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.
PART THREE
_THE LAST FLIGHT_
1. _Crack-up in Hawaii_
Ironically, Amelia Earhart’s flight around the world was her last long
flight. “I have a feeling,” she had said to Carl Allen of the New York
_Herald Tribune_, “that there is just one more good flight left in my
system, and I hope this is it. Anyway, when I have finished this job, I
mean to give up major long-distance flights.”
Her plan was to girdle the earth at the equator on an east-to-west
flight. The time of departure was set for March, 1937.