East to the Dawn

by Susan Butler

  In the meantime she had flown it to Rye, and, assigned the number 7083 by the Department of Commerce, it sat less than a mile away from the Putnam home at the Westchester Country Club. Finally Amelia got to do what she had been itching to do for two months—get her hands on the controls of an airplane. She had no trouble getting used to the Avian. By the end of August, she was giving demonstration flights, taking off and landing on one of the carefully mowed country-club-immaculate grass polo fields. It must have reminded her of California four long years before, to be giving demo flights in her own plane. On the last Friday in August, a sizzling hot day when the temperature reached into the nineties, Amelia took up several passengers, including the intrepid David Putnam, taking the opportunity to gun the plane into the cooler air high above Long Island Sound.

  Amelia had by that time decided that the time was ripe to fulfill her ambition of 1924: to fly across the country. This time there were no obstacles—she was in superb health, it was the right time of the year, and the material she gathered could be used in her brand-new job as aviation editor of Cosmopolitan. The veteran plane, its fuselage studded with medals from many of the towns and cities where it had been, made it easier, reminding one and all as it did that in it Lady Heath had end-to-ended Africa—which made flying across the continent seem tame and eminently achievable. Even though Amelia had five hundred flying hours under her belt, she had never done serious long-distance flying.

  She left on Sunday, August 31. With her was George, off on another adventure, as usual unable to resist playing hooky if there was an exciting event he could take part in. This time he got more than he bargained for. The realities of flying kicked in when Amelia tried to land the Avian at Rodgers field outside Pittsburgh. It was not a polo field—so highly prized by fliers because they knew that a field where horses wheeled and galloped had to be flat and true—but a normal farm field, with rocks and gullies, stumps and ditches. The plane rolled into a shallow ditch hidden in the grass. An incredulous George Putnam couldn’t believe such a bizarre thing had been allowed to occur, insisting, “Miss Earhart had made a perfect landing and was taxiing to a stop when the plane struck an unmarked ditch on the field and went into it. The plane made what is called a ground loop and nearly turned over.”

  In 1928 (and for many years following) in the world of flying, ground loops were so unavoidable that pilots thought of them in the same way that car drivers did flat tires: as one of the unpleasant breaks of the game. Amelia wasn’t upset, although she did blame herself for not having first “taken the precaution of flying low over Rodgers Field to examine it,” as she admitted in an article later that fall.

  But the plane was a mess; it needed new landing gear, a new propeller, and probably a new lower left wing. A distressed George Putnam, faced with the grounding of his star performer, got to work and in record time found the parts needed—but parts for the English plane were hard to come by in the United States, he had to buy a whole new plane to get them. He arranged for a pilot from Air Associates to fly out an identical Avian from Curtiss field within twenty-four hours of the accident. Then four mechanics worked night and day, and forty-eight hours after the accident, Amelia’s plane was fixed. Who bore the expense is not known. What is known is that George was more distressed at being caught out, as it were, accompanying Amelia sub rosa, and having his idyllic little outing not only discovered but ruined. He tried to be jaunty about it and almost succeeded.

  Miss Earhart had visited my home and while there, we decided to take a little jaunt. As she was just “playing around” with no particular object in view, she headed her ship for Pittsburgh. We had a lovely trip, stopping at Bellefonte Field. We had lunch there and then headed for Pittsburgh. There was no incident of any kind to mar the journey until we ran into that ditch in Rodgers Field.

  As for Amelia, she used her enforced layover time to buy a sufficient number of white flags to mark the length of the ditch so that, she said laconically, “maybe there won’t be so many that run into it.” George originally had planned to head back home after Pittsburgh, but he used the accident as the excuse to continue with her as far as Dayton, Ohio.

  There is a prophetic 1928 photo—undoubtedly snapped on the roof of the Copley Plaza by Jake Coolidge—of the two of them before the Friendship flight. Amelia, in boots, breeks, and leather jacket is smiling into the distance; George, tall, handsome, in a well-cut business suit, is staring adoringly into her eyes. Right after the Friendship had taken off from Boston Harbor, he had given the following remarkably prescient interview:

  No money in the world could induce her to go upon a stage or in a film. She would shrink from that sort of exploitation. She might consider writing or a short and carefully selected lecture tour, but I know that she would not give a moment’s consideration to anything of a theatrical nature.

  Indeed she thinks right now that when the flight is over she is going back to Denison House settlement far from crowds, forgotten. She won’t be able to, of course, we all know that. But she honestly thinks that no one will pay any attention to her after it is over. She is an extraordinary girl. She has captivated all who met her.

  In truth, from the beginning of June on, Amelia was rarely out of George’s sight, and as compulsive as he was to keep busy, as driven as he was to always have several projects going at the same time, she was never far from his thoughts. He was forever writing to her, forever offering her bits of advice. Now he even managed to convince her to let him, as well as her mother, know where she was every day of her transcontinental flight. If there were telegraphic facilities available, both got telegrams. And she signed the telegrams to him, those fall days, in a way that was meaningless to anyone but him—“A.E.” To no one else was she known by her initials.

  But no matter his attention, his planning, or the long reach of his influential arm, the flight across the country was for Amelia an exercise in self-reliance, as she had intended it to be. Later, when she wrote it up for Cosmopolitan, she called it a vagabonding trip, and it was; some stops were planned, most were not. “I’m just a tramp flyer now,” she said at one airport. The first night after George left her was one of the planned stops, giving him no excuse to worry. She went to Belleville, Illinois, where two friends from college days, Annabel Hoppe and Dr. Elizabeth Conroy, arranged a dinner for her at the local country club, and she stayed with the Hoppes.

  A surprising number of times she managed to avoid hotels, lodging instead in private homes, even when nothing had been arranged beforehand. She turned into an expert at coaxing food and lodging invitations out of perfect strangers. After she landed unexpectedly at some airfield, she would sigh and murmur how tired she was of hotel rooms (absolutely true), and before the person knew what had happened, a woman (always a woman and usually married) would timidly proffer her home, thrilled to be able to protect Amelia from a night in a hotel, and from crowds and questions. “She said she hated to go to a hotel, that she knew she’d be bothered all the time there,” said her hostess in Muskogee, Oklahoma, who was at the field looking for her husband, the field manager, and happened to see her land; in Casa Grande she even found a woman with whom she had acquaintances in common. Nor did she ever get into trouble this way, for a further talent she found she had was a knack for picking the right people; she enjoyed herself, and inevitably so did her hosts.

  Once, toward the end of a morning, in some unnamed place, hungry, Amelia dropped down and landed on an isolated farm and was invited in for a chicken dinner. The plane, so small and easy to handle, with a propeller she could crank by herself standing on the back side (and then quickly hop into the cockpit), made such independent actions possible. But the realities of flying kept kicking in with a vengeance. A woman or a man traveling alone across the continent in 1928, in the still-not-quite-perfected-air machine, was bound to find trouble, particularly since there was no such thing as a pilot who had not had at least one forced landing. That was where luck and skill came into play—with both on your side,
the trouble would be minor. It had gotten to the point that Popular Aviation magazine gave away a hundred dollar watch for the best forced landing story it received each month.

  Navigation was a serious challenge. This was Amelia’s first long-distance flight, and she learned how hard it was to navigate (or avigate, as aviators called it back then) with the inadequate maps of the day and the lack of defined fields. And it got harder as the populated East gave way to the less populated Midwest and the more sparsely settled Southwest, and even harder as cities gave way to featureless towns, towns became smaller and then became hamlets—just clusters of houses really; and harder still when the empty spaces between the settlements grew, and the farms turned into the endless plains of the Southwest. She learned dead reckoning; she had no choice.

  The open cockpit made it even more challenging. The wind rushing about made the maps blow around. Amelia resorted to pinning the map she was using to her knee with a safety pin, but the pinning and unpinning as she flew off the edge of one map and onto another was never easy and became difficult when there were other things to do. West of Fort Worth, Texas, heading for Pecos in bumpy air, she was pumping gas from the reserve tank and didn’t, momentarily, pin, and suddenly the map of west Texas blew away. She followed her last compass course southwest, but then in pursuit of signs of life, and needing gasoline, she followed cars on a road going northwest, followed the road and the cars into the purple haze of the setting sun, and finally saw a small cluster of houses grouped around an oil well, one road running through. She had to land before darkness fell and rolled right through the town on its one road, its Main Street, to find out that she had flown clear across Texas and was in Hobbs, New Mexico. The townspeople helped her fold up the wings of the little Avian and move it to a safe place for the night (an overhelpful cowboy managed to put his foot through a wing; a piece of tablecloth was glued down over it), fed her at the Owl Cafe, found her some gasoline, and gave her a bed. The next morning she took off down Main Street, with more help from her new friends, but still without a map, heading southwest as instructed, looking for the Pecos River and a railroad line, her markers for the town of Pecos.

  It was a short flight, only a hundred miles. The engine started to sound rough, but she thought it would work its way through and ignored it. She set down in Pecos, where she ended up at a Rotary Club lunch, then took off for El Paso, and then suddenly real trouble—the engine started kicking up badly—and she had to put down in the desert amidst the mesquite bushes. Friendly passersby helped her tow the plane, its wings again folded, down the highway back to Pecos. It turned out the Hobbs gasoline was bad and had ruined the engine valves. She remained there for the five days it took the mechanics to bring the engine back into working order.

  Pecos was one of the control stops in the cross-country flights of contestants for the National Air Races, on their way west to Los Angeles. Amelia had planned to slip in and out of Pecos before the contestants ever landed, but that plan went up in the smoke of her engine. Instead, there she was watching as the forty-odd planes piloted by the top fliers in the country clocked in.

  She had, of course, let George know where she was, and he had a surprise in store for her: a first copy of her just-off-the-press book, delivered to her there in Pecos.

  Several days later she landed at Fly field in Yuma, Arizona, to gas up for the final leg of her journey to Los Angeles. As often happened after fueling, onlookers helped push the plane into position for takeoff. This time among the helpers was the Union Oil man who serviced the plane, who should have been able to control things but couldn‘t, or didn’t—perhaps it was the excitement combined with the 104-degree heat. Suddenly the Avian was nose down in the sand. Later headlines and stories by reporters not on the scene turned it into another drama and had Amelia hammering out a bent propeller prior to takeoff, but it wasn’t true. This time no damage was done. Later still, near Long Beach, California, she did make a forced landing in a field of five-foot grass and turned completely over.

  On September 14, the seventh day of the National Air Races and Aeronautical Exposition at Mines field in Los Angeles, fliers were still straggling in from their cross-country odysseys. Amelia arrived that day in between George Haldeman, who had been forced down in Albuquerque by lack of fuel and bad headwinds, and Jack Iseman, who, flying Charles Levine’s Columbia, had been forced down in Amarillo by a leaky fuel valve. She was given a standing ovation, and later, while many in the crowd had eyes only for Charles Lindbergh, flying in formation with two military aviators, Amelia took the opportunity to spend the afternoon examining the hundreds of different planes parked on the field, the latest and best of the day. Compared with them, she said, hers was just a toy, with no commercial possibilities—a plane for an amateur. She was boning up on aviation information; she didn’t intend to stay an amateur forever.

  Amelia took the more northerly route east on her way home. It was a first for her, flying so high, and she had carburetor trouble in the high altitudes that the Continental Divide demanded. The motor sounded so bad that a hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, just east of Tintic, Utah, she had to make a forced landing in a plowed field; the earth was soft, the wheels sank, and again the Avian nosed over; and again the propeller broke. (“I am going to find out all about carburetors immediately,” she told a waiting reporter.) She spent that night in Eureka, Utah, with Maude Hillsdale, which would have been an interesting experience because Maude had driven an ambulance in World War I, for which the French government awarded her the Croix de Guerre.

  The following day, none the worst for wear, Amelia went to Salt Lake City and assumed her public relations persona—George Putnam had booked her into various speaking and social engagements. She talked to three high school groups, led a discussion on social work and social problems at a meeting of the board of the Salt Lake Community Chest, spoke before the Ladies’ Literary Club, was taken on a tour of a copper mine, visited a settlement house, and was guest of honor at a dinner.

  It was not until Tuesday, October 9, nine days later, that she finally climbed into the cockpit of the Avian and took off over the Wasatch Mountains for Cheyenne and points east. She had indeed learned about mountain air—how it thinned and reduced engine power and affected the carburetor, how it sucked up and down and switched directions and suddenly turned to fog. This time she threaded her way through the high peaks of the Rockies without incident.

  In the 1920s Cosmopolitan was a magazine for forward-thinking “modern” young women but it had a general audience as well. It published topical articles and fiction reflecting the fashionable currents of the day. At that time it was a fabulously successful magazine, publishing Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Emil Ludwig, and Damon Runyan, among others. When Calvin Coolidge decided to explain himself, his article, “Why I Did Not Choose to Run,” appeared in the May 1929 issue. Amelia was signed on because she was a “hot” commodity doing the most exciting thing a woman could do: fly. Ray Long was just jumping on the bandwagon; flying was arguably “the” hot media topic—newspapers were creating aviation sections, radio stations were scheduling aviation hours in prime evening time. Now, with Amelia, Cosmo had the first aviation editor.

  She was presented as daring, ultrafashionable, chic, beautifully dressed, and apparently wealthy. Photos of her in that first issue show her dressed for riding, flying, and tennis, and with a fur draped about her shoulders dressed for a ball; every outfit is beautifully fitted, her hair is perfectly coiffed, she is wearing makeup, and a bemused smile plays about her lips. If Ray Long’s object was to present her as the most glamorous woman of the moment—the Cosmopolitan girl to end all Cosmopolitan girls—he succeeded. He turned her into the Renaissance woman.

  In the 1920s the boyishly slender figure had become the object of every woman’s ambition, and nowhere was that more evident than in the pages of Cosmo. Amelia was exactly what he wanted the Cosmo girl to become. She was tall, slender, with gray eyes and short, apparently curly hair, a nice
little round nose with freckles, the Harres family high forehead, white teeth, pale complexion, quick flashing smile. She looked the perfect heroine of the age; she had the perfect figure. She had long legs and walked with a long-legged, loose-jointed stride, usually wearing slacks, an exciting new fashion statement that Cosmo wanted its readers to note.

  No one knew that Amelia wore pants to hide her thick ankles. Not even becoming the most famous and most photographed woman in the world assuaged her self-consciousness about her legs—she had hated her legs as a child, and fame made absolutely no difference to the adult woman, she still hated her legs. But such was her charisma that even though she wore her trademark pants from sheer vanity, to hide her ankles, as the world’s newest fashion plate, with her innate sense of style, she turned pants into a fashion alternative.

  As the chic, glamourous aviation editor, Amelia, of course, was limited to writing about flying. In the first articles she wrote about how she had gotten into flying, how much she enjoyed it, the planes she had owned. The thrust of all her articles was that flying was safer as well as easier than the general public believed it to be. She answered readers’ questions, published their poetry, and described her trip vagabonding about the country. She told how to go about getting a license, how to make sure of getting a good instructor, how much it all cost. She stressed the safety factor always. She urged women to let their daughters learn to fly and proclaimed that “the year of 1929 is ushering in the Flying Generation.” She wrote about Anne Lindbergh, who was a pilot, and about Amy Earhart, whom she had taken flying so many times that she was bored and now always took a book with her, usually a mystery story.