by Susan Butler
But Condon knew that public opinion would be on Helen’s side—and that if he fired her, his airline would get a black eye and lose business. So instead of firing her, he had her spending her time giving speeches at luncheon clubs, posing for publicity photos, giving tours of the Allegheny airport—and very, very occasionally flying. By the end of August she had made fewer than a dozen round trips between Washington and Detroit, when the number should have been over a hundred. And she was always on call. Frustrated and bored, as August drew to a close, Helen finally resigned.
Amelia and Helen were good friends. Amelia often stayed with Helen as she crisscrossed the country lecturing. Once she even left her car in her care. Now Amelia was angry, even angrier than Helen, at Condon’s shoddy treatment of her. She had been very proud of her friend’s achievement, had gone so far as to publicly say that the daily flights Helen Richey was making as co-pilot on Central Airlines’ run from Detroit to Washington were doing more to further women’s place in aviation and were more significant than her own recent Pacific flight.
Now she looked for a forum—a platform—that would command attention for her objections. She didn’t want to call a press conference, however—that was not her style. In the end, she accomplished her aim with great delicacy: she wrote a letter to a women’s group in Hawaii that had raised money to erect a marker in Oahu to commemorate the airfield she had taken off from on her flight to Oakland suggesting that if they had any money left over, they should set up a fund to help women break down barriers and attain their rightful place in aviation. She carefully explained in the letter what had just happened: that Helen had been fired because the Airline Pilots Association refused to take her in, “not because of lack of ability—all her co-workers admitted she was okay as to flying—but because she was a female. The result of this action was that the Department of Commerce refused to let her fly passengers in bad weather, so the poor girl could not do her part at all and had to resign.”
The result was all she hoped. The Pan American press bureau got hold of the letter and published it, and Amelia’s remarks were heard around the world. By November 7 the story was front-page news. Department of Commerce officials, sorely pressed, acted surprised and insisted they hadn’t even heard of Helen’s resignation. “The only thought was that it was too much of a physical job in rough weather,” said Fred Neely, chief of the department’s aeronautical information section. “It was not an order, not an attachment to her transport license. It was just an informal suggestion made to the airlines,” thereby admitting complicity. The Airline Pilots Association admitted innocently that it was true that Helen had been turned down because membership was restricted to men but that “it had been suggested that Helen re-apply for membership at their next meeting, but she had not done so.” Condon weighed in with “Miss Richey’s father called me shortly before Labor Day and said his daughter’s health was poor. He said she wanted to resign so she could go to California to rest. We agreed to release her, of course.”
Then Alice Paul, the famous suffragette who had picketed the White House in Woodrow Wilson’s time, took up the cause. “Certainly Miss Earhart herself has demonstrated the fallacy of that old idea of women’s physical inferiority which we meet on a thousand fronts every day.” That comment, too, hit the front pages.
Said Helen, “Miss Earhart has told the story better than I could.”
A number of newspapers sought out comments from Ruth Nichols and Ruth Haviland, both of whom held transport licenses, and used them out of context so that the women seemed to imply that females didn’t have the requisite strength, when what they said was that muscular energy was indeed necessary. Ruth Nichols, in fact, was unequivocal about Helen. “I thought that it was outrageous,” she fumed from the hospital where she was recovering from another crash. “High discrimination.... There is no reason why she could not be a co-pilot.”
Clara Studer, editor of the The 99 News, took some grim satisfaction in the fact that it took the Pilots Association eight months to get rid of Helen. Apparently it was this event that led Amelia to back the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. If prejudice extended even into government agencies, there really was no other choice.
November 7, the day Amelia’s letter appeared in the papers, was Amelia’s first official day at Purdue, and instead of all the negatives she could have thrown at the young women, she chose to point with pride to the progress women were making in their pursuit of meaningful careers. For of course, Helen Richey, co-pilot for Central Airlines, had been a breakthrough, she had cracked open the door, nudged the glass ceiling, at least for a little while. An upbeat Amelia chose to dwell on that thought for her first speech on the Lafayette, Indiana, campus: “Things are changing so rapidly and the field is broadening so much for women that the opportunity for employment upon graduation from college is better than it has been, and promises to expand even more,” she announced, more upbeat than ever. A few weeks later Gene Vidal hired Helen as an air-marking pilot for The Bureau of Air Commerce, to work under Phoebe Omlie.
It had been known for months that Amelia would be at Purdue that fall, and the knowledge had been a galvanic force: fifty percent more fresh-men women enrolled than had enrolled the year before; it was for that reason that the year-old South Hall ran out of rooms and put coeds in what were supposed to be guest quarters.
President Elliott, ever sensitive to people, publicity and promotional schemes, had a real flair for the dramatic. Seeing Amelia so happy and so hard and effectively at work, he asked George about Amelia’s immediate goals “beyond academic matters.” George, no amateur himself at seeing all angles, replied that she wanted a bigger and better plane—not just to go faster and farther but to use as a laboratory for research in aviation education and for technical experimentation. But presumably because President Elliott agreed so easily, George later wrote that he thought the idea had been in Elliott’s head from the first moment he heard her speak at the Herald Tribune conference. If they considered her pioneering feats to be “the most potent single influence today in encouraging American air travel,” as Purdue authorities were on record as saying, then the purchase of an Earhart-Purdue plane was almost inevitable.
President Elliott, a very resourceful man, was not one to overlook the possibilities of any situation. One of his more brilliant creations was the Purdue Research Foundation. It grew out of an idea of David Ross, president of the Board of Trustees of Purdue and a wealthy industrialist alumnus, that there should be a connecting link between the university research labs and Indiana industries. Ross’s aim was for Purdue, with its strong engineering department, to give the fruits of its wisdom and its inventions to Indiana industry. What drew Elliott’s enthusiastic support was that if it worked, the plan would benefit the university as well, for it would attract industry funds to academe. The connecting link they devised was the Purdue Research Foundation. Pragmatic as Elliott was, he turned it into a perfect symbiotic relationship in which everyone was enriched. Soon the foundation was involved in myriad projects. Within a few years it was exchanging gifts, such as property, from wealthy alumni for tax-exempt annuities, thereby greatly increasing alumni giving, as well as issuing tax-exempt Purdue bonds to finance the building of dormitories. It had become a free-wheeling, successful entity that attracted wealth, attention, and students to Purdue, much to the satisfaction of President Elliott, who was delighted at its stunning and wide-ranging results.
The hundred-acre Purdue University airport, the first airport owned by a university, was donated by Ross to the Foundation in 1930 in its first year—the first tangible fruit of this labor. A new sports stadium was another early product. There would be many others through the years.
Now, in the fall of 1935, President Elliott arranged a dinner party at Purdue, at which Amelia spoke of her dreams for a flying laboratory. Present were David Ross and J. K. Lilly, both wealthy alumni associated with the foundation. Many figures have been bandied about, but according to Purdue Res
earch Foundation records, before the evening would be out, Ross and Lilly had each offered her an outright donation of $20,000 to make her dream come true. Another $33,000 in equipment and cash would be invested in the plane by the Bendix Corporation, Western Electric, Goodrich, and Goodyear, bringing the fund total to $73,000. In April Elliott announced their gift, the purchase of the plane, and the Foundation’s creation of the Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research, which would receive all future contributions. The purpose of the fund, according to the university, “was to provide ways and means for pure and applied aeronautical research backgrounded on the facilities already established at Purdue.” It was understood by Amelia that although the new Electra airplane would be registered in her name and was hers to use, it belonged as much to the foundation as to her, and that although she could benefit from her writings, the proceeds would be shared with Purdue.
Unbeknownst to everyone until much later, it was Amelia’s plan from the beginning to fly around the world, according to Robert Topping, who wrote the official history of Purdue. “Upon her return she was expected to write a book on her flight and the research activities that were part of it. Her plane was then to become the property of PRF [Purdue Research Foundation]. Income realized from the book and exhibitions of the plane were to be used to advance applied research in aeronautics.”
PART THREE
17
New Records
• • • • By 1934 Amelia had become so involved in her various projects—lecturing, fashion designing, starting airlines, running the Ninety-Nines, encouraging flight competitions, and signing on to teach at Purdue—that she barely had time to fly. She hadn’t set a record since her second transcontinental flight or done any noteworthy flying since the Bendix.
In September 1933 she had been held in such awe that on the occasion of the official opening of the Franklin Institute Aviation Hall in Philadelphia, the twin attractions were Orville Wright standing next to the engine that had powered his epochal flight at Kitty Hawk, and Amelia standing under the Vega in which she had flown the Atlantic. There was no one to touch her—then—but other, younger women had since then been making incredibly difficult “first” flights, for which they were quite properly being lionized. Dashing and pretty New Zealander Jean Batten flew from Kent, England, to Darwin, Australia, in May 1934 in 14 days 22 hours, beating Amelia’s friend Amy Mollison’s record by almost five days; Laura Ingalls, whom Amelia had beaten out to be the first solo female pilot to fly the Atlantic, flew solo clear around South America and was internationally acclaimed. The popular young German pilot Elly Beinhorn had more recently flown solo around the continent of Africa.
There was one great “first” left: the Pacific Ocean had still not yet been tackled—solo—by man or by woman. Its time had come. It had been the hope and goal of Ruth Nichols to be the first to fly solo across that broad expanse of water, broader than the Atlantic, but ever since her crackup in New Brunswick, she had been dogged by ill luck, and so far she had not been able to raise sufficient money to mount the challenge.
Bobbi Trout, co-holder of the woman’s endurance record, came very close to mounting the challenge. It had been almost within her reach; she had made the most meticulous plans. She had secured the financial backing of soap manufacturer Gordon Davidson and hired a promoter-manager, and with much fanfare, in 1931 Davidson ordered an Altair from Lockheed for her. Advertising contracts were drawn up for Miss Commerce, as the plane was to be called, for in addition to Davidson’s backing her manager planned to sell advertising space on the side of the plane for $100 to $2,500 depending on the size of message, to have NBC carry her live broadcasts as she made the flight, and to sell the specially printed first-day air covers she would carry with her. The project made headlines all over the country and seemed to be on track—and then Davidson backed out, the other advertisers drifted away, and the enterprise folded. Bobbi was sidelined.
The Pacific had been flown a few times by pilots with crews—twice by the Australian Charles Kingsford-Smith. He did it the first time with a crew of three from Oakland, California, to Honolulu the same summer Amelia crossed the Atlantic in the Friendship. (He too had been flying a trimotored Fokker.) With a co-pilot, Kingsford-Smith flew it again, reversing the course, in early November 1934. Kingsford-Smith’s 1928 transpacific flight took 27 hours and 28 minutes; his 1934 flight took 14 hours and 59 minutes. The time difference is a startling indication of how quickly planes were improving, but still, everyone was wary of the Pacific. Seven fliers—one of them a woman—had died in other attempts.
Sometime in September 1934, before Kingsford-Smith’s flight, just about the same time she was working with Elliott to fit Purdue into her schedule, Amelia made the decision: her next big flight would be from Honolulu to California. She worked out the details with Paul Mantz, her new technical adviser, upon whose shoulders would fall the logistical and mechanical details; he visited them in Rye the first weekend in October. The final decisions made, on Saturday, October 6, she dropped the bomb on Lucy Challiss: “Amelia told me new plans—oh dear!” wrote Lucy in her diary.
Shortly thereafterJanet Mabie and her fourteen-year-old son Kenneth came to visit Amelia in Rye. Even though Amelia had spread out her parachute, so that it billowed like waves from end to end in the huge living room, covering the piano, lamps, and bookshelves, and smothering the room “like a blanched London fog,” she did not guess that something epochal was about to happen. Mabie later reflected that the reason, of course, was that Amelia acted as if she examined it every week. “The last person on this earth from whom you would hear that Amelia Earhart was going to make a Honolulu—California flight would be Amelia Earhart,” she consoled herself later. And Amelia had indeed been calm. Mabie’s son was listening when the talk at one point touched on the honors Amelia had received and where she kept them. Much against her will, she was persuaded to show them to Kenneth. She scuffed upstairs in her old soft slippers, according to Janet, and scuffed back down again carrying her treasures. So they looked in awe at the velvet and tooled-leather boxes holding the orders from France, Belgium, Italy, Romania, and Sweden, and the medals from scientific organizations. The Legion of Honor gleamed in the palm of her hand.
“Gee,” said Kenneth.
“ ‘Gee’ is right,” said Amelia, snapping closed the suitcase. “I’d better see what there is in the house to eat, or you and I won’t get any supper.”
They closed up the Rye house soon after and rented a house at 10515 Valley Spring Lane in Hollywood. Amelia got in her car and drove west on a lecture tour that would end up in California, leaving Lucy, who was again in residence and helping out, and George to tend to final details. So final was the decision to move west that Amelia even took herself out of the Manhattan directory, which listed her as living at the Seymour Hotel as of November. (George, however, continued to give the Seymour as his business address.) Her mother agreed to visit, for a while; she would hold down the Hollywood house while Amelia was in Honolulu.
The plans and preparations for the flight were made efficiently and seemingly effortlessly. One of the decisions made was that since radios were now more powerful and lighter, Amelia should take one. She filed an application and on November 21 received FCC approval to install radio equipment in her Vega. Probably because hers was the first civilian plane equipped with two-way radio telephone equipment for a long-distance flight, and because the government was involved, in the time-honored way that interesting government news manages to leak, enterprising reporters found out that the FCC had specified that the equipment must be used “only for communication with ships and coastal stations when in flight over the sea.” So they knew she was about to fly an ocean—which could only be the Pacific—and started paying close attention.
George did his best to throw them off: on November 22, accosted by a reporter, he baldly stated that Amelia was on a lecture tour of California and was “not contemplating any long flight.” In fact, of course, all the final d
ecisions and fitting out were just about completed, as was the flight plan, which called for flying from Honolulu to California, since it was commonly accepted wisdom that it is easier to hit a continent than an island.
Ten days later, in California, Amelia had her picture taken with the Australian Charles Ulm who had been the navigator for Kingsford-Smith on the 1928 flight. Ulm was about to take off from Oakland bound for Honolulu with two in crew on the first leg of a flight to Australia. On December 3 Ulm did take off from Oakland—he disappeared to the west and was never seen again. The coast guard cutter Itasca was sent out to search and rescue the fliers, it spent weeks combing the most promising areas but found not a piece of his plane. That brought the total number of fliers killed flying that stretch of water to ten.
It became impossible to hide from reporters the fact that not just Amelia, George, Paul Mantz, and his wife Myrtle were sailing to Hawaii on the Lurline, but the plane and a mechanic as well. By December 18 George was admitting it. She “may” fly back, he grudgingly conceded.
Reporters met them in Honolulu, asking whether Amelia would fly to California. She answered coolly, “I thought I would do some flying over the Hawaiian Islands.” But then, as leis were placed around her neck, she was asked, “If you fly to the California coast will Mantz fly with you?”
That broke through her reserve. “If I fly to the coast I will not take a cat along,” she snapped back. They had her—they knew it was just a question of when.