CHAPTER FOUR
In 1924, less than nine months after she received her FAI license, Amelia Earhart was hospitalized for another sinus operation. She was not only ill, she was broke. Almost twenty-seven, she had spent the last three years racing on a treadmill of multiple, menial jobs to pay for flying. It was a matter, she said, of “no pay, no fly and no work, no pay.” Her only financial help had come from her mother, who gave her the money for the little Airster from the sale of the Otis house in Atchison.
Amy Earhart had been spending capital as well as income ever since she gained control of her inheritance. By 1921 her capital had shrunk from more than sixty thousand dollars to twenty thousand dollars, at a time when a ten-room house could be built for ten thousand dollars. She decided to recoup her losses by investing in a gypsum mine managed by Peter Barnes, a young friend of Sam Chapman’s. It was a foolish venture, one in which both Edwin and Amelia became involved.
Edwin bought a used truck for Barnes. When it broke down he asked Amelia’s friend, Lloyd Royer, a master mechanic at Bert Kinner’s, for his advice. Amelia told Royer not to bother. “I think,” she said, “that Dad imagines all mechanically inclined gentlemenlike to play with broken-down automobiles.” The broken-down automobile was only one of the many misfortunes suffered by Barnes as he struggled to get all the gypsum he could out of the old mine before the rainy season began in February or March.
In January of 1922 Barnes told the Earharts that production had fallen behind schedule and asked for their help. Amelia and Edwin took the train to Las Vegas, where Barnes met them and drove them to the mine site. Amelia shoveled gypsum into one of the two trucks Barnes had and Edwin lifted sandbags to shore up the approach to a small bridge over a gulley that the trucks had to cross. While they worked, a rainstorm swept over the area, creating flash-flood waters that rushed down the gulley, washing away its banks. Amelia, Edwin, and two of Barnes’s friends who were helping load gypsum escaped over the bridge in one truck, but when Barnes followed in the second, the bridge collapsed and he was trapped in the overturned cab. Amelia wrote to Muriel at Smith College: “There is no way I can soften the blow for you. We have to take these things as they come. Peter is drowned, the mine irreparably flooded and all of Mother’s investment gone.”
During the next two years all the Earharts’ efforts to keep the family together and solvent failed. Muriel had to leave Smith at the end of her third year and take a teaching job in Huntington Beach. Amy Earhart gave up her attempt at reconciliation with Edwin and asked him for a divorce. By spring of 1924 both she and Muriel decided to return to New England where the latter had enrolled in summer school at Harvard. Amelia proposed to join her mother and sister there by flying the Airster to Boston. For once Amy flatly countermanded one of Amelia’s plans with one of her own—Amelia could drive her to Boston and Amy would pay travel expenses. Amelia accepted the offer.
Before she left California Amelia sold the Airster to a novice flyer who crashed the first time he took it up, killing himself and his passenger, a young university student. Cora Kinner said, “The kid must have frozen to the stick … we had to pry his hands away from it … It looked like a bombing … fire all over the boulevard.” Amelia thought the accident tragic but unnecessary, the result of ignorance and overconfidence on the part of the pilot.
With the money from her sale of the ill-fated Airster Amelia bought a car—not a cheap, practical Model T Ford like one Kinner lent her, but a 1922 Kissel Kar. A beautiful vehicle with a convertible top, big nickel headlamps, and a long, low, yellow body with black fenders, the car was the equivalent of a modern-day Alfa Romeo. The Kissel was named the Yellow Peril by its new owner, whose penchant for beauty preempted the threat of unemployment and unpaid bills. More aware of economic reality than Amy, Amelia was still her mother’s daughter, a member of the impoverished gentry. At Ogontz she copied a poem by “Moslin [sic] Eddin Saudi, Mohmmadan [sic] Sheik and Persian Poet”:
If thou of fortune be bereft
And in thy store be but two loaves left—sell one,
Buy hyacinthe to find thy soul.
The Kissel was her hyacinthe.
When she packed up for the trip east she took an odd collection of books and notes. One small notebook contained notes from her photography class at the University of California, Los Angeles, along with her thoughts on two widely different subjects:
Crossing a track while driving is much easier diagonally, i.e., so that each wheel strikes the raised surface at a different time—thus distributing and neutralizing the shocks. I think some kind of shock absorber could be devised on this principle. (Drawings later)
Sowing wild oats is putting cracks in the vase of our souls which can never be obliterated or sealed by love. As GBS [George Bernard Shaw] says, “Virtue does not consist in abstaining from vice but in not desiring it.”
The engineer and moralist also showed an interest in economic justice, copying this poem in another book:
Stupidity Street
I saw with open eyes
Singing birds sweet
Sold in the shops
For people to eat
Sold in the shops of Stupidity Street.
I saw in a vision
the worm in the wheat
And in the shops nothing
For people to eat;
Nothing for sale in Stupidity Street.
Ralph Hodgson
Amelia and Amy left Hollywood on a bright May day. Barely recovered from one operation and knowing another would be necessary as soon as she reached Boston, Amelia was determined to see something on the way. She drove to the Sequoia National Park, then to Yosemite and Crater Lake in early June. When Amy asked if they were ever going east, her daughter said, “Not until we reach Seattle.” After Seattle she drove to Banff, Alberta, and Lake Louise before crossing Calgary’s prairie land on her way to Yellowstone National Park where they arrived June 30. The seven-thousand-mile trip to Boston took six weeks. Two weeks later Amelia entered Boston General Hospital for more surgery. After her release she joined Amy and Muriel in Medford, a suburb of Boston, where Muriel was teaching at Lincoln Junior High.
The house Amy rented at 47 Brooks Street was a large, turn-of-the-century, two-storied structure. The neighborhood, so near the crowded, urban center of Boston, was very like the one Amelia had lived in as a child in Atchison. Its large houses were set back from the street with shrubs and flowerbeds in the front yard and vegetable gardens at the rear. Tall trees arched over streets where children played and friendly dogs roamed without leash or owner. Unlike the Ford and Chevrolet sedans parked in nearby drives, theYellow Peril left the neighborhood children awe-stricken.
While she recuperated, Amelia set about trying to raise money to pay some of her bills. In August she wrote to Lloyd Royer, who was building a plane with Monte Montijo at Kinner’s new field in Glenwood. Royer had sold the old Moreland truck for her, left from the Earharts’ ill-fated mining venture, but the buyer was slow in paying. “I certainly wish the gentleman would come across,” she wrote. “I need the money.”
In another letter to Royer she referred to an airplane motor she had left with Bert Kinner: “As long as I have that motor, I’ll have days when I just couldn’t sell it. Either I’ll have to let him [Kinner] sell it soon at any price or let you [Royer] take it and pull down the motor and fix it. Then we’ll think about building a plane for it.”
Before Amelia could think about another plane, Amy offered her the money for a second year at Columbia University and Amelia accepted, returning there in September of 1924. She renewed her friendship with Marian Stabler, who had become an insurance statistician after abandoning efforts to make a living as an artist. “This time she lived poorly,” Marian said, “and went without everything but essentials, in order to maintain the Kissel car, which she loved like a pet dog.”
Marian thought her old friend looked pale and tired. Her bobbed hair had darkened, its sheen dulled by illness and repeated use of a curling iron. Yet whenever she seemed near total exhaustion Amelia would take a twenty-minute nap and awaken completely rested. She was never too tired to discuss art, science, poetry, religion, or politics, but told Marian nothing of a personal nature. Not until years later, when she heard it from a Hollywood reporter, did Marian learn that Edwin Earhart was an alcoholic.
Marian’s parents had moved from their Manhattan apartment to a big house in Great Neck, Long Island, where their childrens’ friends came in droves from the city for dinner and dancing to records in the living room or a game of deck tennis on the porch. One of the regulars, Elise von R. Owen, a music student who was living “on a nickel a day” in the city, was fascinated by Amelia’s powers of concentration. After dinner she would withdraw from the crowd to a desk at the far end of the room where she studied, ignoring the noise of records and conversation. But she turned on the radio beside the desk to listen to classical music, which she told Elise helped her to concentrate.
Elise was not the only one to be impressed by Marian’s tall, quiet friend. On a night when Amelia and Marian were at a party given by a woman artist, another guest, the art director of an advertising agency, kept watching Amelia, who was sitting on the floor by the fire. The next time he asked the hostess to do an illustration for the agency he said, “I want a figure that’s really lovely. Someone like that Amelia Earhart.”
Amelia’s second year at Columbia was her last. Amy could no longer afford the tuition. After the three-time college dropout returned to Boston, she wrote to Marian: “No, I did not get into MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] as planned, owing to financial difficulties. No, I’m not coming back to New York, much, ah, much as I would like doing it. When I leave Boston, I think I’ll never go back.” In the fall of 1925 she found work of a sort, teaching English to foreign students for a University of Massachusetts extension program. Her wages for this part-time work were barely enough to pay for meals and gas for the Kissel.
Sam Chapman who had followed her back east and was working at the Boston Edison Company offered her an alternative to this hand-to-mouth existence when he proposed again. Not long after he returned, Amelia met Marian in the Boston train station, where they sat at the lunch counter waiting for Marian’s connection. It was one of the few occasions on which Amelia confided in anyone about her emotional reactions. “I don’t want to marry him,” she said. “I don’t want to marry anyone.”
She looked away from Marian and sighed. “There’s something the matter with me, Marian. I went to a doctor and he’s giving me pills. He said he’s going to be able to make me fall in love. I can’t. I just don’t want to.” She slowly turned her head and looked into Marian’s eyes, a sly grin widening into a broad smile. “But I’m taking my pills!”
The pills didn’t work, at least not for Sam. He thought perhaps his working schedule was objectionable and offered to change jobs. Amelia was not flattered; she was irritated. “I don’t want to tell Sam what he should do,” she told Muriel. “He ought to know what makes him happiest, and then do it, no matter what other people say. I know what I want to do and I expect to do it, married or single!” Sam continued to see Amelia but he still disapproved of working wives, while the woman he loved referred to marriage as “living the life of a domestic robot.”
It was evident from the clippings and notes Amelia kept adding to her scrapbook that she had not given up her hopes for a career:
A woman has now broken into the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. She is Miss Aleen Cust, sister of Sir Charles Cust, equerry to the King.
I note women are employed as testers in a French automobile factory—proving equal or superior to men.
One of the youngest trust busters is Miss Crena Sellers, now on the staff of U.S. Attorney Buckner here. She graduated from Yale Law School last September.
The supporter of careers for women looked for additional work for herself and found it in October, another part-time job, this one at Denison House, a settlement house in a Boston neighborhood of rundown tenements occupied by immigrants, most of whom were Chinese, Armenian, or Syrian and whose children were to be her charges. At first she captivated the children with her beautiful car in which she often gave them rides. But her obvious patience and affection for them soon aroused a deeper admiration. More companion than mother, Amelia played games with them, bandaged their playground wounds, taught them English, and visited their often chaotic and always impoverished homes. When Marian visited her once at Denison House she noticed Amelia’s “tenderness for children, even the occasionally smelly little children of the settlement.” Amelia assured her, “Chinese are an adorable people. You can’t realize it until you really know them.”
However, the surrogate big sister was also a serious and dedicated social worker. Forty years before Operation Headstart, she decided that “social service should be preventative rather than curative” and defined the ultimate goal of social work with children as giving them “a sound education.” Only with education could they “make adjustments to poverty, illness, illiteracy or any other morbid condition.”
At Denison House she was certain she had discovered a vocation and a career. The work was a practical expression of her basic beliefs, learned and accepted as a child. It was not enough to talk about social justice and charity. One must act. The children in her care needed help and she had the experience to give it. The former nurse could teach basic hygiene. The former office clerk could type. The scholar could write up reports and the teacher of English to foreign adults could teach it to their children. The Ogontz student had enough social poise to gain the approval of a board of directors. The aviator had already raised funds for the house by flying over Boston one spring day dropping leaflets for a benefit carnival to be held in Waltham. Already a friend and protégée of the director, Marion Perkins, in October Amelia became a fulltime staff member, moved into living quarters at the settlement house, and was elected secretary of the board.
Although Amelia worked five days a week at Denison House, she spent her weekends pursuing her “hobby” of flying. She had joined the local chapter of the National Aeronautic Association soon after her arrival in Boston. When her old friend and mentor, Bert Kinner, was looking for a sales outlet for his planes, one of the people he met in California was Harold T. Dennison of Quincy, Massachusetts, who was developing a commercial airport on land near the present-day Naval Reserve Air Base at Squantum. At Kinner’s suggestion, Dennison asked Amelia to become both Kinner’s sales representative at Dennison Airport and one of its stockholders. She accepted both offers and somehow scraped up the money for a few shares of stock.
In a newspaper report on the airport’s official opening, July 2, 1927, Amelia is described as a director of Dennison Corporation, the only woman on the flying staff, as well as a social worker at Denison House and professor of English in the State Extension Service (she continued to teach until her full-time employment at Denison House). A few days before the opening Amelia wrote to Marian Stabler: “Though I haven’t a real job for the summer [Marion Perkins did not hire her on a full-time basis until October] I am kept pretty busy doing things for Denison House and Dennison Airport. I am having a great time selecting hangings and furniture for the main hangar.”
The quiet, reserved woman Bert Kinner had picked to demonstrate his plane became an articulate, persuasive salesperson at the airport. Kinner flew there from Los Angeles the first week in September in a new plane he had just built, one with five cylinders.* He left the plane at Dennison with Amelia as his demonstrator-sales representative.
Bert was still having trouble with cylinders, one of which broke down during Amelia’s first demonstration. She wrote to him suggesting that he send some heavier ones for replacements and told him that a Boston man wanted to take the plane to New York to someone who could develop a good motor for it. She added: “May I report that you will make fittings that can’t be criticized aerodynamically on the next ship? If you do I think the game is almost won.”
On the same day Amelia wrote a second letter to Ruth Nichols, a woman flyer she had never met. A Wellesley graduate, Nichols was a member of the Junior League who played golf, tennis, hockey, and polo, and had driven automobiles, speed boats, and motorcycles. She had received her FAI license a year after Amelia and was later referred to by polar explorer Richard E. Byrd, along with Amelia, as one of the two who stood out among “a handful of women who shared in the hardships and perils of aviation pioneering.”
After introducing herself as a fellow FAI licensee, Amelia wrote, “What do you think of the advisability of forming an organization composed of women who fly?” There followed a list of questions as to who might be eligible before she closed: “Personally, I am a social worker who flies for sport, and am on the board of directors of an aeronautical concern. I cannot claim to be a feminist, but do rather enjoy seeing women tackling all kinds of new problems—new for them, that is.”
Amelia undoubtedly refused to “claim to be a feminist” because the term was perjorative to the majority of Americans who thought of feminists as marching, shouting eccentrics who were frequently chained to fences or jailed by police. Perhaps the word suggested to Amelia an unattractive woman who did not like men. Although male aviators often regarded their female counterparts as lightweights in the profession, the women were aviators nonetheless, partners in a camaraderie that Muriel thought remarkable atKinner Field. Without the men who built airplanes, Amelia could not pursue the “sport” of flying.
Pursue it she did, signing a contract for more lessons at twenty dollars an hour with Dennison Aviation Corporation on October 15, 1927. Notations on the contract show that she paid one hundred seventy-five dollars and logged four and two-thirds hours at unspecified dates. The remaining three hours due her are not accounted for. She had already written Kinner, asking him to estimate her total flying time in California, but seemed to do no better at keeping records of it in Boston.
In November she wrote Kinner again. There were potential buyers for his plane but she could not sell it until the motor had passed government tests. Meanwhile she worried about unscrupulous competitors: “What is to prevent anyone’s taking the dimensions of the Airster and constructing a ship from them and marketing that ship?… I wonder if you are safe in letting your product out here in the east unless you have a very strong organization to protect it?”
Amelia had planned to go to California that summer to learn more about Kinner’s new motor but her work with him was cut short by a telephone call in April. The caller was Capt. Hilton H. Railey, ex-Army pilot and public relations man. He wanted to know if she would fly the Atlantic. She suspected a publicity stunt, a followup on the solo flight of Charles A. Lindbergh less than a year before, but she agreed to an interview with Railey in his Boston office. She had to. If his offer was legitimate she—Amelia Earhart—would be the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane.
Lindbergh’s flight on May 20, 1927, had made him the most famous man in the world. There were four other crossings later that summer—Clarence Chamberlin and passenger Charles Levine from New York to Berlin; Commander Byrd, Bert Acosta, Bernt Balchen, and George Noville from New York to France; Edward Schlee and William Brock from Newfoundland to London; F. de Pinedo with del Prete and Zachetti from New Foundland to Portugal. None could challenge Lindbergh as America’s favorite hero who had just performed “the greatest feat of a solitary man in the records of the human race.” The handsome, modest, twenty-five-year-old, ex-airmail pilot was the personification of an American dream. “Romance, chivalry, and self-dedication—here they were,” author Frederick Lewis Allen wrote, “with the machinery of ballyhoo … ready and waiting to lift him up where everyone could see him.”
A master of that machinery of ballyhoo was George Palmer Putnam, grandson of the founder of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, publishers. It was Putnam who urged the new hero to write a postflight book, We, published by Putnam’s Sons. It was Putnam who instigated Railey’s call to Amelia Earhart. Putnam, who had also published Richard Byrd’s polar story, Skyward, heard that Byrd had sold his Fokker trimotor plane to an Englishwoman who wanted to cross the Atlantic in it. The person who knew her identity was said to be a lawyer, David T. Layman.
Putnam went to Layman, who told him the buyer was a client, Amy Phipps Guest, heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune and wife of the former British Air Minister, Frederick E. Guest. Putnam then asked Railey to check on the plane, which was at the East Boston Airport. If the story was true, he told Railey, they might “crash the gate” and manage the flight of the first woman to cross the Atlantic by plane.
Both men soon learned that Mrs. Guest’s family had refused to let her make the flight and that she had decided she wanted another woman to try, provided her substitute were “the right sort of girl.” Layman entrusted Putnam and Railey to find him one, a woman who was a flier (which Mrs. Guest was not), well educated, with a pleasing appearance and manners acceptable to the English as well as to the less demanding American public.
Railey asked a friend, Rear Adm. Reginald K. Belknap, if he knew of anyone who might qualify. Belknap did. “A thoroughly fine person,” he said, whom he had seen at lectures sponsored by the Boston NAA. “I noticed her,” he told Railey, “because she was always there and seemed so much in earnest.… She said she had been flying about four years then and was still doing a little at Dennison Airport.” Her name, he said, was Amelia Earhart.
From the moment Amelia walked into his office Railey knew she was “the right sort of girl.” “Her resemblance to Colonel Lindbergh was extraordinary. Most of all I was impressed by the poise of her boyish figure. Mrs. Guest had stipulated the person to whom she would yield must be ‘representative’ of American women. In Amelia Earhart I saw not only their norm but their sublimation.”
Although Railey was certain she would be perfect, he explained that the decision would be made by others at a second interview in New York. When he asked her to keep the plan a secret, Amelia said she would have to ask her supervisor, Marion Perkins, for time off from Denison House but assured him that Miss Perkins could be trusted.
Miss Perkins gave her a two-week leave and a promise of confidentiality. To her family Amelia said nothing except that she was going to New York and would be staying with Marian Stabler. Nor did she confide in her hostess during the brief visit. Her thank you note written six weeks later said, “You may grant me pardon when you hear, in a little while, what all this mysterious business is.… Yes, my performance in New York was successful—at least, it gives me a chance at success of a kind.”
For the interview Amelia went to the office of Putnam, who told his secretary to have her wait in the outer office. She made no effort to disguise her irritation when the handsome, forty-one-year-old, publisher-promoter came out to greet her. Nor was she overly impressed by the electric tension and instant charm directed at her by this tall, broad-shouldered man in the well-cut suit. There were four persons at the interview—Mrs. Guest’s brother, John S. Phipps, Layman, Railey, and Putnam, who was already in charge of the project. After explaining that the trimotored Fokker was to be named Friendship as a symbol of goodwill between Mrs. Guest’s native and adopted countries, the committee asked a battery of questions, Amelia said in her account of the meeting:
Was I willing to fly the Atlantic?
In the event of disaster would I release those in
charge of of all responsibility?
What was my education—if any?
How strong?
How willing?
What flying experience?
What would I do after the flight?
Amelia was told that Wilmer Stultz, test pilot for one of Byrd’s planes, would be paid twenty thousand dollars to fly the Atlantic flight and the mechanic, Louis Gordon, five thousand. There would be no reward for her except for opportunities in aviation that she might be offered after a successful crossing. Fees for newspaper stories she wrote would be put back in the operating fund. Accepting those terms, Amelia made some requests of her own. She wanted to check the equipment and to meet the pilot. She also wanted to do some of the flying on the trip. Returning to Boston, she reported to Marion Perkins, “I found myself in a curious situation. If they did not like me at all or found me wanting in many respects, I would be deprived of the trip. If they liked me too well, they might be loath to drown me. It was, therefore, necessary for me to maintain an attitude of impenetrable mediocrity.”
After the interview she said Putnam had escorted her to the train station. He talked all the way, telling her about his young son, David Binney Putnam, who had accompanied him on a trip to Greenland and written a book about it for juvenile readers. Amelia thought him an interesting man but was amused by how quickly he hustled her aboard the train without offering to pay for her return ticket.
Two days later she received a note and formal agreement from Mrs. Guest. Amelia was to be captain of the flight; her decisions, once aboard, to be final. Any money from royalties or advertising would be turned over to the operating fund.
Amelia signed the agreement and returned it promptly. She knew how dangerous the flight would be. Since Lindbergh’s crossing the previous May, fourteen persons attempting the flight had been lost at sea, three of them women. The last, the Honorable Elsie Mackay, an Englishwoman accompanied by Capt. Walter Hinchcliffe, disappeared somewhere over the Atlantic within days of Amelia’s interview in New York. A fourth woman, American Ruth Elder, accompanied by George W. Haldeman, had survived an unsuccessful attempt when they were plucked from the sea by the crew of a Dutch freighter three hundred miles northeast of the Azores.
Amelia’s decision did not surprise Marion Perkins. Not long after she came to work for Perkins at Denison House Amelia gave Perkins a poem she had written, entitled “Courage.”
Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not, knows no release
From little things.
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can
Hear the sound of wings.
How can life grant us boon of living, compensate
For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate
Unless we dare
The soul’s dominion? Each time we make a choice, we pay
With courage to behold resistless day
And count it fair.
It was not a very good poem, almost sophomoric in its disdain for the mundane, but to Perkins and, later, to others who knew her, the poem was the essence of Amelia. She could not and would not live a conventional life. Her objectives were empyrean—to go where no one had gone and to do what no one had done. If to dare was to die, then she would die.
Once committed to the flight, she wrote a will listing her debts, mostly medical bills of a little over one thousand dollars, and her assets, one government bond, the Kissel Kar, and stock in Kinner Airplane and Dennison Airport companies. Amy was to receive anything remaining after settlement of Amelia’s debts. Amelia closed the will with, “My regret is that I leave just now. In a few years I feel I could have laid by something substantial, for so many new things were opening for me.”
She also wrote a letter to each of her parents, to be opened only if she were dead. To her father she said,
Hooray for the grand adventure! I wish I had won, but it was worth while anyway. You know that.
I have no faith we’ll meet anywhere else, but I wish we might.
Anyway, goodbye and good luck to you.
She omitted her doubts about heavenly reunions in the one to her mother:
Even though I have lost, the adventure was worth while. Our family tends to be too secure. My life has really been very happy, and I didn’t mind contemplating its end in the midst of it.
Amelia gave the letters to Sam Chapman, the only other person besides Marion Perkins in whom she confided her plans. The will was in a safety deposit box at Medford Bank, the key left with Sam. She also asked him to tell Amy and Muriel about the flight immediately after the Friendship left Boston.
To Hilton Railey she wrote, “I appreciate your forbearance in not trying to ‘sell’ the idea, and should like you to know I assume all responsibility for any risk involved.” When Railey’s wife, Julia, urged her to back out of the agreement just before theFriendshiptook off, Amelia replied, “No, this is the way I look at it. My family’s insured; there’s only myself to think about. And when a great adventure’s offered you—you don’t refuse it, that’s all.”
* The flight of thirty-five hundred miles took Kinner 16 days, from August 19 to September 3.