PART ONE
Life.
And so, on with the voyage or our lives, a voyage
that we make in general by dead reckoning, for we
have scant time to take an altitude.…
D.B.P.
1
I OFTEN DREAM I AM FLYING.
My grandmother must have felt she was dreaming that hot August day in 1928 when, seated behind her close friend Amelia Earhart, she rose up from the ground at Bowman Field on the wings of a small Avro Avian airplane. In one way, the two adventurers had much in common. In another, they were light-years apart. I love the one photo taken just minutes before they took to the sky, my grandmother standing confidently next to the silver biplane. She was a beautiful woman, tall and slim. On that day she was relaxed and radiant, her face lit up with the thrill of the impending flight.
Amelia was wearing goggles, as she peered down from the open cockpit. A silk scarf circled her long neck. A waif of a woman, both boyish and feminine, she was proudly waiting to share her skills with the elegant Dorothy Binney Putnam.
I can imagine the deafening roar of the plane’s engine; the sensation of being pulled from the seat with each banking turn. My grandmother must have clutched the sides in anticipation, but she was a fearless woman, and like Amelia, addicted to risk.
They had met two months earlier when my grandfather George Palmer Putnam asked my grandmother to join him in Boston to await the departure of Amelia’s historic flight in the Friendship across the Atlantic. The thirty-one-year-old flyer had soared into worldwide fame by becoming the first woman to fly the Atlantic on June 18, 1928. During the following six weeks she was a house guest at the Putnam home in Rye, where she was to write a book about her daring exploit. The first typed draft was finished just the night before her morning flight with my grandmother, making their joint airborne adventure a special celebration.
Speeding toward the airfield down an almost deserted road, they could taste the salty air wafting in from Long Island Sound. Dorothy had put the top down on her new yellow roadster before leaving home. She had been driving her own car for years, almost always a convertible, and loved the feeling of power and freedom, for she lived in a time when well-bred young women were afforded few outlets for such pleasure.
The pair of tousle-haired dreamers racing toward excitement were lively portraits of Americana. Dorothy, at the age of forty, was five foot ten, blessed with a strong, athletic figure and intelligent blue eyes. Amelia, at five nine, was more willowy. Both had cropped hair, as was the latest fashion, and were fond of loose-fitting, flowing drop-waist dresses and cloche hats.
These spirited young women were living proof of the thrill-seeking 1920s. Dorothy had flown many times before, but this would be the first time she had flown in Amelia’s Avro Avian. However, that was not the only thing on her mind this glorious day.
Her high-profile marriage was beginning to unravel.
As far as she was concerned, it was hardly a passionate union, and over the past few years she and George Putnam had inexplicably drifted in opposite directions. “Oh, for years, it’s been so antagonistic. I can’t imagine looking at him with longing or desire. And yet I am passionate and demonstrative. Why, oh why should I want another’s touch and embrace!”
George Palmer Putnam—of G. P. Putnam’s Sons publishing house—was acting as agent and publisher for the young flying celebrity. Dorothy sensed that George had fallen for Amelia’s youthful charm and carefree good looks, a suspicion that raised a mixture of jealousy and relief. For she herself had fallen passionately in love with her son’s tutor over a year ago. She and the younger man had been able to keep the affair secret, but the strain of leading a double life was beginning to wear on her.
On this day, the exhilaration of flight masked any uncertainty she felt about her future. The flight at dawn was a memorable occasion. Riding in the open cockpit with the sun’s first rays warming her face, Dorothy wore a windblown grin. Peering down through airtight goggles, the two flyers studied the patchwork of farms and pastures below, passing directly over the rooftop and gardens of Dorothy’s Rye home, the very house where only an hour before they had shared a cup of hot chocolate.
Dorothy describes the scene in her private diary:
AUGUST 17, 1928 Took my first flight in a small plane in Amelia’s “Avro Avian” her English Moth plane which Lady Heath flew from South Africa to London. A small silver darning needle, with a glinting blue back. G.P. and A.E. off canoeing for hours alter their time at field. I met Larry G. [Gould, noted geologist and family friend] and went to beach for a swim, tea, etc. In p.m. after dinner, Larry read Amelia’s manuscript in studio while I played the piano. She’s practically done a whole book in one month—with Fitz [Fitzhugh Green, writer and assistant to George] and G.P. helping.
After landing, Dorothy and Amelia drove back to Rye, their silk scarves streaming in the wind. Amelia left the house with George to go canoeing and to discuss the finished manuscript, while Dorothy took her younger son, George Junior (“Junie”), to the beach for a picnic and an afternoon swim. They all met again later in the day and continued to discuss Amelia’s book.
George Putnam was an exacting publisher, not satisfied with simply printing and releasing a book, and his name had become synonymous with marketing genius. Only months before, he had published Lindbergh’s We. The book sold over 600,000 copies and helped the lanky, handsome pilot become financially successful. George was hoping to repeat Lindy’s literary success with Amelia’s story.
That evening, Dorothy was exhausted, but she spent an hour at the piano playing the latest show tunes for the usual group of writers and artists who congregated at the publisher’s home. Finally, she left her music and wandered off to bed. An hour later, Amelia made her way to Dorothy’s bedroom.
“Dottie,” Amelia whispered. “I want to dedicate my book to you.”
My grandmother was half asleep and unable to show her surprise or gratitude, but months later, she recorded the scene in her diary and wondered if there might have been an underlying reason, other than friendship, for such a gesture:
“I’d like to dedicate my book to you, Dottie, it you think it’s good enough, and ii you don’t, I won’t. But I’d like to.” This was a surprise, does she really want to? Or was it a sop to me because she monopolized George all summer? She’s deep and silent, one phase or her life all hidden.
Dorothy lay awake for hours after Amelia left the room. It was an odd expression of insecurity on her friend’s part. She worried in the dark, wondering about the relationship between Amelia and her husband. She had begun to question whether it was entirely professional. George had a reputation for turning explorers into writers and becoming intimately involved in their lives, and Amelia was no exception.
Still, Dorothy and Amelia had formed their own bond, and my grandmother enjoyed the companionship of this celebrated young pioneer who almost overnight had become the most famous woman in the world. Both women considered themselves feminists and welcomed the chance to engage in spirited debates: about the future of women in business, politics, and especially aviation.
They had shared many experiences such as that morning’s flight and were equally independent and strong-willed. Dorothy, more socially adept than Amelia, had become a mentor of sorts, and they often shopped together in nearby Stamford, with Mrs. Putnam assisting Amelia in selecting a wardrobe for her endless speaking engagements. Self-assured and self-sufficient, Dorothy was everything Amelia had aspired to.
Amelia, on the other hand, had something Dorothy envied: Independence. Amelia’s image as the modern woman forced Dorothy to reassess her own unacclaimed life.
AUGUST 1, 1928 The days seem to flit by without my accomplishing anything! No practicing, no books to speak of—nothing. Am I ambitionless? Lazy?—a “waster”? Inwardly I wish to accomplish much or at least contribute something of me to what others do!—to help. Yet days pass and I seem idle, ineffective, almost useless.
Dorothy was the product of two strong-minded parents. Her mother, Mrs. Alice Binney, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William H. Stead, was born in London on July 8, 1866. Highly cultivated in the arts, Alice had benefited from a traditional English education and was a college graduate, an unusual accomplishment for a woman at the time.
Dorothy’s father, Edwin Binney, was born in Scrub Oak, New York, on November 24, 1866, to Joseph Walker Binney and Annie Elizabeth Conklin Binney. Though Edwin’s formal schooling ended with high school, he was brilliantly inventive. At the age of fifteen, he was hired as a bookkeeper for his father’s company, the Peekskill Chemical Works; and at seventeen he joined a paint concern in Springfield, Massachusetts, as a traveling salesman. When Edwin turned nineteen, his father retired, handing over the company to his son. Shortly thereafter, Edwin and his cousin Harold Smith changed the name to Binney & Smith. The new firm specialized in carbon black made from natural gas. Edwin was instrumental in organizing the Columbian Carbon Company, a firm that later became the largest producer of natural gas in the world. At this point, the family had modest means.
Shortly after Dorothy’s birth on July 20, 1888, the Binneys moved to the country, some fifty miles from New York City. They discovered a beautiful stretch of rocky beach on Long Island Sound, in Sound Beach (later renamed Old Greenwich), Connecticut. The land they purchased had been farmland and people could not understand why anyone would want to establish a residence in such a desolate part of the country, or as close to the shore as they had chosen. At that time, the family could only afford to build a one-room house, but with the clever use of an extended curtain, one room became two. The square, peaked-roof cottage was surrounded by pastures, punctuated by stone walls to scramble across before reaching the water’s edge. There were apple orchards nearby and lush hillsides leading to the secret hollows of Laddin’s Rock Farm.
In 1890, after the birth of a second daughter, Helen, they hoisted the building up on rollers and moved it closer to the massive gray rocks that jutted out of the Sound. With the birth of their third daughter, Mary, in 1892, a two-story wing was added. Over the years, the family home (Rocklyn) expanded into an impressive vine-covered estate. A conspicuous lighthouse, about a mile out from the beach, would become the famous turnaround point for Dorothy, who as a youngster swam out and back effortlessly. The seaside was a private playground for all the Binney children, and diving into its chilly waters was as comfortable to them as the sandy beaches were to their Florida cousins who often came to visit.
When the fourth and last child of the family, Edwin Binney, Jr. (“June”), was born in 1899, Dorothy finally welcomed the baby brother she had always wanted. Eleven years apart, June and his oldest sister, Dolly, shared many childhood adventures together.
Dorothy’s parents took opposite sides on the subject of child rearing. Edwin raised Dorothy and her sisters with the belief that nothing they desired was beyond their reach. In contrast, her mother was more demanding and more critical. I remember as a young girl my grandmother’s lingering sadness as she recalled her mother’s heartless remark, “Dolly, dear, because you are not a particularly pretty child, you must strive harder than most to accomplish something with your life. For girls without beauty must rely on assets other than a pretty face in order to make their way in the world.”
Though my grandmother blossomed into a beautiful woman, she was burdened by this early insecurity and would spend her life struggling to overcome her lack of self-esteem.
Closely supervised by their mother, Dorothy and her two sisters spent their first three years in a private one-room schoolhouse near Rocklyn. On many mornings, before the school bell rang, the girls walked two miles to the train with their father and then back again. My grandmother’s earliest brush with nature began there, as she listened to her father identifying the birdsongs they heard along the way.
In 1903, Edwin Binney invented what would eventually become one of the most recognizable products of American ingenuity: the Crayola crayon. Little known to historians, it was his wife, Alice, who thought of the name for the now-legendary coloring sticks. As a schoolteacher, she had a trusted sense of what would excite and stimulate a child’s imagination. Binney & Smith had already developed black crayon markers from carbon black when Alice asked her husband to create them in colors.
One evening at the dinner table Edwin announced that he had developed the oil markers for her. She suggested combining the French word craie, for “chalk,” and ola, from the Latin root for “oil.” The family company first marketed its crayons at five cents a box, which included eight sticks of brilliant colors. They were produced in a small stone mill; at night, workers carried them to private homes, where they were labeled by hand. (The employees referred to the different homes by color: Blue crayons were labeled in what was known as “the blue house,” reds in “the red house,” and so on.)
The Binneys were now quite financially prosperous. In the ninth grade, Dorothy transferred to the Catherine Aiken School in Stamford, Connecticut, where she graduated in 1906 with honors. She entered Wellesley College, on the outskirts of Boston, and proved exceptionally skilled in music, theater, and swimming, which immediately set her apart from most of the other girls. She said later she chose the college because it was the only one with a women’s crew team. Her college diaries reflect an exuberant person armed with a wide range of athletic and scholastic achievements. “First crew practice. Oh, my shoulders ache!” At the same time, she was never at a loss for male or female companionship. “No social meeting last night; walked. Basketball. Kate and I maids at a man party of 18 down at Shakespeare House. Fussed to death! Prize to man who could make us smile!” Over the course of four years, Dorothy exhibited the joys and concerns of every student away from home. “Glee Club and it was simply splendid. College Hall never looked more attractive than with myriads of men floating about.”
My grandmother’s earliest diaries exude a passionate love affair with the outdoors, and with birds in particular. “Interesting lecture on birds in Zoology this morning. Math, German, English. Gym. Fudge. Worked. Bed early.” She never ceased to appreciate wildlife, and later taught me to recognize the songs of birds before I had learned to identify them by sight. “Saw some new birds today—the oriole, among others.”
Binney vacations were spent at home, or in Carthage, North Carolina, where the family owned a pre—Civil War plantation, Binneywood. The children also traveled to Paris and London to visit relatives. From the time Dorothy learned to walk, her father Edwin (or “Bub,” as he was known to his children) had taken her along on camping trips. He passed on his skills of setting up camp, and the art of both salt- and freshwater fishing. “With us,” Dorothy recalled, “there was no generation gap. He taught me to fish when I was two; when I was four, he said I was old enough to bait my own hook, and when I was six, he said, ‘You’re old enough to take the fish off the hook by yourself.’”
Bub’s gentle guidance gave his daughter an unusual confidence in the wild. From the family’s backwoods North Carolina retreat over the Christmas holidays in 1908, Dorothy pursued a typical, lively swirl of winter activities: “‘Binneywood,’ N.C.—Up at dawn to go wild turkey hunting. Home at nine, then chopped trees, then quail hunting—good luck. Made fudge and sipped chocolate by fire.” And on another winter day: “A bully long horseback ride. Dressed in p.m. Roasted peanuts. Mother read Kipling aloud to us. Made hot drink, rough-housed.”
During her four years at Wellesley, she was also known as an overachiever. “This afternoon I tried out for the part of Demetrius in the Shakespeare Society June play. In p.m. the Glee and Mandolin Clubs gave a concert at ‘Denison House’ in town.” The Boston settlement house would reappear twenty years later in an ironic coincidence. It was where Amelia Earhart was working as a teacher when she was asked to fly across the Atlantic. The day after Dorothy’s visit to Denison House, she continued to anguish over the underprivileged children: “Have not yet got over my heartache from seeing those poor little street waifs last night. A Springy day, early flowers and a robin! Tried again for my part.”
At the end of my grandmother’s sophomore year in 1908, she and several friends from college traveled across the country by train to join a Sierra Club outing for a two-month camping trip. “Left Boston, 10:30 a.m. for trip West. Russian nobleman and a lot of fellows on the car.” The goal was to climb to the summit of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental United States at 14,495 feet. “The mountains and oh, how wonderful, the deep canyons and gorges, high snowy peaks and big trees. Hot at Sacramento. Arrived on time.”
George Palmer Putnam had joined the Sierra Club outing as one of several guides for Dorothy’s group. He was an impressive figure, dark-haired and ruggedly handsome. He also was a young man with aspirations. At twenty-one he was already working in San Francisco as a writer and reporter, having moved to the West after completing a year at Harvard. He later transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, but stayed only one term.
Given all that is known and has been written about my grandfather, it is not surprising that the young George Putnam was in a place where few of his college contemporaries in the East would have ventured. He was born in Rye, New York, on September 7, 1887, to one of the great publishing dynasties of America. His parents, John Bishop and Frances Faulkner Putnam, created an intellectual atmosphere, and exposed their son to a rich and literate boyhood. George’s pure pleasure in the woods and open air are reflected in the colorful tales described within the pages of his own books. A voracious reader and a shy student at the Gunnery School, George viewed himself as nonathletic, and later recalled: “Most of my small activities, I realize in retrospect, were lonely.”
Though he was guaranteed a career in publishing, he had a restless soul. At the tender age of eleven, as the Spanish-American War was brewing, George was looking for a way to help raise money for the Red Cross. He later recalled the episode:
Being then all of eleven years old, and son and grandson of a publisher, it seemed high time I published something. Which I told father. “A book?” he asked discreetly. I had not thought of that. “No. A newspaper.” Father said we would discuss it after dinner. We did. The upshot, creation of labors during the months that followed, was The Will O’ the Wisp, a paper “published semi-occasionally,” its slogan said. The little paper was a financial and possibly a literary success. Under the circumstances the trades-people took advertising space, although the butcher with whom Mother did not deal would have none of it, with a profanity which in retrospect compels me to admit was justified. I delivered a net profit of eighty-six dollars to the Red Cross. And my name had been on an editorial masthead.
It’s no wonder the Wild West of stagecoaches and frontier towns seduced him as a young man. As he explained in his autobiography, Wide Margins, academia could not satisfy his aspirations: “Following the Berkeley college term I set out to seek my fortune. Exactly that. There I was, an easterner in the far reaches of the roaring west. I wanted to hear it roar.” An expert outdoorsman and fly fisherman, George had struck out on his own and was the perfect choice to be a Sierra Club guide.
Shortly after the trip began, Dorothy and George became inseparable. On July 1, 1908, she writes: “Up at 3 a.m.—35 mile stage ride, 8 mile walk. Putnam with me most of the time—I like him!”
And on July 7: “Made my ‘bed’ in early a.m. Then all afternoon fishing upstream with George Putnam. Caught a trout 2–3/8 lb., the record. Our own little campfire in the evening.” Breakfast was served at sunrise, followed by a bathe in the nearest stream before the group headed off for the great Mount Whitney.
One morning, several newcomers joined the group, among them the legendary John Muir. The indefatigable naturalist and walker of the wild woods had become a one-man force determined to preserve America’s wilderness. Muir was largely responsible for the establishment of the Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks, and was the founder of the Sierra Club. He was a leathery seventy-year-old when he joined my grandmother’s group. In a letter she wrote to me sixty years later, Dofry recalled her encounter with the great spokesman:
John Muir the great explorer, naturalist, joined us (on donkey-back, with Chinese boy on foot). Because I was (probably) the youngest member in the big Sierra Club group (19 yrs), Muir took a “shine” to me, and always along the trail (if he saw me) he urged me to stop “to have a cup of tea with him.” And the Chinese boy would brew it on a little fire (two tin cups). Stupid me, though I didn’t realize till years later what a marvelous experience it was for me just to have John Muir urge me to “visit” with him.
Approaching the initial stage of their climb, Dorothy was stunned to learn that a girl in another group had fallen to her death. She decided to make the ascent anyway. Wearing a long skirt and petticoat, with boots laced to the knee, she staggered breathless to the summit with her new beau, George Palmer Putnam. “Started ascent of Whitney—U.S.’s highest mountain—by moonlight. Reached top at 9 a.m.—lunched there. Glorious view over Owens Valley.” In a letter to me, she recorded the difficulties encountered during her final ascent:
The Whitney Trip; bled at the nose at 10,000 feet, staggered and couldn’t breathe, etc. It shook me a bit, yet I continued with 4 men, the only ones of a big mountain crowd who’d been approaching, mile by mile, entirely on foot for over three weeks! Enough. It was a staggering and frightening event, adventure. Plenty.
On July 20, 1908, Dorothy had much to celebrate, including her twentieth birthday: “Twenty years old today and oh, such a day. Fourteen of us had lunch down on an island in the Kern Valley. There were gifts and cakes. Ladies night at campfire.” And the following day: “Fished down river with George Putnam. Bully trout lunch on a pine isle. Arrived late at Coyote Creek where ten of us camped overnight. Two rattlesnakes.”
Returning home to Connecticut for the rest of the summer, she boasted to her family and friends about the “swell fella” she had met. Coincidentally, she had learned that the Putnam home in Rye, New York, was a few miles from where she had been raised. But George was bent on a life in California and Dorothy was still two years shy of graduation. Young Putnam managed to court his new lady friend by returning east whenever he could, and during the Christmas holidays he joined the family at their North Carolina retreat. George was a skilled marksman, which impressed Dorothy. “Up at dawn, George and me for ‘blind’ in Cockle-bends Marsh, Shot my first duck, a redhead! After lunch over to ocean with George all afternoon.…”
Returning to college, Dorothy continued to date other men while faithfully corresponding with George. “Letters almost every day from G.P.P. History for quiz, a whopper.” Almost as frequent as his letters were the red roses delivered to her dormitory. “My picture in Boston paper, as ‘Star in Wellesley Jr. Play.’ Exciting day, everyone congratulating me. Flowers and letter from G.P.…”
A high profile on campus prompted a glowing article in her hometown newspaper. “Miss Dorothy Binney, of Sound Beach, Excels in Swimming, as Vocalist and Has Histrionic Ability”:
Miss Binney is a versatile girl. She excels in outdoor sports, is accomplished in music and the more homely arts. Among the treasures she carried to Wellesley with her were medals won during the summer in swimming races at the water sports of the Stamford Yacht Club and the Riverside Yacht Club. She rows admirably, plays basketball well enough to be twice center on the college team, holds her own at tennis and golf and drives and rides skillfully
She has taken up music seriously and her strong contralto voice is heard frequently in solo parts in the college chapel. She was elected leader of the Glee Club for the year 1909–1910. Last season she was a great success as John Hale in the dramatization of “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” made by members of the junior class. In the annual Shakespearian production of commencement week last June Miss Binney appeared as Ferdinand in “The Tempest.”
Dorothy pushed her body to greater extremes and adopted an almost masculine sense for competition. “In p.m. won cup first prize in Ladies 50 yd. Dash at Rye Yacht Club after cheering of a big crowd. Yesterday rescued a drowning man—stranger.” Music had become her soul’s companion and she had an extraordinary talent for whistling while she played piano. Not only could she whistle the latest show tunes, but Dorothy possessed an unusual gift: People remarked that she whistled like a bird. She was not shy about it, often drawing stares when she could be heard across campus whistling the precise notes of her favorite songbirds. “Glorious warm day to make anyone happy! Saw 2 orioles and a grosbeak on the hill behind the house. A Whistling Quartet.”
She had also developed an early fascination with airplanes: already flying meant freedom and escape. “Off to aviation meet. Had a splendid day—saw 2 Wright biplanes go 1,500 feet up and Latham in his monoplane.” In my grandmother’s scrapbook, there is a photograph of Orville Wright flying overhead in his simple, almost toylike airplane, the Flyer.
Yet despite all her activities, personal relationships were very much on her mind. In 1909, during Dorothy’s junior year in college, her younger sister Helen married Allan Kitchel. For several months after her sister’s marriage, Dorothy pondered her own future, and painfully described her deepest insecurity. “I wish someone would love me.”
Dorothy was aware of George’s undemonstrative persona, but hoped that with her influence, he would loosen up a bit. There was an element of suitability about George Putnam, and the two families saw their relationship as a convenient social merger. Not surprisingly, the two-year courtship resulted in his proposal of marriage. In truth, George was desperately in love with the accomplished young college student, though she was not a total believer in the engagement. “A strenuous letter from George, and two apologies in next mail. So, do I love him enough to wear his ring? Oh, heavens. Why this?” At this early stage in their relationship, my grandmother had already begun to question her love for George. Perhaps her eagerness to leave home was in part responsible for her willingness to marry.