by Susan Butler
Neta was unable to comprehend Amelia’s attitude toward what she considered a very dangerous pastime, and she didn’t realize that Amelia was dealing in mental gymnastics to keep her as a friend. All she saw was that Amelia seemed to exhibit a callous disregard for danger (flying the Airster at all, much less buying it, and flying between high-tension wires), yet in the one major area, soloing, Amelia was obdurate: under Neta’s supervision she wouldn’t do it. It drove Neta to the edge of distraction. Amelia simply would not agree to solo. “By this time she had had four hours and 45 minutes in the Canuck and four hours in the Airster, and I told her I felt she was capable of flying alone.... She’d look at me with her winsome half smile, but she never committed herself.”
From the beginning Neta felt threatened by Amelia’s intellect and probing mind. Neta was a Seventh Day Adventist and a fundamentalist who believed in the imminent end of the world; Amelia was an inquiring agnostic and an insatiable searcher for knowledge. Between them was a gulf that grew wider as they got to know each other better.
Before the first summer was upon them, Amelia had changed instructors. What undoubtedly strengthened Amelia’s resolve to drop Neta were the two crashes they had. Once as they were taking off from nearby Goodyear field, a malfunctioning cylinder made the Airster’s rate of climb too slow to clear the grove of eucalyptus trees at the far end of the runway. Amelia, in the rear seat, instinctively put the nose up and went into a stall—the only thing to do. “I would have done the same,” Neta admitted. The result was a mild crash; as they hit the ground, the propeller broke and the landing gear gave way. Before Neta had a chance to say anything, indeed before she had thought to turn off the engine—necessary to prevent a fire—novice Amelia, with great presence of mind, cut the switch. By the time Neta had pulled herself together and turned around, Amelia was collectedly powdering her nose because, as she said, “We have to look nice when the reporters come.” The other crash came about because the plane ran out of gas. Amelia did not, at the time, accuse Neta of negligence, but later she did, publicly, for all the world to read about, in her first book, 20 Hrs. 40 Min. writing, “Crashes were frequent enough in these earlier days. I had one myself, during my instruction period. Owing to carelessness in not refuelling, the motor cut out on the take-off, when the plane was about 40 or 50 feet in the air. Neta Snook was with me, but she couldn’t help depositing us in a cabbage patch nearby. The propeller and landing gear suffered and I bit my tongue.”
Neta undoubtedly brooded over this enigmatic passage, because in her book fifty-two years later, she tried to get even; she wrote about a time when the two of them were setting out, at Amelia’s instigation, on a longer trip than usual. Soon Neta made Amelia abort the trip because she hadn’t personally checked the gas tank. She found out upon landing back at Kinner field that they had only half a tank of gas. “I was almost angry at her. Perhaps I had misjudged her abilities,” Neta primly wrote.
Amelia, whose loyalty to friends was legendary, who made it a point to stay close to all the people she cared for from childhood, would never lay eyes on Neta again after she left California in 1924. The significance of that fact, in terms of Amelia’s personality, is enormous. Amelia would stay rooted in Neta’s memory, looming ever larger, but the closest Neta ever got to Amelia after 1924 would be corresponding with her sister. When, fifty years later, Neta wrote her autobiography, she called it I Taught Amelia How to Fly. In it she goes on for pages about her beloved old friend. She deals in her own way with the fact that she was merely Amelia’s first instructor, that Amelia abandoned her, and that Amelia wouldn’t solo with her because she didn’t believe Neta knew enough to teach her competently.
The friendship, so important to Neta, actually would wither on the vine; she was too intrinsically different from Amelia for the relationship to continue. Even in their attitudes toward men they were at opposite ends of the pole. Neta loved going out on dates with any reasonable young man, it seemed, but Amelia didn’t. As Neta could not help but observe, the boys were certainly interested in Amelia. Tall at five foot eight but not too tall, and willowy, with her new short blond bobbed hair, nose freckled from the California sun, she was quick to smile at the boys that hung around her at the field, and just as quick to turn them down. Unless she was really interested, Amelia thought dating a waste of time; her preference was to spend her evenings at the library, reading up on something she considered interesting, such as California history. Amelia’s mindset at the time can be seen from the following, which she copied down in her small notebook: “Sowing wild oats is putting cracks in the vase of our souls—which can never be obliterated or sealed—even by love. As G. B. S. [George Bernard Shaw] says, ‘Virtue does not consist in abstaining from vice but in not desiring it.’ ”
The gulf grew wider as they got to know each other better. Amelia must have been amused by Neta, although she would not have shown it. Neta was remarkable in that she was one of the first fliers in the world and had an enormous amount of courage, but the singleness of purpose that had enabled her to achieve goals against outstanding odds carried with it a penalty: once set on a path, she never swerved. Just as for her the only book was the Bible, the Canuck for her was the only plane—and one did not experiment with either. If Neta had not been as closed-minded about planes as she was about the Bible, the relationship between the two might have continued, but as it was, Amelia gently disengaged from her friend.
For Amelia, the flying that Neta taught was merely phase one; phase two—learning to get into trouble and learning to get out of it, in the next-generation plane—was the next step. Just as walking a school horse in a ring will not teach a person how to control a spirited horse at a gallop, so taking off, flying level, and then landing would not teach mastery of the Airster. If Amelia were going to fly the Airster, she wanted to learn how to take it through all its paces. And that meant what was called stunting. Amelia never explained any of it to Neta; later, from a distance, she explained it to the world.
I refused to fly alone until I knew some stunting. It seemed foolhardy to try to go up alone without the ability to recognize and recover quickly from any position the plane might assume, a reaction only possible through practice. In short, to become thoroughly at home in the air, stunting is as necessary as, and comparable to, the ability to drive an automobile in traffic.
It was natural that Amelia chose an ex-army pilot to teach her stunting—they were the best. Her choice was John Montijo who, like many ex-army pilots, had been knocking about the country trying to make a living out of flying and was another recent arrival on the Los Angeles scene. He was a superb pilot and liked and had full confidence in the Airster. As Neta faded out of the picture, he faded in. Within a short time he knew the Airster like the back of his hand and had taken over demonstrating and racing it. Before many months elapsed, he had as well become financially involved in Bert Kinner’s enterprise.
Short and stocky, always well dressed to the point of wearing a shirt and tie with his jodhpurs, he exuded competence. Monte, as everyone called him, and his wife Alta became Amelia’s friends.
Amelia learned stunting under his watchful eye, to become competent in the air no matter what the conditions. Under John’s instruction, she learned how to sideslip the Airster, do forty-five-degree banked turns, vertical banked turns, dives, tailspins, loops, and barrel rolls, “and their relatives and friends”—not so useful, she had to admit, but she learned them “mostly for fun.” She practiced until it became second nature, likening stunting to the necessity of learning how to drive a car in traffic when the right reactions are vital.
Within a few months she would solo, in a flight that was a bit of an anticlimax. As she was taking off, one of the Airster’s shock absorbers broke, causing the left wing to sag, and she had to abort the flight. After the damage was repaired, she took off again, climbed to about five thousand feet, fooled around, and returned to the field. The flight ended with a “thoroughly rotten landing.”
Before the year was out, it was not Neta Snook but Amelia with the calm gray eyes and freckled nose who was the celebrity aviatrix at Kinner field, whose exploits were being written about in The Ace.
On November 3, Miss Earhart with a 175 pound passenger and a full tank of gas climbed to 10,200 feet in one hour and twenty eight minutes and during the course of the flight was 3000 feet directly over Mt. Wilson.
She was not only participating in air meets but was featured as a drawing card to boost attendance: “The Pacific Coast Ladies Derby will bring out two of our best lady pilots Miss Amelia Earhart and... Miss Aloysia McLintic.”
On November 12, at Daugherty field, Bert entered the Airster in the first air rodeo. The air rodeos, dreamed up by the Commercial Aircraft Association of Southern California and run by the Aero Club of Southern California, were designed to attract people and money into the aviation world while simultaneously offering the pilots fun and exposure. Those behind the rodeos were emphatically of the camp that approved of stunting for a very pragmatic reason—for most people, the novelty of just seeing an airplane fly by had worn thin. To draw crowds now, there had to be more of everything—more thrills, and more and new stunts.
It was at this first rodeo that the first aerial refueling was carried out. Wing-walker genius Wesley May strapped a five-gallon can of gasoline onto his back, walked out onto the wing of the Jenny that Earl Daugherty was maneuvering through the air as Frank Hawks flew perilously close, jumped onto the wing of Frank’s Standard, walked to his gas tank, poured in the gasoline, and finally walked back into the Standard’s cockpit. The Airster performed in three events—stunt flying, landing over an obstacle, and a tug-of-war that was dramatically advertised as a test between the plane and a one-ton truck but in fact ended up as a contest between the plane and a large seven-passenger automobile loaded to capacity; it ended in a draw. Undoubtedly the Airster used was Amelia’s, for her name is included in the list of those whom the Commercial Aircraft Association thanked for their assistance in making the Long Beach Air Rodeo a success, putting her name on a short list with such luminaries of the air world as Earl Daugherty, Frank Clarke, Frank Hawks, Wesley May, and Waldo Waterman.
On Sunday, November 27, Emery Rogers, racing against a French Nieuport in his C1 Monoplane, banked on a turn above his field from which he never came out. In reporting the fatal accident, the press made sure, as they always did in those days, to point out that it wasn’t because flying was inherently dangerous that the plane had crashed but because the pilot had made an incredible error. In this case, the error was not only that Rogers had not yet recovered from a “severe” case of the flu but that he “had been given strict orders by his doctor not to fly as he was subject to dizzy spells.... There can be but one answer. Emery Rogers became dizzy from the speed and strain of the race, perhaps only for a fraction of a second, but the ship was but forty-five feet from the ground and the speed was 140 miles per hour.”
Overlooked was that Emery Rogers had been a pilot of such talent that he had graduated two weeks ahead of all the others in his army training class at Souther Field, that he was a man of such leadership qualities that the army shortly thereafter put him in charge of Souther field, and a man of such judgment that while he ran Souther field not one officer, not one cadet, had ever been seriously hurt.
His death didn’t change Amelia’s plans, or those of anyone else in the flying fraternity. On December 17, Amelia and silent screen star Aloysia McLintic were a featured attraction of the second air rodeo at the Sierra airdrome in Pasadena, a by-invitation-only air show. The rodeo consisted of twelve events—everything from the usual tug-of-war between a plane and a truck, to aerial tumbling, landing contests, aerial transfers, wing-walking, a mail-bag-dropping accuracy contest, a three-lap relay race, a parachute jump (which did not take place), and a radio hookup from a plane to a waiting General Pershing in Washington, D.C., which also failed to come off. Amelia and Aloysia’s event was number ten on the program: “Pacific Coast Ladies Derby,” consisting of Amelia in her Kinner Airster and Alyosia in her Laird Swallow. The two women doing stunts flew similar planes—light sport model biplanes, although the Swallow, at close to six thousand dollars was much more expensive.
During the afternoon before and between events, many of the seven thousand spectators who had paid to attend were free to wander about the field and examine the planes up close—a necessary inducement to lure nonpaying customers, parked on the perimeter of the field, out of their cars and through the gates onto the field. The curious, who circled, questioned, or merely gawked at her elegant little Airster, gave the twenty-four-year-old Amelia her first taste of dealing with crowds.
Amelia had turned up even though something was the matter with the Lawrance engine—actually, it was out of the Airster, being repaired.
At that stage in the development of planes, parts were constantly being interchanged: land planes would have their wheels taken off, replaced with pontoons and become seaplanes; wings would be replaced with other wings; engines would be exchanged with other engines. Nor was it unusual for engines to be put to use in vehicles other than the kind they had been designed for. Motorcycle engines, being small and light were pressed into service to power planes; amateur automobile builders put powerful but inexpensive plane engines into cars.
Reflecting this practice, aviation magazines ran as many ads for pieces of planes as for whole ones. Jenny wings “new and covered” went for $20; an OX-5 motor somewhere between $150 to $275; a new Lawrance engine “complete,” probably a two-cylinder, could be bought for $85.
Replacing one engine that was temporarily down with another was done all the time. If it hadn’t been, pilots would have been grounded for unsuitably long stretches. It was just another one of the risks one had to accept. So Amelia didn’t let the fact that her Lawrance engine was on the bench stop her—she simply hunted up another to put in its place. Her substitute came from a somewhat unusual source, however: the Goodyear pony blimp, a midget dirigible that usually ran at a speed of only thirty-nine miles per hour and carried three people. Such usage made far lower demands on the engine than the Airster, and as a result, as Amelia was flying, one of the three spark plugs blew out and the engine quit, luckily just as she arrived over the Pasadena airdrome. She made a dead stick landing over the field, which must have been excellent because it went totally unnoticed: “the chatterers never knew they came near having something actually to talk about.” After a new extralong spark plug was inserted, Amelia decided to participate anyway.
As 1921 drew to a close everything was falling into place for Amelia. She had won her wings, had her own plane, had earned the respect of her fellow pilots for her flying prowess, and had been accepted as an equal by the California flying fraternity. She was full of plans and high hopes—looking forward to buying the newest model Kinner Airster that Bert was designing, turning over in her mind the possibilities of flying it to New York in the spring to compete in the 1922 flying season there and, once there, re-enrolling at Columbia.
Amelia had a wonderful time piloting her pet. Sometime that winter she (momentarily) established a new altitude record, which found its way into the papers. In an unusual departure from her usual modesty, she included the clipping in her first book. The newsclip reported that “Miss Amelia Earhart, local aviatrix, established a new altitude record for women yesterday under the auspices of the Aero Club of Southern California. Flying her own Kinner Airster, containing a 60 horse power motor, she ascended more than 14,000 feet.” She was becoming so well known that beginning in April, Bert Kinner used her in the full-page ads he regularly took out in The Ace to advertise his plane—and of course the exposure made her even better known. “A Lady’s Plane as well as a Man’s,” ran the headline of his advertisements.
On August 8, 1922, the Los Angeles Examiner ran a story on the probable departure of the famous local aviatrix Amelia Earhart. It was a puff piece (“Vassar College is primed for its thrill of thrills. Some sunny day ne
xt fall a large and dusty airplane is due to pull a near-tailspin over its exclusive campus and, descending, to disgorge Miss Amelia Earhart, Los Angeles society girl-student aviatrix.”) and it featured a half-page photo of Amelia in flying togs in front of an Airster. But she didn’t go. “I lingered on in California, another sunkist victim of inertia—or was it the siren song of the realtors,” she wrote, glossing as usual over problems.
Amy and Edwin were still struggling with their lives. That first summer when Edwin had moved out to Los Angeles alone, he had been taken in hand by members of the Christian Science Church, and it was as a result of the efforts of the Church that he no longer drank and had returned to his old self. By the time Amelia and Amy moved out, he was part of a law firm, Earhart and Maine, located in the Fay Building in Los Angeles, was full of plans for the future, and was exploring the possibility of running for the state legislature. To support his political plans, he had old friends write references. A former mayor of Kansas City obligingly wrote, “I am sure that he would make a safe, active and intelligent member of the Legislature, and one in whom the District he represents can place absolute confidence.”
In 1921 they had moved from the modest home on West Twenty-third Street, where they had been living, into a larger, more comfortable house on West Fourth. The move, however, was based more on optimism about Edwin’s prospects than anything else. They were, as usual, just getting by.