coaster she disapproved strongly. Young girls just didn’t do those
things. They stayed at home and sewed and learned how to cook. “Why,”
Grandmother Otis used to say to Amelia and Muriel, “the most strenuous
thing I ever did as a girl was to roll a hoop in the public square.”
Despite Grandmother’s remark, the girls would scamper hand in hand
through the paths from the bluff down to the river where they would
search the caves for arrowheads and play Pioneers and Indians. One day
when they had returned from such an adventure, Mrs. Earhart looked at
her daughters’ dirty pinafores and decided they needed costumes more
in keeping with their play. Amy Otis bought for her girls some new gym
suits. The neighborhood was shocked. Amelia and Muriel were delighted:
now they could climb on the back of the cow in the barn, or play
baseball and basketball, and never worry about tearing their dresses.
Amelia and Muriel attended the College Preparatory School in Atchison.
Of her days at grammar school Amelia wrote later: “Like many horrid
children, I loved school, though I never qualified as teacher’s
pet. Perhaps the fact that I was exceedingly fond of reading made
me endurable. With a large library to browse in, I spent many hours
not bothering anyone after I once learned to read.” But there was
some difficulty with her mathematics teacher, Sarah Walton, who had
insisted that Amelia put down all the steps she went through to arrive
at her answers if she expected to win honor prizes at the end of the
term. Amelia didn’t care about the honors: she knew she could work the
problems in her head, and it was a waste of time to put the steps down
on paper.
Early in her life Amelia revealed a mind that was inventive, original,
and stubborn. She was bright and inquisitive about everything. Her
parents encouraged her interest in books and took turns reading aloud
from Scott, Dickens, George Eliot, and Thackeray. The reading habit
became ingrained, and later, when Amelia and Muriel helped in the
housework, instead of both of them doing it together, one would read
while the other worked. One of Mr. Earhart’s favorite games with his
girls was to spring words on them which they had to define without
running to a dictionary.
Edwin Earhart, much like Lincoln in stern appearance and with gentle
and pervasive humor, was unusually open-minded about his girls and
what they wanted to do. He did not think he should keep his daughters
in school at all costs. Sometimes he took Amelia and Muriel with him
on his trips for the railroad--to Kansas City, Des Moines, St. Paul,
Chicago--thinking the visits as educational as classes in school. He
also took the girls along whenever he went on a fishing jaunt. For such
things as a lunar eclipse he would let them stay up late at night. And
Amelia never forgot the one occasion in 1910 when she saw Halley’s
comet.
“Anything unusual is educational,” Amy Earhart said, supporting her
husband’s views. And the girls, dressed in their dark-blue flannel
suits and their “shocking” full-pleated bloomers, collected the unusual
and did the unusual. They added toads and spiders and chameleons to
the collection of Indian arrowheads. They cooked and baked at the oven
outside, and Amelia, forever the experimenter, once tried to make the
manna she read about in the story of Moses. She was convinced that it
was a cross between a popover and angel-food cake. Whenever she was
asked why she wanted to do such things, her answer was always the same:
“Because I want to!” The reply may have been unsatisfactory, but she
used it all her life--for her ungirl-like interest in house painting,
working metal, taking mechanical gadgets apart and putting them
together again, and flying an airplane around the world. These were the
things she wanted to do.
But nothing was more enjoyable than the new flat sleds with steel
runners that Mr. Earhart bought the girls for Christmas, 1905, when
Amelia was a round-faced, towheaded girl of seven. As soon as she heard
that the hill nearby was covered with snow, she rushed out to try her
new sled--a “belly whopper,” she called it. When Amelia and Muriel
reached the slope, the other neighborhood girls were sitting on their
old-style upright sleds with wooden runners. Amelia noted that her
sled was much more practical; it was a sled you could steer this way
and that. She made a running start and thumped onto the sled. Down the
steep slope of the hill she swooped, blinking, her wet eyes whipped
by the icy wind, feeling the cold rush into her nostrils. Suddenly
a junkman’s cart labored out of a side street at the bottom of the
hill. Amelia shouted to the driver, but he did not hear. The horse,
plodding carefully across the icy patches on the road, had blinders
on and could not see her. It was impossible for Amelia to stop and
too dangerous for her to go off the side of the road into the ditch.
With presence of mind born of necessity, she coasted on straight,
then carefully guided the sled by the steering bar up front, and shot
through the underside of the horse, between his front and back legs.
The tomboy way to sled had saved her life.
Despite the disapproval of his mother-in-law, Mr. Earhart continued to
give his girls what they wanted to play with, and they wanted to play
with footballs, baseballs, and basketballs.
Amelia loved strenuous games and she tried them all. She rebelled at
the idea that they were not proper exercise for girls. That made her
nearly as mad as some of the stories she read: the heroes were always
boys. “Exercise of all kinds gave me intense pleasure,” she said
later in her life, after she had become an accomplished equestrienne.
“I might have been more skillful and graceful if I had learned the
correct form in athletics. I could not get any instruction, so I
just played and acquired a lot of bad habits.” She had always wanted
to ride a horse, and she would climb onto the back of any nag that
stopped in front of her house for a delivery. The most fun was riding
the heavy-footed sorrel that pulled the butcher’s wagon. He bucked
with devilish determination for no reason at all, and Amelia was often
unseated.
Her favorite horse was a neighbor’s mare named Nellie. Nellie’s owner
kept her in a small, hot, confining shed near the Otis property.
Whenever Nellie, tormented by flies, would kick her heels at the sides
of the shed, her owner would beat her with a buggy whip. Amelia hated
the neighbor for his cruelty, and often tried to calm the horse with
cubes of sugar before Nellie’s clattering and banging aroused her
master.
One day, in the summer of 1906, Amelia and Muriel watched the neighbor
saddle and mount Nellie. The girls glared as the rider reined his
horse in tight. They followed horse and rider as they moved into the
street. Suddenly Nellie reared and bucked high into the air. The owner
shouted, cursed, and beat the animal with his riding crop. Nellie
reared again and bucked higher. The owner tumbled off and fell to the
ground in a wild heap. Nellie galloped off to the end of the driveway,
then raced to the foot of the street, to the narrow bridge over a
little stream. The horse was cornered and bewildered. In defiance she
jumped over the railing of the bridge into the rocky stream below. The
next day the broken body of the horse was found near the milldam a mile
below the bridge.
It was an experience Amelia never forgot, and in later years she loved
to read Vachel Lindsay’s poem, “The Bronco That Would Not Be Broken of
Dancing.” It always reminded her of Nellie.
Amelia greatly admired spirited animals, and perhaps even as a young
girl she learned something of her own nature from them. There was much
of the untamed and the unrestrained in herself and she resented what
she considered unnecessary restrictions.
In 1907 her family moved to Des Moines, Iowa, and she saw her first
airplane. She remembered the exact day she saw the plane; it was at the
Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, on July 24, her ninth birthday.
Amelia and Muriel were enjoying the merry-go-round and the pony rides,
but Mr. Earhart was impatient to see the airplane, which, it had been
advertised, was going to give a demonstration flight. Ever since he had
read about Wilbur and Orville Wright, who only four years ago had flown
successfully from the sand dunes at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Edwin
Earhart had wanted to see a plane, especially see one fly. But his
daughters wanted another pony ride, and after that he had to buy them
some paper hats. Mr. Earhart obliged, but only after they promised him
they would go directly to the flying field.
Later, Amelia remembered looking beyond the fence to the airplane. She
thought it was an ugly thing of rusty wire and wood. It had two wings,
one above the other, and between the wings at the center a man sat with
goggles over his eyes and with his feet on a crossbar. Just behind the
man was a motor with a big wooden propeller. The tail looked like a
large box kite. An assistant spun the propeller. The motor sputtered.
Slowly the plane rolled over the ground on its small wheels; then it
moved faster. All of a sudden it rose into the air.
A woman who was standing beside Amelia took her arm and said, “Look,
dear. It flies!” But Amelia was more interested in the ridiculous paper
hat she was wearing, which looked like an inverted peach basket and had
cost fifteen cents.
5. _Over the Atlantic_
AE shook her head and looked out the small square window in the side
door of the _Friendship_. She wondered what the implications were of
her nine-year-old disinterest in that early airplane. Certainly now,
as she had for many years, she hated hats and loved airplanes. Why
the exact opposite in attraction repulsion, why the substitution in
meaningful symbols, why the clean and clear-cut reversal? She did not
trouble herself for the answers; she took out her log and made some
quick entries:
140 mph. 3,600 feet. Mist and fog, white from the afternoon sun
churn in the props. 4:15 P.M. It is cold in the cabin and colder
outside. Bill Stultz has picked up XHY _Rexmore_, a British ship,
which gives him a bearing--48 North, 39 West, 20:45 GMT. The HXY
has promised to give New York the _Friendship_’s position.
Amelia knelt beside the chart table, drinking in the color from the sun
splashing on the mist, fog, and clouds. Cloud peaks tinted pink from
the setting sun towered in the distance; their hollows were gray and
black. The mist on the arc of the props combined with the sun into
three bright rainbows. The pink exhausts from the three motors matched
the pink of the cloud peaks. The plane sank in the fog to 4,000 feet.
They were 1,096 miles out from Trepassey.
It was night. Cloud, mist, and fog combined. Ten o’clock. Amelia
tried to write in the dark by using the thumb of her left hand as the
starting point of a line. The words were uneven on the logbook but
distinct:
How marvelous is a machine and the mind that made it. I am
thoroughly occidental in this worship. Bill sits up alone. Every
muscle and nerve alert. Many hours to go. Marvelous also. I’ve
driven all day and night and know what staying alert means.
Bill climbed to get over the fog and roughness. Five thousand feet.
There was another mountain of fog to climb. Six thousand feet. The
north star was reflected in the wing tip. Three fifteen A.M. More
mountains of fog had to be scaled. Bill gave the plane all she had.
Nine thousand feet. Ten thousand feet. Since Trepassey the _Friendship_
had been in the air thirteen hours and fifteen minutes, despite the
four-hour advance in clock time. Periodically, Slim Gordon focused a
flashlight on the compass so Bill could take a reading.
Stultz had to fly his plane now completely by instruments. He decided
to go down through the fog. He began slowly, then more quickly, down to
5,000 feet. Amelia’s ears hurt from the rapid descent. Water streamed
on the windows. The left motor started to cough, then the other two.
Bill opened the throttles wide, trying to clear the cylinders.
Three thousand feet. The left motor still sputtered. Slim took over
the controls, while Bill came back to try the radio. It was dead.
Everlasting clouds were everywhere. It began to get lighter as the
day dawned. The plane came down through an opening in the clouds.
Everything in the cabin slid forward, Amelia with it. She thumped
against the forward bulkhead. That sensation again. She grinned, then
smiled broadly. The story of her life could be given in forward slides.
The roller coaster, the belly whopper, the Columbia dome. It seemed
that she had always been coming down from altitude, after seeking the
highest point of woodshed, street, or building and exulting to the
thrill of quick descent.
6. _Premed at Columbia_
Amelia studied hard and long at Columbia. She had enrolled in the
fall of 1919, when she was twenty-one, as a premedical student. After
having been a nurses aide in Toronto during the war, she decided to try
medicine as a possible profession. She took all the courses ending in
“ology,” and chemistry and physics; and she treated herself to a luxury
course in French literature.
Marian Stabler, a close friend at the time, was amazed at the number
of credit hours that AE was carrying. “This course she was taking,”
Miss Stabler writes, “was really a three-man job, with the full quota
at Barnard, and listening courses elsewhere. Apparently Columbia and
Barnard didn’t compare notes, as she wouldn’t have been permitted to
carry a load like that if anyone had known. She could only manage
it because there was little homework or preparation in the science
courses.”
But Amelia found time to give free rein to her exploratory nature. As
she had adventured into the caves along the shores of the Missouri
River below the Otis house, so now she had to investigate every nook of
the underground passageways at Columbia. She would go down the steps to
the basement of Hamilton Hall, enter through a heavy door, follow the
maze of steam pipes wherever they led, and, happily surprised, come out
at Schermerhorn Hall on the other side of the campus.
One Thursday evening at about eight o’clock in the summer of 1920
Amelia, seeking unusual diversion on the one night off she allowed
herself during the week, decided to climb to the top of the Columbia
library dome. Somehow she had managed to borrow the key that would
admit her up the winding stairs.
Impatient to be off, she ran up the long, wide steps in front of Low
Library. She brushed past the bronze statue of Alma Mater and puffed up
more steps to the library door.
Once inside, she walked past the check-out desk and around to the
northwest flight of stairs. She climbed the steps to the fourth floor,
and came out on one side of the rotunda. There before her on the north
parapet were the more than life-size statues of Euripides, Demosthenes,
Sophocles, and Augustus Caesar. She turned to the door and unlocked it.
She took the steps of the spiral staircase two at a time. She pushed
open the door and entered onto the narrow walkway at the base of the
dome. Gripping the railing that went around the top, she took a deep
breath. The view was marvelous, but not so good as it could be at the
very top. She now crawled on her hands and knees up the smooth rounded
arches to the peak.
Sitting there and looking out over the city which was veiled in the
half light of dusk, she felt a warm excitement spread through her body;
then suddenly coupled to the warmth, as she caught sight of Alma Mater
far below, a quick chill pierced the base of her spine. She grinned:
this same mixture of feelings had gripped her before. She had them as a
girl when she first tried the roller coaster and when she had coasted
down the hill on the belly whopper and nearly hit the junkman’s horse.
And in Toronto, when she thrilled to the sight of the pilots taking off
in the snow and was suddenly seized with fear. It was a question of
which feeling would overcome the other.
As before, she waited for the warmth to overtake the chill; then calmly
she drank in the view of New York at night as lights turned on against
the enveloping darkness. To the left on Amsterdam Avenue was an angel
perched against the sky on the highest point of the cathedral of
St. John the Divine. Trumpet raised, the angel sounded a flourish of
unheard celestial music to unhearing earthly ears below.
To the right, Broadway stretched downtown into the night as far as she
could see. She swung around on the peak and looked up the Hudson to the
dock at 125th Street. The ferry was on its way across to New Jersey.
The ferry made her think of Sundays when she liked to ride across
the river and go for hikes along the Palisades. It was as much fun
as Atchison had been. Now Atchison was all over. Grandfather and
Grandmother Otis had died and the property had been sold. Amelia’s
father and mother were now living in California; they had been urging
her to come out there so they could be together. Mr. Earhart had left
the railroad and gone into private practice, first in Kansas where he
was eventually raised to a judgeship, and now in Los Angeles where with
a partner he had opened a law office. “Dear Parallelepipedon,” her
father’s last letter had begun. Perhaps the big word for a solid of six
sides was both a description and a prediction. In later life she looked
on herself as having been successively student, nurse, teacher, social
worker, clothes designer, and ultimately flier.
She would like to see California, she mused. Columbia had been
interesting, but she didn’t feel that she really wanted to be a doctor,
after all. She had liked the courses as such, and the lab work. And she
had enjoyed feeding orange juice to the white mice and dissecting the
cockroaches. But visions of the practical application of medicine, the
actual dressing of wounds and the sewing of stitches, sickened her.
For a few more minutes she sat on the top of the dome and breathed
deeply of the clear night air. Then she slid down to the walkway,
opened the door, and clattered down the metal spiral staircase.
Back outside, she stopped at the statue of Alma Mater and for no
reason climbed into her lap. That it was an irrational thing to do,
she readily admitted, but she liked to do silly things once in a
while. She decided to walk for a few blocks down Broadway. She turned
the corner at 116th Street. Campus couples were walking arm in arm up
Broadway and down the side streets to Riverside Drive. She walked in
long, even strides, moving with the easy, unconscious grace of the
natural athlete.
“The girl in brown who walks alone.” She remembered the inscription
under her picture in the high-school yearbook. She had cried over it
when she had shown it to her mother; the tag line had been unkind but
true.
She blinked her eyes quickly at the memory. She could not be like those
other girls who clung to boys as if they were gods or something. It was
worth it to be different and go it alone and do what one wanted to do.
7. _Land!_
“Going it alone,” Amelia repeated the phrase to herself, alone in the
passenger compartment of the _Friendship_, a lone woman, the first
woman in history on a transatlantic flight. She looked up and forward
to the two men flying the plane. Bill was nosing down again, and Lou
was gazing intently out his side window. AE walked carefully up to the
cockpit. Twenty-five hundred feet. Eight fifty A.M. Lou Gordon pointed
out to the right. Two ships!
One of them was the S. S. _America_. Lou took over the controls as Bill
Stultz went back to try to make radio contact with the ships; but the
radio failed to operate. How could he get a position?
The _Friendship_ dropped down and circled the _America_. Bill scribbled
a note. Amelia attached it to an orange, put both in a paper bag, and
aimed through the opened hatchway for the deck of the _America_. The
combination of speed, movement of the ship, wind, and lightness of the
bag made the bombing a failure. A second attempt failed.
An alternative plan was suggested: should they try to land near the
ship, get a position report by voice, then try to take off again? The
rough sea would make a landing difficult, a take-off impossible. Bill
tried again, but in vain, to receive a message on the radio. What to do?
They decided to trust their earlier course determination, and turn
back to retrace the twelve-mile detour they had made to circle the
_America_. They had to trust their own original judgment. They had only
one hour of fuel left.
At this low point of desperation Lou Gordon, smiling as if there were
nothing to be alarmed about, came back for a sandwich. He tore off the
wrapper--another ham sandwich--and crawled back to the cockpit. Amelia
liked his easy manner. She looked out: the cloud ceiling was low and
the visibility limited. Bill headed the plane down to 500 feet.
Suddenly a fishing vessel came into view, then a fleet of them. The
fliers happily noticed that the course of the boats paralleled the
course of the _Friendship_. The gasoline tanks were emptying fast.
Amelia guessed that there must be land near, but where? She scanned the
horizon, hoping.
Then a nebulous blue shadow appeared through the fog. Was it another
mirage of fog, a deceptive cloud formation? Slim Gordon studied the
shape, then threw his sandwich out the window and screamed.
“Land!”
Bill Stultz smiled. He had brought the _Friendship_ across the
Atlantic. To Ireland or England, he did not know which, but he had
found land.
Soon several islands appeared, then a coast line. Bill worked the plane
in close and cruised along the coast, looking for a good place to bring
the Fokker down. There was not much fuel left. He decided to land.
Circling a factory town, he chose a stretch of water beyond it. He
landed beautifully, and taxied to a buoy a short distance away.
They had been in the air for twenty fretful hours and forty exciting
minutes. Now they safely rode the waves at Burry Port, Wales, looking
for a stir of recognition from the earth they had so defiantly left.
8. _A Sack of Potatoes_
Three thousand miles from home and only a half mile from the Welsh
shore, the _Friendship_ lay anchored to a heavy buoy, secure in the
swift-moving tide. Amelia stood in the square open doorway of the
fuselage, gripped the side, and looked out. She saw three men working
on the railroad along the shore; she waved her hand in greeting. The
men looked up, walked down the shore, cast an unbelieving glance at
the big seaplane, then turned their backs and went back to work.
Carmarthenshire of South Wales was unimpressed.
Time passed. The _Friendship_ strained at the rope Lou Gordon had used
to fasten the plane to the buoy. It started to rain. Sheets of water
hit and spread over the Fokker. Pilot, copilot, and passenger stared
out from the doorway, frantically waved their arms, cupped their hands,
and hollered in vain. Slim crawled out again onto one of the pontoons,
and screamed at the top of his lungs. Gray smoke swirled from the
factory stacks of the town, his only answer.
Amelia took out a white towel from the crew’s common duffel bag and
waved it at the shore. A man near the railroad took off his coat,
playfully waved back, put it on again, and returned to his work.
An hour went by. Finally, a boatload of policemen rowed out to the
anchored plane. Other boats, full of the now curious, followed.
The chief of the policemen spoke first. “You be wantin’ somethin’?” he
asked.
“We’ve just come from America,” the fliers answered.
“Have ye now?” The chief was indulgent if not credulous. “Well, we wish
ye welcome, I’m sure.” The policemen rowed back to shore, apparently to
make arrangements for the sudden visitors.
Several hours passed before the crew could disembark from the
_Friendship_. Rowboats and sailboats came out to meet the plane. The
few railroad workers were now convinced that something momentous had
happened; they quickly passed the word, and the curious began to
gather, in hundreds, then thousands.