by Susan Butler
Amelia and Eleanor had so much history in common: they both had alcoholic fathers, both had been largely brought up by grandparents. There were the physical similarities—imagined and real: they both believed themselves to be ugly ducklings, too tall, with bad teeth (Amelia had a gap between her two front teeth that she tried to hide), and bad legs, and both had unexpectedly long, graceful fingers. They had the same outlook, the same high sense of moral purpose that had led them both into social work, the same fierce need for independence, the same desire to open doors for women that would shortly lead Eleanor to institute weekly White House press conferences in the Treaty Room for women reporters only. (They would be limited to women in order to force editors to hire female reporters if they didn’t already have any on their staff, but limited also because Eleanor thought she’d get better coverage if the stories were written by women. Both women were very practical feminists.) There was, as well, the shared dislike of ostentation and ceremony.
It was, significantly, Eleanor, not Franklin, who cabled congratulations to Amelia after her solo transatlantic flight, and it was to Eleanor that Amelia directed her brief reply: “Thank you very much for your message.... It was kind of you and Governor Roosevelt to think of sending it.”
The two women met on November 20, 1932, just weeks after Franklin was elected president. Amelia was giving a routine talk and showing movies at the local public high school in Poughkeepsie, a half hour’s drive from the Roosevelt home at Hyde Park. The newspaper notices of her lecture, billed as “Flying for Fun,” mention that Amelia would show movies as well as talk. Nancy Astor, the lone female member of Parliament who had entertained Amelia in England, was spending the weekend with the Roosevelts. Before the publicized lecture, Amelia and George were invited to Hyde Park to dine with the Roosevelts and to renew old ties with the outspoken Nancy. Eleanor Roosevelt always had a special place in her heart for achieving women—and here was the superachiever who had flown the Atlantic. Eleanor went to the lecture and introduced her. By her remarks it was apparent that while other people may have admired her, there was no doubt whom Eleanor admired: “I hope to know Miss Earhart more and more but I never hope to admire her more than I do now. She has done so many things which I have always wanted to do.”
At the Poughkeepsie lecture, Amelia described her solo transatlantic flight; ran movies of her incredible receptions in London, Paris, and Rome; and diplomatically praised Poughkeepsie hometown boy Lieutenant John Miller, who had beaten her across the continent in his autogiro. When she finished, she was given a standing ovation. Nancy Astor, never one to be left out, made some concluding remarks. Poughkeepsie and the Women’s City and County Club got more than they had bargained for.
That had been the beginning of Amelia and Eleanor’s friendship. Eleanor’s introductory remarks had not been idle words. The life of a pilot spoke to her: the freedom, the mastery of the air, the aloneness. It appealed to Eleanor at this critical juncture in her life: she could learn to just fly away. She was a gutsy woman: she took her first airplane ride in 1930 at the age of forty-five, she rode a bobsled at the 1932 Winter Olympics, and as notations in the White House ushers’ diaries show, she rode horseback virtually every morning in all the years she was in Washington. She was taught to shoot by the national guard a few years later and usually carried a pistol when she was by herself on car trips. Now she spoke of her desire to fly to Amelia. The timing was perfect—Amelia offered to be her instructor and arranged for the use of a plane at a secluded field and for her friend, Dr. Henry Templeton Smith, to give Eleanor the general physical examination, plus the eye color test, depth perception test, and the equilibrium test that were required for a student pilot permit. Eleanor passed, and the doctor signed her permit. Six weeks later, Eleanor enclosed the permit to her flying mentor, Amelia, with the notation “The question now comes as to whether I can induce my husband to let me take lessons. I will let you know if I am successful with him. I haven’t had a chance even to talk to him about it.” But when she did, the answer was no. Not that Franklin forbade her, of course, as she wrote Amelia later; their relationship was much too complicated for that “My husband convinced me that it was a waste of time to learn when I could not afford to buy a plane.” And of course it was out of the question that she would ask him to ask his mother, who held the purse strings.
Eleanor gracefully—perhaps with a tiny sigh of relief—gave up the project, but she remained gamely air-minded. She once stated to reporters that she only took trains when her secretary accompanied her, so she could get work done: “But I always fly when I travel alone.” And her admiration for Amelia continued to grow.
She put Amelia on the White House invitation list. She invited Amelia to a small luncheon with Frances Perkins, Franklin’s new secretary of labor, the first woman appointed to a Cabinet-level job, shortly after the inauguration, then invited her and George for dinner and to spend the night, on the evening before Amelia’s lecture to the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) on April 21, 1933. A few days before, Eleanor had been made honorary chairman of the United States Amateur Pilots Association. Now Amelia arranged for Eastern Airlines to loan her a plane—a Condor—and flight crew and after dinner, having waited to make sure the sky was clear and the stars brilliant, asked Eleanor if she wanted to taste the experience of night flying for the first time. She did. So not bothering to change, in their elegant satin evening dresses, fur coats, and white kid gloves, accompanied by several reporters, Eleanor’s brother Hall, and George, they went up in the Condor. Amelia had the cabin lights turned out so that Eleanor could savor the full beauty of the night. Amelia spent a bit of time demonstrating that she could fly the plane, and Eleanor took a turn in the cockpit so that the captain could explain the controls to her.
They were all on a high after the flight, particularly Eleanor. When they got back to the White House, the new car Hall had driven east for his sister, washed and shining, was standing just beyond the portico. “Amelia, lets see how it rides!” Eleanor exclaimed, and they hopped in and took a spin before calling it a night.
The next day in her talk to the DAR, Amelia praised Eleanor’s spirit: “The example set by the first lady of the land has done more to advance aviation among women, I think, than any other factor.”
Eleanor thought so much of Amelia that she kept her poem “Courage Is the Price” in the desk drawer where she kept special items that gave her strength and inspiration. Later she would also keep a photograph of Amelia in her sitting room. Franklin, too, enjoyed Amelia’s company, appreciated her fresh good looks, her sense of humor, her flying ability, and her intelligence, and didn’t hold her project of teaching Eleanor how to fly against her. He thought highly enough of Amelia’s input to grant her that most-highly-prized commodity in Washington, time with him whenever she requested it. He held her in such high esteem that she had but to ask Louis Howe, Franklin’s liaison in the early years, for an appointment for the request to be immediately granted. For example on April 5 she sent a telegram to Howe, requesting a three minute interview with the president, “tomorrow, Thursday or Friday.” It wasn’t quite done on those days, but it was arranged for Wednesday, April 12, at 3:30 P.M.. At the time when Franklin was debating the merits of forming an umbrella organization (a department of transportation) to regulate rail travel, flying, roads, and the nation’s waterways, he listened to what Amelia had to say on government regulation of flying and how the department could operate most efficiently—she thought an umbrella organization was a good idea.
The Bendix race was without a doubt the most exciting annual event in American aviation—the Kentucky Derby of the air world. Two generations of fliers would struggle to win the Bendix, promoted by Clifford Henderson to spur pilots, plane designers, and manufacturers to ever-faster speeds in ever-more dependable machines. Held annually since 1931, it was a free-for-all cross-country race designed by Henderson to “force airplane designers, builders and pilots to really get down to business.” It al
ways ended at the airport where the National Air Races were held and served as its opening event. The race was named for Vincent Bendix, the tough, bright, high-profile inventor, pilot and head of Bendix Aviation, who each year donated half the cash prize, $15,000 (Henderson put up the other half), and the trophy. Ex-army pilot Jimmy Doolittle, the first person to make a landing flying blind (cockpit hooded over) won the first race in a Laird, flying the route from Los Angeles to Cleveland at an average speed of 223 miles an hour. In 1932 Captain James Haizlip, former air corps test pilot, flying a Wedell-Williams, flew the same course at 245 miles an hour.
The third year, 1933, Henderson suddenly decided that women could enter. June 30 was the race date and Henderson waited till the beginning of the month before announcing his decision. It wasn’t nearly enough time to get a plane up to racing speed, nevertheless, Amelia thought it was important to enter, as did Ruth Nichols, even though both knew they couldn’t win against the men who were flying planes equipped with engines twice as powerful as theirs that they had been fine-tuning for months. They were the only two women to enter.
After her solo flight Amelia had sold her plane, minus its engine, to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia for $7,500 for exhibition in their new Hall of Aviation, presumably because she felt that it had seen its best days. Indeed, Clarence Belinn, an engineer whom she knew from TAT, who examined it sometime after her transatlantic and cross-country flights thought it was in dangerously bad shape. Dot Leh, another Ninety-Nines friend of hers, has suggested that as a replacement she buy the Vega that Elinor Smith had once owned, which Elinor had sold to William W Harts, Jr., a few weeks after Amelia’s transatlantic flight—not having any use for it after Amelia had bested her—which was languishing in dead storage at Floyd Bennett field on Long Island. Amelia had taken possession of the plane and its license number 965Y in April “hanging” into it her 500-horsepower Wasp engine, which was still in excellent shape. The plane was quite similar to her old one but in much better condition.
That year the Bendix was revamped and the direction reversed, for the National Air Races were being held at Mines field in Los Angeles. The start was from Floyd Bennett field. There Amelia, with George’s aid, got ready for the transcontinental endurance contest. Ruth Nichols, even with Clarence Chamberlin helping her, had the bad luck of running into serious problems with her borrowed Vega. As a result she started a day late (with Henderson’s permission) but the retractable landing gear kept giving her trouble, and it took her three days to complete the course. She was overlooked by the media; very few people even realized she was a contestant.
Amelia as usual drew a crowd—close to two thousand people gathered on the evening of June 30 at Floyd Bennett field to see her take off. It was planned for shortly before midnight, but at dusk a violent electrical storm suddenly rolled in, bringing with it pelting rain and powerful wind gusts. As it became obvious that her departure would have to be postponed, the numbers of onlookers dwindled, Amelia retired to a lounge at the airport and, as was her habit, quickly went to sleep. George was in his element, keeping everything organized, gathering the weather reports, bustling about. Some three hours later, when all the turbulence had blown out to sea, he woke her up, and at 3:50 A.M. she was the first contestant off, zooming down the long concrete runway in her Vega, leading a field of six. The men waited longer, more cautiously letting the weather settle down even further: a prudent move, rationalized the New York Times (male) reporter, because their ships “were faster and harder to control.” Roscoe Turner was second off, over an hour later; followed by Lee Gehlbach, flying Haizlip’s plane, which had won the Bendix the year before; followed by Russell Thaw, in a Gee Bee racer; followed by Russell Boardman in another Gee Bee.
Boardman had trouble taking off. His Gee Bee yawed, slipped off the runway and hurtled through the tall grass for a hundred feet before he finally got control and pulled it safely into the air. At Indianapolis, where he stopped for fuel, he was not so lucky. On takeoff, as he swept away at the end of the runway, having gained an altitude of about forty feet, the Gee Bee again went out of control, flipped over, and fell upside down to the earth. Boardman, pinned under the wreckage, suffered a fractured skull, a punctured lung, and a broken shoulder; he died the next day.
Thaw too had trouble at Indianapolis. His Gee Bee suddenly dropped a wing and ground-looped, damaging the plane to such an extent that he was forced to drop out of the race.
Gehlbach had problems with a clogged gas fuel line, and while making a forced landing at New Bethel, Indiana, he crashed through a fence in a field; he was not seriously injured, but he was out of the race.
Amelia, somewhere west of Wichita, Kansas, reported that her motor was heating up badly in the headwinds, causing her to make such poor time, she was “hopelessly” out of the race; as a result she decided to spend the night on the ground and not even try to make the deadline. She continued westward the next day and then had the misfortune to have the hatch cover of her plane blow open; she landed in Winslow, Arizona, to have it repaired. When she arrived at the Los Angeles municipal field (Mines field), it was at a peak moment of interest. The stands were jammed, for the Thompson trophy race, a fifty-mile free-for-all—probably the most exciting contest at the National Air Races—was in progress: Amelia couldn’t land. She circled the field for half an hour until the race was over. Tired and frustrated as she was, she undoubtedly enjoyed the idea that all those thousands of people sitting in the stands had a chance to see her pretty red machine silhouetted against the canopy of blue, for by the time she landed, everyone knew she was up there. And even though she hadn’t finished by the 6 P.M. Bendix deadline, everyone knew she, the first woman to dare fly in the Bendix, had finished, proving her particular toughness of character and her competence and by extension the “rightness” of allowing women to enter the race. She won an extra bonus—a two-thousand-dollar prize—for being the first woman to finish.
The winner, Roscoe Turner, also had had problems. Finding himself low on fuel after crossing the Alleghenies in darkness, he had had to make an unscheduled and therefore dangerous stop in Columbus, Ohio. The only pilot who had an uneventful flight was James Wedell, who came in twenty-eight minutes after Turner.
Amelia’s calm demonstration of competence was lost in the furor created by a tragedy two days later. Florence Klingensmith, twenty-six, of Fargo, North Dakota, a fine flier with a solid competitive record in closed-course racing, the only woman entered in the hundred-mile Philips trophy race, had completed three-quarters of the race, was in the middle of the pack holding fourth place, and was leading four of the ablest men pilots of the country when the fabric of one wing of her Gee Bee gave way, and she crashed to her death.
Cliff Henderson, who had only grudgingly allowed women to compete in the Bendix and the National Air Races to start with, used Klingensmith’s death as the excuse to reimpose the ban on women flying competitively. The idea being bruited about by misogynists (starting with him) was that Florence had died only because she lost her head; if Florence had kept her head, he asserted, she would have pulled up and bailed out. It was a patently absurd idea. Gee Bees were known to be dangerous planes. Florence’s was the third Gee Bee to crash in three days, but no disparaging comments had been made about the men who crashed—Boardman, who died, and Thaw, who didn’t. Nor, earlier, had anyone cast aspersions on the flying skills of Lowell Bayles, killed when his Gee Bee crashed in 1931, or on Jimmy Haizlip, whose Gee Bee’s wings broke off, followed by both wheels, as he came in for a landing, throwing the plane end over end before it came to rest. Nevertheless Henderson was not to be denied: he wanted the women out of his hair, and he decreed that none would fly in the Bendix or in the National Air Races in 1934.
Within three days Amelia was again trying to better her long-distance Los Angeles-to-New York record. Typically, she told inquiring reporters that she had little hope of breaking her previous time. Then, taking off from Los Angeles and landing in Newark 17 hours and 7 minu
tes later, she did just that, flying 1 hour and 56 minutes better than she had done before and maintaining an average speed of 165 miles an hour. But she made two stops, having announced she would make none. The first, in Amarillo, Texas, was to fix the hatch, broken again, that she had been holding closed with her right hand for some seventy-five miles. The second, in Columbus, Ohio, was for gasoline. When she appeared finally at Newark, her white coveralls streaked with grease, she apologized for looking dirtier than usual. Compared to Roscoe Turner’s time flying against the wind, her time was slow, but for a Vega driven by a 500-horsepower engine, it was very respectable indeed.
When she and George, who was at the airport waiting for her, walked to their car to go home, she got in on the driver’s side, gunned the engine, and set off for home. She was still not sleepy.
George had business in Europe and was pushing Amelia to go with him. She refused to go. “It is a business trip and I don’t look forward to a stuffy ride over for a week there and a stuffy one back,” she confided to her mother. George put off the trip in the face of her intransigence, hoping that later he could prevail upon her to change her mind.