forward.”
She had bent her thoughts forward and they had carried her
to a resolute conclusion: she had to become a recognized flier
in her own right.
40


PART TWO
THE WORLD OF FLIGHT





1. Wealth and Independence
THE ACCIDENT of sex made Amelia Earhart front-page
news. After her arrival in New York, she received thousands of
letters, telegrams, and invitations. They grew in piles about her
feet. Some of the letters hailed her as a “gallant pioneer”; others
called her a "foolhardy nitwit.” Those that began, “The presence
of your company” had to be accepted or refused.
Thirty-two cities asked the three fiers to visit them. Over-
night Amelia became the native daughter of Boston, Kansas City,
Chicago, Des Moines, Los Angeles, but she still claimed the
place where she was born, Atchison, Kansas, as her native city.
Taking the advice of Hilton Railey, GP, and others, the heroes of
the hour decided to accept the invitations of New York, Boston,
and Chicago.
The receptions were wild, frantic, tumultuous. The American
people gave the fliers the same thunderous acclaim they had
given Charles Lindbergh one year before. The two men and their
woman passenger were showered with ticker tape and torn
telephone books, and they were given the keys to each city in
turn.
The festivities over, Amelia sought to retire into peaceful se-
clusion, but she soon realized that she had become, undeniably
and perhaps irrevocably, a public figure. Opportunities were
offered to her which could not be ignored. G. P. Putnam pre-
sented her with a contract to publish her account of the historic
flight, manufacturers wanted her to endorse their products, and
an offer for the syndicated rights to her story promised her
43


$10,000. Amelia quietly made her decisions, and within a few
months she had earned more than $50,000.
Never had she even dreamed of making so much money. She
was now financially independent, and this new freedom meant
that she could act and do exactly as she pleased. Yet the new
wealth plagued Amelia's conscience. If, as she painfully realized,
she did not deserve the fame for having crossed the Atlantic, how
could she accept the fortune that came with it?
New feelings of guilt compounded with the old. She would
have to regain her self-respect by someday flying solo across the
Atlantic, or die in the attempt. She could not live with the nick-
name "Lady Lindy” for simply having been a passenger; she,
too, would have to be a "lone eagle.”
For the writing of her book Amelia accepted the hospitality
of George Palmer Putnam and his wife at their home in Rye,
New York. There, with the solicitous guidance of her publisher,
AE studied her log of the flight and her many notes; then, slowly
and carefully, she began to join one word to another. The job
of writing, she discovered, took much longer than she had
planned, much longer than the actual time of the flight, which
was twenty hours and forty minutes. She dedicated the book,
aptly called 20 Hrs., 40 Min., to her hostess, Dorothy Binney
Putnam.
Amelia had often been warned about GP; mutual friends had
told her that he would not hesitate to divorce his wife if he
thought AE would capitulate to his charms. But in 1928 Amelia
did not seem particularly interested in any man, although she
had become the center of a triangle of men that included GP,
Hilton Railey, and Samuel Chapman.
Samuel Chapman, according to some sources, was supposed to
have been her fiancé, even at the time of the Friendship flight;
yet such a commitment was denied by her, most emphatically,
when she was approached on the subject by a reporter in Boston.
“No,” she said to him, “I am not going to announce my engage-
ment. I have seen Samuel Chapman since I have been here,


but I have seen a great many other people also.” GP, who had
been acting as a buffer between AE and the press, clearly indi-
cated that the subject was closed.
Pressed further about plans to get married at any time, Amelia
announced: “You never can tell what I will do. If I was sure of
the man, I might get married tomorrow. I am very sudden, you
know, and make up my mind in a second.”
Despite this comment, many years before AE had decided that
marriage for her would never be an escape. Even in her teens she
had observed that too many girls used it for a storm cellar, that,
afraid to meet life head on, they ran from their first real problems
to hide behind a husband.
Amelia had assumed an attitude of almost imperial inde-
pendence; about men and a possible husband she was never
sudden. It was not until three years later, and then with con-
siderable reluctance, that she became Mrs. George Palmer
Putnam. She had learned to go it alone, without any reliance
upon any man. She had become, in spite of appearances to the
contrary, a “loner.”
Hilton Railey, her discoverer and manager, had developed a
deep and abiding affection for Amelia, and in spite of tentative
signs of encouragement from her when they were in England
and returning home on the President Roosevelt, he was still
deeply in love with his first wife and had every intention of
remaining that way. Over the years that followed, there con-
tinued between them a strong friendship, and it was Railey
who was the first to speak seriously to Amelia about GP.
It was just before he discontinued his connection with her as
her unpaid manager. During Amelia’s welcome in the harbor of
New York, Commander Byrd had asked Railey for his help in
financing the forthcoming expedition to the Antarctic as soon as
he could break away from the Friendship celebrations. A few
days later, in Amelia's hotel room in New York, Captain Railey
jotted down on a piece of paper the one word “brushfire,” and
gave it to AE. He told her to consider it as a code word and to
45



WU
AE and the Lindberghs.

Famous Fliers, 1928: (standing,
left to right) Eielson, Wilkins,
Chamberlin, Balchen, (seated)
Stultz, Earhart, Gordon.

AE and GP and the King and
Queen of Belgium.

AE and President Hoover, after he
awarded her the National Geo-
graphic Medal, 1932.



The Lockheed Electra, AE in the cockpit.



A
Paul Mantz, AE, Harry Manning, and Fred Noonan before taking off
for Honolulu from San Francisco, March 7, 1937, in the Lockheed
Electra. (Courtesy The Smithsonian Institution)
Fragment of wood about 23 inches long, possibly associated with AE's
last flight, 1937, found by Robert D. Weishaupt at Baranof Island,
Alaska, in 1942. (Courtesy The Smithsonian Institution)

FROM AWAN-NW.OUR MOTE
INTO FLAM2 SAAPKS REE



Josephine Blanco Akiyama, who affirms she saw
AE on Saipan in 1937.

AE and Fred
Noonan at Cal-
cutta on the
last flight.


off the
than the sandpiper she au
limbing turns to gain
the ailerons and the elevator. She taxied down to the edge of
the field, carefully easing on and off first the left then the right
brake as she zigzagged across the close-cropped grass. She turned
into the wind, held both brakes hard, pulled the stick all the
way back into her middle, then revved up the motor to check out
the magnetoes. She reached up and turned the switch: the rpm's
dropped within the minimum for first the left then the right, and
finally held for both magnetoes. Amelia smiled in satisfaction.
With her left hand she slowly advanced the throttle. The prop
blasted back hard and loud. Faster and faster the plane moved
down the turf, and she eased the throttle ahead as far as it
would go. She held the stick forward, bringing up the tail, then
forced the plane to stay on the ground until it fought to get into
the air. She pulled back on the stick. The plane clattered noisily
off the ground. Amelia grinned. This little craft soared into the
air quicker than the sandpiper she had owned in California.
Clearing the way ahead, she made climbing turns to gain
altitude. At 10,000 feet she looked down, then out to the left
and right and to the back and front. The sky was clear for
acrobatics.
Stalls, spins, loops, rolls, Immelmanns: she skillfully com-
manded the plane through each maneuver. She slipped and
climbed and dived swinging and dancing the Avian along the
reaches of the sunlit sky. The plane handled perfectly. After an
hour of skylarking over the polo field she felt that she and the
plane were ready for a long flight, one perhaps to California
and the National Air Races.
Amelia knew that she needed much more experience in the
air before she could consider herself a qualified pilot. The cross-
country trip, she finally decided, should season her for all kinds
of flying-over large cities, plains, and mountains. Although she
had never made such a flight before, her preparations, consider-
ing the distances involved, were happy-go-lucky and without
design. She bought navigation maps and made her flight plan:
she would fly over railroads, rivers, and big cities whenever
47


Ien
swung up and over, the propeller cracked and splintered, the
tail thumped to the ground. Amelia hung upside down on the
safety belt. Calmly she felt along the instrument panel and cut
the switch. She was unhurt.
The headlines in the morning papers, however, told a different
story: “AMELIA EARHART NEAR DEATH IN CRASH.” AE read the front
page, was irritated and mad. The accident of sex again. If the
pilot had been a man, nothing would have been said about it,
especially if he had walked away from his plane unharmed.
Amelia folded the paper and slapped it against her leg. Why
couldn't they leave her alone? All this emotionalism about women
fliers, as if a female neck were more important than a male neck.
Amelia went to the phone and called New York. Another plane,
twin sister to the Avian, would be ferried in, so that parts from
it could be used to repair her plane. The following day four
mechanics worked around the clock for a day and a half until
the Avian was repaired.
Dayton, Terre Haute, St. Louis, Muskogee followed in un-
eventful succession. Then came the towns that were small and
displayed no signs on barns or roofs to tell her where she was.
Not recognizing any of the landmarks and flying by at 100 miles
an hour, AE noted that one small town seemed like any other.
She checked her map, then scrutinized the terrain under her
wing. It was no use. Each town was just another checkerboard
of streets and roofs, trees and fields, railroads and highways.
Frankly, she admitted to herself, she did not know where she was.
Her confusion mounted as she flew west, but at last she found
an airport which, she was happy to discover, was in Fort Worth.
She now decided to stay on course. Once off the ground, how-
ever, the light plane hit bumpy weather. It lurched and climbed
and dived; and to Amelia’s constant annoyance, her map kept
slipping from her lap. Flying the plane with one hand, she found
with the other a safety pin in her handbag. She picked the map
up from the floor and clumsily pinned it to her dress.
AE fought her plane through the updrafts and downdrafts. She


scanned the instrument panel, then noticed that the gas-gauge
needle was leaning toward empty. She reached up to pump fuel
from the reserve tank to the gravity tank. During the refueling
the pin loosened from her dress, a gust of wind swept into the
cockpit, and the map started to blow against the side of the
fuselage. Amelia let go of the stick and grabbed for the map.
The plane angled into a sharp dive. Quickly taking the stick
again, she pulled back too hard; the Avian went into a steep
climb. The map, flapping against and over the side, whipped
out of the cockpit. Amelia grumbled. Now she could not possibly
determine where she was. She held her last known course, south
of west, and kept on flying. She hoped that something would
turn up.
Finally, to the north, she noticed a highway. It was busy with
cars crawling into the slanting sun. Amelia turned the plane and
followed the road, her only guide across the state; when it ended,
abruptly and with disheartening finality, she was completely with-
out bearings. The sun sank behind the mountains in the west,
leaving a swath of purple haze along the length of the horizon.
It began to get dark too fast for her to establish any orientation
with the ground. Amelia decided that she would have to find
a place to land-soon.
Ahead in the dusk she noticed some houses grouped about a
solitary oil derrick. She hoped that they would yield to a small
town nearby. She throttled back and eased the plane down into
a shallow dive, then circled low, looking for possible places to
land. There were none, and her heart sank as she thought of
running out of fuel and having to make a forced landing. Then,
flying over the town, her spirits revived as she considered an
alternative, at once brilliant and desperate. The main street,
which was blessedly empty of traffic, was long enough and
wide enough to accommodate her plane. With decision born of
necessity, she swung the Avian into a low, wide turn and came
around, nose down, over the trees that marked the end of Main
Street. Because of the high altitude of the land, the plane came
50


in fast, but Amelia dropped the tail smartly, held the nose up
straight, and stalled expertly onto the dirt road. A grin creased
wide across her face as she rolled through the center of the town.
She was, she soon discovered, in Hobbs, New Mexico.
The people of the town turned out in force to see who the
sudden and unconventional visitor was. They were not only
surprised to see a plane parked in the middle of Main Street, but
aghast to find a woman seated at the controls. And when the
woman flier took off her helmet and goggles, they were shocked
at her appearance. The sun had burned a red outline on her
face, and when Amelia looked out to greet her welcoming com-
mittee, she looked exactly like a wide-eyed owl.
Amelia climbed out of the plane and asked some of the
men to help her fold the wings and park the Avian off to the
side of the street. Then, as if in ironic commentary on the way
she looked, she walked to the Owl Café for something to eat.
She made a dinner of breakfast-fried eggs, bread and butter,
and milk.
After a night of cool and refreshing sleep in the high altitude,
Amelia rose early the next morning in the hope of getting off at
dawn. Again she planned to negotiate reliable Main Street. Down
she rolled over the dirt road for the take-off. Then the left tire
blew out. AE chopped the throttle and cut the switch. She
shook her head, then grinned. It seemed that her troubles would
never stop. The nosing over in Pittsburgh, the loss of the map,
the emergency landing in town, and now a flat tire. She laughed
at her new predicament.
While the tire was being patched, Amelia went back to the
Owl Café and had the same breakfast of the night before. When
she climbed back into the cockpit, she felt that the repaired tire
was getting soft. The men who had done the job assured her that
she was in error. Convinced but still suspicious, she took off
once more down the street and happily into the air.
She had been told in Hobbs that if she flew to the southeast,
she would find in about a hundred miles either a river to the
51


right or a railroad with a highway to the left. Or was it a rail-
road to the left and a highway to the right? Which one, they had
carefully explained to her in town, depended on whether she was
more west than east or more east than west. As it had often
happened when she became lost in her car and had asked for
the way to a certain highway or town, she didn't pay close
attention to the directions. Now she wasn't sure which was
which and what was what. She looked down for guidance from
· the rivers that coursed through the land, but they snaked such
a confusion of meanderings that she did not know which one
to follow.
Late that morning she found a railroad that led her back to
Texas and into Pecos. Remembering that she might have one
bad tire, she circled to land. She set the Avian down gingerly.
The left wheel plopped and wobbled; the tire was flat! Fortu-
nately the plane was light and rolled clumsily, but safely, to a
stop. Amelia sat in the cockpit, looking enigmatically straight
ahead. Someone asked her if there was anything wrong. She
looked up and smiled, then shook her head. How could she
tell anyone that she had been trying to understand an in-
scrutable fate?
While the tire was again repaired, Amelia had lunch with the
Rotary Club. That afternoon she started for El Paso, her original
destination of the day before.
Tire trouble now became engine trouble. At 4,000 feet the
motor coughed, then sputtered, and finally stopped. In quick
reflex action, Amelia jammed the stick forward and brought the
plane into gliding turns. She looked for a place to make a forced
landing. Noticing a small clearing among mesquite bushes and
salt hills, she nosed the plane in and landed.
She now wondered if she weren't having a contest of wills with
some higher power who was trying to keep her earth-bound, or
if she weren't being tested to see if she had yet the skill and
courage to meet and overcome any danger for the privilege of
continuing to fly. She liked the second possibility better. She
52


3. The Kinner Canary
In 1922, when she was twenty-four years old and the owner
of her first plane, a yellow Kinner Canary, she had tried for
her first record. She decided that the ceiling of the Kinner should
be tested, and asked an official from the California Aero Club
to seal the plane's barograph-a revolving cylinder for recording
altitude. The little three-cylinder Lawrence engine took the plane
to 14,000 feet, and a new altitude record before the 60-horse-
power quit. The fault, AE learned when she landed, had not
been with the motor but with the spark control lever. It had
become disconnected during the test run.
Undismayed, Amelia tried again for a higher altitude a few
days later. She hoped this time that everything would work
smoothly. The Canary climbed quickly and easily to 10,000 feet,
but ran into a layer of thick clouds. At 11,000 feet she hit a
driving wall of sleet, and at 12,000 feet she looked into a blind-
ing blanket of fog.
AE now did a very stupid thing, she later confessed, one that
should have cost her her life. It was a miracle that she survived
the experience. Rattled because she could not tell her position
without instruments and because she had no outside landmarks
for check points, she did the first thing that came into her mind:
she pulled the stick back and kicked the plane into a spin. She
spun, down and around, winding the Kinner through the over-
cast until she broke out of it at 3,000 feet. Seeing the ground at
last, Amelia straightened out of the spin and pulled the plane out
of its headlong dive.
After she landed, she nonchalantly climbed out of her plane
and started to walk away. She snapped off her helmet and shook
her close-cropped head. From the edge of the tarmac one of the
54


old-time pilots rushed over to her. He cussed her out roundly.
"Suppose there had been fog all the way to the ground?” he
shouted at her, flailing his arms. “You would have screwed your-
self into the ground.”
"I guess I would have,” Amelia said, refusing to be alarmed.
She held her head high, turned, and walked cockily away from
any further discussion about the incident. She had set a new
record of 14,000 feet a few days before, and that was good
enough for her.
Luck had been with her before in other accidents, the kind
she liked to call the "blowout” variety in flying. Once in her
early instruction with Neta Snook, her first instructor, the motor
of the Canuck cut out shortly after take-off. Neta nosed the plane
down for an emergency landing and glided into a nearby cabbage
patch. For Amelia the crisis had produced a slow passage of time,
time enough for her to reach over and calmly cut the switch before
the plane hit the ground. The propeller and landing gear were
smashed, but the women fliers walked away from the crash
unharmed.
Another time, on a solo flight, she had to make an unexpected
landing in a field drenched with rain. The wheels had stuck in
the mud, and the plane up ended and nosed over. Unhurt, Amelia
hung upside down from the safety belt.
In yet another emergency landing she had hit dried weeds
more than six feet high. The plane flipped over so suddenly and
with such force that Amelia broke away from the safety belt and
went flying out of the cockpit. Again she had walked away from
her aircraft without a scratch.


4. Aviation Editor
By the autumn of 1928, after Amelia had returned to New York
and concluded her first cross-country flight, she had survived
seven crack-ups in as many years of flying. But she looked back
upon the solo trip with great satisfaction: it was the first time
a woman had made a transcontinental flight, alone, east to west,
and west to east.
The press had closely followed her adventures across the
country and when she was resettled in New York, she was flooded
with business offers of all kinds, many of them having nothing
to do with aviation. Simply because she was a news figure, she
had the opportunity to join many advertising agencies and to
take part in other enterprises for which she had no qualifications.
She had at least two offers to write for the magazines: one
was from McCall's; the other from Cosmopolitan. Because AE
had endorsed a cigarette advertisement, McCalls reluctantly
withdrew its contract; the magazine did not at that time carry
any advertising for cigarettes, and apparently did not approve
of women smoking. Ray Long, president and editor of Hearst's
Cosmopolitan, wanted Amelia to join his staff as aviation editor.
Amelia did not deliberate for very long. Realizing the opportunity
she would have to reach many readers because of the enormous
circulation of the magazine and the rare chance she was getting
to write every month about what she knew and liked best, she
accepted. She had now established herself permanently with her
one great love-aviation.
Working for Cosmopolitan, Amelia divided her time equally
between writing articles and answering letters. Letters poured in
from everywhere and from everyone. Men, women, boys, girls;
teachers, mechanics, laborers; inventor, realtor, office boy: all
56


had questions and problems they wanted answered and solved.
Some said:
“Do you know the name of a good school of aviation?"
“Why is the monoplane faster than the biplane?”
“I have quarreled with my boy friend and have decided to
take up aviation. Please tell me how."
“Do you know Colonel Lindbergh?”
"I want to fly, but my mother won't let me.”
Many of the letters AE answered in the magazine. She
cautioned the young girl who had quarreled with her boy friend
and advised her against taking up flying: no one should take up
flying with what appeared to be thoughts of suicide! She cajoled
a youngster and told him to bide his time; the day would come
when he could start flying lessons without parental approval.
Yes, she did know Colonel Lindbergh and his wife, but she had
not yet had the opportunity to know them well.
AE enjoyed the queries from her readers, but one complaint
from the younger ones made her chafe with irritation: restrain-
ing parents. “Why not now?" she would say to the mother who
refused to let her daughter fly until she was sixteen, and she
continued to ask it of any parent who had established an arbi-
trary age somewhere in the future.
She began the Cosmopolitan articles with the November,
1928, issue. They continued somewhat erratically until one year
later. Amelia sat at her typewriter and pounded out her thoughts
and feelings about flying. Her own sex was often her target for
the month: “Try Flying Yourself,” “Here Is How Fannie Hurst
Could Learn to Fly," "Is It Safe for You to Fly?” “Shall You Let
Your Daughter Fly?” “Why Are Women Afraid to Fly?”
In the same issues other counterpointing writers sounded their
convictions: "I Don't Want to Be a Mother,” “I Wish I Were a
Man,” “Could You be a Platonic Friend?” “Clinging Vine? Hal”
"I Have My Rights, Too."
This was only part of the exciting 1920's in America. The
57


day before was the first off the ground. This prevented any lag-
ging behind. One by one the women fliers headed toward the
San Bernardino Mountains.
Following in turn, AE slipped through Cajon Pass and headed
across the desert to Yuma, Arizona. Coming into the Yuma air-
port, Amelia crashed into a sandbank and damaged a propeller.
She escaped unhurt. The other women, seeing what had hap-
pened to AE's Vega, voted to stay three hours instead of an
hour and a half, until the propeller was fixed.
Amelia loved this kind of sportsmanship. It saved time for her,
she reflected, because her flying time was supposed to be
counted from the starting time, regardless of repair time. Off
they flew to Phoenix, where they would stay for the night.
For all the women the event promised adventure, for many
danger, for a few disaster. Claire Fahy, of Los Angeles, withdrew
because someone had been tampering with her motor. Marvel
Crosson, from San Diego and holder of the women's altitude
record, was the only fatality. She was killed when she jumped
from her disabled plane and her parachute failed to open.
One of them, her plane out of gas, went down in the sage-
brush and cactus of the desert; another turned back because
of engine trouble; one had to wait for a damaged landing gear
to be repaired; another had wrestled with a whirlwind. Amelia,
less fortunate than most because of the broken propeller, never-
theless thanked her luck that she had survived yet another
crash, her seventh since she first started flying.
The days clicked by. The third day they remained overnight
in Douglas, Arizona; the fourth, in El Paso, Texas. Everywhere
they landed, the women, worn out with weariness, would find
hundreds of autograph hunters and souvenir seekers waiting for
them. The crowds thronged to Amelia's plane more than to the
others. AE despaired to hear that some of the other women had
pencils punched through the fabric of their planes by the in-
quisitive. Her friend Blanche Noyes had discovered fire in her
60


cockpit because of a carelessly thrown cigarette, and was forced
to make an emergency landing.
At many of the fields there was no place to rest, no more than
a table to sit on. At other airports there were banquets to be
rushed to and back from. On the good days AE was happy to
find luncheons served at the field and hotels to go to for the
night. Many fields provided soap and water, clean towels, cold
cream, powder, combs.
At the luncheons and dinners Amelia chuckled at some of the
names the speakers used for the women fliers: “sweethearts of
the air," "fying Alappers,” “angels,” "sunburned derbyists.” All
they wanted to be called, AE insisted in vain, were “Aiers," and,
if necessary, "women fliers."
The press called the race “Lipstick Derby,” “Petticoat Derby,"
"Powder Puff Derby.” The last one stuck and has continued to
the present time.
At El Paso, the fourth stop, the women waited for a storm to
pass, rather than risk some of them not having enough fuel to
fly around it; for the next leg, to Fort Worth, was the longest
and most hazardous-600 miles, much of it over mountains.
At Pecos they stopped for food and fuel. All the planes landed
safely except one. Florence Barnes, wife of a San Morino minis-
ter, misjudged her landing roll, overran the runway, and crashed
into an automobile. She was rescued, unharmed, from the wreck.
On the night of the fifth day they stayed in Wichita, Kansas;
of the sixth, in St. Louis. When they landed in Columbus, Ohio,
the last stop before Cleveland, sixteen of the original nineteen
had made it.
The morning of the eighth day broke clear. Amelia and Ruth
Nichols, her friend from Rye, had been running neck and neck
during the entire race. AE had landed just two minutes ahead
of Ruth at Columbus and looked forward to the last lap to
Cleveland. It would be nip and tuck between them all the
way. The girls started their engines and waited for the signal
to move out in interval.
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Ruth Nichols, poised at the far end of the runway, gunned
her motor for take-off. Just as she broke from the ground, the
right wing dipped, then hit a tractor parked at the edge of
the runway. Amelia blanched. Ruth's plane struck the ground,
flipped over three times, and stopped in a shrieking scrape along
the pavement.
AE stopped her engine, climbed out of the Vega, and ran
toward the crash. Ruth Nichols was not hurt, but the wings and
landing gear of her plane were smashed beyond immediate
repair. The private race between the two friends was over.
Louise Thaden of Pittsburgh won the race. Gladys O'Donnell,
the mother of two children, from Long Beach, came in second.
AE, just nosing out Blanche Noyes, was third. In the light-plane
class, Phoebe Omlie was the winner.
6. Developing Air Lines
The race had whetted Amelia's competitive appetite, although
the event, generally, had annoyed her because of the unnecessary
excitement and trouble which the women fliers had caused. She
would have preferred a straight and simple race, one in which
she could have competed, without fanfare, with men. This last
possibility was out of the question for the time being; she turned,
therefore, to establishing some speed records of her own. The
Vega had yet to prove its mettle at full throttle.
In November of that same year AE set the new speed record
for women over a one-mile distance; and a few months later
she established the international speed record for women over
a 100-kilometer course.
In her fever of activity, Amelia now turned from competitive
flying and magazine writing to developing air lines. With a
characteristic burst of initial energy, she plunged into first one
62


asking for a show of hands from those who had flown. The career
women invariably won out over their less daring sisters from a
college group or a women's club.
Difficulties of all kinds were encountered in the running of
the line. Irate customers, usually women, complained to Amelia
about cabin temperatures that were either too high or too low.
Would the plane please stop bumping? Did they have to fly
into air pockets? One passenger insisted that she would not
pay extra for her thirteen pieces of luggage; after all, the trains
did not set any silly limits at thirty pounds. A woman bought a
ticket for herself and what she said was a small lap dog: Amelia
insisted that the woman sit in the same seat with the lap dog,
which, it turned out, was the size of a small pony. At another
time the same seat was sold to two different people. Frequently
passengers were grounded by the weather and had to be turned
over to the railroads.
Amelia soon fidgeted with an unrest to try something else. The
right to fly at no cost on the air line was too expensive for her
energies when she had to pay for the privilege with so many
irritations on the ground. If she could fly and earn money at
the same time, she could then build up her hours in the air
and yet realize enough funds, finally, to back her contemplated
solo across the Atlantic. The dual opportunity came in the form
of the newest experiment in aviation, the autogiro.
For AE, the forerunner of the helicopter was a challenge to
her flying skill. In 1931, to the surprise of everyone, she learned
how to fly one in just a few hours, and a couple of days later
she took it to 18,415 feet and set a new altitude record for auto-
giros. Because of the publicity she had gained from the flight,
Amelia was approached by the Beech-Nut Packing Company
to fly an autogiro across the country as a promotion stunt for
the chewing gum. She readily agreed: the venture, although
commercial, was the answer to her desire for flying time and
money.
Beginning in May of 1931, and for the next two months, Amelia
64


flew back and forth from New York to California, advertising
the name of Beech-Nut painted on the side of her plane.
The cross-country flight, although unusual in some respects,
was even more unusual in another. Three months earlier AE
had quietly slipped away with GP, who had divorced his wife,
and married him in Connecticut. And now by leaving on a
"business trip,” Amelia had put the marital shoe on the other
foot, that of the male, and had left her mate waiting for her
at home.
For a long time AE had felt that marriage was a cage; but
GP, who had begun his campaign early after the Friendship
flight, had finally overcome her continued reluctance. He con-
vinced her that the cage could be attractive if the door to it
were left unlocked and open.
The marriage was marked by an interesting public reversal
of roles. Not unlike an anxious woman who has been left behind,
George waited for Amelia to finish her new adventure in the
air. He worried about her. She had already sustained one
accident in Texas, and had complained about the accounts of
it in the press as much as any righteously indignant male.
“A fatal accident to a woman pilot,” she wrote, “is not a
greater disaster than one to a man of equal worth. Feminine
fliers have never subscribed to the super-sentimental valuation
placed upon their necks. I am sure they feel they can endure
their share of misfortune, whatever it be, as quietly as men.”
When Amelia was heading back East on her trip, GP went to
Detroit to meet her. She had been scheduled to appear at the
State Fair Grounds, where she was going to give a demonstra-
tion flight with the autogiro. Waiting for her, George stood on the
outside of a circle which had been marked off for AE to land in.
Close by stands had been erected, and from them long support
wires had been stretched and staked into the ground. GP talked
with a group of people who had gathered.
“Here she comes!” someone shouted, pointing over GP's
shoulder.
65


George Putnam turned his head and saw the giro, whirling
and clattering above the treetops. Assured that everything was
as it should be, he resumed his conversation.
Then he heard a loud crash. GP spun around. The giro lay
broken in a cloud of smoke, the rotor blades cracked and
splintered, the landing gear smashed.
He ran toward the wreck. Ignoring the ground beneath him,
he struck one of the support wires. He flew up, over, and down,
and hit the ground flat on his back.
Amelia emerged from the accident without injury. When she
saw her husband sprawled on the ground, and apparently hurt,
she ran to him. She saw that he was winded but otherwise, it
seemed, in good condition.
“So fying is the safest, after alll” she teased him. "If you had
been with me, you wouldn't have been hurt."
GP turned to get up. His face creased in pain.
He had cracked three of his ribs.
7. George Palmer Putnam
George Palmer Putnam II was a man of many accomplish-
ments. Because of his highly active and extroverted nature,
people either liked him or disliked him. No one who knew him
felt an apathetic indifference toward him.
Newspaperman, mayor, publisher, explorer, author, promoter,
manager, publicity man extraordinary, he was tall, good-looking,
aggressively masculine, brilliantly informed, and he married some
of the most charming women of his day. (GP's four wives were
Dorothy Binney, Amelia Earhart, Jean Marie Cosigny, and Mar-
garet Haviland.) In appearance he was deceptive: he looked like
an intellectual, a scholar, a college professor, perhaps because of
the rimless glasses that he wore; yet he was very much the man
66


of action, the man of constant activity in many fields at the same
time.
“Lens louse," photographers later dubbed him, as he managed
to get into picture after picture with Amelia. He loved the lime-
light and as much publicity for himself as he could manage, yet
he would do many charitable things for people which he would
absolutely forbid them to mention. "The meanest,” some called
him; others said, “The kindest.”
Born in 1887 into a family of wealth and position, George
Putnam was a gentleman, a gentle man, yet was capable of an
irritability easily aroused by what he considered stupidity in
others. He was capable with the right provocation of changing
from a person of charm and grace into one of explosive anger
and violent fury.
In his lifetime GP wrote ten books in his spare time. He could
produce a book "with his left hand,” while with his right he
went about his daily business of publishing and promoting. His
books reflected his many interests: four on travel, four biogra-
phies, and two novels. With the eye of a close observer he
recorded a perceptive understanding of the land and the people
of Central America, the Oregon country, the Arctic, and Death
Valley. His ability to see through the deceptive surface and
into the reality of his own life and the lives of others produced
the biographies of Salomon August Andrée, the gallant Swedish
aeronaut; of Amelia Earhart, his famous wife; of Captain Bob
Bartlett, "the mariner of the north"; and Wide Margins, the story
of his own life. Combining his knowledge of people and places,
he wrote the novels Duration, about an older man and his son,
who are both involved in World War II, and Hickory Shirt,
which is laid in the Death Valley of 1850.
Frequently charming, kind, generous-anything but the tough
guy he wanted people to believe he was-George Palmer Putnam
would rather be hanged than have anyone discover he was soft
behind the hard shell. Typically, he was ever quick to respond
to distress in others.
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Blanche Noyes, a famous woman flier, who is now chief of the
Air Marking Staff, National Aviation Agency, remembers the
George Putnam who didn't want to be found out. She writes:
The thing that I shall always remember of “G.P.” was my
first public appearance after my husband's death, when I
was mistress of ceremonies in New York at a large luncheon,
at which time I was to introduce these celebrities without
benefit of notes. However, this time I felt a little shaky and
asked “G.P.” to write my introductions for me, which he did,
but swore me to secrecy. It was quite annoying, after the
luncheon, to have two people come up and thank me for
the lovely things I said about them, but each said that the
only thing that spoiled the luncheon was the fact that they
sat next to “G.P.," the man they disliked intensely. I wanted
to tell them that all the flattering things I had said about
them were “G.P.'s” thoughts and words, not mine, but he
had sworn me to secrecy. Someday I am going to tell them
how wrong they were in their thoughts of this grand per-
son....
Grand indeed. When Mrs. Noyes' husband Dewey was killed
in 1935, AE had insisted that Blanche come with her and GP
from New York to the West Coast and stay with them as long
as she could at their home near Toluca Lake, California. From
time to time on the trip Amelia would see Blanche crying in the
back seat. Husband and wife up front would whisper; then they
would detour off the main highway, sometimes to see a rodeo, to
see a friend whom they thought Blanche might enjoy, or to spend
the night at some interesting historical spot. AE was like that, and
so was GP.
When George was a boy, his father, Bishop, and his two
uncles, Irving and Haven, were the publishing firm of G. P.
Putnam's Sons. In their time, George Palmer, the founder, and
George Haven, his successor, were the deans of American publish-
ing. Authors on the Putnam list were famous; they are now
required reading in any course in American literature: Washing-
68


ton Irving, James Russell Lowell, James Fenimore Cooper, Na-
thaniel Hawthorne, William Cullen Bryant, Francis Parkman.
GPP II at the time when his father and uncles were running
the firm had little interest in the classics of literature, either
British or American. He was having a marvelous time growing up.
Like the elder Putnams, GP went to Harvard, but he soon
transferred to the University of California at Berkeley; then, like
Francis Parkman before him in the 1840's, he went to the wilds
of Oregon. The road was mud, ruts, potholes, and bumps; but
up and beyond, as far as his eyes could see, was the most magnifi-
cent scenery he had ever seen. Rolling hills to the east, the
Cascades on the west, California's valleys to the south, and
rock-rimmed ruggedness all the way to the Columbia River
to the north.
Twenty-three years old, and with three hundred dollars in
his pockets, GP settled in the valley of the Deschutes River at
Bend. He was soon elected mayor of the town. The previous in-
cumbent had died; he had fallen out of a second-story window
of a bawdy house and landed on his head. GP had needed the
job, for he had prevailed upon a young lady in Connecticut to
come out to Oregon and marry him. Dorothy Binney came
northwest, and became his bride in October, 1911.
In the seven years that GP continued to live in Bend, he
became the father of a son, David Binney, and the editor of
the local newspaper, The Bulletin. One of the best stories con-
jured up by George to fill space in his paper was the tale about
Lucy, the tame trout. Lucy had been kept in a shallow pan,
until she spilled out all the water and somehow learned to
live by breathing air. GP would take her to one of the local
bars to perform. One day he forgot to close the door where
Lucy was kept; and having walked halfway across the foot-
bridge over the Deschutes River, GP looked back to see Lucy
flapping along after him. Then, before George could get to the
fish to help her across, Lucy lost her balance, fell into the river,
and drowned.
69


After serving in World War I, GP, his father and brother
having died, now took his place in G. P. Putnam's Sons. In the
beginning his selections of manuscripts for publication were
happy choices. Under the Putnam imprint were issued, among
others, Alexander Woollcott's first books, Rockwell Kent's Wilder-
ness, and the novels of Ben Hecht.
One of the cleverest of George Putnam's literary coups was
Bobbed Hair; it was a novel, and it was victorious on all fronts.
The book was a twenty-author production. GP conceived the
plot; then, with the help of ten women authors and nine men
writers (Putnam was the tenth), each to do one chapter, the
mongrel fiction was given birth. The novel was serialized in
Collier's, published in book form, then made into a movie. In-
cluded in the assembly-line production were Louis Bromfield,
Sophie Kerr, George Agnew Chamberlin, Bernice Brown, John
V. A. Weaver, Alexander Woollcott, George Barr McCutcheon,
Carolyn Wells, Rube Goldberg, Edward Streeter, Kermit Roose-
velt, and Frank Craven.
For George Putnam these were fabulous times. Franklin P.
Adams, Harold Ross, Marc Connelly, Heywood Broun, Herbert
Bayard Swope, Ben Hecht, Alexander Woollcott, Maxwell Ander-
son, Laurence Stallings, Sidney Howard, Louis Shipman, Burton
Rascoe, Christopher Morley: all were enjoying the first of their
many successes. GP was in their midst, and like cut glass catching
and refracting a brilliant light, he shone among them.
During this period George scored smashing results in publish-
ing books on exploration, and he was a publisher who practiced
what he preached. In the Putnam stables of authors were Charles
Lindbergh, Richard Byrd, Amelia Earhart, Martin Johnson,
William Beebe, Roy Chapman Andrews, Knud Rasmussen,
Lincoln Ellsworth, Bob Bartlett, Rockwell Kent, Robert Cush-
man Murphy, Merion Cooper, Larry Gould, William A. Robinson,
Fitzhugh Green, Sir Hubert Wilkins. But GP was not content
simply to publish books on exploration; he had to be an explorer
himself.
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In 1925 he organized and led an expedition into Greenland
for the American Museum of Natural History. The exploration
was also a writing and publishing success that produced books
by Knud Rasmussen, Bob Bartlett, and David Binney Putnam,
GP's first son. David Binney's David Goes to Greenland was a
tremendously successful boys' book. It was a successor to his
equally famous David Goes Voyaging, written at the age of
twelve after an expedition to the Galápagos with William Beebe.
For the boy the Arctic Circle was as full of thrills and adventure
as the equator; happily, the son had his father's talent for record-
ing new, unusual, and exciting experiences.
In May of 1927 Charles A. Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, alone,
and it was G. P. Putnam's Sons that published We. In June of
1928 Amelia M. Earhart flew across the Atlantic, as passenger,
and it was again Putnam's that released 20 Hrs., 40 Min.
George Putnam admired Colonel Lindbergh for his accomplish-
ment but accused Lindy of having a "mechanical” brain and a
"one-track” mind. Unfortunately, George did not live to read The
Spirit of St. Louis; if he had, he would have changed his mind.
The girl from Kansas who looked like Lindbergh, however,
became his wife. "Amelia Earhart,” he wrote later, “knew me
better, probably, than anyone else ever can. With her discern-
ment, why she married the man she did was often a matter of
wonder to me. And to some others.”
8. Marriage
Before the wedding of GP and AE in February, 1931, there
were warnings given to both. Why did they want to marry?
Why did GP want to become a hero's husband? Of all men why
did Amelia Earhart choose George Palmer Putnam?
en
71


No one, perhaps, understood heroes better than George Put-
nam. Himself a writer, publisher, explorer, and promoter with,
as Time said of him, “the dangerous combination of literary
ability, business acumen, [and] energy," he was to the young
Amelia Earhart the fitting opposite to her essentially modest and
retiring nature. He was, in brief, her kind of man.
Soon after the Friendship flight AE realized that she needed
a man to protect her, to help her continue as the symbol that
she was. GP was the man to clear the way for her, to find the
money, to stand beside her in the press of circumstance, to
support her in every venture. Although many men could fill
such requirements in a husband, Amelia felt that she could find
happiness, if it were possible to find it with anybody, only with
George Putnam.
For GP his first wife, Dorothy Binney, had given him many
good years and two sons. But the Oregon years were in the
distant past and by 1928 they had become cool and aloof toward
each other. Dorothy Binney divorced him on a formal charge of
"failure to provide,” and moved to Florida. George continued
at Rye. He was never long without a wife.
The marriage of AE and GP was, to employ a metaphor from
flight, a delicate combination of solo and dual. George was forty-
two years old; Amelia, thirty-two.
Before the ceremony at the home of George's mother in Noank,
Connecticut, on February 8, 1931, AE gave GP a letter that
defined an attitude for the future course of their life together:
Dear GP, there are some things which should be writ. Things
we have talked over before-most of them.
You must know again my reluctance to marry, my feeling
that I shatter thereby chances in work which means so much
to me. I feel the move just now as foolish as anything I could
do. I know there may be compensations, but have no heart
to look ahead.
In our life together I shall not hold you to any medieval
code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound
72


to you similarly. If we can be honest I think the difficulties
which arise may best be avoided....
Please let us not interfere with the other's work or play,
nor let the world see our private joys or disagreements. In
this connection I may have to keep some place where I can
go to be by myself now and then, for I cannot guarantee to
endure at all times the confinements of even an attractive
cage.
I must exact a cruel promise, and that is you will let me go
in a year if we find no happiness together.
I will try to do my best in every way....
The letter was signed simply "AE.” Willing but reluctant,
Amelia Earhart effected the agreement-it would have been too
demanding for most men-and became Mrs. George Palmer
Putnam.
She had refused marriage at least twice before, and as late
as 1930 she had written to a friend, “I am still unsold on mar-
riage. ... I think I may not ever be able to see marriage except
as a cage until I am unfit to work or fly or be active-and of
course I wouldn't be desirable then...."
Amelia's mother, Amy Otis Earhart, had been opposed to the
marriage. At Greenwich House in New York, where Amelia was
occupying the top floor as a celebrity in residence, AE and Mrs.
Earhart discussed Amelia's plans. The mother argued in vain;
her daughter had made up her mind.
Hilton H. Railey tried to dissuade GP from his plans. For
his efforts Railey was accused of being in love with Amelia
himself.
Amelia was often asked her opinion on the marriage-career
question. “Marriage is a mutual responsibility,” she would answer.
“And I cannot see why husbands shouldn't share in the responsi-
bility of the home. By that I mean something more detailed-
and for as long as it takes them to get used to the idea, perhaps
73


more arduous, even uncomfortable to the men-than merely keep-
ing a roof over the collective head and coal in the furnace."
As for her career and its effect on her marriage, she wrote:
"It seems to me that the effect of having other interests beyond
those exclusively domestic works well. The more one does and
sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine
may be one's appreciation of fundamental things like home, and
love and understanding companionship.”
The problem of money was frequently brought up. "For the
woman to pay her own way,” Amelia said, "may add immeasur-
ably to the happiness of those concerned. The individual inde-
pendence of dollars and cents tends to keep a healthy balance
of power in the kingdom of the home. If one's time is worth
more at specialized tasks-writing, flying, interior decorating,
what have you-it is good sense to put in one's hours at such
work rather than cooking, cleaning, and mending. Assistants
more skilled than myself can be employed to substitute in the
housewife role without robbing a marriage of its essence. It
is fortunately no longer a disgrace to be undomestic, and married
women should be able to seek, as unrestrictedly as men, any
gainful occupation their talents and interests make available.
Thus-for me-can joyful luxuries like low-wing monoplanes be
had-as adding to the sum total of contentment.”
And George Palmer Putnam seconded his wife's views. GP
and AE had a joint bank account and every month each would
put part of his earnings toward those regularly recurring bills
such as household, doctor, clothes, clubs, automobiles, and trips.
Occasionally some wag would call GP “Mr. Earhart.” “Usually,"
George observed, “it was some nitwit who didn't care whether
or not he lived.” But on one occasion GP called himself exactly
that.
The Putnams went out to Hollywood to join other celebrities
in making a film for charity. In the group were Douglas Fair-
banks and Mary Pickford, “America's Sweethearts," whom GP
and AE had never met.
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"I," said Douglas Fairbanks, introducing himself to Miss Ear-
hart, "am Mister Pickford.”
"And I,” said GP, picking up the thread and introducing him-
self to Mary Pickford, "am Mister Earhart.”
In 1931 GP gave up publishing and went to work for Para-
mount Pictures as head of the editorial board. He had sold his
interest in G. P. Putnam's Sons to a cousin, Palmer C. Putnam.
GP stayed four years at Paramount. Among his successes was
Wings, which promoted Clara Bow, Dick Arlen, and Buddy
Rogers to stardom. Playing a bit part in the film was a tall,
gangling youth whose name was Gary Cooper.
There were many delightful days in the seven years of their
marriage for AE and GP. George spent most of his time working
for Paramount in New York. Amelia flew from her cage in the
autogiro and advertised Beech-Nut. The flying advertisement
had been one of GP's money-raising ideas. He had many of them.
One, however, Amelia could not accept. It was the "Amelia
Earhart Hat.” AE, George, and Hilton Railey were at the Bilt-
more in New York. GP crossed the room and from behind his
back proudly produced a woman's hat. It was made of russet
suède and on the silk band around it was reproduced Amelia's
signature.
Amelia looked at it and turned it in her hands, pensively. Her
smile of amusement narrowed to disappointment. “Of course,
GP,” she said firmly, “this won't do at all. You'll have to cancel it.”
"But I can't!" George cried out. "I've already signed the con-
tract. They're already made up."
"Then tell the manufacturer to unmake them. Tell him at
once-right now!” She pointed to a telephone on a small table.
"Phone him," she commanded.
Angrily glaring at Railey, GP flailed his arms and stomped
about the room. Amelia waited for the fury to subside.
"Since I can't very well sue the manufacturer, and you had
my power of attorney, then I shall most certainly sue you-
unless!” She was unyielding; she wanted no part in the scheme.
e
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The matter was settled, and no “Amelia Earhart Hats” were
put on the market. Railey, bringing all his powers of persuasion
to bear, had talked the manufacturer into tearing up the contract.
But there were other, more acceptable, ideas from George
Putnam. Amelia became a woman's fashion designer for a time,
and she modeled her own original creations—the lines simple,
classical, functional. She devised buttons, buckles, and other ac-
cessories; they were adapted from such airplane parts as a
hexagonal nut, a wing light, taillight, parachute buckles, wing
bolts, cotter pins, and ball bearings.
She endorsed the Franklin Motor Car; its engine was air
cooled like that of her airplane. And there was Earhart luggage,
light, practical, and designed for air travel.
Because of his many and varied ideas and activities, AE had
a pet name for George—“Simpkin.” The name came from a book
Amelia remembered from childhood, which told the story of the
Tailor of Gloucester who lived with his cat Simpkin. Simpkin be-
lieved in keeping mice in reserve by secreting them under cups;
whenever he was bored, he always had a mouse to liven the day.
Amelia discovered early in her marriage that she was just another
one of the many enterprises that her husband managed. One
mouse at a time was not enough for GP; thus his nickname,
“Simpkin.”
The marriage of AE and GP produced no children. Neverthe-
less, it was a happy one for the most part, although a New
York columnist had reported in 1933 that AE and GP were on
the verge of breaking up. Helen Hutson Weber, who was a
house guest in the Rye home, where she was recuperating from
a serious illness, chuckled when she read the item. For as she
did, AE and GP were out on the patio cavorting like two play-
ful children: George was driving Amelia around in a wheel-
barrow, then dumping her on the ground. AE squealed in delight.
Neither George nor Amelia had to meet the pledge of two
years before and go their separate ways if they found no happi-
ness together.
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She walked to the crocuses, blooming in bright dabs of yellow,
purple, and white, and felt their grasslike leaves. Overhead she
noted the elms and oaks beginning to leaf. Bernt and GP had
stopped at the croquet rack. Amelia joined them. They started
to play.
At the middle wicket on the turn for home AE dropped the
long handle of her mallet and walked toward the men. “Bernt,”
she said suddenly, "I wanted to tell you. ..." Her voice trailed
inconclusively.
Bernt and George laid down their mallets. They followed
Amelia to a nearby rock and sat down. AE looked down at
Bernt. “I want to fly the Atlantic, now, by myself,” she said to
him. “Am I ready to do it?" she asked. “Is the ship ready? Will
you help me?"
Balchen, a Norwegian of few words, fixed his clear blue eyes
on a wire hoop of the croquet game. His voice still had the trace
of a Norseman's accent. “Yes,” he said slowly. “You can do it.
The ship, when we are through with it, will be O.K. And, yes,
I will help.”
Her questions answered, Amelia returned to the game with
renewed vigor and clouted her opponents croquet balls into
the bushes.
Toward dusk Bernt returned home. AE, suddenly hungry, went
into the kitchen. She started to make cocoa. Lucy Challiss, her
cousin from Atchison, who had been staying at the house for
a few days, came in with George.
“Can you keep a secret?” Amelia said, grinning, to her cousin.
“Of course," Lucy answered.
AE went to the table and started slicing a loaf of bread. She
reached out a forefinger, picked up a bread crumb, and placed it
on the tip of her tongue. “I'm going to fly the Atlantic again,"
she said. “Alone.”
Incredulous, Lucy stared at Amelia. The cocoa on the stove
came to a quick boil, bubbled, and spilled over the pan onto
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the floor. GP sprang for a mop, Lucy for a dishcloth. Laughing,
AE reached into the cupboard for more cocoa.
It was the first time that Amelia had taken into her confidence
someone not directly connected with her flight. Lucy Challiss
did not betray her trust.
Unlike the first flight across the Atlantic in the Friendship
plane, which had three engines, pontoons, and three crewmen,
the Vega with its one engine and fixed wheels would have to
go the whole distance with one pilot. For the next month, there-
fore, AE sharpened her reactions in the conditions demanded
in blind flying. For hours at a time she practiced flying by her
instruments alone: setting a course to some distant city, then by
following the dial of the gyrocompass and keeping the Vega
straight and level by flying the needle and ball of the turn and
bank indicator, she would compute the time and distance from
the chronometer, and finally look out from the cockpit to see if
she had made her estimated time of arrival at her destination.
She would then turn around and go through the same procedure
all the way back to New Jersey.
If possible, she wanted to be ready for the Atlantic take-off on
the same day as Lindbergh, five years earlier, had left New York.
She had never forgotten the time in Boston when she read about
Lindy's historic flight and how she had hoped even then before
the Friendship venture that she might, somehow, be the first
woman to attempt the same flight.
While she waited at Rye or Teterboro, she often phoned the
office of Doc Kimball at the Weather Bureau office in New York
and asked for a prognosis. The weather conditions that had been
forecast for the North Atlantic were not too encouraging, but
she had decided that if there was the slightest chance to be on
her way she would take it.
On the morning of Friday, May 20, AE climbed into her car
and started for New Jersey. She was on her way to see Bernt
Balchen at Teterboro airport. Ground fog, heavy and wet,
bubbled on the windshield of the car; she turned on the wipers.
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were waiting by the plane. Eddie and Amelia climbed through
the door into the waist. Bernt crawled up on the wing and
descended through the hatch into the cockpit. Balchen had con-
vinced AE that he should fly the first leg so that she could
conserve her strength for the long solo.
The red high-wing monoplane with gold stripes along the
fuselage lifted off the runway at 3:15 P.M. Amelia looked out
the small window in the door. On the ground below, standing
on the edge of the pavement, was George Putnam, waving. She
waved back. For a change, a man would wait, anxiously, for
his woman to come home.
The Vega cruised over the coast of New England to Cape
Cod. Behind the big fuel tank in the cabin Amelia was sleeping,
stretched out on the floor of the fuselage, her leather flying
suit under her head. Three hours and thirty minutes later Bernt
Balchen brought the plane into Saint John, New Brunswick.
Early the next morning they flew to Harbor Grace, Newfound-
land. Amelia found detailed weather reports from GP waiting
for her when she arrived. While Bernt and Eddie made a final
check of the aircraft, she pored over the predictions. The weather
outlook was not too good but held the promise of something
better. She decided to leave that evening. That settled, she
found a cot, lay down, and took a nap.
At dinnertime she was awakened. There were more telegrams
from GP. Her decision to leave that night, she learned, had been
a good one. The weather seemed to be clearing on her route.
Amelia put on her heavy flying suit, picked up her maps, and
went out to the field.
Bernt had already warmed up the engine. Awkward in her
clumsy gear, Amelia plodded out to the plane. She reached a
hand out to Bernt, then to Eddie. They helped her up the side
of the fuselage onto the wing. She let herself down through the
hatchway into the cockpit. She grinned through the side window
and waved.
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10. Other Atlantics
"If you follow the inner desire of your heart," she had said
in a magazine article, “the incidentals will take care of them-
selves.” For four long years she had waited to justify herself to
herself. She wanted to prove that she deserved at least a small
fraction of all the nice things people had been saying about
her as a flier. She had the credit, to spilling and overflowing, for
already having flown this ocean; she now wanted to make the
credit good by making a large deposit, by flying the Atlantic
alone.
"Illogical?” She tried to explain with reasons from her heart.
"Perhaps. Most of the things we want are illogical!”
Under the left wing she watched a ship knifing slowly through
the water toward Newfoundland. She reached for the light toggle
and blinked her navigation lights. There was no answer from
the ship.
Amelia swallowed. Her mouth was dry. She reached down for
a can of tomato juice, punched a hole through the top with a
screw driver, and inserted a straw. She sipped slowly, letting the
juice moisten her tongue and the inside of her mouth, then she
swallowed a mouthful.
“Adventure,” she had always felt, “is worth while in itself.”
Even when she was a little girl in Kansas, playing with her
sister Muriel and her cousin Lucy Challiss, she had often gone
to play "bogey” in the barn in back of the house in Atchison.
The three girls would sit in the old buggy. Amelia would pick up
the mildewed whip and crack it over the heads of the imaginary
horses. They would ride wildly over a cobbled road, the buggy
swaying. The horses galloped; the girls were in a hurry to get
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to Vienna. A knight in shining armor came riding out of the
woods-toward them.
“Who's that?" Lucy shrieked.
“Dispatches, Sir Knight!” Amelia shouted at the man on horse-
back; she was not afraid. “For the Congress of Vienna of Treves,
in favor of the Holy Grail.” Undaunted, she continued, “Crusade
about to start-unless we get through, the Pagan may prevail!”
The knight put up his lance and let them pass.
"Women can do most of the things men can do,” she had
written. "In anything that requires intelligence, coordination,
spirit, coolness, and will power (and not too heavy muscular
strength) women can meet men on their own ground.”
She grinned as she remembered. She had once climbed upon
a delivery horse, had explored the caves in the cliffs overlooking
the Missouri River, had invented a trap and caught a chicken,
had jumped over a fence that no boy her own age had dared to
try, had even popped bottles off a fence with a rifle. If it was
new and if it was different, she couldn't wait to try it, especially
if some boy dared her.
She had twenty-eight different jobs in her life and she hoped
to have two hundred and twenty-eight more.
The restless urge. Better than any college education was it to
experiment, to meet new people, to find out what made them
tick. Adapt, please, anger, study: these were better than any
classroom. The unexpected by adventure became the inevitable.
Even the small things, if they were an invitation to hop out of
the rut, meant just as much-as flying the Atlantic.
She stamped her feet on the floor of the cockpit. Then quickly
she lifted herself from the seat and tried for a more comfortable
sitting position. The motor purred steadily. The phosphorescence
of the numbers and dials of the instruments was the only light.
Outside it was night. The moon shone over plane and sea.
There had been many “Atlantics” before-things she had
wanted very much to do, against the opposition of tradition,
neighborhood opinion, and so-called “common sense.” There
85


had been the time she left Ogontz School before graduation to
become a nurse in Toronto. Learning to fly in California had
ostracized her among the more conventionally minded girls. By
driving a truck to deliver sand and gravel, to earn money to
fly and buy her own plane, she had become a simple nobody.
Such things were simply not done, not by a girl.
"The girl in brown who walks alone.” Now she was the girl
in brown leather flying suit and helmet, flying alone across the
Atlantic Ocean. She looked at the smooth and worn leather of
the arm of her suit, and grinned as she remembered her first
flying jacket, how she had slept in it so it would have a used
look. At first she had been shy about flying.
11. Flying in California
California was a wonderful place for flying. In the summer of
that year-it was 1920 and she was an exuberant twenty-two-
Amelia had dragged her reluctant father from his Sunday news-
papers and persuaded him to take her to an air meet at Daugherty
Field, out on the far stretches of Long Beach. By the time they
arrived, Mr. Earhart was hot and uncomfortable. He ran a long
finger under his wilted collar, and mopped the sweat and dust
from his face. He could not understand his daughter Millie's
enthusiasm for airplanes. After you had seen one, he affirmed,
you had seen them all.
Amelia was fascinated at the sight of the old Jennys and
Canucks. They were the same kind of planes she had seen
at Armor Heights in Toronto. A man in uniform with an official”
badge pinned to his coat passed in front of her. She took her
father by the arm. “Dad," she asked, “please ask that man how
long it takes to learn how to fly."
Mr. Earhart went to talk to the official; then he returned to
86


his daughter. “He says it's different with different people.” Then
he added, “The average time is between five and ten hours.”
Amelia reflected on the report. “Please ask him how much
lessons cost."
Unwillingly Mr. Earhart went to the official again. When he
came back he said, “The answer to that question is one thousand
dollars."
All the way home Amelia thought about the $1,000. It was
more money than she had ever had, and she wondered where she
could get such a large sum. Her father did not seem to share
her interest, and she did not know how her mother would react
to the idea of her taking flying lessons. She would begin her
campaign by first asking her father if she could take just one
ride in a plane.
She finally coaxed him into taking her out to Rogers Airport.
They ate a hurried breakfast then took the streetcar to the out-
skirts of town, to an open space at Fairfax and Wilshire boule-
vards which was the airfield.
A young pilot of about Amelia's age, noting prospective custom-
ers, came forward and introduced himself. He was Frank Hawks
and he would one day establish numerous records as a famous
racing pilot. Amelia told him she wanted to go up for a ride.
Frank Hawks glanced at the tall, slight build of the girl in
the high-laced shoes. He was unimpressed. If she wanted to go,
he told her, she would have to suffer another passenger in
the same seat with her, and he nodded to his companion standing
by the plane. Hawks didn't trust frightened females in his air-
plane. Amelia saw that argument was pointless and agreed to
the conditions.
The pilots helped her into the front cockpit. Hawks climbed
into the rear seat, and his friend squeezed in beside Amelia. A
mechanic swung the propeller and the plane came suddenly to
life. AE watched the whirling blur before her and covered her
ears to shut out the deafening blast. The plane started to roll
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a steep glide
over the uneven ground to the far end of the field, then it
turned and stopped.
The wings and fuselage shook as the motor clattered wide
open. Amelia screwed up her face to the noise. The plane began
to move down the take-off run, dipping and bumping as it picked
up speed. Then, suddenly, it broke cleanly into the air. As
suddenly Amelia was thrilled: she felt as if she were floating on
a cushion of air.
She looked down from 300 feet. Trees and ground were speed-
ing by; everything was getting smaller as the plane climbed into
the sky. The automobiles on Wilshire Boulevard looked like
black bugs, the houses like toys.
The plane leveled off. “Two thousand feet,” Hawks shouted
from the back seat. Amelia looked over the side of the cockpit.
The oil derricks on the edge of the city were directly below;
farther out, the Hollywood hills and the ocean.
Hawks nosed the plane into a steep glide, then tipped up the
wing into a turn. The wind whistled over the wings and through
the struts and cross wires.
Amelia braced her arm against the instrument panel. She
smiled as she rose slightly from the seat. The stick in front of
her angled forward; she wanted to hold it. When she reached
out a hand, the man beside her shook his head and pushed
the hand aside.
She turned quickly left and right in the seat, then tapped her
feet on the floor. How wonderful to climb and turn and dive
through the air! She felt buoyant, light, free-something she had
never known before. A warm wave of exhilaration surged
through her.
The plane had landed and the flight was over too soon. AE
was on the ground but her thoughts were still in the sky. She
knew now that she would have to fly again, whatever the cost.
As soon as she had left the ground on that take-off she had known
it. She now understood what had lured the young Canadian
pilots into the air.
the struts and .. The wind
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That evening she had to tell her family about her plans. "I
think I'd like to learn to fly," she said finally, when the supper
dishes were being cleared from the table.
“You aren't really serious, are you?” her father said. “I thought
you were just wishing. I can't afford to let you have instruction.”
Amelia was by no means defeated. She would find other ways
of getting the money. She would get a job and pay for her
lessons by herself. She was now old enough to decide what she
wanted to do with her life. Her father's decision forced the issue
and broke the financial ties she had grown to depend upon.
Amelia found a job with the Los Angeles telephone company.
It paid little, but sorting mail and running errands provided
enough to get started with her lessons. She worked five days
a week, leaving her with weekends to spend at the flying field.
Neta Snook, an early woman flier and a graduate of the Curtiss
Flying School, was her first instructor.
Early one Saturday morning AE rolled out of bed. She was
wearing a leather flying jacket over her pajamas. For the last
several nights she had been sleeping in it to give it a worn look.
She didn't want the curious to know that she was a novice at
flying. She ate her breakfast quickly; she wanted to be out of
the house before seven o'clock.
The ride out to the airport took more than an hour to the
end of the carline, then she had to walk another three miles
along the dusty highway to the field. Amelia wore her riding
breeches, her high leather boots, and her leather jacket; tucked
under her arm was her leather helmet and goggles. Although
she had not soloed yet, she felt like a flier. And to complete
the woman-flier portrait, she had been secretly snipping away
at her hair.
Instructor Neta Snook and student Amelia Earhart must have
looked strange to the casual onlooker. What were these two
women doing, dressing like men and climbing into an airplane?
Neither woman cared. Why couldn't a woman enjoy the
pleasures and run the risks of flight? Snooky did not trouble
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Neta reduced throttle, pulled up the nose until the wing stalled;
the plane plunged down, then she jammed the stick forward and
added throttle to pull out of the dive. This was a simple stall,
and Amelia soon commanded the necessary skill to recover
the plane.
A spin was more involved; again Neta proved that the Curtiss
Flying School had taught her well. As before she pulled the
plane back into a stall, but now she kicked the right rudder hard,
snapping the wing over. The plane spun to the right, and Amelia,
getting dizzier from each tightening whirl, tried to concentrate
on Neta's recovery. Neta applied opposite rudder to the direction
of the spin, straightening the wings; then she thrust the stick
forward, adding power, and slowly came back on the stick to
bring the nose back onto the horizon. Amelia thought the
maneuver too complicated to master, but after several attempts
with Snooky patiently guiding her through each step, she finally
learned. Her reactions became quick, sure, and accurate.
Having learned how to take off and land, and how to recover
from stalls and spins, Amelia began to radiate with the new sense
of power which these basic skills and accomplishments had
given her. She was eager to get on with her lessons, but there
was never enough money to pay for them. Much of her instruc-
tion from Neta had been on credit, and her job with the telephone
company scarcely paid enough to meet all costs. It became im-
mediately clear to her that she needed a better-paying job. She
found one a few days later in a most unlikely occupation for a
girl-driving a truck for a sand and gravel company.
By this time Amy Earhart realized that her daughter was
serious about flying, and she decided to help. On the condition
that Amelia would spend more time at home, Mrs. Earhart let
her have some of the money she had been saving over the years.
Amelia readily agreed to the terms.
To her sorrow, however, when she returned to the field a
few weeks later to tell Neta Snook the good news, AE learned
that Neta, herself desperate for funds, had sold her plane. Disap-
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the take-off. As the plane rolled down the barren strip, gaining
speed for the take-off, Amelia felt the right wing sag just before
the plane should have lifted into the air. Instinctively, AE
chopped the throttle, pulled back the spark-control lever, and
settled the plane onto the ground. Getting out to see what had
gone wrong, Amelia noticed that one of the shock absorbers
had collapsed.
After the damage had been repaired, Amelia, taking courage
anew, tried again. She inched the throttle forward, and when
the plane had more than enough flying speed, she eased back
on the stick, waiting an anxious moment for the plane to break
from the ground. The shock absorber held, and the Airster
sprang from the end of the runway. Gently, almost caressingly,
Amelia coordinated throttle and stick, aileron and rudder, in her
climbing turns out of take-off. Suddenly, as she leveled the wings
and straightened the nose, she realized an overwhelming fact:
she was alone, gloriously alone. She was in complete command
of the surging power from the engine and it was just at her
fingertips to obey her will and no other. "
Her nerve ends had multiplied, for now the power of the
engine was her power and had become part of her own body,
and the wings and fuselage and empennage were extensions of
her own limbs. She climbed and dived and turned, pranking the
air in the thrill and exhilaration of new-found love. The aware-
ness of soaring flight now struck her consciousness as if for the
first time. She was now the master of her life, her destiny, and
perhaps her death. The realization brought a bitter joy and a
livid loneliness, but beyond them lay a new kind of freedom
and a blessed peace.
Buoyant and elated, she swung the plane into the landing
pattern. Feeling too confident, she neglected to lose enough
flying speed in her final approach to the runway, and when
she tried to touch the plane down, it kept bouncing off the ground
and back into the air. Finally, realizing that she had not cut the
power, she pulled the throttle all the way back and held the
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stick hard against her middle. The engine sputtered, the wing
stalled, and the plane thumped to the ground.
When she had taxied the plane to the parking area, some of
the other pilots came running over to her. “Congratulations!”
they shouted. “How did it feel?” they asked. “Were you scared?”
Amelia felt guilty and somewhat silly, but she certainly had not
been frightened. She was ashamed of her rotten landing, but
took some comfort in what John Montijo had once told her. All
landings are good ones, he said, if you can walk away from
them. Amelia was proud that she had finally soloed; by flying
only on weekends, she had taken months to do what others
had done in just a few weeks of constant instruction. She turned
to one of the men standing near her plane and asked him to
take her picture out in front of the Kinner. She posed like a
wistful maiden who is going to announce her engagement in
the society section of the Sunday newspapers. She smiled softly
and held her arms out from her body, her hands angled, her
fingers pointed. The camera clicked.
12. The Girl and the Machine
The remembered sound was enough to snap Amelia back from
her reverie. She looked at the chronometer on the instrument
panel of her Vega. Time had passed quickly. She checked the
fuel-flow indicator. Everything normal. It was 11:30 P.M. She
glanced at the air-speed indicator: 180 mph. She wondered what
ground speed she was making along her track: that depended
on the direction and velocity of the wind. To the right of the
air-speed dial she noticed the dials of the altimeter; suddenly
they started to spin crazily around and around. In her twelve
years of flying this had never happened before. With the altime-
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Amelia reached into the pocket of her shirt, under the leather
jacket, and took out a pair of dark glasses. Through the dark-
ness of the glasses the light was still too bright. She nosed the
Vega down through the lower layer, hoping to find some shade
near the water.
Ten hours of the long flight had passed. She reached for the
thermos bottle of hot soup. Pressing the stick firmly between her
knees, she gulped down the hot liquid food. It was her first meal
since the take-off from Harbor Grace. Amelia checked the fuel
gauges: 120 gallons left. Since take-off the Vega had burned
300 gallons.
Amelia looked out across the water for passing ships. None
were within sight. The sunshine and low-hanging clouds per-
sisted. Preferring the shade, she continued to fly close to the
water.
She looked out far ahead. In the distance a thin line of black
stretched across the horizon. Was it landfall or a front of black
clouds? She had been deceived before. Then a dark object moved
out from the black line. It had to be a ship; whether a fishing
vessel or tanker, it was too soon to tell.
The vibration of the exhaust manifold became severe. Amelia
saw that the cracked weld had melted and grown larger from
the exhaust flames during the night. The engine would probably
not last much longer. Paris as a destination, she now decided,
was out of the question. She would have to come down on the
first available piece of land.
Gently applying right rudder and stick, she banked into a
turn, leveled off, and held a new compass course of ninety
degrees. By flying due east she intended to hit the tip of the
black line on the horizon, the tip of what she hoped was Ireland.
Doc Kimball in New York had told her she might find bad
weather south of her course during the flight. The fact of last
night's experience now convinced her she must be south of
course, especially if the wind had been long from the northwest.
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The line on the horizon grew in contour. It was definitely a
coast line, and probably Ireland. By maintaining her course she
would hit it, not at the tip as planned, but exactly in the middle.
The coast came into full view below. Amelia screamed in
delight; she had made her landfall. Exultant, she turned and
headed down a long spine of mountains. Crowded against the
peaks and knobs were thunderstorm clouds, growing and spread-
ing up and out.
Knowing that she could not depend on the broken altimeter
and realizing that she did not know the country, Amelia turned
north to where the weather seemed better. She did not want to
churn through billowing clouds whose roots were mountain peaks.
The new course proved a wise one. Ahead she saw a railroad,
the blessed “iron compass” which in any country could bring
a pilot home to a city and perhaps to an airport. Dutifully,
Amelia followed the double track. The worst of the flight, she
knew, was over.
Happily she tried to stretch in the narrow seat. She felt like
that Greek traveler Odysseus whom she had read about at school
in Philadelphia-again, she mused, another male hero. He had
triumphed over that sea-god who had tried to drown him-and
so had she, over whatever it was that had knocked out her
tachometer and altimeter, and had tried to drown her in the
Atlantic.
Dead ahead on course what appeared to be a large city began
to take shape. Once over it, Amelia circled in wide, swinging
loops, looking for a landing field. There was none. But out beyond
the city she saw grazing pastures, neat, green, and trim. One of
them would have to do.
She brought the Vega down low over a pasture dotted with
cows. She made several passes, checking carefully for any
obstacles to a landing. The cattle, frightened by the sound of
the plane, scampered in all directions. She reduced throttle and
began her letdown. She brought the nose up slowly. The meadow
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"I haven't slept since Friday morning,” she told him. “But I
don't feel the least bit fatigued.”
She slept until the next day.
Amelia Earhart had become what she was in the eyes of her
public—the great American woman flier. She had regained her
self-respect; she was no longer what she considered a "phony
heroine.” The eighteen tons of ticker tape and torn telephone
books that had greeted Lindbergh five years before in New York
could now scatter down on her. She had paid her debt. She was
now ready to play the part of a true heroine. A smooth lyrical
grace, the romantic quest of old, and the chivalric spirit of
adventure had now combined in the boyishly slender figure of-
this time—a woman. Like the lone eagle who preceded her, Amelia
acted with ease, modest self-effacement, and exemplary good
manners, becoming a good-will ambassador for America.
On Sunday, May 22, Amelia left Londonderry for London
in a plane provided by Paramount News. Cables and telegrams
had already reached her. “We do congratulate you,” said the
Lindberghs. “Your flight is a splendid success.” Lady Astor wired
to her: “Come to us, and I will lend you a nightgown.” The one
message Amelia would never forget was in the cable from her
cleaner, Phil Cooper, in Rye. “Congratulations!" it said. “I knew
you'd do it. I never lost a customer.”
At the airport in London AE was met by Ambassador Mellon.
They were driven through the cheering crowds to sanctuary
at the embassy. Not having brought any clothes other than
those she flew in, Amelia was eager to change out of the jodhpurs
and sports shirt into something feminine. After a long night's
sleep at the embassy, AE, in dress, coat, shoes, hat, gloves, and
purse borrowed from Mrs. Mellon, went forth to shop at Self-
ridge's and to sign her name with a diamond-pointed pencil on
the plate-glass window that served as the Selfridge autograph
album for celebrities.
The British conferred upon her an award that had been given
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to only one non-British subject before. Norman Selfridge, who
had AE's Lockheed Vega on display at his store and who was
its official custodian for the time being, flew Amelia to Brook-
lands. Here she received the Certificate of Honorary Member-
ship of the British Guild of Air Pilots and Navigators.
Luncheons, dinners, receptions, more awards and decora-
tions followed. Amid all the fanfare Amelia said, “I realize this
flight has meant nothing to aviation.” The remark went un-
noticed; the press continued in notes of triumphant praise-except
for one discordant chord sounded by M. E. Tracey in the New
York World-Telegram: “Amelia Earhart has given us a magnifi-
cent display of useless courage. ... The interest in such per-
formances is one great weakness of the present age.”
Amelia retained her composure. "If science advances,” she
said, “and aviation progresses, and international good will is
promoted because of my flight, no one will be more delighted
than I-or more surprised.”
For millions of people in America, however, Amelia's solo flight
across the Atlantic was not a display of “useless courage,” nor
was it a “tremendous trifle.” Here was a feminine successor to
the long list of heroes whom Americans had idolized and adored.
Amelia took her place with Lindbergh in aviation, in the glitter-
ing gallery that included Bobby Jones in golf, Babe Ruth in
baseball, Bill Tilden in tennis, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney
in boxing. In an age of heroes, a heroine was most welcome.
To help manage the avalanche of invitations that had en-
gulfed her, Amelia sent for her husband. GP sailed on the
Olympic; when he arrived in Cherbourg, Amelia was there to
meet him on board the Evadne, the yacht of C. R. Fairey. GP
scrambled up the ladder. AE stood in the doorway, grinning
in the morning sun.
"Hil” she said to her husband, as if he had just come home
from work. Man and wife joined arms and went into breakfast
with the others.
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She told him about her visit with the Prince of Wales. She
had a private audience with him in his library at St. James's
Palace. He had pinned a dark pink rose on her blue suit, and
escorted her back to her car. The prince was a pilot, but they
would never let him fly solo.
“We just talked shop,” Amelia said. “That is, we did a little
ground flying. I told the prince all about my flight. He was
most warm in his congratulations.”
Of his guest the prince had been quoted as saying: "She is
just as charming as I had expected.”
On they went to Paris. The French people were most excited
by her visit, and the French Senate extended an official reception.
Gallic wit glittered, turning on a pretty compliment from the
modest American flier.
“But after all, m’ssieurs,” Amelia concluded her little speech
before the Senate, “it is far more difficult to make good laws
than it is to fly the Atlantic.”
“Ah, madame," crackled the president, “when you fly the
ocean, what you do is a danger only to yourself, while the
laws we make are a danger to so many."
At the American embassy in Paris Amelia was awarded the
Cross of Knight of the Legion of Honor. “Five years ago," M.
Painlevé said at the ceremony in the drawing room, “I had the
pleasure to decorate Colonel Lindbergh after his remarkable
flight. And now I have the honor to bestow this cross upon the
colonel's charming image.”
Rome followed. The Italian Government invited the couple to
a gathering of fliers who had flown the Atlantic. For the Italians
Amelia's sex was a problem. A woman simply did not set
aviation records; she stayed home and had babies. Amelia was
a kind of curiosity whom they could not understand.
From Rome they went to Brussels. King Albert and his queen
received them at their summer home in Laehen. Amelia loved
the easy affability of the king and his dainty wife. They lunched,
talked about flying, and took snapshots of one another. For
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Amelia there was yet another decoration, the Cross of the
Chevalier of the Order of Leopold.
On June 15 they sailed for home. Aboard the Ile de France
AE rested for the ordeal ahead in New York. When she arrived,
the city clasped her to its breast: she was their heroine, and
thousands cheered her as they had Lindbergh.
The climax of all receptions came on June 21, 1932, when AE
had the gold medal of the National Geographic Society presented
to her by President Herbert Hoover. In contrast to the warmth
of the royal reception in Brussels, the atmosphere of the dinner
at the White House was formal and cold.
After dinner they removed to Constitution Hall for the actual
ceremony. The President rose to a respectful silence and made
his address.
It is a great pleasure to come here and share in your
honoring of Mrs. Amelia Earhart Putnam. She has shown a
splendid courage and skill in flying alone across the Atlantic
Ocean. ... She has been modest and good-humored.
All these things combine to place her in spirit with the great
pioneering women to whom every generation of Americans
has looked up, with admiration for their firmness of will,
their strength of character, and their cheerful spirit of com-
radeship in the work of the world. ...
Her success has not been won by the selfish pursuit of
a purely personal ambition, but as part of a career generously
animated by a wish to help others to share in the rich oppor-
tunities of life, and by a wish also to enlarge those oppor-
tunities by expanding the powers of women as well as men
to their ever-widening limits.
Mrs. Putnam has made all mankind her debtor by her
demonstration of new possibilities of the human spirit and
the human will in overcoming barriers of space and the
restrictions of Nature upon the radius of human activity.
[The President turned to Amelia] The nation is proud that
an American woman should be the first woman in history to
fly an airplane alone across the Atlantic Ocean. As their
de all manke the human
and the
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spokesman [he moved to Amelia now standing beside him]
I take pride and pleasure in conferring this rarely bestowed
medal of the National Geographic Society upon Mrs. Amelia
Earhart Putnam.
Amelia took her place behind the microphone. She spoke
calmly in a low, well-modulated voice. “I think,” she said, re-
affirming the position she had often taken, “that the appreciation
for the deed is out of proportion to the deed itself. ... I shall be
happy if my small exploit has drawn attention to the fact that
women, too, are flying."
Later, at a less formal occasion, Mrs. Hoover added her per-
sonal opinion to what her husband had said in his prepared
statement. “I often think,” the President's wife said, “that if
a girl was to fly across the Atlantic alone and so, in a sense,
represent America before the world, how nice it is that it was
such a person as Miss Earhart. She is poised, well bred, lovely
to look at, and so intelligent and sincere.”
It was not until the Roosevelts came to Washington, however,
that Amelia became a close friend of the White House. AE
gave Eleanor Roosevelt her first experience in night flying, both
women taking to the air in evening clothes. The first lady of
the nation and the first lady of flight became fast friends. At
one time Mrs. Roosevelt decided to take flying lessons from AE,
and even went so far as to get her student pilot permit. But
the President strenuously objected to the idea of his wife becom-
ing a pilot, and the matter was finally dropped.
After her solo flight, Amelia could count enough awards and
decorations to fill a display cabinet, but she cherished one above
all. In tribute to her accomplishment the Congress of the United
States presented her with the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Not content to rest on her Atlantic laurels, AE now turned to
more challenges, some in the air and some on the ground. The
Pacific Ocean, Mexico and its gulf, the transcontinental speed
record: each in turn presented the unexpected in life that could
indeed become the inevitable.
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14. Solo from Hawaii to California
On July 24, 1934, Amelia Earhart was thirty-six years old.
Mature, confident, and poised, she spent the summer of that year
working in her flower garden, swimming and boating at Rye
beach, entertaining a wide variety of guests. To all appearances
she was calm, radiant, self-assured; yet within, the unrest of old
began again.
On a day, happy yet disconsolate in the bittersweet of autumn,
Amelia walked about the grounds at Rye, under the great oaks
and through the paths. Underfoot the dead leaves crunched and
crackled; above, bare branches hung in the crisp air, the remain-
ing leaves hanging on, tenacious and unwilling to surrender to
the wind, which was relentless in its sudden swirling gusts.
AE hooked the fur neckpiece closer to her neck, drove her
hands deep into the pockets of her tweed coat, and looked down
at the dust that had gathered on her flat brown walking shoes.
She walked up the flagstone steps to the side door that opened
on the patio, then raised her head and looked up over the tops
of the trees. Across the clear blue of the sky she watched after-
noon clouds scud by. Her eyelids flicked quickly over her gray-
blue eyes. With a sudden jerk at the door handle, she swung
inside the house.
Early that evening she showered briskly and put on gold
crepe pajamas. She sat before the fireplace and read the evening
paper, waiting for GP to come home.
It was six thirty when he came through the front door. AE
looked up at him; she had rehearsed all afternoon what she was
going to say to him; it couldn't wait.
"I want to fly the Pacific,” she said. “Soon.”
GP stood inside the doorway, leaning against the arch. With
w
ul.
105


a forefinger he pushed his glasses up along the bridge of his nose.
"You mean from San Francisco to Honolulu?” he asked.
“No. The other way. It's easier to hit a continent than an
island.” She fingered the topaz link at the cuff of her long
pajama sleeve.
George put his brief case and hat on the hallway table. “When
do you want to do it?"
“Fairly soon. But only when I'm ready-and the ship.”
It was not long afterward that the Putnams moved to the West
Coast, not so much to be closer to the Pacific Ocean, but so
that AE could be near the center of the aviation industry in
California.
By December plane and pilot were ready. Paul Mantz, Amelia's
good friend and a crack pilot, acted as her technical adviser. He
was her Bernt Balchen on the West Coast. On December 22
AE and her husband and Paul Mantz and his wife left Los
Angeles aboard the S. S. Lurline of the Matson Line, bound
for Honolulu. Lashed to the aft tennis deck of the ship was a
new Lockheed Vega. The old one had been sold to the Franklin
Institute in Philadelphia for more than eight thousand dollars.
The new plane, like the old, was painted a vivid red for quick
recognition in the event it should go down on a flight.
When the ship docked five days later, Amelia, as soon as she
descended the gangway, was surrounded by newsmen. “Would
she be the first woman to fly from Hawaii to the mainland?”
they asked.
Amelia bent her head to accept the lei placed about her neck
by a pretty native girl. Never one to divulge her plans to the
press, AE replied affably yet distantly: “I thought I would do
some flying over the Hawaiian Islands.”
Not satisfied with that answer, a reporter pressed his point.
"If you fly to the California coast,” he asked, “will Mantz fly
with you?"
Amelia grinned, then broke into a rare, broad gat-toothed
106


smile. "If I fly to the coast,” she replied, "I will not take a
cat along."
For two weeks she waited in Honolulu for the right weather
conditions and for the sign from Paul Mantz that the plane and
engine were in top condition for the Pacific crossing. The Vega
had been taken to the Navy's Wheeler Field.
Amelia made one public appearance, at the University of
Hawaii, where she spoke on “Flying for Fun.” Before the speech,
word of the flight had leaked out, and there had been criticism
of her from the press; a newspaper had said that her radio
equipment was inadequate for the long flight to California.
The night of January 2 Amelia stood at the podium in Far-
rington Hall, telling students and faculty about her fun in
flying. In the audience sat GP, listening attentively. His wife,
he thought, had responded beautifully to his coaching: she had
become a first-rate public speaker. A young man came down the
aisle and handed George a note. GP unfolded it and read: Paul
Mantz, at the moment flying above the islands at 12,000 feet in
AE's plane, had reached radio stations up and down the main-
land, and inland as far as Arizona. The Vega's radios could send
and receive, GP concluded, not the mere 300 miles leveled at
Amelia in the criticism from the press, but 3,000 miles. GP sent
the note up to his wife.
AE read the note aloud and grinned. She looked up at her
audience. “I realize”-she spoke in a solemn tone-"that I have
made a serious mistake.” The audience bent forward to hear
the rest. Amelia's mouth curled up in a half-smile. "I was born a
mere woman,” she said quickly, "instead of a man.” The au-
dience roared in delight.
While they were in Honolulu the Putnams and Mantzes stayed
at the home of Chris Holmes in Waikiki. Early on the morning
of January 11 GP and Paul Mantz went to Wheeler Field. Amelia
stayed behind and ate a slow, leisurely breakfast, then went
outside for a sun bath.
Toward noon a light rain began to fall, and Amelia scurried
107


inside. By the time George returned for lunch, the rain had
developed into a heavy tropical downpour. AE stood at the
window; disgusted with the sudden change in weather, she
watched wanly as the thick raindrops slid against the panes and
outside splashed on the palm leaves and streaked to the ground.
It did not seem that she would take off today.
"I don't think it looks very good yet,” she said. Then hoping
that the rain might slacken and make it possible for her to get
off later, she added: “Do you mind if I take a nap?"
At 3:30 P.M. GP checked with the Navy weather officer. The
forecast predicted good weather along the projected course of
the flight if Amelia could get off before more bad weather moved
in from the west.
George went into the bedroom and awakened his wife. After
hearing about the predicted weather, Amelia decided she would
try it. She put on her brown flying suit and went to the window.
The rain had stopped.
At four thirty they drove out to the field to the concrete apron
where the Vega was parked. Paul Mantz and Ernie Tissot, the
mechanic, stood by the plane. They told her everything was
ready. AE clambered up to the wing and down into the narrow
cockpit.
She settled her one hundred twenty pounds onto the cushion
of the seat, reached up over her head, and pulled the hatch
shut. She started the engine and let it idle while she checked
the dials for fuel and oil temperature and pressure. The pistons
worked smoothly and evenly: she quickened to their steady
rhythm. It was four forty-five.
Amelia signaled to Ernie Tissot standing by the wing. He ran
under and removed the chocks from the wheels. AE waved from
the cockpit to GP and Mantz on the apron.
She moved the throttle forward and taxied to the edge of
the field. She swung the nose around and pointed the plane up
between the two rows of flags that had been planted along
either side of the unpaved runway. The Vega stood ready.
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it was a tail wind. She felt the tail come up, then the plane
getting lighter. Suddenly the wheels hit a bump. The Vega
jumped into the air, then began to settle toward the ground.
Amelia jammed the throttle full forward. The engine caught the
added power, and the plane lifted slowly into the air. AE grinned.
She had made it.
She climbed to 5,000 feet, swung to the right, and headed
out to Honolulu and Diamond Head. She had left behind 2,000
feet of unused runway.
"If I do not do a good job,” she had written to GP, just in
case, “it will not be because the plane and motor are not excel-
lent, nor because women cannot fly."
The letter need not have been written. The women with hand-
kerchiefs at the ready would not have to use them. Ernie Tissot
could scrape the mud from his shoes, regain his color, and light
a fresh cigarette.
Amelia dipped her wings over Honolulu. Below she could
see people—they looked like ants-going home to supper. At
5:00 P.M. she crossed Makapupu Point, the last of the island out-
posts. Out under the wing and to the right the long sloping side
of Molokai glittered through a blue haze. Clouds began to
gather.
She climbed to 6,000 feet, well above the clouds; from on top
they looked fluffy, like mashed potatoes, and the dark sea under
them like gravy.
She rolled out her radio antenna and unhooked the hand
mike. “Everything O.K.,” she reported in. She adjusted her ear-
phones, then turned the dial of the radio beside her to station
KGU in Honolulu, and listened to the music.
The music stopped, and an announcer broke in. “We are inter-
rupting our musical program with an important news flash,” he
said. “Amelia Earhart has just taken off on an attempted flight
to Oakland.”
"You're telling me!” Amelia shouted out loud in the cockpit.
The announcer continued: “Mr. Putnam will try to communi-
110


cate with his wife.” GP broke in loud and clear. “AE,” he said,
“the noise of your motor interferes with your broadcast. Will
you please try to speak a little louder so we can hear you?”
Amelia was thrilled to hear his voice; it seemed as if he were
sitting next to her in the plane. She reported in again, louder,
and George was satisfied. It was the first time they had spoken
together ground to plane. The darkness outside had enveloped
the Vega.
But above and below and around her the night became a night
of stars. They clustered about her; she felt that she could reach
out and pluck them as they rose from the sea and hung outside
the cockpit. She had never seen such large stars, and now the
moon slipped out from behind the clouds. The contrast of the
starlight and the moonlight and the white clouds against the
black sea struck her as no other night scene had before.
In the thousands of miles of ocean she had flown over before
this, she had seen little of the ocean below. She had sped over
clouds, fretted between layers of them, or plowed through
thunderstorms, for hours on end. And ships she had seen only
near land.
Now the night was bright and she reveled in its beauty. She
spread her map on her knee and checked for the positions of
ships out of Honolulu, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The
ships on or near her course had agreed to keep their searchlights
on for her. She looked at her clock: it was nearing midnight.
Off the right wing and below, against the black sea, shone a
pink light. It had to be a searchlight from a ship. Amelia snapped
on her landing lights, flashing them three times. Then she flicked
the toggle three more times. She turned her radio dial, trying
to tune in on station KFI in Los Angeles. A spattering buckshot
of radio code hit her ears. She realized it was the ship, trying to
submit a signal to her. Then from the ship's lights came a rapid
flicking on and off. They were answering her earlier signal from
her landing lights. She checked her map again: on course, 900
111


On one blustering morning, a few days before Christmas,
Amelia went shopping. She pulled the collar of her long, warm
coat close to her neck and buried her chin in the fur against
the cold. She bent into the icy wind whipping in from Lake
Ontario and slowly pressed her way down the street. Late
shoppers bustled in and out of the stores and up and down
the sidewalk.
Toward her came four one-legged soldiers with crutches,
thumping and swinging up the pavement, and grimly pressing
their shoulders against the wooden supports. The sight of one
of the veterans in particular greatly disturbed Amelia. He was
younger than the others and he caught her eye as they went by.
He had smiled at her with difficulty and in his face was the
look of incredulous bewilderment, as if he had suffered his
loss too soon to realize what had happened to him. Amelia tried
not to stare at his empty khaki pants leg which had been folded
and pinned to his hip. She forced a smile in return for his, and
then looked the other way as her eyes welled up with tears.
For her, war had been simply a matter of parades and brass
bands and men in unifom. She had been unaware that Canada
had been at war for four years. Like so many other Americans,
especially women, she really didn't know what war was like.
The crippled soldiers made her feel guilty and ashamed. She
decided she must do something to help.
That night she had a long talk with her mother. “I want to
stay in Toronto," she told her, “and help in the hospitals. It's
useless for me to go back to school.”
Mrs. Earhart tried to dissuade her daughter. “But you're
graduating this year, Melia,” the mother said. “You should
graduate from school before you do anything."
"I don't care," she answered. “I want to help. A diploma
doesn't mean anything; but what you do does. I'm old enough
to know what I want to do, and I want to do something useful
in this world.”
The mother had met this stubbornness before, when as a child
113


Amelia had wanted such things as a flat-bellied sled, a football,
a baseball bat. Mrs. Earhart relented: her daughter was of an
age to make her own decisions, even if they did seem somewhat
impulsive. She would have to learn for herself, now, and dis-
cover the consequences of her own acts.
Amelia started training under the Canadian Red Cross and
soon qualified as a nurse's aide. Her first assignment was to
Spadina Military Hospital, a converted college building. With
characteristic energy in meeting a new challenge, she scrubbed
floors, made beds, and carried trays of food. She worked from
seven in the morning until seven at night, with two hours off
in the afternoon.
“Sister," the patients would call to the slender girl in the
white coif and the white starched uniform, "please rub my
back.” Sister Earhart would rub backs-some of them lovely
ones, she frankly admitted. “Sister, please bring some ice cream
today instead of rice pudding.” Sister Amelia, remembering the
rice puddings that came back untouched, bearing little crosses
with the epitaph R.I.P., matched pennies with the help in the
kitchen. With her winnings she bought ice cream for her patients.
Although Amelia found much satisfaction in her work as a
nurse's aide, there was another activity that attracted her as no
other had. At first she had looked simply out of curiosity, but
now she would go out to the edge of the city to Armor Heights
whenever she had time off. She had become fascinated by the
training planes and the way they took off and landed. She had
seen and talked with some of the young beginning pilots at the
hospital; they had crashed their planes through some mishap or
other, and some of them had barely escaped death. Yet they were
of unqualified good humor: they laughed and joked with one
another about their accidents, and spoke gruesomely yet smilingly
about an ambulance as a “meat wagon.” They were blasé and
devil-may-care, and such an attitude toward life and death, so
kindred to her own, intrigued her.
She wanted to know more about these young men and their
114


business of flying. Despite their surface merriment, she wondered
what it was that made them fly, even in the face of death.
Certainly they realized the danger involved; if so, she reasoned
to herself, there must be something beyond the danger that
somehow lured the pilots into the air. She would have to find
out for herself what it was.
Soon she ventured closer to the airport and the operations
shack where she could watch the young men. They were
Canadian, Scotch, Irish, American. She talked with some of
those she had seen at the hospital either as patients or as visitors.
She loved to watch their descriptions of various maneuvers;
"hangar flying," they called it. They simulated with their hands
the best way to execute a loop, or a barrel roll, or a lazy-eight.
Their enthusiasm fired her with an irrepressible urge to go up.
She begged one after another of the pilots for a ride to see
what it was like. Just a take-off and a landing, and she was
willing to pay. "Sorry," they would say. "Regulations absolutely
forbid giving civilians any rides.” Certainly not a woman. “Even
the general's wife couldn't go up," one of them said. “And she
can do just about anything she wants.”
The pilots laughed at the expense of the general's wife. Amelia,
turning away in disappointment, kicked her toe into the packed
snow. A plane with skis turned off the ramp and taxied out to
the field; the blast from its propeller flung back a sheet of snow
that stung Amelia full in the face. She raised her arm against
further lashing, and walked away toward the side of a building.
Here, she thought, was a challenge she would like to meet.
She watched the pilots put on their big padded helmets and
adjust their goggles. The men smeared grease on their faces to
prevent freezing in the biting cold of the Canadian sky. Someday
she would get her chance to fly in an airplane, and maybe fly
one herself. She wanted to be the master of one of those planes
and make it obey her will like a horse, a winged horse, and send
it roaring through the sky. Amelia was a lone and disconsolate
figure as she nurtured her private dreams and left the eager
115


-something thrilling and buoyant and exhilarating. There was
now no question that someday she, too, would fly. And it didn't
matter if she was a woman. Someday she would get her chance.
16. Back Home Again
Amelia shook her head and rubbed her eyes. After staring
at her instruments and following them during the night, she
looked forward to the dawn. She had missed it on the Atlantic
solo because of the clouds. There was still time, she knew,
before light could crack through the darkness of the eastern
horizon. Like a window with the panes painted black, it was
closed shut.
She felt warm and cozy in the small cockpit. She yawned.
Easily she held the stick between her legs and thighs, then
reached her arms high and stretched, working her long fingers
open and shut. She took the stick again with her right hand,
brought her feet up from the rudders, then pressing her heels
on the floor, she sat up and down in quick, short jumps.
Resettled on the cushion of the seat, she scanned her instru-
ments, then looked out. To the right, a thin line of light lay
on the dark horizon. She looked up through the hatch: the stars
were gone. Slowly, well to the right of course, the top arc
of the sun appeared. Amelia was puzzled: she should be flying
into the sun. She wondered if she weren't heading for Alaska.
She quickly checked her maps and charts, then the compass
before her on the left. Everything was as it should be. Obviously,
then, the sun was wrong and she was right.
From the compartment in the left wing, where she kept her
small tools, an extra flashlight, spare batteries, and other odds
and ends, she took out her sunglasses and hooked them behind
117


She climbed to 1,800 feet. Dead ahead on course she saw an
undulating outline of what she hoped were the coastal hills of
northern California. As she approached, they were unmistakable.
She looked up for the tops, then noticed a valley between them.
She added throttle and nosed over the hills. Squinting ahead
as far as she could see, she saw at last the familiar notch of land
and water that could only be San Francisco Bay. Directly below,
San Mateo rolled into view.
In the next six minutes she crossed over the bay, then sighted
Oakland, and finally the airport. She had made it back home.
Elated with her victory, she felt a new tide of energy surge
within her, flooding out the ache and soreness of tired muscles.
As she had done so many times before at Oakland, she made her
approach and landed.
As she started to taxi from the end of the runway, she noticed
great crowds waiting at the ramp. Then the barriers broke and
thousands of people ran toward her plane. Amelia chopped the
throttle, cut the engine switch, and locked her brakes. She
opened the hatch and stood on the seat, and as she shook her
mop of hair from out of her helmet, a deafening roar assailed
her ears.
Amelia climbed down from the Vega and dropped to the
ground. Her knees felt weak; her face, as if it were drained. “I
feel swell,” she said, stroking her hair with a quick sweep of the
hand. She held a stray lock between her fingers. “I always look
this way,” she explained. “I'm a little tired-you will have to
excuse me.” She was driven away in a waiting car.
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17. Solo from California to Mexico
For the next few weeks after the Pacific flight Amelia rested
at her home near Toluca Lake and luxuriated in the warm
California sun. She spread a blanket on the wide lawn and took
sun baths. She stretched her long, straight legs over the soft wool
of the blanket, closed her eyes against the glare of the sun; then,
as if she were preparing maps and charts for a long flight, she
surveyed her past accomplishments and her future plans.
The Friendship flight and its sudden catapulting to fame of
an unknown social worker. The year before that when she had
read in the Boston newspapers about Charles Lindbergh and
his sensational solo conquest of the Atlantic: how she had thrilled
to his victory. The “Lady Lindy' tag the press had given her
because she looked like him: how it made for difficulty in trying
to be herself and making her own flights. The Atlantic solo: she
had to do it to deserve the fame that the Friendship flight had
heaped upon her. The hop from Hawaii was free and clear: it
involved no debt that had to be paid. And so would the rest
of her flying be. Women could fly as well as men; she had proved
it and would prove it. Then when she reached forty, that fortieth
year which followed July 24 in 1937, she would quit-give up
long-distance flying and retire to short jaunts for pleasure. Each
thought had unfolded before her scrutiny, like new stretches of
countryside beneath the wing of her Vega. Amelia turned over
on the blanket and tanned her back. She was not yet thirty-seven.
Not for long after the Pacific flight, therefore, did she stay on
the ground or remain confined in her attractive California cage.
The year 1935 became one for record-making and record-break-
ing. On April 19 she flew 1,700 miles from Burbank, California,
to Mexico City; then on May 8, from Mexico City to Newark,
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New Jersey. The first flight she made because of an invitation
from the president of Mexico; the second, because Wiley Post
told her not to do it.
One day when AE and Wiley Post were discussing flying in
general, Amelia told the veteran pilot about her plans to fly
from Mexico to New York. He asked her what route she intended
to take. She told him she would go as the crow flies-in as straight
a line as possible.
Wiley Post strode across the room to a globe on the table. He
turned it until he found Mexico, then measured the distance to
New York between his thumb and little finger. He raised his head.
“You are cutting across the Gulf then?” he asked. The white
patch over his eye caught the light from the window.
“Yes, sirl” Amelia answered. There was no doubt in her voice.
"That's about seven hundred miles," he said. "Almost half an
Atlantic.” He looked at her directly, his large round face serious
and questioning. "How much time do you lose if you go around
by the shore?"
“About an hour. Maybe a little more.” She fingered the long
string of pearls about her neck. Her voice was low and soft.
“Amelia, don't do it,” Wiley Post said. “It's too dangerous.”
AE was incredulous. Did Wiley Post, who had braved every
hazard in flying, think such a simple flight as this one was too
dangerous? She could not wait to be on her way.
It was not the first or the last time that she disregarded pro-
fessional advice.
Shortly before midnight on the nineteenth of April she soared
into the California moonlight, heading south and east. The light
from the full moon was soft; it gently gilded the rolling hills
and marked as with a large diffused flashlight the course to
the Gulf of California. In the moisture of the night air the Wasp
motor purred: the rhythm of the pistons was smooth and even.
The moonlight, which had been a guide, now played tricks
on the earth below. A white haze had moved in from the coast
and covered the shore line and the stretches of desert. In the
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light it was difficult to tell the one from the other. Amelia strained
her eyes, looking for telltale signs to help her navigate. Now she
caught the light on the rolling breakers, then a black shadow
on the scalloped sand, but the short glimpses were not enough
for pilotage.
She scanned the instrument panel. Her eyes stopped short at
the dials on the lower right. The hand of the oil-temperature
gauge pointed beyond the red quadrant. The engine was burn-
ing hot. Amelia reduced throttle, then readjusted the propeller at
another setting. Neither helped. The Wasp continued to overheat.
She pulled out her flashlight, flicked it on, and checked her
maps. According to time and distance, Mazatlán, on the Mexican
coast, should be directly below. Gently she applied left stick and
rudder, leveled her wings, and headed east. Mexico City should
be 600 miles away. She stared directly before her and slightly
to the left at her compass: it had rolled into the new heading.
Left and right under her wings the mountains of Central
Mexico sloped upward into high tables. She found the towns of
Tepic and Guadalajara. She hoped she would not wander from
her course: unknown winds had a way of keeping a plane from
making its track.
The Vega, cruising at 10,000 feet and at an indicated air speed
of 150 mph, sped over the mountains and plains. Amelia caught
sight of a railroad below. A railroad? It should not be there. She
wondered where she might be.
She had estimated her time of arrival at one o'clock, Mexican
time. The chronometer for total elapsed time clicked past the
hour for arriving over Mexico City. She looked down, trying to
find something on the ground to correspond to the markings on
her map. She flicked off the flashlight. She was lost.
As if in insult an insect flew into her left eye. Amelia tried
to dislodge it by rubbing the closed eyelid with her finger; the
rubbing made the eye sore, and it started to burn and cry. She
flickered her eyelid, trying to keep the eye open so that she
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she wanted a path cleared down the dry lake so that she could
once more get into the air. She climbed into the plane, then
taxied down to the edge of the hard, sandy bed. She looked out
to see if the way ahead were clear: two cowboys had placed
themselves in the middle of the take-off run, directly in front
of the plane. Amelia set the brakes and climbed out of the cockpit.
With much pointing and gesticulating, she finally convinced
them that everybody-including cattle, goats, and children-was
safest far over to the sides.
She walked back to the Vega. She took a corner of the
kerchief about her neck and wiped her left eye dry; the insect
had been watered and flushed out.
The Lockheed roared off the dry lake bed. In less than thirty
minutes AE had found the military field at Mexico City and rolled
her plane to a stop.
The days that followed were for Amelia what she called
"Fun in Mexico”: meeting, seeing, doing in endless activity. She
met President Lázaro Cárdenas, she saw the floating flower
gardens of Xochimilco, she watched a game of jai alai and a
charro fiesta. She attended a concert given in her honor.
A few days after the concert she was given a costume like
the one worn by the cowboy musicians who had entertained her.
She promptly put it on and wore it to a horse show; then posed
in it, her face cracked wide in a full smile.
She loved the color of the costume because it was her favorite
blue. There was fine silver embroidery at the collar, sleeves, and
waist, and along the seams of the trousers. To top the ensemble,
she wore on her head a large high-crowned sombrero with a
curled-up brim gaily trimmed in entwining leaves and flowers.
It became one of her treasured gifts.
The women of Mexico, particularly, interested Amelia. As she
went about from place to place, she noted the few sheltered
women of the higher classes; the many, bent and worn from
the hard labor of the peon; then again the few self-supporting
of the middle classes in the city. She would have liked to know
es
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more of their strivings and ambitions; she had seen enough, how-
ever, to know that reforms were needed in the new order.
“I, for one," she wrote of the experience, “hope for the day
when women will know no restrictions because of sex but will
be individuals free to live their lives as men are free-irrespective
of the continent or country where they happen to live.”
As in the past, GP had joined AE and guided her through all
the festivities. As her manager he had become indispensable to
her, particularly where only a man could get certain things done.
She was free to live her own life as men are free, but there were
times when GP with his bulldozing energy was the only man for
the job. Without his help she would not have been able to take
off from Mexico.
18. Solo from Mexico to New Jersey
Mexico City was 8,000 feet above sea level. To fly non-stop to
Newark, New Jersey, Amelia would need a full load of gasoline;
with a full load, she would not be able to take off from the short
runway of the military field. George Putnam resolved the dilemma.
Nearby there was the dry bed of Lake Texcoco; if the obstruc-
tions were cleared, there would be plenty of room to get three
tons of aircraft and fuel into the air. She had landed and taken
off under similar conditions at Nopala when she had lost her way;
why not now? Amelia looked over the mud-caked flats and agreed
it could be done.
GP took over. He organized and supervised the work of Mexi-
can soldiers in getting the dry bed ready for the Vega's landing
and take-off. He pitched in with the men as they leveled hillocks
and filled ditches, until they had prepared three miles of make-
shift runway. The job done, George then flew to New York to
gather weather data from Doc Kimball, in order to advise his
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wife as to the exact weather conditions she would encounter
in her record hop.
The Vega had been flown into the dry bed while AE waited
from her husband for the signal to go. Weather permitting was
always a condition imposed on any flight. For eight days she
waited in Mexico City for the weather to become favorable.
It was not until after midnight on May 8 that GP phoned from
New York. “Good visibility,” he said, summarizing Doc Kimball's
analysis, “but the winds are not very favorable.”
At one o'clock that same morning Amelia decided to go. She
sent word to the men at Texcoco to fill the Vega's tanks with 470
gallons of gasoline; then she went back to bed for a few hours'
sleep. At four o'clock she awoke, had breakfast, and drove out
to the lake bed.
As at Wheeler Field in Honolulu, the pathway for the take-off
run had been staked out with flags. Amelia walked to her Lock-
heed. By the light of automobiles which had been parked with
headlights on she could see empty gasoline drums that had been
rolled off to the side; and perched on a ladder, a mechanic who
was giving the Wasp motor a final check.
AE climbed into the cockpit. She was handed some provisions
through the hatch. Earlier she had ordered one hard-boiled egg
and one sandwich, but into the cupboard in the right wing she
now placed much more. There was enough food for many days
of sustained flying: six hard-boiled eggs, three of them already
shelled; four sandwiches, with thick slices of meat; three cans
of tomato juice; one thermos bottle of hot cocoa and another
of water. The way she was cared for, the accident of sex was
sometimes a happy one!
She started the engine and let it idle for a few moments. Then
she opened the throttle wide and checked the rpm's and mag-
netoes. She watched the fuel and oil pressure, the fuel and oil
temperature. She brought the throttle back. Everything set.
At 6:06 A.M. the Vega roared down the runway and blasted
into the air. AE had used only one mile of the three she thought
126


Hoover Airport.” He was calling from his office at the Bureau
of Air Commerce.
Amelia grinned. “No thanks," she answered him. “Going through
to New York.” Then she added, "Cheerio.”
It was a beautiful night for flying, too beautiful to land.
Clusters of bright green and silver stars against the black of the
night were better than emeralds and diamonds at Tiffany's.
Amelia checked the gasoline gauges for the left- and right-wing
tanks and for the big extra tank in the passenger compartment.
She studied the fuel-flow meter. Everything normal. The Wasp
purred in steady, rhythmic beats. She pulled out the thermos
of hot chocolate. She gulped a mouthful; the warmth from the
sweet liquid spread through her.
People had often offered her coffee or tea, and on other occa-
sions liquor and cigarettes. She didn't believe in stimulants of
any kind; she didn't need them. Once, someone had asked her
why she didn't smoke. He had undoubtedly seen her endorsement
of a cigarette after the Friendship flight.
Amelia smiled as she remembered. To overcome any thoughts
of prudishness he might have of her she had thereupon taken
two cigarettes, lit them, and puffed them into clouds of smoke.
“There,” she had said, after they had burned down and she put
them out in an ash tray, “I have smoked.” She never smoked
again, not even in jest. But there was nothing to prevent her
if she wanted to. That point had to be made clear.
She looked out from the cockpit and ran her eyes from wing
tip to wing tip. It was a lovely night: the new moon, the stars
that could be scooped into the palm of her hand, the clean,
fresh air that whistled through the opened windshield. Space
unlimited. She looked at the tachometer: the needle was steady
at 1,750 rpm's; then at the indicated air speed: unwavering at
150 mph. Homeward bound. Everything fine.
Waiting for her at Newark were GP and thousands of other
people who had heard about the flight and driven out to the air-
port. With George were Paul Collins, AE's other good friend
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from the Ludington Line; Doc Kimball, the famous New York
weatherman; and Dr. Eduardo Villasenor, consul general for
Mexico. From the southwest they saw a single-motored, high-
winged plane. It was AE, and she was ahead of schedule.
Paul Collins, a veteran of more than a million miles in the air,
watched the plane come in. The red and green passing lights
slid down and up in a turn, then rolled out and headed down
for a landing. Thinking of the long flight that was being finished,
apparently without effort, Paul shook his head. There was admira-
tion in his voice. "That's a flier!” he exclaimed.
Doc Kimball was proud that AE was one of “his fliers.” “Such
people are good for us all,” he said, just after the plane touched
down on the runway.
Amelia taxied the plane to the parking ramp. She saw a huge
crowd of people straining at the ropes that held them in. The
crowd broke and ran for the plane. AE cut the switch. The throng,
now wildly shouting, had eddied up and completely surrounded
the plane. Amelia opened the hatch. A loud roar of welcome
acclaimed her.
GP, lost in the sea of faces, looked up at his wife who could
not pick him out. She looked like a little girl in the heavy flying
clothes. Her face was streaked with grime; her eyes were taut
and strained.
Two policemen pushed through the crowd to the side of the
plane. Amelia jumped down to them. One policeman grabbed
her right arm; the other her left leg. They started to move in
opposite directions. Amelia screamed. The policemen reunited
at the girl and plowed through the mob to the police car.
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back, no new lands flowing with milk and honey this side of the
moon to promise surcease from man-made ills. But there are
economic, political, scientific, and artistic frontiers of the most
exciting sort awaiting faith and the spirit of adventure to discover
them.”
She brushed her hair back with a quick sweep of the hand.
“Probably no field,” she continued, now with more animation,
"offers greater lure for young people-explorers-than aviation.
It has the color and movement of flying to kindle the imagination,
and its growing importance as an industry is tempting to those
who plan serious careers in transportation, for aviation is simply
the newest form of transportation-the climax of the human
pageant of human progress from oxcart to airplane. ..."
She listed some of the problems in aviation that had to be
solved, and admitted that there were no easy solutions. “For,"
she then explained, “the economic structure we have built up is
all too often a barrier between the world's work and the workers.
If the younger generation finds the hurdle too absurdly high,
I hope it will not hesitate to tear it down and substitute a social
order in which the desire to work and earn carries with it the
opportunity to do so.”
She narrowed to a conclusion. “The ancients, such as I am,”
she said, as she drove home a burning conviction, “should be
listening to young ideas, rather than pointing up opportunities in
a world”-she paused for a quick breath-"which has the elders
decidedly on the run.”
President Elliott of Purdue nodded in agreement. Such a
woman, he decided, who believed in young people, belonged
on a college faculty.
A few days later Dr. Elliott joined the Putnams for dinner at
GP's favorite restaurant in New York, the Coffee House Club.
GP and AE sat with their guest at a little table on the second
floor. The room was cozy. The men talked.
Amelia glanced at the familiar surroundings, and was glad
132


that her husband had taken her to such a place. As if clearing
the area before making a turn in the Vega, she directed her eyes
across the books and paintings along the wall, the piano in front
of the little stage, the Fish drawings and Chappell cartoons along
the other wall.
George looked at his wife. She seemed particularly lovely to
him that evening. Her long bangs, neatly combed over the
high forehead; the clear blue-gray eyes, forever hiding a mystery;
the sensuous lips and the wide mouth; the strong jaw; the long,
lovely hands: on such a night as this he could propose to her
all over again.
After dinner they walked casually out of the room toward a
couch against the far wall. Dr. Elliott pulled up a chair; AE
and GP sat on the couch. Amelia leaned to one side, held her
skirt, and tucked her feet up and under her.
President Elliott looked at the bulletin board above the couch,
then at the slight figure of Amelia. He caught her eye, then told
her how much he had enjoyed her speech at the Tribune confer-
ence. Young people, he explained, were his business and he could
never find enough of the professionally trained to motivate and
inspire his students.
“Amelia,” he said, smiling, “we would like to have you at
Purdue.”
AE thought a moment. “I'd like that,” she said, knowing never-
theless that she had no degrees to qualify for such an assignment.
“But what do you think I could do?”
Dr. Elliott's eyes brightened and crinkled at the corners. “We
have about six thousand students. Eight hundred of them are
girls. We don't think the girls are keeping abreast of the oppor-
tunities of the day nearly as well as they might be.”
Amelia warmed to the possibilities. “And I ...?” She began a
question.
“You could supply the spark they need,” he answered. “Some-
thing from outside the classroom.”
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For two hours they continued to discuss the idea. By the time
President Elliott had been taken to Grand Central for a midnight
train, the project had assumed a definite shape. For one month
during the academic year Amelia would deliver lectures, act
as a counselor to the girls, and advise the department of aero-
nautics. AE liked the challenge. Purdue at the time was the only
university in the country that had its own airport.
On June 2, 1935, after the Pacific and Mexico flights, President
Elliott formally appointed Amelia Earhart to the faculty of
Purdue University. “Miss Earhart,” he announced, “represents
better than any other young woman of this generation the spirit
and courageous skill of what may be called the new pioneering.
At no point in our educational system is there greater need for
pioneering and constructive planning than in education for
women. The university believes Amelia Earhart will help us to
see and to attack successfully many unsolved problems.”
Amelia was heartened by the announcement. Not satisfied with
the record flights of the spring, she now tested the high-speed
capabilities of her plane. In July she set the transcontinental
speed record for women, by flying from Los Angeles to Newark
in seventeen hours, seventeen minutes, and thirty seconds.
In November, AE was the "fying professor” of the Lafayette,
Indiana, campus. With the students, male and female, she was
easy, casual. Dressed in slacks at a conference, she would swing
her legs up on a desk or table and chat. She invariably preferred
an atmosphere of informality.
She lived in one of the women's dormitories at Purdue, and
kept her door open for any of the girls who wanted to drop
in for a visit. In the dining hall she had a different group sit
at her table for every meal.
Amelia soon declared herself as the empiricist and pragmatist
which she was. Learn by doing and have fun at it had guided
her every step through life. At one of her first lectures she
explained why she came to Purdue. It was her kind of school-
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a technical school where all instruction had its practical side.
Education, she felt, had failed to discover individual aptitude
soon enough. If a child's bent could be determined early, much
study and work in the wrong direction could be avoided.
“We have watched the colleges,” she said, “produce countless
graduates who could only demand jobs for which, notwithstand-
ing the adequacy of their formal education, they might be
totally unprepared or unfitted, and in which they were often
even just plain not interested.
"It's a fundamental problem, and I can imagine that reform
may involve the entire reconstruction of our educational system.
Because Johnnie liked to play with tin soldiers, his mother has
jumped to the conclusion, since the year one, that he wanted
to be a soldier! So she packed him off to military school-which
he hated-though maybe she never found it out-all because what
really interested him about tin soldiers was that they were made
of lead, and lead is metal, and you heat metal and melt it and
make it into lots of things-steel for skyscrapers, decorative iron-
work, leading for stained-glass windows...."
Although she would have liked to, AE soon discovered that it
would be impossible to interview all 800 women students. She
therefore sent out a questionnaire to them. In answer to one
question she learned that 92 per cent of the coeds wanted to
go into useful employment after graduation.
She would assemble the girls in large groups and talk to them.
"After all,” she said to them, drawing from her own experience,
"times are changing and women need the critical stimulus of
competition outside the home. A girl must nowadays believe
completely in herself as an individual. She must realize at the
outset that a woman must do the same job better than a man to
get as much credit for it. She must be aware of the various
discriminations, both legal and traditional, against women in the
business world.
“I cannot tell you that you will be able to bounce right out
135


of college into your life work. I believe, under existing condi-
tions, that it is almost impossible to do. But I believe also that
it doesn't greatly matter, for the business world will draw out
one's aptitudes.
"Probably no sure way has yet been discovered for women-or
men either-to know before they reach the age of sixty-five if
they have done right by their lives; and even then I believe they
can't be exactly sure that something else they could have chosen
would not have made their lives richer.
"Probably people of outstanding talent-like Lily Pons, for
instance-couldn't do anything but follow their natural bent. Such
people must know they're in the right profession. The rest of us,
I fear, can never know for certain until we can take a backward
look in old age, for we must have a background of experience
against which to make comparisons. So our vocational starts are
somewhat conditioned. But not fatally, surely. Of course if men
and women are very unhappy in their work, they are entitled to
a pretty good opinion that they are in the wrong work. Yet if
they are happy in it-I don't believe it means, necessarily, that
they couldn't be happier.
“And so I'm inclined to say that, if you want to try a certain
job, try it. Then if you find something on the morrow that looks
better, make a change. And if you should find that you are
the first women to feel an urge in that direction-what does it
matter? Feel it and act on it just the same. It may turn out to
be fun. And to me fun is the indispensable part of work.”
Aptitude, trial and error, practicality, fun: such were the
tenets of her proclaimed philosophy for living. For the girl who
initially had accidentally become a heroine of flight, then had
to prove it to herself, and for the rest of her life to the world
who acclaimed her, it was the only possible philosophy.
Although she forgot to mention it, there was in her life, in
addition to the necessity of fun for work, much work in her
fun. And despite the fact that her practical self would never
136


admit it, she was also a romantic and a visionary. Like the sky-
lark and the nightingale of Shelley and Keats, she was a blithe
spirit and a light-winged dryad, who soared on the wind and
pranked the starlight sky. Without her dreams she could not
live in the wide-awake world.
Like Henry David Thoreau, the famed mystic of Walden Pond,
she could say:
I hear beyond the range of sound,
I see beyond the range of sight,
New earth and skies and seas around.
There was fitful restlessness in the way Amelia had skipped
from job to job and interest to interest on the ground, the ground
in which her soaring ambition could never take root. It was only
in the air that she found the repose and the leisure to probe
the depths of her own soul, to come to a sustaining knowledge
of herself.
Dr. Elliott was pleased with her work. So was the Purdue
Research Foundation, which set up an Amelia Earhart Fund for
the purchase of a plane that she could use experimentally at
her own discretion.
AE, despite a deep interest in the engineering and mechanical
aspects of flight, wanted to study the human elements involved
-“the effects of flying on people.” She had named herself as
the first guinea pig.
Early in 1936 enough funds were declared available for her
to make her choice of airplanes. Amelia picked a new twin-
engined ten-passenger Lockheed Electra transport plane. It was
what she had wanted for a long time: a bigger, safer airplane.
Amelia now announced to GP that she planned to fly around
the world at the equator. It was something no man had done, not
even Lindbergh.
Like the matador of many victories who pits his ability against
the bull by getting closer and closer to the horns and making
more and more difficult passes, or the mountain climber who has
137


F
eb --


There had also been some remarkable distance flights by
others. In 1933 the Lindberghs made a 29,000-mile air-route
survey of Europe, Africa, and South America. Laura Ingalls in
1934 had flown solo from New York to South America and return,
a distance of 16,897 miles. Also in 1934 the Pacific was flown in a
first west-east flight, from Australia to California, by Sir Charles
Kingsford-Smith and Captain P. G. Taylor.
By girdling the globe, Amelia could achieve not only the
record for distance, but also fly around the world. She would
like to do it alone. It would be fun to be the first to fly the equator.
AE made her plans, the most elaborate and time consuming
of her career. The details that had to be worked out, she found,
were formidable. But she began simply, almost casually, to map
out the 27,000 miles of the flight.
One day early in the winter of 1936 she walked across the
living room in her home at Rye. She picked up the globe from
the long table behind the sofa. She turned the globe to the
Pacific, placed her thumb on Oakland, and spanned her hand
to Honolulu; then from Honolulu her long, slender fingers
reached easily to two little islands just above the equator. In
another stretch of the hand she reached New Guinea. Seven
thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean were easy to cross by
a span of the hand, but those two little islands, Howland and
Baker, were mere specks on the globe.
She looked closely at Howland, and wondered if she could
find it fying alone after nearly 2,000 miles out from Hawaii. She
swept her hand quickly over her hair and grinned. This was
the most exact kind of flying. She would need the best of naviga-
tion equipment. She would need a navigator to make it.
When GP came home she told him of her need for a navigator;
not for the whole flight, but just for the long over-water legs
across the Pacific. George picked up the phone. He always knew
whom to call.
GP first telephoned Bradford Washburn, a young Harvard
professor who had done some distinguished ground navigation
142


and exploration. Washburn agreed to come to New York for
an interview.
AE was sprawled on the living-room floor with her maps when
the young professor came into the house. She liked his cut: he
was slim, wiry, handsome. She liked the set of his jaw and the
look of his clear eyes. She got up from the floor, smiled, and
reached out a hand in welcome.
Pilot and prospective navigator sat on the floor and discussed
the problems involved. Amelia traced the itinerary she had
marked on the map, mentioning, as she moved her finger, the
distances between points.
Bradford Washburn examined the first two proposed legs of
the flight. He was familiar with the Electra and felt it could easily
make the distance from California to Hawaii. The long stretch
over the vast Pacific to the tiny dot that was Howland Island:
that was an immediate difficulty to overcome.
“How far did you say it was to Howland?” he asked.
"Roughly, about 2,000 miles,” Amelia said.
"Your 50-watt radio isn't strong enough for that kind of flying.
On such a long leg as that one you'll be out of range of any
ground stations." Washburn looked intently at Amelia. “If you're
off just one degree on your heading, you'll miss that little island
completely."
Amelia had no intention of being one degree off course. The
best navigator available could hit the island right on the nose.
"What kind of radio signals will there be at Howland to
home in on?" The professor pursued the point.
“None," Amelia answered.
For Bradford Washburn the interview was over. The project
was out of the question. He did not want to look for a needle in
a haystack, especially if the haystack were the Pacific Ocean-
and certainly not without a strong magnet to find the needle.
Bradford Washburn was convinced that Amelia had rather
not have a navigator, that she had decided on one only as an
irritable necessity. Her self-confidence, her belief in her own
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Lockheed, in keeping with its previous stellar designations for
its aircraft, had christened the low-winged, twin-engined mono-
plane the Electra, after the “lost” star of the Pleiades.
Amelia, dressed in a mechanic's white coveralls and inspecting
her new plane, paid no attention to any designations, stellar,
mythological, or psychological. She promptly dubbed the plane
"the flying laboratory.” That was practical and to the point, for
that was what the plane in fact was.
She loved the navigation equipment which had been installed
in the passenger compartment. She climbed in to look it over.
The fuselage had been cleared of passenger seats. Directly behind
the cockpit two large tanks had been bolted in place; they could
hold 1,000 gallons of fuel. That would give the plane an added
range up to 4,000 miles. Behind the tanks was a complete naviga-
tion room.
She walked to the wide chart table set up against the bulkhead
and under the far window. Through the round glass in the table
she read the master aperiodic compass placed directly below.
Mounted at each window was a pelorus, for taking bearings from
any land mass. She set her eye to the tube of the one at the
window over the table. The special flat plane of the window
allowed for no distortions, especially for the readings from the
bubble sextant. She noted next to the table a temperature gauge,
an air-speed indicator, and three chronometers; and above the
table and to the left side of the window an altimeter.
The arrangement for the use of the drift indicator was bril-
liantly simple. On the cabin door a special latch had been
installed to keep the door open about four inches. Down through
the opening in the door she swung the drift indicator. By looking
through the instrument at smoke bombs during the day or flares
at night, a navigator could determine the direction and velocity
of the wind. Amelia was satisfied: her laboratory was adequate
to the task from the navigation point of view.
The communications equipment, however, was at once de-
lightfully modern and frustratingly primitive. Pilot and navi-
145


ailed to the end down bamboo fisications the nations, but not
gator had voice radio; but only the navigator had telegraphic key.
Both could transmit and receive with ground stations, but not
with each other. For intercommunications the navigator would
have to use a cut-down bamboo fishing pole, with an office clip
nailed to the end of it, to send messages written on cards up to
the pilot; if he wanted to talk to the pilot, or if he wanted to dial
the radio behind the pilot to a new frequency, he would have to
crawl along the catwalk over the two big tanks between the cock-
pit and the passenger compartment.
The radio had a power of only 50 watts. Amelia was not satis-
fied, and she tried to borrow a better, more powerful, system. The
radio was the weakest link in the laboratory chain.
For weeks she flew the Electra up and down the California
coast, working out the "bugs.” In August she went to New York
to enter the Bendix Trophy race. The coast-to-coast speed flight,
she felt, would be an excellent “shakedown” for the plane.
Other women joined in for the race and gathered at Floyd Ben-
nett Field. Louis Thaden, Blanche Noyes, Jacqueline Cochran,
Laura Ingalls, Martie Bowman, Mrs. Benny Howard: all were
stiff competitors. Helen Rickey had agreed to be AE's copilot.
During the race trouble developed in the Electra's fuel lines,
and Amelia had to drop out much against her will. But two wo-
men did win the race: Louise Thaden with Blanche Noyes as her
copilot.
Preparations moved along for the world flight. Clarence S.
Williams of Los Angeles was engaged to get ready maps and
charts. He laid out compass courses, the distances between points,
the exact times at which to change headings: he prepared sec-
tional after sectional for the many legs of the flight. His work was
invaluable.
Paul Mantz was technical adviser, as he had been for the
Hawaii-California flight. He supervised the mechanical readiness
of the plane, and took it up on many test flights.
GP managed the far-flung problems, and they were many, of
stopping places and alternates for the caching of fuel, oil, spare
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near to the equator as I can make it, east to west, about 27,000
miles.”
The press moved in. Reporters fired questions at her, photog-
raphers shot pictures at close range, newsreel men turned on their
bright lights and rolled their cameras. Somewhat flustered by the
sudden excitement she had caused, Amelia laughed. “You know,”
she said to them, “I feel you men have pushed me into this. You
are the ones who have kept saying that I was going to fly around
the world, until finally you've compelled me to think seriously
about doing it.”
Carl Allen, her friend from the New York Herald Tribune,
would have none of it. “Oh, come now," he protested, “nobody
has pushed you into it. You know you've been wanting to do it
all the time.”
Captain Manning, stolid and silent beside AE, smiled uneasily.
Amelia quickly relinquished her ground. “Yes, I suppose you're
right. I guess I didn't get away with that, did I?"
"What are you going for?” one reporter abruptly asked.
AE thought for a moment. The question was one she had heard
many times before. “Well,” she answered, “I've seen the North
Atlantic. And I've seen the Pacific, too, of course; at least a part
of it. But”-she hesitated—“well, just say I want to fly around the
globe. And I think a round-the-world flight just now should be
at the equator."
She turned to the quiet man beside her. She looked at his
thick, curly black locks. “Captain Manning is going with me part
way,” she explained, “because I don't believe the pilot on such
a flight can navigate, too.”
Interview over, reporters broke for the nearest telephone. The
world heard and waited.
Amelia dived again into the myriad details of preparation. She
was still dissatisfied with the radio equipment. She realized that
a 50-watt transmitter and receiver could reach only about five
hundred miles under normal conditions. On the Hawaii-Cali-
fornia flight the Vega radio had reached up to 2,000 miles, but
148


only because of skipping-a radio phenomenon in which radio
waves bounce up and down from the ionosphere and move for-
ward for incredibly long distances.
But skipping was something that could not be depended upon.
Some of the ground stations would be much farther than 500
miles apart. The distance between Hawaii and Howland was
1,940 miles; between Howland and New Guinea, 2,556 miles. The
other navigation equipment was good, and worked well in test
after test. How to strengthen the weakest link?
The problem continued to plague her while she gained more
and more experience flying the Electra during most of the year
1936. Often she flew cross-country until she attained that assured
feeling of confidence that came when the plane became an exten-
sion of her own body and limbs.
It was during the late morning of one of these flights, with
Jacqueline Cochran acting as copilot, that Amelia landed at
Wright Field in Ohio. The women pilots were met by Manila
Talley, AE's friend from Denison House days, whose husband
was stationed at the field. The three of them climbed into
Manila's car and drove to the Officers' Club at adjoining Patterson
Field for lunch. Mrs. Talley noticed that AE seemed somewhat
distraught..
When they sat down to lunch Amelia told her companions how
she had hoped to borrow desperately needed radio equipment.
She had been unable to get better radios from the manufacturers.
They told her they had lost all they could afford on flights that
didn't make it. And, she was reminded flatly by them, regulations
absolutely forbade lending government equipment.
Mrs. Talley and Miss Cochran tried to dissuade Amelia from
making the flight with inferior equipment.
AE was adamant. “I have to meet my obligations,” she said.
“We've sold letter covers to pay for the flight. I have to carry
them.” She had earned $10,000 by selling and carrying letter
covers for the Pacific flight. And for the world fight, Gimbels in
149


New York had sold to collectors 10,000 covers, which had realized
some $25,000 to meet expenses.
Amelia straightened her back against the chair and popped her
crumpled napkin onto the table. “I will simply have to make do,”
she said with a stamp of finality, “with what equipment I have.”
Other equally important matters occupied her days and nights.
One at a time problems had to be faced, solutions had to be
worked out. The preparations were the part of the iceberg that
didn't show.
Paul Mantz wrung out the Electra in shakedown flights and
final tests. GP surveyed the extra-long runway at Oakland, waited
for the final word about the emergency field being completed at
Howland Island, and coordinated final arrangements with the
Department of Commerce, Pan American Airways, and the Coast
Guard.
For two weeks Amelia pored over weather maps, waiting for
the one which would let her go: it didn't have to be completely
satisfactory, only acceptable.
There was plenty of help for the flight to Honolulu. Paul Mantz
would be her copilot, and helping Captain Manning in the navi-
gation room would be Fred Noonan. They were a right good
crew.
Captain Harry Manning, a Congressional Medal of Honor win-
ner for heroic daring in having rescued thirty-two men from the
sinking steamship Florida, had taken leave of absence from his
ship to be the navigator. Paul Mantz, expert pilot, movie stunt
Alier, aviation instructor, owner of a flying service, dependable
technical adviser, was as familiar with the Lockheed as AE her-
self. Fred J. Noonan, a veteran of twenty-two years of ocean
travel before he joined Pan American Airways, transport pilot,
instructor in aerial navigation, had pioneered routes for PAA
flights across the Pacific.
The plan was to drop Mantz off in Honolulu, where he could
join his fiancée; to leave Noonan at Howland, where he could take
the Coast Guard cutter back to Hawaii; and finally to drop Man-
150


2. New Route, New Preparations
"Hamlet would have been a bad aviator,” Amelia once said. “He
worried too much. The time to worry,” she added, “is three
months before a flight. Decide then whether or not the goal is
worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying. To worry is to
add another hazard. It retards reactions, makes one unfit.”
Contrary to her injunction, AE, like the melancholy Dane, wor-
ried, but only for two months before she reattempted the world
Aight. In May the Electra would be repaired and ready again.
After the accident at Luke Field, messages offering encourage-
ment poured in from everywhere. Loyal friends helped her to
pick up the pieces and start again.
The brush with death she had taken as a fatalist. "Someday,"
she told GP, “I will get bumped off. There's so much to do, so
much fun here; I don't want to go. But when I do go, I'd like to
go in my plane. Quickly."
The old plans, most of them, would now have to be scrapped.
Routes and weather conditions would have to be restudied.
Where rains had been in March, there were now none; where
winds had once proven favorable, they would now prove adverse;
where monsoons had been predicted, there would now be dust
storms.
For a world flight beginning in late May, the advantage seemed
to lay in flying west to east. To beat the bad weather predicted
for the first legs of the route, she would have to be through the
Caribbean and Africa by the middle of June. If she left from
Miami, the flight to Florida could serve as a final shakedown for
the Electra. Amelia decided on a west-east route.
The reversal of flight plans brought on countless difficulties
and greatly added expense. Fuel, oil, spare parts, mechanics
154


took off early the next morning. She searched the area for three
days and verified the names and locations in Miss Cochran's
descriptions; but she could not find any trace of the plane. That
spring, however, when the snows had melted, the wreckage of the
plane was found just two miles from where Jacqueline Cochran
had said it was.
At other times subsequently Miss Cochran demonstrated again
her extraordinary extrasensory powers. At AE's request, she lo-
cated another missing airliner, crashed and pointing downward
from a mountain peak. The plane was found at the exact location.
Before one of her flights with GP in the Electra, Amelia asked
her friend to record the details of the flight. Miss Cochran gave
exact dates, times, and locations near Blackwell, Oklahoma, where
AE had landed to remain overnight
As a result of these experiences, the two friends decided that
in the event AE should go down and get lost on the world flight,
Jacqueline would tell the rescuers where to look for Amelia and
her plane. That she failed when Amelia went down in the Pacific
is one of the deepest sorrows of Jacqueline Cochran's life. Yet
many of Miss Cochran's perceptions about the disappearance
were correct.
Upon returning from Indio to plunge again into her prepara-
tions, Amelia immediately concerned herself with finding a new
navigator. Captain Harry Manning's leave of absence had expired
and he had to return to the command of his ship. AE turned to
Fred Noonan, Manning's co-navigator for the Honolulu-Howland
leg of the aborted east-west flight. Noonan agreed to sign on.
There had been some anxiety from some quarters as to whether
Fred Noonan was capable of the expert, high-speed celestial
navigation needed on the long over-water legs of the world fight.
Jacqueline Cochran, in particular, was most anxious, and con-
vinced Amelia that she should take Noonan far out over the
Pacific, fly him around in circles until he was disoriented, then
make him take her back to Los Angeles. AE obliged. Noonan
156


gave her the course back. The Electra hit the California coast
halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Apparently, Amelia was undisturbed by the navigation error,
even in view of the irrefutable and just-demonstrated fact that a
mistake of one degree on the compass could, on a long flight,
take her miles off her course. That she still engaged Noonan,
knowing as she did that tiny Howland Island was just two miles
long and only three-quarters of a mile wide, a mere fifteen feet
above sea level, and more than 2,550 miles from Lae, New
Guinea, is testimony to an unshakable confidence in her own
ability.
On May 19, two months to the day after the crack-up on Luke
Field, the Electra, repaired and gleaming, was rolled out of the
Lockheed hangar. Two days later it was flown up to Oakland
where the letter covers were quietly and secretly placed on board
again, then flown back to Burbank.
Amelia had made no public announcement about the reversed
direction of the flight. To all appearances, therefore, when she,
Fred Noonan, her mechanic "Bo” McKneely, and her husband
George Putnam took off the next day for Miami, the trip was just
another routine flight.
Actually, it was the final shakedown flight. If it proceeded
without mechanical difficulties, Amelia decided, she and Fred
would continue around the world from Miami; if not, she could
bring the plane back to Burbank for further adjustments.
Late that afternoon they landed in Tucson, Arizona. The sum-
mer heat of the desert rose from the concrete ramp in wave after
stifling wave. Discharging her passengers, AE taxied to the re-
fueling pit. After having her tanks topped, she restarted the
Wasps. The left engine stuttered, caught, then backfired, and
finally exploded into a burst of flames. Amelia cut the switches
and hit the left fire-extinguisher button. The men on the ground
sprayed the burning engine with foam. The fire suffocated and
died.
AE climbed out of the Electra to examine the damage. Wisps
157


of smoke rose from the Wasp. The acrid smell of burned rubber
filled her nostrils. The engine and prop were black with dirt and
grime, the cowling caked gray-white with bubbled foam. The
heat from motor and ramp cloyed the air.
Early the next morning, when Amelia and her three men re-
turned to the ramp, the engine had been repaired and the plane
thoroughly washed. Out of the west, winds charged with sand
began to swirl and sweep over the field. Amelia wanted to be on
her way. "Let's see if we can get up and over it,” she said.
They took off and climbed to 8,000 feet. All the way to El Paso,
on the western edge of Texas, the sandstorm below, like a golden
turbulent sea, billowed and eddied. On they pushed across Texas.
That night they were in New Orleans. The next day, after crossing
the Gulf of Mexico to Tampa, they turned southeast to Miami. At
Miami the final decision had to be made.
Now began a week of final preparations. The Electra, Amelia
decided, would not have to be returned to Burbank; the Pan
American mechanics in Miami, she happily discovered, had all the
skill needed to make a last tune-up on the plane.
While the men worked on the Electra, Amelia was ostensibly
calm, patient, unhurried. She would sit on a service stand to
watch an adjustment being made on one of the engines, sprawl
on the tarmac to help with a bothersome strut, or join the me-
chanics for lunch at the "greasy spoon” restaurant across the
street. The men, noticing her ready smile and easy ways, admired
her as a pilot who knew her plane and as a woman who knew
what she was about.
Fred Noonan renewed his old acquaintances among the Pan
American personnel. “Poor old Fred,” they had said about him
initially, “Aying around the world with a woman pilot.” But grow-
ing to know Amelia as she calmly went about her tasks, they
finally conceded to Fred that he had the pick of women fliers for
his pilot.
Their acceptance of AE on an equal footing with the men of
aviation reflected Fred Noonan's personal views. "Amelia is a
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grand person for such a trip,” he wrote to his wife. “She is the
only woman flier I would care to make such an expedition with.
Because in addition to being a fine companion and pilot, she can
take hardships as well as a man-and work like one." .
For Amelia there was criticism from the press that she was
just another "stunt flier,” despite her statements to the contrary
that she was conducting an experiment on the human level. The
press was partially right.
“When I have finished this job,” she said in confidence to Carl
Allen, “I mean to give up long-distance 'stunt' flying." Then a
smile creased her face. "I'm getting old,” she added. “I want to
make way for the younger generation before I'm feeble, too."
There were serious conversations with GP at the hotel where
they were staying. He was anxious about her safety on such a
long trip. Life held out so much else for her, he asked her if
she could not give up the idea.
"Please don't be concerned,” she said. Her voice was low and
soft. She parted the bangs of her dry mop of hair. “It just seems
that I must try this flight.” She walked to the window and
watched the waves in the distance breaking on the shore. She
turned slowly. “I've weighed it all carefully. With it behind me,
life will be fuller and richer. I can be content. Afterward, it will
be fun to grow old.”
George Putnam knew from the look in his wife's eyes that her
mind was made up irrevocably. Such was the woman he had
married. She had to prove to herself, and to the world, that
women could do as men could do.
Amelia made the final inspection of her aircraft. She was
concerned about all the weight the plane had to carry and looked
for ways to lighten the load. After she checked again each item
of equipment, she finally decided to remove the 250-foot trailing
wire antenna from the plane. It was too bulky and it was too
much trouble to reel out and reel in while she was trying to
fly the plane. One had to take chances.
159


3. Miami to Africa
Shortly after five o'clock in the morning of June 1, 1937, AE
and Fred climbed into the Lockheed Electra to begin their
flight around the world at the equator. Amelia started the engines.
The dials of the engine instruments-rpm's, oil pressure, fuel
pressure-swung into place; then she noticed that the needle for
the left cylinder-head pressure failed to respond. AE shut down
the motors. The left Wasp would have to be checked.
Bo McKneely scurried up a ladder, removed the cowling, and
quickly spotted the trouble. It was a broken lead to the thermo-
couple-a thermometer coupled to one of the cylinders. AE and
Noonan rejoined GP and his son David on the ramp, while
McKneely resoldered the lead. The sun edged over the gray
line on the horizon.
As Bo McKneely replaced the engine cowling, AE and Fred
remounted the wing on either side and again climbed into the
cockpit. GP, climbing up after Amelia, leaned in to bid his wife
good-by. It was their last farewell.
Amelia slid the hatch shut, started the engines, and signaled
for the chocks to be pulled from the wheels. She taxied to the
southeast corner of the field and turned into the take-off run-
way. At 5:56 A.M. the Electra broke from the ground, bound for
California by the longest way possible. The last flight was on.
The Lockheed climbed slowly to cruising altitude, then swung
southeast to the course for Puerto Rico, the first stop. Amelia,
settling back in her seat, looked out under the left wing. The
blue waters of the Gulf Stream shaded into the green off the
coast; against the light ocean floor, fish flitted darkly.
Shortly after six o'clock she tuned in on Miami's WQAM to
find out what weather conditions were ahead on course. She
160


realized that she had forgotten to eat any of the sandwiches
placed on board the plane. Breakfast had been pre-dawn and
1,000 miles ago. She was hungry; and from the abrupt release
of tensions, tired.
Friends waiting at the airport came to the rescue: Mrs. Thomas
Rodenbaugh with food and Clara Livingston with rest. At the
Livingston plantation, twenty miles from town, Amelia turned
in at eight o'clock. The sound of the surf outside the window,
"charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam / of perilous
seas,” surged over her and drowned her in a deep sleep.
For the 3,000-mile stretch, south and east down the coast of
South America to Natal, there were only four satisfactory airports;
between them, the grim alternatives of ocean or jungle. The
first stop was to be Paramaribo, 1,000 miles away.
At four the next morning Amelia bounded out of bed, de-
termined to make a dawn take-off. But occasion conspired against
her. Repair work on the take-off runway would necessitate a
shorter run to get airborne; to get airborne, she would have to
reduce the fuel load; to reduce the fuel load, she would have
to forego Paramaribo. She would have to push through to another,
closer stop.
“Push through,” she wrote. “We're always pushing through,
hurrying on our long way, trying to get to some other place
instead of enjoying the place we'd already got to."
As she had skipped from place to place as a little girl, and
from job to job and interest to interest as a young woman, so
now she skimmed over the world to touch and go. “Sometime,”
she said, realizing that her schedule prevented long visits, “I
hope to stay somewhere as long as I like.”
By the time the Electra was ready for take-off the sun was
in full view above the horizon. The leg would have to be a short
one; strong head winds had been predicted. Once in the air
Amelia watched the green mountains of Puerto Rico change to
white clouds and blue sea. From 8,000 feet the little clouds looked
162


like white scrambled eggs. Far into the distance, and dead ahead
on course, the hazy outline of the land mass of Venezuela came
slowly into focus.
South America, the second of five continents to be flown over,
was a complex of densely timbered mountains, valleys of open
plains, and thickly tangled jungle. Amelia, looking at her first
jungle, shuddered at the thought of the Electra having to make
a forced landing—“the getting away would be worse than the
getting down."
Fortunately, Fred had flown the region many times before.
He would get them through. Such were the advantages of flying
the Pan American route with a former Pan American navigator.
A dirty red-brown river snaked through a mountain pass.
Amelia followed it inland to a town of red roofs and black oil
tanks. It was Caripito. The airport offered a long, paved runway.
AE eased the Electra down.
They lunched at the hangar and stayed overnight at the home
of Henry E. Linam, general manager of Standard Oil for
Venezuela.
The next morning-it was June 3-mountainous rain clouds
hemmed in the town. Determined to get on, Amelia plowed
through them, then skirted around them back to the coast. She
climbed through showers to 8,000 feet and broke into the sun-
light. The gray, dank world lay below.
AE pulled out her log and scribbled her sensations of the
moment: “The sun illumines mystic caves,” she scribbled on the
pad,“or shows giant cloud creatures mocking with lumpy paws
the tiny man-made bird among them.”
Over sea, jungle, and shore line Amelia played tag with the
clouds. From well out to sea she recognized off the right wing
a muddy river spilling into a wide dirty fan; together they formed
the Nickerie River and delta that separated British from Dutch
Guiana. She turned inland toward the coast; and rather than
follow the coast in true Pan American fashion, she now cut
163


across jungles. A strong head wind was reducing her ground
speed: she advanced the throttle to make a true air speed
of 148 mph.
Another river cut across the course line. It was a curling
thread of silver with green beads of islands. Amelia spread the
sectional map across her knees. It should be the Surinam River,
she concluded as she ran her finger along the blue line on the
map. Paramaribo must be 12 miles in from its mouth; and the
airport, another 25 miles farther. Alongside the river on the
map a cross-hatched line indicated a railroad. Instructions from
Fred were to follow it; like Casey Jones, Amelia did.
On either side of the railroad track were jungle and now and
again rice fields and mud huts. From the clothes swinging from
the lines behind the huts AE tried to determine the direction
of the wind, but she was too busy following the course of the
river to get an accurate reading. Expecting to find a small hacked-
out clearing for a landing field, she was delighted to find one
of the best airport facilities she had ever seen. Paramaribo had
gone aviation-modern! A wind sock marked the wind direction;
strips of white cloth indicated the best landing strip; smoke from
a bonfire, set ablaze when her plane came into view, showed the
wind velocity. How thorough are the Dutch, Amelia thought,
as she began her letdown.
Amelia and Fred were hot and tired when they climbed out
of the Electra. Coffee, orange juice, and sandwiches were quickly
provided. Refreshed, they went to the Palace Hotel, one of
Fred's old Pan American stopping-off places.
At the hotel pilot and navigator discussed possible delays
from rain and mud at the field. Amelia was eager to get on;
Fred, calm and stoical.
"It's all a matter of comparison,” he said to her. “We're im-
patient about a day's delay. That's because that lost day's flying
might see us across a continent or an ocean. But a swell way to
learn patience,” he assured her, recalling one incident in some
was
164


twenty years of sailing the seven seas, “is to try a tour of sailing-
ship voyaging. Back in 1910”-he stretched his long, slender body
across a chair and footstool_“I was on the bark Compton which
was then the largest square-rigged ship under the English flag.”
Fred's eyes crinkled at the corners into crow's-feet as he smiled
about what he was going to say. “We were weather-bound for
152 days on a voyage from the state of Washington, on the
Pacific coast, to Ireland. After nearly half a year on one vessel
on one trip you become pretty philosophical about the calendar.”
Amelia's concerns about delay were somewhat alleviated by
Fred's story, and, as she discovered the next morning when the
day broke clear, unfounded. Ceiling and visibility were unlimited,
except for a diaphanous mist that clung to the Surinam River.
Happily they took off, bound for Fortaleza in Brazil, to fly over
960 miles of jungle and 370 miles of ocean.
They had left Paramaribo too early to receive any weather
reports; as a result, what the weather would be like on course
was strictly a matter of wait and see. Amelia hoped she would
not have to turn back: of all possibilities, this would be the
most exasperating.
The first of four projected crossings of the equator lay ahead.
Unbeknown to Amelia, Fred had planned appropriate ceremonies
for the occasion. He had set aside a thermos bottle full of cold
water, and at the right time he was going to crawl across the
catwalk and pour the water over her unsuspecting head. But
Fred became so occupied with his navigation that the Electra
had winged across the zero line of latitude before he could play
his role of baptismal King Neptune. When Amelia learned his
plan she laughed in victory, but shuddered to think of the
next three crossings.
The broad banks of a long river wound through the jungle. It
reminded Amelia of the Mississippi, which she had flown over
many times. This South American cousin could only be the
Amazon. Under the right wing yellow and brown currents
er
165


ready for the take-off. Amelia fretted: the only runway marked
by lights in the black night could not be used because of a
strong cross wind. For an upwind take-off the run would have
to be made across a grass field. Flashlights in hand, Amelia and
Fred walked in the grass, looking for obstructions and for any
landmarks that could serve as guides.
The Electra came through splendidly; as it had so often before,
it sprang easily into the air.
In the blackness of the night, inside the cockpit the instrument
panel glowed. A glimpse at the bright dials pointing at the
correct numbers cheered Amelia. She flew by the instruments
she believed in, had learned to believe in from experience. On
such a night it was the only way. And it was up to Fred in
the navigation room to pass up the right headings to fly by. This
was her third crossing of the Atlantic, she reflected happily;
Africa, her third continent to be spanned, and her second leap
over the equator. She hoped Fred was again too busy to think
about dousing her with water.
For the first half of the 1,900 miles across the ocean the Electra
bucked head winds averaging 20 miles in velocity. AE set the
throttles ahead just far enough to average a ground speed of
150 mph. The dial of the indicated air speed inched forward
to 170. She wanted to nurse the engines, whatever the wind and
weather, for the long, hard pull around the world.
Ahead she noticed jagged mountains of clouds building up
with towering peaks, and below them dark downward-streaking
geysers of rain. There was no way around them. She would have
to plow through.
The rain was hard and heavy. Mixed with oil from the pro-
pellers, it spattered and smeared brown and black against the
windshield. Amelia could feel the weight of the rain on the
wings against the pressure of the wheel in her hands. The
Electra buffeted and surged in alternating downdrafts and up-
drafts. Then, as suddenly as the thunderstorm had hit, she was
through it.
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She looked out in to catch again. Too mingine, then the right
At six forty-five she crossed the equator and reported her
position to Natal radio. At six fifty the left engine, then the right,
started to miss, then to catch again. Too much oil, Amelia guessed.
She looked out to the left and saw a plane streaking across the
sky. It was an Air France plane. She would have liked to talk
with it, but she knew it had only telegraphic key, and she in
the cockpit only voice telephone. The Electra's key for trans-
mitting code was back in the navigation room with Fred; and
even if she shouted back at him, he could not hear her over the
noise of the engines. With all its modern devices, the "Aying labo-
ratory' lacked an intercom between pilot and navigator.
Locking in the auto pilot, she placed the stenographer's pad
on her knee. She scrawled hastily: “Gas fumes in plane from
fueling made me sick again this morning after starting. Stomach
getting weak, I guess.” Then she added later: "Have tried getting
something on radio. No go. Rain, static. Have never seen such
rain. Props a blur in it.” Fred had crawled up from in back to
sit in the right seat. "Fred dozes,” she observed. “I never seem to
get sleepy flying. Often tired but seldom sleepy."
Fred stirred, woke up, and looked about. He got up from the
seat and crawled back to the navigation room to see if he could
get a fix. The haze was too thick. He studied his other instru-
ments, then made an estimate. He jotted on a card:
3:36 change to 36°
Estimate 79 miles to
Dakar from 3:36 P.M.
then sent it up ahead to Amelia. She read it, shook her head,
then added at the bottom in pencil:
What put us north?
Amelia disregarded the advice of her navigator. Although
Fred's directions indicated a turn to the right, she turned left: it
seemed better to her.
Forty-five minutes later she found herself over St. Louis. She
170


was north instead of south, and 163 miles off course to Dakar!
She decided to let down and make a landing. It was too late
to turn around and go back.
To hit a continent, such a refusal to follow directions was of
no grave consequence; to hit an island, however, it could prove
fatal.
The flight across the South Atlantic, Amelia was careful to
note, took thirteen hours and twelve minutes. That was one hour
and sixteen minutes less than it had taken for the solo hop across
the North Atlantic.
4. Africa to India
Far from the customary skies was Africa and its smells. To
Amelia's sensitive nostrils the aromas of South America had been
the lush and pleasant ones of fruit, fish, meat; in Dakar, as in
St. Louis, the odor was the strong one of people.
The big bare feet of the natives she found extraordinary. She
walked through the teeming streets, her eyes focused to the riot
of color, her ears tuned to the comic opera of sound. Splashes
of bright yellow, red, and green marked the native garments.
The women wore Mother Hubbards and slung their babies on
their backs or held them at their breasts. Amelia went over to
one of the market stalls and bought a large bag of freshly roasted
peanuts, her only West African export.
At Dakar, the Electra was scrubbed and washed, oiled and
greased; the engines were given a forty-hour check, and a faulty
fuel-flow meter was repaired.
The flight so far had been over the charted Pan American
route to Natal and the Air France course to Dakar. Ahead, how-
ever, inland across Africa, lay regions rarely, if ever, flown over.
Exactly what course they would fly, pilot and navigator were
171


undecided. But they would have to leave soon, for tornadoes
to the south and sandstorms to the north had been predicted.
They would have to find a way somewhere in between.
The schedule for crossing Africa was a strenuous one. It meant
flying the distance of 4,350 miles in at least four separate legs-
a daily flight, in comparison, from New York to St. Louis. Where
neither pilot nor aircraft was replaced, or replaceable, and this
fact coupled with the thousands of miles that lay behind and
ahead for the same pilot and plane, the flight became an ordeal
of endurance and courage.
Amelia carefully studied the situation: the navigation aids
were only two-contact and celestial. She could fly contact by
following her map and identifying landmarks with the corre-
sponding symbols on the sectional; but the African maps were
pitifully inadequate, even when supplemented with pilot reports
at each stop on the way. There were no radio beams to home
in on, nor were there any lights at the landing fields they planned
to stop at for refueling. For Fred, although he could, if it were
clear, make position fixes from the sun and the stars, navigating
over Africa was more difficult than finding his way over any ocean.
“Our flights over the desert,” Fred wrote to his bride of one
month, "were more difficult than over water. That was because
the maps of the country are very inaccurate and consequently
extremely misleading. In fact, at points no dependence at all
could be placed on them. Also recognizable landmarks are few
and far between, one part of the desert being as much like
another as two peas in a pod. However, we were lucky in
always reaching our objectives. In all the distance I don't think
we wandered off the course for half an hour, although there
were times when I wouldn't have bet a nickel on the accuracy
of our assumed position.”
Despite the difficulties Amelia blithely set out. They would
push through somehow: there were, after all, countless places
for an emergency landing if anything went wrong or if they lost
their way.
172


For the present, however, the chance to ride a camel could
not be foregone. Amelia and Fred rose to the occasion-literally.
The way the camel swung up from the ground, nose-diving
forward then lurching backward, Amelia, ensconced between
the humps, felt as if she were going into a flat spin.
“Better wear your parachute,” Fred called over to her.
After the ride, or rather the swing aloft from extended rubber
pads, AE went to the post office to have the "covers” canceled
for her subscribing philatelists back home.
Out at the airport, the largest AE had ever seen, mechanics
from Imperial Airways worked around the clock getting the
Electra back into top-flight condition. Two instrument specialists
on loan from the Royal Air Force repaired the troublesome fuel-
flow indicator and the jammed mixture-control lever.
5. India to Australia
Two days later, on June 17, the Electra was pronounced ready;
and on that same day they left Karachi for Calcutta, 1,390 miles
directly across India to its eastern border.
Shortly after take-off low clouds formed and sped by beneath
the wings but were soon outrun. The waves of sand of the Sind
Desert now whipped into little whirlpools; then, driven by a
strong wind from the south, they became a sandstorm of un-
abated fury. Amelia climbed higher in escape.
Ahead there was no storm, and she could see ridges that grew
from the ground rising to foothills and then to mountains. They
were like “sharks poking their backs through a yellow sea.”
Over Central India aids to contact flying became a surfeit of
plenty: well-mapped railroads, rivers, and mountains were easily
identified. By such landmarks her way was made easy.
But it was not so in the air. Large black eagles dived out of
180


Four hours later Amelia was sound asleep. The long, hard
flight had exhausted her; her eyes, tired and sore from the
constant strain of watching ground, wings, and instruments, had
closed as if from an involuntary reflex action.
Because of the Honolulu crack-up and the consequent change
in plans that turned the flight to a west-to-east crossing at the
equator, the monsoon season, which they had hoped earlier to
escape, was now upon them. For India, it meant that the winds,
beginning in June, would sweep in from the Indian Ocean in
the southwest, carrying with them rains heavy, violent, and
destructive. For the Electra, it meant cross winds and down-
pours, for its course lay directly in the path of the monsoon. For
Amelia, it meant one of the supreme tests of her skill, courage,
and endurance.
During that night of June 17 the monsoons began. When
Amelia and Fred reached the airport in the morning, the ground
was wet and soggy. A take-off would be risky at best; but the
forecast was for more rain, which would make a take-off impossi-
ble. Amelia decided to chance the risky.
She revved up the engines. Slowly, as she added throttle, the
Electra began to roll and gain speed. Tail up and at full power,
the plane sloshed through the mud and strained to become air-
borne. The end of the runway loomed ahead; in a desperate
move, AE pulled back sharply on the control column. The Electra
broke from the mud, then began to settle, but finally held. Amelia
pulled up the gear; the wheels, still spinning and slinging mud,
rose into the wells. As the plane rose in a steep climb, the
underside of the wings and fuselage just cleared the treetops
at the edge of the field. The Lockheed had done it again.
Difficult and dangerous as it was, the take-off was but the
beginning. The worst was yet to come. The sky was a dull metallic
gray, and in it leaden clouds heavy with rain crowded about the
plane. AE felt that they were grim harbingers.
Through occasional holes in the clouds Amelia saw scattered
chunks of land that looked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. They
182


marked the mouths of the Ganges. From the hot land, steam rose
as if from a giant cauldron. In a constantly moving pageant, rice
fields dotted with workers, grass houses, and green trees sped by.
The weather clearing ahead, Amelia recognized the two un-
mistakable landmarks of Akyab: two golden pagodas and many
volcanic islands. Beyond the city was the airfield with two run-
ways and one hangar. She wanted to refuel and push on to Ran-
goon that same day, but the monsoon proved a superior foe.
At Akyab, while the Electra was being refueled, AE checked
the weather reports for the way ahead. They were dire and
discouraging. Amelia decided she would have to try to get
through somehow.
No sooner had she leveled off from her climb out of take-off,
and turned into her course heading, than a head wind, full of
rain, hit the Electra squarely on the nose. It was the heaviest
rain Amelia had ever seen. Sheet after sheet, thick and concen-
trated like shovelfuls of gravel, Aung back from the props and
slapped against the windshield. The Electra heaved and churned
through wave after wave, through wall after wall of water.
Amelia could not see out from the cockpit and had to fall back
completely upon her instruments.
For two hours she pitted herself and her plane against the
storm, trying to break through the monsoon. Finally exhausted,
her legs and arms heavy as lead from fighting stick and rudders,
she relented, and retreated from the encounter. Reluctantly, she
turned out to sea, nosed down to the tops of the waves, and headed
back to Akyab.
For her navigator Amelia had nothing but praise. “By uncanny
powers,” she wrote later, “Fred Noonan managed to navigate us
back to the airport, without being able to see anything but the
waves beneath the plane."
When they returned to Akyab, the weatherman at the airport
told them that the weather would probably not improve for three
months. Amelia wondered if she and Fred would not have to set
183


AE quickly determined from her map, and that meant Rangoon.
She grinned happily: she was dead on course.
They landed to refuel and with the intention of leaving im-
mediately for Bangkok. But the Electra had not rolled to a stop
when a heavy downpour engulfed the airport, making a take-off
out of the question.
Amelia and Fred made the best of the delay by sight-seeing.
The first tour was a short motor trip on the road from Rangoon to
Mandalay. The fliers, in a sudden release from their tensions, could
not restrain themselves from singing snatches of Kipling's "The
Road to Mandalay,” although they shuddered to think of the
number of tourists who must have done exactly the same thing on
the same road.
After finishing the line—“Where the flying fishes play" - Amelia
turned to Fred.
“That's it,” she said to him.
“What is?” Fred asked.
“Flying fishes,” she answered. “See?” Amelia explained: “That's
what aviators are-ought to be-if they're silly enough to squash
around aloft at this season.”
Fred agreed. He had never known at sea storms like those of
the last two days.
They then went to see the golden Shwe Dagon Pagoda, the
same that had guided them into the city from the air. Fred refused
to go inside, but Amelia kicked off her shoes, climbed the long
flight of steps to the top entrance, and entered to see the many
Buddhas and to watch the white-robed men at their priestly tasks.
On the morning of June 20 they were off for Bangkok. They
crossed the upper half of the Gulf of Martaban to Moulmein, then
flew across the north-south range of mountains that marked the
dividing line between Burma and Siam. From the height of 8,000
feet Amelia looked out beyond the right wing and back to Ran-
goon: like the prow of a ship, the city divided the waters of the
Indian Ocean and the Andaman Sea, creating the wide Bay of
185


Bengal on the right side and the smaller Gulf of Martaban on
the left.
Since take-off, clouds had begun to form. What had been gentle
sheep-backed formations far into the west now grew and changed
into forbidding anvil-shaped thunderheads; in the east, flanking
the range of mountains, clouds broke and scattered, baring to
Amelia's view green foothills that gradually sloped and diminished
into broad, thickly snarled jungle. As she looked at the heavy
undergrowth, Amelia hoped she would never have to pancake
the Electra anywhere below.
They cut across the Mae Klong River. In the distance were
plains backed up by mountains. Slowly a ragged outline on the
horizon became the sharp needle points of Buddhist temples and
the peaked roofs of tiled buildings. It was the city of Bangkok.
Through the city AE could see from above how the Mae Nam
River continued its tortuous course from the mountains in the
north to the Gulf of Siam in the south.
Hoping to make Singapore before nightfall, they landed at
Bangkok only to refuel and be on their way again.
Back in the air, Amelia stretched the sectional map across her
knees and studied the way ahead. Singapore lay on an island to
which pointed the long 900-mile finger of the Malay Peninsula. To
reach it, she would have to cut across the Gulf of Siam, then pro-
ceed on a course east of the Malay coast, and finally head directly
south.
She looked out from the cockpit. The day was clear and the
visibility unlimited. She found it hard to believe that she was fly-
ing over the fabled world she had so often set out for, riding the
old buggy in the Atchison barn, or lying on the floor in the parlor
looking at one of Grandfather Otis's big geography books. She
loved the sound of the names, Siam and Cambodia, and she picked
out others at random from the map-Bang Saphan, Lem Tane,
Koh Phratnog. Yet there were two of them below: Siam to the
right, Cambodia to the left.
Nevertheless, Amelia shook her head, as she had failed to see
186


the head winds were strong, and it was not until three and a half
hours later that Amelia sighted the bright emerald sea on the
northern coast of Australia. They landed at Port Darwin.
Again, as it had happened before in arriving at a new country,
Amelia and Fred had to be fumigated. For the last time they
stoically submitted to the spray guns.
At Port Darwin they unloaded their parachutes and sent them
home. Over the Pacific a parachute would be of no use whatever.
Gracefully declining all invitations, Amelia and Fred parted for
their separate rooms to turn in early for much-needed rest. The
next stop was Lae, New Guinea, only a few hours away from
Australia, but an eternity away from home.
6. New Guinea to Howland Island
The flight from Port Darwin to Lae, on June 30, was a flight of
seven hours and forty-three minutes of the same day. The flight
from Lae to Howland Island, however, was a flight into yesterday.
For Howland lay one day earlier across the international date
line. By the flight to the other side of the 180° of longitude there
was one day to be gained; but to get to the great divide, there
were two hours to be lost. And two lives.
In March, before she had cracked up in the earlier try for
Howland from Hawaii, AE had written: “It is much better not to
let fatigue of any kind creep into the early part of any expedition,
for it cannot be eliminated later."
Now she was weary and tired from a fatigue that could not be
eliminated. Twenty-two thousand miles of flying in only forty
days had taken its unremitting toll upon her and Fred.
Amelia wanted to be home by the Fourth of July and before
her thirty-ninth birthday on the twenty-fourth. She considered the
7,000 miles that lay before her and wrote in her logbook:
190


Electra's direction finder-the loop antenna-were listed as 200 to
1,500 and 2,400 to 4,800 kilocycles.
Giving her call signals, KHAQQ, Amelia would report in on
radio at quarter past and quarter to each hour, as was her custom
when possible during the entire world flight. Her frequencies for
transmitting were 6,210 kilocycles by day and 3,105 kilocycles by
night. For telegraphic code by key, Fred would use 500 kilocycles,
the standard frequency used by ships at sea.
On the hour and the half-hour the Itasca would broadcast
weather reports and forecasts, and homing signals, on 3,105 kilo-
cycles by voice and 7,500 kilocycles by key.
At 6:30 P.M., Howland time, the first of July, the San Francisco
division of the Coast Guard notified the Itasca that the Electra
was airborne. To make doubly sure that the ship's radios were
operating correctly, the Itasca tested signal strength with San
Francisco, then tried to contact the Electra. It was too early to
establish communication with the plane.
Listening at two receivers and a loud-speaker, in addition to
officer and enlisted members of the crew, were correspondents
from the Associated Press and the United Press, and the Interior
Department's Richard Black, whom GP had asked to be his repre-
sentative and the coordinator for the flight. The Itasca was stand-
ing by and ready.
12:04 A.M. The Itasca transmitted by voice on 3,105 and by key
on 7,500, trying to make contact; then keyed the homing signal,
• -, the dit dah of the letter A.
12:15 A.M. KHAQQ was not heard.
12:30 A.M. The ship sent out the weather, repeating twice each
part of the report: wind direction east, force 11 miles, partly
cloudy, visibility 20 miles, calm swell, direction east.
Checking against possible radio receiver difficulty, the Itasca
asked Samoa if the cutter Ontario had heard the Electra; the
ship's answer was that it had not.
12:45 A.M. KHAQQ was not heard.
1:00 A.M. The Itasca sent the weather on 7,500 kilocycles by
194


key and on 3,105 kilocycles by voice. The code was sent at a
slowed-down ten words per minute.
1:15 A.M. The Itasca had not heard AE's signals. The ship felt
that there was no cause for alarm, for the Electra was still about
1,000 miles out.
1:25 A.M. KHAQQ from Itasca: "Have not heard your signals
yet; please observe schedules with key; go ahead, am listening on
3,105 now.”
This transmission was not answered by Amelia.
1:45 A.M. KHAQQ not heard.
1:55 A.M. The Itasca sent the weather on 7,500 kilocycles by
key and on 3,105 by voice.
2:15 A.M. KHAQQ not heard on 3,105 kilocycles.
2:45 A.M. Electra heard on 3,105, but the message was not com-
pletely understood because of the static. AE's voice, identified by
Carey of AP and Hanzlick of UP, was a low monotone. "Cloudy
and overcast,” she had reported; they were her only intelligible
words.
The Itasca, having heard Amelia, however indistinctly, now
tried to establish communications with her. The attempt was un-
successful. Again checking its own signals, the cutter now broad-
cast to stations in the vicinity; its messages were heard throughout
the Pacific area.
3:00 A.M. The Itasca reported the weather by key on 7,500 and
by voice on 3,105; wind direction east 8 miles per hour; clear,
calm; ceiling unlimited. Then by key the ship sent out the homing
signal, the dit dah of the letter A.
3:15 A.M. The Electra was not heard.
3:30 A.M. Itasca weather report: Wind direction east, force 8
miles per hour; clear visibility, 20 miles; calm swell, direction
east; ceiling unlimited.
Then by voice on 3,105: "What is your position? When do you
expect to reach Howland? Itasca has heard your phone, go ahead.
on key. Acknowledge this broadcast next schedule.”
3:45 A.M. AE reported in by voice: “Itasca from Earhart ...
195


to compensate for head winds she had averaged a ground speed
of 142 mph over the distance of 2,556 miles, she should have
been over Howland at the end of eighteen hours. If she had
averaged only 128 mph because of head winds, after twenty
hours she should have been well over the target island.
8:33 A.M. KHAQQ from Itasca: “Will you please come in and
answer on 3,105. We are transmitting constantly on 7,500 kilo-
cycles. We do not hear you on 3,105. Please answer on 3,105. Go
ahead."
The message was not acknowledged.
One minute later the Itasca continued: “Answer on 3,105 kilo-
cycles with phone. How are signals coming in? Go ahead."
8:45 A.M. Amelia broke in on 3,105 kilocycles. Her voice was
loud and clear, but broken and frenzied. “We are in a line of
position 157-337,” she said hastily. “Will repeat this message on
6,210 kilocycles. Wait, listening on 6,210 kilocycles. We are run-
ning north and south.”
Anxiety drew taut across the radio room of the Itasca as every-
one strained to hear the repeated message on 6,210. Nothing was
heard by anybody.
8:47 A.M. KHAQQ from Itasca: "We heard you O.K. on 3,105
kilocycles. Please stay on 3,105. Do not hear you on 6,210. Main-
tain QSO on 3,105."
The same message was sent by key on 7,500 kilocycles.
The Itasca again heard nothing on 3,105 or 6,210.
8:49 A.M. KHAQQ from Itasca: “Go ahead on 3,105."
8:54 A.M. KHAQQ from Itasca: “Your signals O.K. on 3,105.
Go ahead with position on 3,105 or 500 kilocycles.”
The ship listened for AE's answer on 3,105, 6,210, and 500
kilocycles.
The message was not acknowledged.
“We are running north and south,” at 8:45 A.M. had been
Amelia Earhart's last words.
Until ten o'clock on that morning of July 1 the Itasca continued
to call. The operators transmitted on 3,105 and 7,500, and listened
198



110
100*
120
-
1500
1600
1700
180°
70°
CHINA
1.: TROPIC...OF. 1.ANGLA...
20°
20
MARIANA.
ISLANDS
FRENCH
SPHILIPPINE
SIAM
RANGOON
BANGKOK
SAIPAN
INDOCHINA
ISLANDS
W27
.: 74
700
.
XRSHALL ISLANDS
CAROLINE
ISLANDS
LOSINGAPORE
TARAWA
HOWLAND ISLAND
BORNEO
J MATRA
EQUATOR
. GILBERT ISLANDS
BAKER ISLAMD
CELEBES
ISLANDS
PHOENIX ISLAMDS:
men
NEW GUINEA
BANDUNG SURABAYA
NEWS
LATT BRITAIN
Dod
ALAT BRITAIN
A Self
SOLOMON
SLANDS
KOEPANG
TIMOR
00
100
PORT
DARWIN
20°
200
***TROPIC OF CAPRICORN
т
в
А
і
І
1000
1100
1200
130°
140
1500
160°
1700
1800
1700


the Itasca. Obviously, there was nothing wrong with the ship's
radios.
The Lockheed engineers were contacted to find out whether
the Electra's radio could operate if the plane were floating. Their
answer was the first heavy note of discouragement. The Electra's
radio definitely could not operate if it were on the water, they
wired, because it needed the right engine for power. But, they
added, the plane could float from the buoyancy provided by the
empty tanks for a maximum period of nine hours. It was now
hoped, for radio purposes, that the Electra had made an emer-
gency landing on land.
The Itasca searched an area of 9,500 square miles without
success. In addition to constant transmission on 3,105 and 500,
during the day it set up a smoke screen, and during the night it
played its searchlight against the sky. These measures were
in vain.
On July 7 the battleship Colorado and the minesweeper Swan
joined forces with the cutter Itasca. The Colorado with its planes
went south and east through the Phoenix Islands, exploring the
157° reciprocal of 337° represented in AE's last reported line
of position. The Swan and the Itasca turned north and then west
to the Gilbert Islands.
On July 9 the aircraft carrier Lexington, with 63 planes, ac-
companied by the four destroyers Perkins, Cushing, Lamson, and
Drayton, sailed from Hawaii. They arrived in the Howland area
on the thirteenth to lend their support to the search. For the
next five days the Lexington's planes logged 1,591 hours looking
north and west for the missing fliers. The planes covered an
area of 151,556 square miles without turning up a trace of the
Electra or its pilot and navigator.
Each ship was required to send out the same broadcast:
“We are using every possible means to establish contact with
you. If you hear this broadcast, please come in on 3,105
kilocycles. Use key if possible, otherwise, voice transmission.
If you hear this broadcast, turn carrier [a steady key trans-
204


the Rocky Mountains in Cheyenne; and from as far inland as
Cincinnati, now reported hearing SOS signals from Amelia
Earhart.
If Amelia had landed on an island or reef, and were using
her radio, it was possible that her signals had skip-waved back
and forth and forward between ionosphere and ocean across
thousands of miles. Yet, if there were SOS signals, they were not
heard in the Pacific by the official radio operators on any of the
assigned Navy and Coast Guard ships, or on any of the shore
stations from the Gilbert Islands through the Hawaiian Islands
to San Francisco Radio on the West Coast.
In exploring the Gilbert Islands, the Itasca sent a party ashore
to Tarawa, to confer with the senior British administrator of
the islands. He had been informed of the Earhart search, and
was surprised that neither the station at Tarawa nor the one
at Beru had been notified about the flight before it began from
Lae. Both stations, although they heard no Electra transmissions,
could have helped, for Amelia's course had lain just 20 miles
south of Arorae, the most southern island of the Gilbert group.
The concentration of the search to the northwest had been
based on a very careful analysis of the evidence. The weather
conditions at the end of the flight were a clear blue sky to the
south and east of Howland but heavy cloud banks about fifty
miles north and west of Howland.
The Itasca had laid a heavy smoke screen for two hours on
the morning of July 2; it would have been visible to AE, flying
at an altitude of 1,000 feet, for more than forty miles from the
south and east, but only twenty miles from the north and west.
Evidently, judging from her reports, Amelia had been flying
earlier during the night at a high altitude and above a thick
overcast of clouds. Her signal strength, if direct and not the
result of skip waves, indicated a maximum distance of 250 miles
from Howland and not nearer to the island than 30 miles. Such
was the conclusion of the Itasca.
All available land areas were searched and hundreds of thou-
206


sands of miles of sea area. On July 19, 1937, the Navy released
the Itasca from any further search; the cutter's mission was
completed.
Back in California George Palmer Putnam had called on
Jacqueline Cochran. He remembered Amelia's having told him
about her friend's strange and marvelous powers at extrasensory
perception. He was very excited when he came into Miss
Cochran’s Los Angeles apartment. He begged her to help him
locate Amelia.
Miss Cochran told GP where the plane had gone down: that
it had ditched in the ocean, that Fred Noonan had fractured
his skull against the bulkhead, that Amelia was alive, and that
the plane was floating on the water. She named the Itasca as a
ship that was in the area although she had never heard the name
before; and she named a Japanese fishing vessel in the same
location. She told GP to get ships and planes into the area im-
mediately to begin the search.
For two days Jacqueline Cochran followed the course of the
drifting Electra. Ships and planes searched the area of her in-
sight, but to no avail. Miss Cochran was racked with disappoint-
ment. If her ability were worth anything, she reasoned, it should
have been able to locate and save her friend. Giving up, Jacque-
line Cochran went to the cathedral in Los Angeles and lit candles
for the repose of Amelia's soul. She never tried her powers
at ESP again.
Amelia had unquestionably disappeared. At best, her attitude
toward her radio plans for the flight was casual; at worst, a
combination of poor coordination, faulty radio receiver, and im-
perfect navigation instruments, had sent plane, pilot, and navi-
gator to a watery grave.
The search over, rumors now began to abound and multiply
about what had really happened to Amelia Earhart and her
navigator Fred Noonan.
Each would cause Noonan's wife and Amelia's husband and
mother untold hours of anguish and false hope.
207


8. The Fog of Rumors
The first great rumor, which had gained widespread accep-
tance, was that Amelia and Fred were prisoners of the Japanese.
They had flown over islands in the Japanese mandate which were
being illegally fortified, the plane had been shot down by anti-
aircraft guns, the pilot and navigator had been taken and held
as spies.
This Japanese-prisoner story still persists after more than
twenty years, largely because of a movie released in the early
forties, while World War II was at its highest pitch and anti-
Japanese feeling at white heat. The film, Flight for Freedom,
starring Rosalind Russell and Fred MacMurray, told the story of
a famous American woman flier, “Tonie Carter," who had been
asked by the United States Navy to "get lost in the South Pacific
(actually, to remain in hiding at Howland Island), so that Navy
planes could take photographs of illegal Japanese fortifications
while “looking for her.
In the movie, Tonie Carter's navigator was an old beau, "Randy
Britton,” to whom she had once been engaged. This gave rise
to another rumor: Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were in
love, and decided to find a lonely Pacific island where they could
live out their idyllic love "happily ever after.” Incensed by the
broad allusions of the film, George Palmer Putnam filed suit.
The movie company settled out of court.
The scenario writers for Flight for Freedom were not alone,
however, in their belief. Aboard the U.S.S. Colorado while it
was conducting its search for the missing fliers were Dr. M. L.
Brittain of Georgia Tech, and other university presidents, who
were guests of the battleship on a Pacific cruise.
There was the possibility, Dr. Brittain later suggested, that
208


Amelia was a prisoner of the Japanese, even as late as 1944,
and that one day soon she would be liberated by the advancing
United States Marines.
"We got the definite feeling," Dr. Brittain was quoted as say-
ing, “that Miss Earhart had some sort of understanding with
government officials that the last part of her voyage around the
world would be over some Japanese islands, probably the
Marshalls."
Amelia's mother, Amy Otis Earhart, has long maintained that
her daughter was on a secret government mission and that she
was captured by the Japanese. This is Mrs. Earhart's belief
although she has no official basis for it.
The Navy Department at the end of World War II was com-
pelled to make a final official announcement about AE's dis-
appearance. Amelia Earhart had not been sent on a naval cloak-
and-dagger operation. Her plane had not been shot out of the
skies by Japanese gunfire. She had not been captured, held as
a prisoner, or shot as a spy.
Nevertheless, despite official and unofficial beliefs and state-
ments to the contrary, rumors still flourished.
There was the story of the Japanese fishing boat. After United
States forces had invaded the Marshall Islands-north and west
of Howland-Lieutenants Eugene T. Bogan and James Toole
were quoted as saying that this story was told to them by a
missionary-trained native named Elieu:
“Ajima, a jap trader, said three and a half years ago that
an American woman pilot came down between Jaluit and
Ailinglapalap Atolls [southeastern Marshall Islands] and was
picked up by a Japanese fishing-boat crew. She was taken
to Japan."
In July of 1944, during the invasion of Saipan, in the Mariana
Islands-far north and west of Howland Island-the Marines
found in an abandoned Japanese barracks a photograph album
filled with snapshots of Amelia Earhart in her flying clothes. It
209


AWARDS AND DECORATIONS
City of Chicago: medal presented by Mayor Cermak, 1932.
City of New York: medal of valor presented by Mayor Walker,
1928. .
City of New York: mayor's committee medal; presented by Mayor
Walker, 1932.
City of Toledo: medal presented 1928.
Atlantic City: key.
City of Philadelphia: medal presented by mayor, 1928.
City of Pittsburgh: key.
Mexico: Order of the Aztec Eagle; medal with blue center and
crest; gold ribbon and lapel pin.
French Legion of Honor; with lapel pin.
Belgium Order of Leopold; with lapel pin.
Commonwealth of Massachusetts: medal presented, 1928.
Commonwealth of Massachusetts: medal presented, 1932.
Aero Club Royal de Belgique: medal presented, 1932.
Aero Club de France: medal presented, 1932.
Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association: medallion presented,
1933.
Le Lyceum Société des Femmes de France of New York: medal-
lion presented, 1928.
Le Comité France-Amérique: medallion presented, 1932.
Distinguished Flying Cross: medal presented by the Congress of
the United States, 1932
Columbia Broadcasting System: medallion presented, 1932.
Mexico: Union de Mujeres-Americanas: medal presented, 1935.
American Society of Mechanical Engineers: medal presented,
1929.
221


EARHART, AMELIA. “My Flight from Hawaii,” National Geographic
Magazine, 67:593-609, May, 1935.
ELLIOTT, LAWRENCE. “Amelia Earhart's Last Flight,” Reader's
Digest, 36:110–116, July, 1957.
MAYBIE, JANET. “Miss Earhart Sleeps as Her Shipmates Gossip,”
Bookman, 68:256, October, 1928.
- “Amelia Earhart's New Flight: Expedition into the Realm
of Academics,” Christian Science Monitor Magazine, April 29,
1936.
MCINTYRE, O. O. “I Want You to Meet a Real American Girl,”
Cosmopolitan, 85:21, November, 1928.
MCMULLEN, F. D. “First Women's Air Derby,” Woman's Journal,
14:10–11, October, 1929.
PERKINS, MARION. "Who Is Amelia Earhart?" Survey, 60:393, July
1, 1928.
PITMAN, JACK. “Amelia Earhart's Last Flight,” Coronet, 39:122–
125, February, 1956.
PUTNAM, GEORGE PALMER. “Forgotten Husband,” Pictorial Review,
34:12–13, December, 1932.
-. "Flyer's Husband," Forum, 93:330-332, June, 1935.
-. "Lady with Wings: The Life Story of My Wife Amelia
Earhart,” Liberty, Vol. 16, Nos. 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16; March
11, 18, 25; April 1, 8, 15, 22, 1939.
C. UNSIGNED ARTICLES
"Air-Hearted,” Commonweal, 16:116, June, 1932.
“ Amelia Earhart: How Long a Mystery?" The American Weekly,
September 10, 1941.
"Amelia Earhart's Record Flight from Hawaii to California,"
Literary Digest, 119:8, January 19, 1935.
"Appreciation,” Commonweal, 26:336, July 30, 1937.
“Collector's Stamps to Pay for Round-world Trip," Newsweek,
9:33, February 20, 1937.
“Earhart Wrecks Ship After Setting an Ocean Record,” News-
week, 9:27, March 27, 1937.
“First Woman to Fly 2,408 Miles Over the Pacific,” Newsweek,
5:20, January 19, 1935.
225