East to the Dawn

by Susan Butler

  Now Margaret’s departure weighed heavily even on Alfred, who confided his anguish to another brother, Charles: “It grieves me to tell you but it is a fact all the same that if nothing unforeseen happens she will be married in the late spring or early summer to a Philadelphia man.... He has been here and gotten our consent as we believe him to be noteworthy and everything a gentleman ought to be but I feel pretty badly about it though I do not mean to be selfish at all.”

  Margaret married Clarence Balis on June 5, 1900, and moved to Philadelphia. Alfred became increasingly morose, and Amelia Otis increasingly lonely. Amy was relatively nearby, only fifty miles distant in Kansas City, but she was again pregnant and so could not help; on December 29 Muriel was born. With her new infant to care for and Amelia just three, Amy had more than she could handle. The solution was at hand to lighten Amy’s chores in Kansas City and Amelia Otis’s spiritual burden in Atchison—to send Amelia, her namesake grandchild. Again young laughter would fill the house. And so at three Amelia Earhart was bundled off to Atchison. There, as her mother had, she puttered around in the kitchen mindful of Mary Brashay, the Irish cook, grown fatter as well as older over the years, and prowled the grounds under the watchful eye of the gardener Charlie Parks, who had strung the lanterns for her mother’s coming-out party. She learned to stay away from her crusty grandfather. It worked beautifully for everyone concerned.

  Millie Otis, whom her Millie Earhart called “Grandma,” grown stouter with the years, was now in her sixties. Her great interests in life were her children, her grandchildren, her gardens, and the church. When she moved out west, she had carried with her three volumes filled with the dance tunes and sentimental songs popular in Philadelphia at that time. She kept those volumes—those remnants of her eastern society life—with her always. She finally gave them not to any of her own children but to Millie Earhart, who, understanding their importance, as an adult would number them among the possessions she treasured most. Millie Otis appears never to have tried to absorb the culture and the ways that she found on the banks of the Missouri—the new world of the Indians and the farmers and those other pioneers who traveled west. She carried with her the values of the eastern seaboard, sought to perpetuate them, and succeeded. The literature she fed her children and grandchildren—the books Amelia Earhart found in the library and grew up on—were the tales of Beatrix Potter, the writings of Thackeray, Dickens, Swinburne—almost all English except for a few Americans like Cooper and Poe—the same literature that was being read in Philadelphia and Boston and New York. It was not surprising that both Amelia Otis’s daughters and their sons and daughters, having been taught to value the cultural icons of the East from the time they were born, would eventually return east, from whence that culture came. Even Amelia Otis’s lovely flower gardens—that Amelia raced around and through—were fashioned after those she had left behind in Philadelphia—the hollyhocks, phlox, gladioli, the heliotrope, the rows of roses in the beds separated by strips of lawn in the sunken garden, the wonderful orchard full of apple and peach trees she had planted, and the vineyard between her house and her sister’s where she grew malaga and concord grapes. So Amelia, although brought up in Kansas, absorbed the eastern establishment culture her family had imported west.

  Amelia was given the northeast bedroom for her own, the room her great-grandmother Maria Harres had lived in for thirty-three years, with its huge window that gave such a spectacular view of the river below. She felt Maria’s presence. On long winter evenings Amelia would hear about Maria firsthand from her grandmother—how Maria had saved Amy’s life, how extraordinarily vigorous she had been, how she had lived to see two great-great-grandchildren born and had almost lived to see her—as well as hearing stories about the early years of the town.

  For Amelia it was a happy experience. There was no abdication of parental responsibility on her mother’s part; Kansas City was only fifty miles away—not halfway across the continent, as had been the case with Alfred and his parents—and Amelia went home in the summers. Furthermore her mother took every opportunity to visit and was around often, bringing Muriel, two and a half years younger, with her. The main drawback was that Edwin rarely visited North Terrace. His separation from his daughter was a wrench for Edwin, acknowledged by him or not, because when Amelia had been very little, he had spent so much time with her and they were so fond of each other that Amelia’s first word was Papa, not Mama. Now he had to be content with seeing a great deal less of her.

  Amy kept a baby book titled Queer Doings and Quaint Sayings of Baby Earhart. The entries detail the progress of a likable, slightly precocious baby with a strong self-sufficient streak. “She sleeps all the time,” wrote Amy once for the amazing duration of nine hours. She never sucked her thumb. At twelve weeks she “laughed and talked to herself in the looking glass.” On March 4 she caught hold of the end of her buggy and twice pulled herself to her feet. By May she was creeping. On August 27 she took her first step. “After she was two years old,” her mother writes, “she went to bed by herself, often singing herself to sleep ... invariably taking a rag doll with her.” Her imagination “was largely developed.... Will amuse herself for hours with imaginary people and playthings.” The concluding entry is the most charming and the most revealing: “I overheard her talking to herself and on her discovering me in the room she said, ‘If you are not here to talk to I just whisper in my own ears.’ ”

  Her health was a hallmark of her personality. In this she was unlike her mother, who though fit, had been stricken with so many assaults on her health. It was as if Maria’s genes had jumped the generations in-between. Even Amelia’s teeth were unusually strong; her first tooth came in at four months, on the early side, and she never had a cavity until she was twenty. She managed to avoid most of the childhood contagious diseases; in those prevaccine days the only illness she succumbed to was measles, for which she had an early and healthy respect. When her thirty-one-year-old cousin Ruth Martin came to visit, Amelia, even though only seven, ignoring the ordinary rules of conduct, warned the family, “Don’t go near Cousin Ruth. She’s got measles at her house.” And she stood across the room until Ruth left. In her instinctive awareness of health precautions that should be taken and her personal fitness, Amelia was such a throwback to her great-grandmother Maria that one imagines Amelia Otis would have noted it and been comforted.

  She learned to read at five and after that spent hours in the Otises’ library devouring the back issues of Harper’s Magazine for Young People, or reading the novels of Scott, Dickens, George Eliot, and Thackeray. Hawthorne, too, she read, but she thought him too given to description. (“Why doesn’t he say Judge Pyncheon’s dead in that chair,” she fumed.) She could also at least get glimpses of the world beyond Atchison in the New York and Chicago newspapers and in Harper’s Weekly, which also came to the house.

  She was thin—so thin her friends sometimes called her Skinny—and growing up was always on the tall side for her age. She had freckles, level gray eyes, a round nose, and straight dark blond hair parted in the middle. Photos of her show her hair drawn smoothly back in pigtails and tied with the enormous ribbon bows fashionable at the time.

  There in Atchison Amelia grew up secure of her place, secure of her family’s position, nurtured by tradition, and surrounded by friends. Every one of the friends she would mention in later life were the ones she made then, in Atchison, and all would remain her best friends for as long as she lived.

  Yet if she was raised in a family that had achieved local, state, and national recognition, still its day, like Atchison’s, was past; in Amelia’s growing-up years, Atchison was subsiding into a sleepy town. Gone was the vibrancy of the years when Amy was growing up. In its 1880s exuberance—its certainty that it was about to become the gateway to the West—a sign had been put up at the railroad station that read, “Atchison Kansas population 30,000,” strategically placed so that passengers in the trains approaching from the south could see it before they turned west t
o go out across the Kansas plains. In Amelia’s day the sign was still there, but now it served only as a reminder of past dreams. The population was scarcely half that. The famous of the world no longer strolled through town as they had when her mother was a child. The most exciting thing going on in town was to watch Deefie Bowler—the deaf and dumb brick-layer with the powerful shoulders and crippled stumps for legs, famous throughout Kansas for being able to lay more bricks than anyone else in America-finish paving the outlying roads.

  It must have seemed to Amelia as if the whole world were connected either by blood or by marriage—all bound together by the intertwined linkage that grew out of fifty years of common history. When she was three, she would have been present when the far-flung Challiss clan gathered in the Challiss house next door for Mary Ann and William’s golden wedding anniversary, when they were remarried by the Baptist minister Dr. Comes with all ten children in attendance. She would get to know her august great-aunt Ida Challiss Martin, now widowed, who spent her life doing good works and keeping an eye on the John A. Martin Memorial Library at the Soldier’s Orphan’s Home on the outskirts of town, which had been started after Governor Martin’s death. She played with her Challiss cousins, who lived next door. There were four Challiss children in Amelia’s generation: Jack, just Amelia’s age; Lucy (Toot), with the big brown eyes and brown hair and bangs, two years younger than she; Kathryn (Katch), five years younger, with mischievous green-blue eyes and light brown hair; and Peggy, the baby of the family. Lucy and Katch became her best friends. Then there was her second cousin Orpha Tonsing, Ida Martin’s granddaughter, who lived half a block away, whom Amelia Otis would invite over to play and for dinner. Although they were not close, Amelia and Orpha would play together with the toys stashed under the stairs—the stone blocks, the Jack Straws, and the big bisque doll in its carriage.

  Amelia’s closest friend besides Katch and Toot was Virginia Park, nicknamed Ginger, whose grandfather had provisioned the wagon trains going west back in the pioneer days and been a friend of Alfred Otis and William Challiss. Virginia and her younger sister Ann lived two blocks away on North Third Street and also were great friends of the Challisses. Although Amelia and Ginger went to the College Preparatory School and the Episcopal Sunday school and the Challisses went to public school and the Baptist Sunday school, they all got along so well and lived so near each other, they were all practically inseparable. The younger sisters Katch and Ann adored Amelia, but then so did most younger girls, because even when she was young, Amelia enjoyed teaching skills to those who wanted to learn. She taught all the younger sisters how to ride a bicycle. It was not Toot but Amelia who taught Katch to ride, not Ginger but Amelia who taught Ann. Katch never forgot how Amelia steadied her, running alongside her as she pedaled her bike down Second Street. “Such a kind, thoughtful person,” she recalled, a smile playing about her lips, as she remembered the event more than fifty years later. Ann, too, recalled the fun of Amelia, “getting me up there—giving me a shove, telling me to hang on, don’t fall off.” They were just two of her pupils.

  Amelia’s grandmother was not only timid, she was a worrier, and she treated Amelia far differently from her own children. Her own mother Maria and her sister Mary Ann had been able to stiffen her spine and give her courage all those years before, when her own children were growing up. Now she was older and nervous and alone—her mother dead, her sister recently moved away to live with one of their children, Alfred withdrawn; there was no one left to stop her from saying no, to shake her out of her natural timidity and fears. So the ordinary everyday things that children did became scary in her eyes. Although Amy had possessed her own Indian pony at the age she was now, Amelia Otis wouldn’t permit Amelia to ride. Amelia Earhart solved the problem her grandmother presented by keeping her own counsel. She didn’t argue. “Amelia was much too kind to bother her grandmother, even when she was unhappy about something,” observed her wise cousin Katch. She was also instinctively wise enough and gutsy enough to know she could do anything she wanted as long as it didn’t make waves. Instead, she found a way to ride by becoming friends with the daughters of the butcher, who made deliveries in his horse-drawn wagon. When business was slow, the butcher allowed his girls and Amelia to unhitch the two horses from the traces and ride. Of the two animals, Amelia liked the sorrel who bucked, best: “this horse opened vistas of pleasure,” she bragged. She also explored the sandstone caves that dotted the bluff as it dropped down to the Missouri, which were off limits because at the water’s edge were the tracks of the Burlington roundhouse, where the trains turned, and the tramps who rode the rails occasionally dropped off there. And indeed once Amelia came upon three men huddled in one of the caves. She found that she enjoyed exploring and kept going back, even putting up “beware” signs to keep others away from her favorite caves. She found the river itself “exciting,” with the “large and dangerous looking whirlpools to be seen in its yellow depths, and the banks ... forever washing away.”

  In small ways she had to be careful, and she found it was more difficult to hide her everyday tomboy habits from her grandmother than her larger escapades. Her grandmother observed her vaulting the fence surrounding the house, as she habitually did on her way home from school or going to or from the Challisses’, and objected with such force that in later years Amelia never forgot that her grandmother had made her feel “extremely unladylike.” She went around by the gate—“for several days in succession.” Her grandmother, in her own defense, claimed understanding from her granddaughter. “You don’t realize that when I was a small girl I did nothing more strenuous than roll my hoop in the public square.” “I think,” Amelia Earhart would write of Amelia Otis, “inside she never quite got used to the West for now and then something came popping out which made me feel Philadelphia must be quite superior to Atchison.”

  Nor did Amelia Otis have a sense of humor. Her family said of her that they had to diagram all the jokes for her, which also seemed not to bother her granddaughter. Sometimes, in fact, Amelia would tease her grandmother—but gently. If Cousin Annie Otis, in Atchison for a visit, was late for a meal, Amelia would say, “Cousin Annie is just coming down the waterpipe, she will be in to lunch just as soon as she gets the peacock feather put in her hair.” Her grandmother didn’t seem to mind, even if she couldn’t follow, for her granddaughter’s sense of fantasy and love of nonsense often left her completely bewildered. Amelia Otis did forbid Amelia to go on the snake hunt into the hills organized by Virginia Park’s step-father Dr. Beitzel, respected doctor and family friend. The expedition had great luck, and came back with various specimens. Although Amelia went through a stage when she wouldn’t even kill a fly—she would catch houseflies, take them outdoors, and set them free—she particularly wanted to hunt snakes, viewing them as a threat to horses, and was so bothered by her grandmother’s interdiction that she made a rare exception and complained about it to her mother. When next the good doctor organized a hunt, Amelia went along, but on this trip only one snake was found.

  Amelia usually did get her way, one way or another. When she was seven, Edwin took the family to the St. Louis World’s Fair. For Amelia a high point of the trip was riding with her father on the Ferris wheel; the lowest point was having her mother forbid a ride on the roller coaster. Even at that age Amelia liked heights.

  She also liked working with her hands and building things. So, once home, she decided to build her own roller coaster and capture the sensation—the rushing dropping-down-out-of-control speed trip she had been denied. She found some wooden two-by-fours, propped them at an angle against the toolshed roof to make the track, and made a cab out of a wooden packing box, to which she attached roller-skate wheels. Various willing hands, including her school friend Balie Waggener joined in the project. Giving her advice was her mother’s youngest brother, Uncle Carl. The first ride, naturally, was hers. She started from the ridge pole, slid down the steep incline—and somersaulted head over heels as the cab hit ground. Und
aunted, she added more track to make the incline less steep and the ending less abrupt. Amelia tried again, and this time the roller coaster worked. Balie Waggener, fifty years later, recalled that “a ride down that thing was a thrill.”

  Amelia Otis’s views on proper ladylike behavior for young girls was by no means unusual—she was merely reflecting the existing mores of the day. Amelia wasn’t the only little girl in Atchison who felt the unfairness of the limitations of being born female; Lucy and Katch Challiss also chafed at the restrictions imposed upon them. Fretting over things they were not allowed to do, envying the freedom they didn’t have, they would vent their frustration by pretending they were boys, for therein, they were certain, lay freedom. “We thought being a boy was much better than being a girl,” recalled Katch. And when the opportunity presented itself, they jumped at the chance to rough-house with their boy friends—including Balie Waggener and his friends Jared and Ed Jackson. The girls gave as good as they got, according to Balie; they were tough for girls, but of the three, Amelia was the toughest: “She could get as rough as we did.” A bit later, grown out of their tomboy phase, they would discuss how when they were grown, they would be different from their mothers, how they would control their own lives, not let the men do it.

  She used her conciliatory skills to get along with her remote grandfather, who provided so little company for her grandmother. Amelia’s response to her unresponsive grandfather was to relegate him to oblivion—in her eyes, he was nowhere near as important as her grandmother. If she knew of his accomplishments, and she must have, she never mentioned it. He impinged on her consciousness so little, in fact, that she would write, describing her childhood, “Until the eighth grade I stayed the school year with my grandmother in Atchison, Kansas”; she would even describe the Atchison barn as “my grandmother’s barn.” Muriel, younger by three years and only a visitor in the house, didn’t notice her grandfather’s moods. She would associate the creaking of his heavy black square-toed shoes as he walked about, or as he stood rocking in front of the fire, with a sense of well-being, speaking of the Atchison home as “our home, creaking with plenty.” She would also remember him sawing wood for exercise. But the only time Amelia ever referred to her grandfather in her writings, it was merely to describe what he did—a very different treatment from what she accorded the other members of her family, all of whom she described in some detail and with obvious affection. Nevertheless in Amelia’s genes was the grit that had carried him through.