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.