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 fliers to visit them. Overnight 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 seclusion, 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 presented 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 $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 nickname “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 engagement. 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 indicated 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 independence; about men and a possible husband she was never sudden. It was not until three years later, and then with considerable 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 continued 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 use it whenever she needed help in warding off George Palmer Putnam. Amelia grinned, took the paper, folded it, and put it in her purse. She never found the need to use it.

While she had been writing _20 Hrs., 40 Min._, AE was approached for many new endorsements. The one she remembered and talked about the most, because it was the funniest, was the offer to sponsor canned rabbit; the “stunt” was to have _her_ picture on the can. A promotion which she did agree to, however, was one to help finance Commander Byrd’s next expedition. Although she was a non-smoker, Amelia signed a statement for a cigarette advertisement.

For her endorsement she received $1,500, which she immediately gave to Byrd. It was a gesture of good will that Commander Byrd deeply appreciated; later he presented her with copy number two of the limited edition of his book, _Skyward_.

While Amelia was correcting proofs of her book, Lady Heath’s Avro Avian was finally delivered. AE kept the plane at the nearby polo field of the Westchester Biltmore Country Club in Rye. She was eager to test it out. Hastily she finished making her corrections and gave the proofs to GP.

The Avian was everything she wanted in a plane. It was small, light, maneuverable, and fast; it reminded her of her first airplane, the yellow Kinner Canary which she had owned in California, except that the Avian had two open cockpits in tandem. Amelia walked across the soft, firm grass to where the plane was parked. She lowered the panel from the left side of the rear cockpit, and holding her plain black dress against her legs, she climbed in. She buckled a white helmet under her chin and adjusted the goggles at her forehead.

She started the engine and watched for the instruments to respond while it idled, carefully checking the oil and fuel temperature and pressure and engine revolutions per minute--rpm’s. She fingered the strands of pearls about her neck and waited for the engine to warm up.

AE curled her long, tapering fingers about the stick and worked 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 commanded 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, considering 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 possible; once she arrived in the Far West and the Rockies, she would then determine what to do. Summarily she announced her plans to the Putnams, thanked them for their hospitality, and was off.

2. _Vagabond of the Air_

Once in the air and on her way 3,000 miles to the west, she surveyed the land below. It was a quilted patchwork of green and brown, and woven through it, now the thick and now the thin threads of light and dark rivers and tributaries. Even the mighty Hudson and the Palisades had seemed from 8,000 feet but the thickest thread and the deepest brown.

This was release from little things. Flat-topped beetled automobiles, toy houses, clustered beads of cities: such was the Lilliputian world of men. Cruising along over New York and New Jersey into Pennsylvania, she knew that she would have to do right by the little Avian. Lady Heath had flown it back and forth between London and Cape Town for a record 12,000 miles; now AE would have to add to that record some 6,000 miles of the United States.

She spread her map across her knees and noted the penciled circle in western Pennsylvania that marked Rogers Field in Pittsburgh, her first stop. She began her letdown from cruising altitude. The airport, she observed, had a grass runway.

Amelia dropped down for a closer look. She dragged the field, hoping to spot rocks, or holes, or ditches. The way seemed clear. She tipped up one wing in a tight turn and came around for a landing. She reduced throttle and glided in to what looked like the best part of the field. The plane started to settle; AE chopped the throttle, pulling back hard on the stick. At that moment the landing gear hit a shallow ditch hidden in the grass. The Avian 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 uneventful 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, however, 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 without 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 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 committee, 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 right or a railroad with a highway to the left. Or was it a railroad 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! Fortunately 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 inscrutable 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 much preferred a challenge, for the joy that lay on the other side of conquest was far superior to any she had ever known.

Fortunately, AE had landed near a road. Cars began to gather almost at once; men and women came running to the scene of her emergency landing. The men, Amelia felt, she could handle in such a situation; but the women, with their shaking heads and fluttering moments of undue concern, she dreaded.

The plane had to be towed back to Pecos, where new engine parts could be ordered from El Paso. Slowly, at a mere ten miles an hour, the Avro retraced its course, cruelly on the ground, back to the Texas city of its morning take-off. It was late and dark that night before the plane was parked behind a garage, there to await repairs.

It took three days before the parts could come the 187 miles from El Paso and before the engine trouble could be located and repaired. Amelia was impatient to be off across the mountains to the West Coast. Thankfully she arrived in Los Angeles in time to see the start of the National Air Races and to visit friends she had not seen since her early days of learning to fly in California.

On the way home across Utah, she again had to make a dead-stick landing because of engine failure. She landed in a plowed field, and again nosed over and escaped unhurt. As in Pittsburgh, as in New Mexico and Texas, she rose to fly anew, like the phoenix from its ashes. With skill and courage she had once more conquered her adversary, the challenge.

The challenge, she had often reflected upon her luck in flying, had been with her from the very beginning, and she had always, sometimes through the workings of a mysterious fate, won out.

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 blinding 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 overcast 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 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 yourself 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, _McCall’s_ 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 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: restraining 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 arbitrary 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? Ha!” “I Have My Rights, Too.”

This was only part of the exciting 1920’s in America. The postwar period of the disillusioned lost generation, the new place of women in society, the Freudian explanations for behavior, prohibition, the automobile, the worship of speed, the idolization of heroes: out of such an era Amelia Earhart came and conquered.

“I Want You to Meet a Real American Girl,” wrote O. O. McIntyre in an enthusiastic introduction of AE to his _Cosmopolitan_ readers. In a day when young women went from “gin-guzzling to calculated harlotry, here,” he said, was a “wistful slip of a girl” who would be a “highly moral reaction from the inflamed tendencies and appetites which have aroused so much alarm. Amelia,” he concluded, “has become a symbol of a new womanhood--a symbol, I predict, that will be emulously patterned after by thousands of young girls in their quest for the Ideal.”

Every woman’s goal at the time was the slender, boyish figure, the flattened breasts, the close-cropped boyish bob, the long, youthful waist. In Amelia every woman found her image, cleanly liberated in the speed of solo record-breaking flight. Here was a woman who could satisfy in an acceptable way the cravings of any woman blocked at home, of any housewife chained to a husband, home, and children.

She was a product of her times and a reaction to them, too caught up in them to realize they were driving her to impossible achievement. For the present, however, she was having a gloriously good time doing what she wanted to do for “the fun of it.” And what she was doing was well within her capabilities.

In the spring of 1929 Amelia sold the little Avro Avian and purchased a used Lockheed Vega--a high-wing monoplane with Whirlwind engine. She itched to test it out. California beckoned again, not for a visit this time, but for the chance to enter a race.

5. _The First Women’s Air Derby_

In August the first Women’s Air Derby was held. Amelia left New York and joined the field of nineteen planes in Santa Monica. This was the kind of competition she liked. A women’s transcontinental air race had never been held before. It was something brand-new for fliers, judges, committees, those in charge of every point.

Early on the morning of the eighteenth, AE rolled her Vega onto the field and turned into a double row of planes. To her left and right the planes gleamed under a clear California sky. The lighter planes, six of them, took their positions in front of her. Amelia counted: hers was one of thirteen heavier planes lined up in the rear rank.

The starter dropped his flag. At one-minute intervals the planes roared into take-off. Part of the National Air Races, the women’s event would terminate eight days later at Cleveland, Ohio. Certain stops had to be made each day, and no one could fly at night.

As Amelia had done, women from all over the country flocked to take part. Wealthy women, sportswomen, businesswomen, wives, mothers; all were young; many of them pretty. Some came with old planes, others with new; some flew stock planes, others racers. All carried a few canned goods, enough food for three days in case of a forced landing in the desert.

From Santa Monica the women headed for the first stop at San Bernardino. All made it, Amelia learned, except one. Mary Elizabeth von Mack, flying one of the heavier planes, had found the landing field overcrowded and turned back to land at Montbello.

The next day, according to plan, the last woman in from the day before was the first off the ground. This prevented any lagging 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 airport, Amelia crashed into a sandbank and damaged a propeller. She escaped unhurt. The other women, seeing what had happened 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 sagebrush 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, nevertheless 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 inquisitive. Her friend Blanche Noyes had discovered fire in her 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,” “flying flappers,” “angels,” “sunburned derbyists.” All they wanted to be called, AE insisted in vain, were “fliers,” 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 minister, 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.

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 then another aspect of air-line operation, first with one organization then with another. But, as with nursing and medicine, and as at Columbia when she was too impatient to follow a prescribed course of study, she soon tired of the new activities. There was no occupation on the ground that could hold her interest for long.

Her destiny, she knew, lay in the air; but she would have to continue getting more and more flying time before she could finally break the ties with mundane pursuits. Working for an air line at least offered chances to fly, even if it meant paying for the privilege by trying to sell aviation to stubborn women.

Mothers and wives, Amelia was to complain later, were the great stumbling blocks in her attempt to convince the American public that flying was safe. It seemed that sons and daughters and husbands were willing to take to the air, but a matriarchal opposition barred the way. As she had used her arguments writing for _Cosmopolitan_, so now AE used them again in speaking tours for the cause of aviation in general, and for Transcontinental Air Transport, the air line she represented, in particular.

Amelia flew from point to point on the Ludington Line of TAT and delivered her talks to women’s groups. Often her mother would go along with her. AE would point to her mother seated at the speaker’s table and indicate her proof: if mother and daughter could fly together, the air was as safe for any woman and her family as the highway and the railroad. Gradually women began to be sold.

Working on TAT with Amelia were two young men, Paul Collins and Gene Vidal. They had many progressive ideas about the running of an air line and were anxious to put them into operation in their own business. They took AE into the new organization with them as a vice-president.

As she had before, Amelia worked primarily with the women passengers, finding them, quieting them, convincing them. Again she made many lecture tours. She always began her speeches by 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 autogiros. 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 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 convinced 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 demonstration 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.

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 flying _is_ the safest, after all!” 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 accomplishments. 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 Margaret 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 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 limelight 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 biographies, 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.

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 person....

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 publishing. Authors on the Putnam list were famous; they are now required reading in any course in American literature: Washington Irving, James Russell Lowell, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel 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 magnificent 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 incumbent 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 conjured 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.

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 _Wilderness_, 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 _Colliers_, published in book form, then made into a movie. Included 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 Roosevelt, 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 Anderson, 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 publishing 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 Cushman 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.

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 recording 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 accomplishment 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 discernment, 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?

No one, perhaps, understood heroes better than George Putnam. 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 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 marriage.... 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 responsibility 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 more arduous, even uncomfortable to the men--than merely keeping 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 immeasurably to the happiness of those concerned. The individual independence 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 Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweethearts,” whom GP and AE had never met. “I,” said Douglas Fairbanks, introducing himself to Miss Earhart, “am Mister Pickford.”

“And I,” said GP, picking up the thread and introducing himself to Mary Pickford, “am Mister Earhart.”

In 1931 GP gave up publishing and went to work for Paramount 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 Biltmore 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 contract. 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.

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 accessories; 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 believed 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. Nevertheless, 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 playful children: George was driving Amelia around in a wheelbarrow, 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 happiness together.

9. _Solo Across the Atlantic_

Five years to the day after Lindbergh’s famous flight in _The Spirit of St. Louis_, Amelia Earhart flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Like Lindbergh, Amelia had competitors who had tried the solo flight before her; but, like his, the luck of “Lady Lindy” held out.

Ruth Nichols, AE’s friendly neighbor and fellow flier from Rye, was on the way for the transatlantic hop in June, 1931, but as she came in for a landing in Saint John’s, New Brunswick, her overloaded plane cracked up, nearly killing her. Although she was still encased in a body cast from the crash, Ruth Nichols was ready in 1932 to try again. But, just as she was ready to go, she heard that Amelia had made it.

The two women fliers were the friendliest of rivals, and they were always neck and neck to be the first woman-to-do in aviation. In 1930, for example, AE had set the speed record at 181.157 mph; in 1931, Miss Nichols set a new one at 210.685 mph. They had raced together in the first Powder Puff Derby, until Ruth crashed in Columbus. Each wanted to be the first woman to fly around the world: AE failed; Ruth succeeded.

For Amelia the flight alone across the Atlantic came four years after the _Friendship_ venture. She had gained experience in all kinds of flying, in all kinds of weather. She had flown coast to coast across the United States four times: twice in Lady Heath’s Avian and twice in the autogiro. With her Vega she had made numerous flights; one of them the Women’s Air Derby in which she placed third in the race from California to Ohio.

AE purchased another Vega; although secondhand, it was in excellent flying condition, and as added insurance she had a new Wright Whirlwind engine installed. After nine crack-ups and emergency landings, most of them because of engine failure, she felt that the new motor was a wise investment.

One morning in the winter of 1931, the Putnams sat at breakfast in their Rye home. Amelia lowered the morning paper and looked out the dining-room window. The light was clear, hard, and bright. The oak trees out beyond the patio were stark and bare. The air seemed crisp and clean, as if snow might begin to swirl at any moment.

Amelia brushed her stiff locks with a quick sweep of the hand and turned to her husband. “Would you _mind_,” she asked slowly, “if I flew the Atlantic?”

GP was elated with the idea, finally expressed, for he knew the project had been growing within her, like a child, for a long time. He could see, as he looked into his wife’s steady gray-blue eyes, that she had arrived at that point of self-confidence where only agreement with her was possible.

“Of course I don’t mind,” he said quickly. “I think it’s an excellent idea.”

Plans began to take definite shape. To avoid any possibility of advance notoriety, Amelia chartered her Vega to an old friend, Bernt Balchen, the famous Arctic explorer and an intrepid flier. He had agreed to act as her technical adviser. It was well known that Balchen and Lincoln Ellsworth were planning an Antarctic expedition; everyone could now infer that AE’s plane was going to be used by the explorers.

As with the earlier _Friendship_ flight, when everybody thought the Fokker seaplane was being made ready for Byrd, thus giving Stultz and Gordon the necessary freedom for test-hopping the aircraft, so now Amelia had hour after hour and day after day for checking out the new Whirlwind motor, for blind flying entirely by instruments, for preparing for the variable weather over the North Atlantic.

On a Sunday in April of 1932 the Putnams had asked Bernt Balchen to drive over to Rye for lunch. After a leisurely meal, AE led the way down over the stone steps outside to her garden. 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 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, therefore, 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. It did not seem to her now that she would get off this gray day. When she turned onto the George Washington Bridge she could barely make out the tops of the towers. The Hudson River below was clouded in mist.

Just before noon at the airport she was summoned to the telephone by Eddie Gorski, her mechanic. It was GP, calling from the office of Doc Kimball at the Weather Bureau. “It looks like the break we’ve been waiting for,” he said. “Doc Kimball says this afternoon is fine to get to Newfoundland--Saint John’s, anyway.”

Amelia asked for particulars about the weather. A “low,” she learned, which had threatened the first leg of the flight, had dissipated to the southeast; and a “high,” which promised good weather, was moving in beyond Newfoundland.

“O.K.!” she said. “We’ll start.”

In ten minutes she made final arrangements with Bernt Balchen and Eddie Gorski. They had agreed to fly with her as far as Newfoundland, to make sure everything was all right before the Atlantic take-off. Amelia looked at her watch. There was no time for lunch.

Always a fast driver, AE now drove quickly back to Westchester. Take-off had been set for 3:00 P.M. She had to pick up her clothes and maps, and then meet GP at the New York end of the George Washington Bridge. Two o’clock, he had said. She swung into the driveway. She had driven the last twenty-five miles in fifteen minutes.

She rushed upstairs to her room. In five minutes she had changed into jodhpurs, plaid sports shirt, and windbreaker. She tied a bright blue scarf about her neck, then stuffed toilet articles into a small bag. She stopped at the window that looked out on her garden. The dogwood trees were in full flower, white and pink in the sun. She turned, picked up her leather flying suit and the folder of maps, and fled out of the room and down the stairs.

At 2:55 P.M. AE and GP reached Teterboro. Bernt and Eddie 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 convinced 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, Newfoundland. 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.

“Okeh,” said Bernt with characteristic brevity. “So long. Good luck.”

Amelia took command of the plane. She looked over the instrument panel, her “dashboard,” and checked the engine gauges. Four new instruments had been installed in the plane to help her find her way: a drift indicator, an aperiodic and a magnetic compass, and a directional gyro. She taxied to the end of the only runway. The wind was from the northeast, nearly perfect for take-off.

At 7:13 P.M. the Vega broke from the ground and rose into the air. It was May 20, 1932. Amelia headed out to sea, to fly the Atlantic Ocean for “the fun of it.” A few hours later it would be anything but fun.

Amelia eased back on the stick and climbed to 12,000 feet. She leveled off. She looked out the narrow windshield to the right. The sun, beginning to set in the west, sprayed out in a multicolored fan of gold, yellow, orange, and red. This was beauty, and adventure: the excitement and romance of flight. She looked quickly across the instruments, then out the other side of the windshield. The moon, like a disc of butter in whipped potatoes, sat on the top of a bank of clouds.

The nose of the plane felt a little heavy against the stick. She reached down and rolled in a little trim. She then held the wings straight and level, and trimmed the rudder against the torque of the propeller. The turn-and-bank indicator responded promptly: needle and ball aligned in the center of the instrument. The steady rhythm of the motor was like another heart; and the wings and fuselage were like extensions of her arms and body and legs. She was one with her plane.

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 themselves.” 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 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 horseback; 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 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 newspapers 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 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 outskirts of town, to an open space at Fairfax and Wilshire boulevards which was the airfield.

A young pilot of about Amelia’s age, noting prospective customers, 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 airplane. 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 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 speeding 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.

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 herself about how she looked: she was comfortable in a pair of mechanic’s dirty coveralls. Tall and slender, Amelia, with her hair pushed under her helmet, looked like a handsome boy. She was not concerned about her appearance; she was being practical: the field was dusty and the plane was difficult to climb into. The jodhpurs and jacket, like the gym suits she wore as a little girl, made good sense.

Amelia was glad that Neta Snook was her first instructor. With a woman to teach her she felt less self-conscious about taking lessons; any of the men fliers, who overwhelmed her with their abilities, would have scared her away, at least in the first difficult stages of learning how to fly. Her self-confidence was still shaky and insecure.

AE learned slowly but well. At first Neta showed her how to read the instruments, how to start and rev up the engine, how to check the magnetoes, follow through on stick, rudders, and throttle as she took the Canuck off, climbed, made gentle turns to the left and right, and came in for a landing.

After a few weeks Amelia had learned how to fly a quadrangular course. This had been difficult at first in the light plane. She had to fly around a fenced-off field by keeping the right wing, at a steady altitude of 1,000 feet, exactly in line with the fence. She would angle in to the line, move swiftly downwind, turn steeply into the wind and crab along the cross-wind leg, then level out and move slowly upwind. The fourth leg was the hardest, for it meant a shallow turn with the wind to stay on course. The maneuver around the field demanded coordination of up and down and left and right. But Amelia could see the point of the exercise: if she could successfully work stick, rudder, and throttle in getting around the field, she would have learned the basic requirements for a landing pattern.

Then Neta taught her stalls and spins. These had to be mastered soon if she hoped someday to solo. Again Amelia followed through on the controls. AE sat in the rear cockpit and studied Neta’s every move with stick, throttle, and rudder. 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 instruction from Neta had been on credit, and her job with the telephone company scarcely paid enough to meet all costs. It became immediately 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. Disappointed but not discouraged, Amelia turned to a man to help her through enough lessons so that she could solo. Fortunately, her choice of a new instructor was a good one. He was John Montijo, a former Army instructor with hundreds of hours of experience in the air. And what was more, he was patient and unexcitable before the most trying stupidities of his students. He was demanding, but very knowing and skillful in his ability to teach others.

Amelia learned quickly from him. And she insisted that he teach her acrobatics before he allowed her to go up alone. She wanted to have complete mastery of the Kinner Airster biplane. She knew that if she could stunt the plane, she would then have the necessary confidence to recover the plane from whatever attitude it might assume.

Under Montijo’s guidance, her reactions to the most unusual conditions of flight became as trigger fast as they were in the more normal spins and stalls. She practiced for hours doing slips and split-S’s, loops and rolls, lazy-eights and Immelmanns.

Amelia had gained such a sure degree of skill from her new instructor that when her time to solo finally came she had lost all nervousness and fear. She reversed the usual procedure for the first flight alone. Most fledglings she had watched took off with a joyful sweep and circled the field; then--suddenly ground shy--they kept circling until the tanks ran dry and they had to summon the courage to land. The necessary judgment for a good landing is one of the first tests of a good pilot, and AE hoped that hers would be as smooth as John’s always were.

On the day of her solo Amelia walked out to her plane with the graceful ease of newly won self-assurance. Her patent-leather jacket gleamed in the sun; her high leather flying boots, carefully laced over the tight-fitting breeches, kicked up the dust as she walked; her white shirt, jauntily opened at the neck, revealed the inevitable feminine touch. She stepped onto the lower wing of the plane and swung into the front cockpit. She buckled her helmet and set her goggles over her eyes. A mechanic spun the wooden propeller and the biplane headed out to the runway for 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 awareness 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 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 altimeter out, she would have to fly by carefully watching the air-speed needle.

She looked out. The moon slid behind a tall build-up of clouds. Then more clouds grew and thickened about the plane. The Vega started to buffet, then to buck like an unbroken horse. Rain pinged and splattered against the metal wings and fuselage, hit and spread like gravel against the windshield, and streamed across the width and off the trailing edges of the wings. Whips of lightning cracked across the nose of the plane.

Amelia set her jaw hard and flew the plane by the needle and ball. She hoped the driving downdrafts of the storm were not nosing her too far down to the water. She could only trust to luck. For an hour she fought the plane through.

Fleetingly she saw the moon. If she could only pull out on top of the clouds. She added throttle and applied back pressure to the stick. She watched her instruments. For thirty minutes the Vega climbed. Amelia felt the controls getting sluggish. The dial of the rate-of-climb indicator fell off. The wings were picking up ice. Slush now splattered on the windshield. Amelia checked the engine rpm’s. Like the altimeter, the tachometer now began to spin wildly. It had picked up ice from the freezing outside temperature. The stick and rudder became sloppy and unresponsive.

Suddenly one wing lurched up high and snapped over. The plane, heavy with ice, spun out of control down through the clouds to the ocean below. Amelia quickly jammed opposite rudder, drove the stick all the way forward, and slowly brought the nose of the plane up out of the dive. She looked out. The gun-metal waves of the Atlantic rose and fell less than a hundred feet beneath her. She inhaled deeply against the pounding of her heart.

Amelia continued to fly near the water, hoping the lower altitude would melt the ice. Then fog and clouds gathered and spread over the ocean. Without the altimeter she dared not fly that low, and she climbed again to what she hoped was a safer altitude: low enough to escape the ice and high enough to avoid the water.

She would have to depend on her remaining instruments to make it across. She did not look out of her cockpit again until morning. The Sperry directional gyrocompass became her savior. She believed in it and followed it. Setting the gyro every fifteen minutes to a new heading, she pursued it across the night and through the engulfing clouds. For Amelia, it was now a grim, dogged, and stubborn refusal to be overcome. As long as the Wasp engine kept firing, she would fly her plane. The last hours became the worst of the flight.

Toward dawn the exhaust manifold began to vibrate badly. Then the stinging odor of gasoline filled the cockpit. The gasoline gauges of the reserve wing tanks leaked drops of fuel on the floor by her feet. Her eyes and nostrils smarted from the strong smell. From about her neck Amelia brought her kerchief to her eyes and wiped away the tears.

Daylight finally dawned. Through the dim light Amelia found herself between two layers of clouds. Her eyes burned from the ordeal of the night and she rubbed them briskly with her hand. She fidgeted in her seat trying to relieve the stiffness and soreness. She rubbed her back against the back of the seat, and pressed her feet against the rudder pedals in an effort to stretch her legs. Below, the cloud layer began to break and clear. Amelia dropped down to examine the whitecaps; from the spray of the waves she hoped to determine the direction of the wind. She decided it was from the northwest.

Out on the leading edge of the wings she noticed ice. It had not yet melted from the heat of the morning sun. She climbed a little higher, but ran into another cloud bank. Suddenly she broke into the clear; the clouds were now below her, closely packed in clear white and looking like fields of snow she had once seen in New England. The upper layer of clouds began to thin out, and through an opening came the morning sun, blinding bright against the white snow of the clouds below.

Amelia reached into the pocket of her shirt, under the leather jacket, and took out a pair of dark glasses. Through the darkness 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 persisted. 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.

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 spreading 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 sloped upward. The tail skid hit, then the wheels. The Vega rolled to a quick stop at the top of the slope.

Amelia shut off the switch and locked the brakes. She was weary and tired but at the same time exhilarated and wide awake.

It was 1:45 P.M. Saturday, May 21. She had flown for fifteen hours and eighteen minutes.

13. _A Real Heroine_

It was not until after she had climbed up through the hatchway that Amelia noticed a cottage at the edge of the meadow. Flying over and making her passes she had not seen it.

A man came running out from the cottage. When he reached the plane, breathless, Amelia said to him, “I’m from America.”

It took awhile for the farmer to understand: a woman, from America, flying the Atlantic, all alone? He shook his head in disbelief.

As they walked to his cottage, Amelia learned that she had landed in Culmore, Ulster, near Londonderry, the city she had circled. There was no mistaking that she was in Ireland: the accent of the farmer, and his name, Patrick Gallagher, were sufficient proof. Amelia asked to be taken to the nearest telephone.

Gallagher commandeered a neighbor’s car and drove her to The Elms, the home of Mrs. Francis McClure, five miles down the road. Amelia put through her call.

“I did it!” she said to GP in New York; then she told him about the altimeter, and the tachometer, and the gas leak, and the broken manifold.

George Putnam thanked God that she had made it safely.

Amelia then returned with Gallagher to his home. He asked her if she were tired, if she wanted to sleep.

“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 Selfridge’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 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 Brooklands. Here she received the Certificate of Honorary Membership of the British Guild of Air Pilots and Navigators.

Luncheons, dinners, receptions, more awards and decorations followed. Amid all the fanfare Amelia said, “I realize this flight has meant nothing to aviation.” The remark went unnoticed; 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 magnificent display of useless courage.... The interest in such performances 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 glittering 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 engulfed 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.

“Hi!” 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.

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 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 comradeship 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 opportunities of life, and by a wish also to enlarge those opportunities 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 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, reaffirming 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 personal 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 becoming 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.

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 remaining 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 afternoon 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 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 gap-toothed 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 Farrington 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 mainland, 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 audience 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 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.

Paul Mantz dashed to the rear of the plane and removed a thick clod of mud and grass from the tail skid.

Amelia calmly appraised the scene outside. About two hundred people, it seemed, had gathered to watch her attempted take-off. She could see that many of them, particularly Wheeler personnel, were armed with fire extinguishers. The women had handkerchiefs in their hands: Amelia hoped she wouldn’t have to bring them to tears with a crash. The ground underfoot was wet and soggy from the rain. The wind sock hung limp; the prevailing northeast wind had not only failed to prevail, it was dead.

Down the runway she fixed her eyes at a point along the marker flags where she would chop throttle and jam on the brakes if she could not lift the plane off the ground. Beyond that point and the end of the 6,000 feet of runway she saw the fields of sugar cane, and diagonally across from them, into the distance, the mountain peaks cushioned in low-hanging clouds.

Out of the corner of her eye, to the left and down the field, she caught a glimpse of three fire engines and an ambulance. With everybody so pessimistic, she decided, the least she could do was try.

She opened the throttle and held the brakes hard. The plane shook and vibrated against the prop wash, blasting back against wings, fuselage, and tail. She released the brakes. The Vega started forward, slow, sluggish, heavy with the extra fuel tanks.

She could see Ernie Tissot running alongside the wing: his feet squashing in the mud, a dead cigarette drooping from his lips, his eyes flashing fear in a dead-white face. “Cheer up, Ernie!” she wanted to call to him over the noise of the motor. “It will soon be over.”

Paul Mantz stood along the side, next to one of the marker flags. “Get that tail up,” he shouted. “_Get that tail up!_”

The plane strained against the sucking mud and then began to roll, now faster, through the mud. Amelia saw the flags flapping in a wind, but it was just the opposite of what she needed; 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 excellent, nor because women cannot fly.”

The letter need not have been written. The women with handkerchiefs 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 outposts. 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 earphones, 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 interrupting 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 communicate 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 miles out; the ship was--it had to be--the _Maliko_, from the Matson Line.

Below, clouds now joined, knitted, and closed over the ocean. Ahead, the stars grew misty, dim, and distant. There was blackness everywhere, and dead ahead on course--rain.

Like pins, fine raindrops hit the windshield and spread in long, wet needles down the glass. Amelia squeaked open the cockpit window and breathed deeply of the cool wet air. The rain squalls continued for the next two hours.

Suddenly she realized that she was hungry and thirsty. She reached into the little cupboard she had prepared in the right wing. There, neatly stored against hunger, were water, tomato juice, sweet chocolate, malted-milk tablets, a thermos bottle of hot chocolate, and a picnic lunch. She decided on the hot chocolate. She unscrewed the top of the thermos, pulled out the cork stopper, and poured out a cupful. In short, quick sips, she drank the hot, sweet chocolate liquid. Its warmth spread through her and she felt good.

She set the empty cup down in the cupboard; then, changing hands on the stick, she rubbed and kneaded the muscles of her thighs and calves. They were stiff and tired. She could not look upon her legs for long without feeling a deep sense of thankfulness, for they invariably called up the image of those amputees she had seen in Toronto during the war. The experience had changed the course of her life.

15. _Nurse’s Aide in Toronto_

She had been nineteen at the time. It was in 1917, during the Christmas vacation of her senior year at Ogontz, the Philadelphia finishing school, when Amelia and her mother went to visit sister Muriel, who was attending St. Margaret’s in Toronto.

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 uniform. 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 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 discover 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 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 pilots and their planes to their man’s world of flight. She headed back to the city and to woman’s work at the hospital.

AE was still working as a nurse’s aide at the time of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, and at the time of the great Toronto Exposition a few months later.

Amelia and a friend joined the crowds that pressed through the fairgrounds to see the displays and exhibits. AE wanted especially to see a highly advertised added attraction: a demonstration of stunt flying by one of the returned aces of the war.

As the time drew near for the air acrobatics, the two companions settled themselves in the middle of a clearing. Suddenly they heard the plane. Shading their eyes against the afternoon sun, they looked up.

The plane was black against the sky, then red as it turned and the wings and fuselage caught the sun. The little plane twisted and turned and rolled; then it looped and spun down to the right. As the plane swooped down close to the ground, the crowd broke and ran like frightened deer.

The friend grabbed Amelia’s arm; she wanted to get out of the field, fast. Amelia stood her ground. The companion fled for safety.

Nose down and motor roaring, the plane hurtled headlong in a steep dive toward the lone girl in the middle of the clearing.

Amelia gripped her hips, spread her feet and planted them defiantly on the ground. No plane and pilot were going to scare her. She had seen them pull out of dives many times before. Certainly this pilot was no fool, and he seemed to have the plane fully under control.

The plane, a bare 200 feet from the ground, roared out of its dive, wings and struts shaking, and climbed in a tight half-loop back into the sky; now on its back, the plane kicked over in a half roll, then sped away, a disappearing speck on the horizon.

Amelia hadn’t moved an inch. And because she had faced it in that moment of danger, the plane had said something to her--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 instruments, 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 her ears. She wanted to be ready for the full brilliance of the morning sun.

Through the dark glasses she saw below her a solid overcast of clouds. They looked like the stiffly-beaten whites of eggs, and they made her think of breakfast. She reached into the cupboard in the right wing and pulled out a hard-boiled egg from the picnic lunch.

While she nibbled on the egg, she looked at one of the three chronometers she had set in Honolulu, the one for indicating lapsed time. She had been flying for fifteen hours, and according to her time and distance figures, she should be somewhere near San Francisco--if there had been no head winds during the night. Below, the ocean was blanketed in overcast.

The fog over the water began to break up. Through one of the holes she hoped to see signs of land, but she saw only water, blue in the morning sun, ruffled, and flecked with white. Then through another larger hole, she caught sight of a ship; from 8,000 feet it looked like a toy boat. Down through the opening Amelia plunged, and pulled out at 200 feet to investigate. She circled the ship several times, and discovered it was the _President Pierce_. The wake from the ship, which stretched for a mile, was exactly on her compass course. AE followed the foam as if it were a beam.

She tried to make radio contact with the ship, but was unsuccessful. She then tried radio station KPO in San Francisco and this time established contact. She asked for the position of _President Pierce_ and was told that the ship was 300 miles out from San Francisco. Amelia checked her map and grinned: that was exactly where the ship was supposed to be. Settling back in her seat, AE cruised at 1,500 feet and made straight for the coast.

She strained her eyes for sight of land. The clouds overhead played tricks on her: their shadows on the water looked exactly like islands. Amelia now wondered if real land would look like cloud shadows.

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.

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-breaking. On April 19 she flew 1,700 miles from Burbank, California, to Mexico City; then on May 8, from Mexico City to Newark, 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, sir!” 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 professional 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 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 burning 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 could see. It was no use. Suddenly she decided to make an emergency landing.

Amelia thought of Wiley Post, who could make a landing easily with one eye. He had learned to get along without depth perception in judging distances and lining up objects on the ground. Would that she had his ability now.

She circled, looking for a likely place; then she spotted what seemed to be a pasture. She swung down low and swept by in quick inspection. Unlike the time in Ireland when Gallagher’s cows fled in all directions at the sound of the plane, now the goats and cattle were placidly indifferent to the roaring plane, and the Irish green grass and shamrock were replaced by cactus and prickly pear.

Amelia fixed her good right eye on a patch of the pasture, swung a wing up in a steep turn, and eased the plane into the final approach. Reducing the throttle, she brought the stick back slowly, held the nose up, and dropped the tail skid then the wheels onto the ground. The plane clattered to a stop.

Cowboys and villagers sprang up as if out of nowhere and rushed to the plane. They were not at all surprised at seeing a woman pilot, at this time of the night, at such an unlikely place.

The vaqueros could not speak English and Amelia could not speak Spanish. Smiles and gesticulations served as the common tongue. One of the cowboys showed Amelia on her map where she was. He pointed to Nopala, then pointed down to the ground; a bright white smile broke across his dark skin. Amelia nodded, then noticed on the map that Mexico City was only about fifty miles away.

As she looked about around the plane, she could now see that what she had thought was a pasture was in fact the bed of a dry lake. Happily she noted as she walked up and down that the bed was flat and without obstructions for take-off. She hoped that the engine had now cooled down sufficiently so that she could make it to the capital city.

By waving her arms she tried to explain to the villagers that 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 more of their strivings and ambitions; she had seen enough, however, 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 obstructions 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 Mexican 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 makeshift runway. The job done, George then flew to New York to gather weather data from Doc Kimball, in order to advise his 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 Lockheed. 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 magnetoes. 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 she would need for the take-off from the dry lake bed. She smiled as she climbed to 8,000 feet. Again the plane had behaved beautifully. If there was one name she truly loved besides Earhart and Putnam, it was Lockheed. During the take-off run she had forced the Vega to stay on the mud flats until it developed a speed well over a hundred miles an hour; then it flew into the air by itself.

Amelia watched the altimeter until it indicated 10 on the dial, then she leveled off. She skimmed over the mountains surrounding the valley in which Mexico City lay. Together valley and mountains formed a large saucer and rim. Behind her Popocatepetl and Ixracihuatl mountains loomed; they seemed mighty, proud, majestic with their white-peaked crowns of snow. The rising sun flung its warmth over the dappled earth.

To Amelia, the tomboy of Kansas whom the magic of flight had transformed into an air adventurer astride Pegasus, the land below was a veritable fairyland of beauty. Like Alice through the looking glass she thrilled to each new sight. Like a taller Gulliver she looked down from 10,000 feet and strode on swift, unseen legs through a Lilliputian world of small green fields, narrow dirt roads, tiny adobe huts, bull rings that could be covered with a hand. They were the playthings of a child.

She crossed the divide. Thick clouds formed and stretched out over the Gulf. Briefly they parted and through them she saw a cluster of oil tanks. She checked her map and estimated that she was over Tampico. Applying right stick and rudder, she turned, leveled her wings, and took up a northeast heading. Straight ahead, across the Gulf of Mexico and 700 miles away, should be New Orleans.

Over the water, she remembered the warning of Wiley Post: “Amelia, don’t do it; it’s too dangerous.” She grinned and shook her head. Why, everything was fine! She scanned the instrument panel, listened to the steady purr of the motor. Fine indeed. She reached into the cupboard and unwrapped one of the peeled hard-boiled eggs. She ate the egg quickly; then she took out one of the thick sandwiches and the thermos bottle of water.

She munched, sipped, and mused. Wiley Post was right in a way. It would be safer to make long over-water flights in a bigger and better plane. Two engines would be ideal. Why, with a multimotored plane a pilot could fly anywhere. She rolled the paper wrapper from the sandwich into a tight little ball. She squeezed it hard in her hand, then popped it into the compartment in the left wing. Why, with a two-engined plane a pilot could fly--around the world! She settled back in her seat and pressed her shoulders against the bulkhead behind her. One day, perhaps. One more good, long flight. It would be the last. Then she could sit back, relax, and really write a good book about flying. The others, the articles and the books, had been done too hastily. She could do better.

Ahead she saw a ragged peninsula jutting out into the water; short, stubby fingers of land, then the long index finger. At the base of the notch formed by the thumb and index, a city. It must be New Orleans. She radioed in on the New Orleans frequency. She had made it; her dead reckoning had been right on the nose.

From New Orleans to Newark she could be in radio contact all the way. She reported in to Mobile, Montgomery, Atlanta, Charlotte, Richmond. She felt like a country telephone operator listening in on party lines, the conversations were so numerous and frequent on the way across the country. She looked out and watched the darkness cover the earth. She snapped on her navigation lights.

Successively, each of the cities as she looked down at the lights was a treasure of diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds. A thousand and one nights’ treasure that had been tipped over, spilled out, and spread over the black land. She thrilled to the sparkle and glitter.

At 9:05 P.M. she passed over Washington, D.C., and reported her position. Into her earphones came the voice of Eugene Vidal, her old friend from the Ludington Line. He came in loud and clear. “You’ve done enough,” he said. “You’d better land at 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 occasions 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 airport. With George were Paul Collins, AE’s other good friend 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 admiration 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.

19. _Purdue University_

“You are all a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein had said to Ernest Hemingway about him and the group of disillusioned postwar expatriates who lived in Paris. Hemingway had quoted her in _The Sun Also Rises_, published in 1926. The phrase “lost generation” became a touchstone of the times; in the early thirties it still persisted, but now included in one wide sweep all who were the young, the troublesome, the enigmatic.

In 1934 the New York _Herald Tribune_ held its annual conference; the topic: “Women and the Changing World.” Amelia Earhart was a guest speaker. In the audience was Dr. Edward C. Elliott, president of Purdue University. Up on the platform Mrs. William Brown Meloney rose to introduce the famous woman flier.

“I present to you,” Mrs. Meloney said, turning to AE, “evidence against a ‘lost generation.’ For I remind you that no generation which could produce Amelia Earhart can be called a lost generation. She has set a pace for those of her age and time. She has never been content to rest on her laurels. She has worked, and is working, and will continue to work hard to further the science to which she has dedicated her life.”

Amelia, thirty-six years old and born in the same year as Ernest Hemingway, sat uneasily as she listened to the introduction. She had been asked to discuss youth. Although she did not consider herself a member of the younger generation, she certainly did not consider it lost. She got up from her chair and walked to the speaker’s stand. Her voice was low and confident. The speech was short and to the point.

“It is true,” she said, after making the usual introductory salutations, “that there are no more geographical frontiers to push 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 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_ conference. 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 nevertheless 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 opportunities 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. “Something from outside the classroom.”

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 aeronautics. 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 “flying 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--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, notwithstanding 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 ironwork, 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 of college into your life work. I believe, under existing conditions, 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 admit it, she was also a romantic and a visionary. Like the skylark 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 proven himself the victor over the tallest peaks and has yet to climb Everest, so Amelia, who had triumphed over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and the North American continent, now would set out to conquer the one remaining adversary to her skill and courage--the world.