Amelia Earhart

by Doris L. Rich

  Every summer Amelia went to Kansas City, a twenty-two-mile journey into a different world. She left the house directed by her wealthy, generous, but somewhat reserved grandfather for a second household headed by her idol—her tall, handsome, witty, loving father. Edwin Earhart was all of these, but he lacked the self-confidence and drive of his father-in-law. Bored and unhappy in his ill-paid job at the railroad, he was certain he had found a faster, easier road to fame and fortune by means of an invention, a holder for signal flags at the rear of railroad cars. In May of 1903, when Amelia was almost six, he left for Washington to secure a patent, financing the trip with money needed for property taxes on the Kansas City house. While he was in Washington, Amy received two messages in the mail. The first was the bill for delinquent taxes. The second, a letter from Edwin, revealed that a man from Colorado had filed a patent on an identical holder two years before. Assuring her he would be home soon, Edwin added, “I must recount a feeling which I experienced as I walked past the glorious buildings which house our lawmakers and the great legal minds of the Supreme Court. I felt that I shall some day mount those marble steps in an official capacity or never again. Who knows?”

  For Edwin, already forty-seven years old, it would be “never again.” Amy was both angry and frightened. To marry him she had defied the father she loved, endured a delay of five years before the marriage, and after a few idyllic months, suffered a miscarriage. The house in Kansas City was a gift from her father. Money was a constant worry to her and the social status she had taken for granted was diminished by Edwin’s failure to earn a living. This latest defeat threatened to leave them bankrupt. To pay the taxes Edwin sold several valuable law books given him by his father-in-law, a sale inadvertently revealed to Otis by the buyer. The Judge was convinced that Edwin Earhart was a hopeless failure as a businessman, a husband, and a father.

  Unaware of her father’s difficulties, Amelia spent a happy summer. In the late afternoons she waited for him to come home and play cowboys and Indians, which he did with gusto. During the day she explored unknown territory, cutting across the neighbors’ backyards. She planted a flower garden and, when a neighbor’s chickens invaded it, she designed a chicken trap from an empty orange crate with a hinged lid. When it worked she felt “like a big game hunter.”

  The following summer, when Amelia was seven, Edwin made one hundred dollars from legal work done outside the office. He promptly spent it all on a family excursion to the World’s Fair in St. Louis. The roller coaster with its serpentine track climbing and plunging, its cars filled with screaming, laughing passengers, fascinated Amelia. As soon as they returned to Kansas City, she began to build one of her own, aided by Muriel, neighborhood playmate Ralphie Morton, and her Uncle Carl, Amy’s brother.

  They hauled lumber from a tool shed behind the house and nailed wooden tracks from the ridge pole of the shed down to the lawn below. A cart was constructed with buggy wheels to fit the tracks, which were greased with lard, and the cart was dragged up to the roof where Amelia lay on it, her feet held by Muriel until she gave the signal to let go. The first run ended in a crash landing, cart and rider hitting the ground well off the tracks. Amelia called for additional track for a more gradual descent. With this in place, the second run was a success. It was, Amelia said, “just like flying.”

  Amelia was ten in the summer of 1907 when Edwin was transferred by the railroad company to Des Moines, Iowa. He took Amy with him and the girls went back to their grandparents in Atchison, to remain until living quarters could be found. They stayed until September of 1909, when they joined their parents in Des Moines. Without enough money to pay day school tuition for her daughters and worried by reports that pupils in the public school had lice, Amy hired a young widow, Florence Gardiner, to move in as governess. After Amelia and Muriel had endured a few months of French, poetry, music, and sampler stitching, their mother realized that the public school had to be accepted and Mrs. Gardiner was dismissed.

  Amelia entered the seventh grade and Muriel the fourth, untroubled by fears of lice or the company of classmates less privileged than those of Atchison’s College Preparatory School. That summer they spent a month in Worthington, Minnesota, where Amelia had her first automobile ride and went fishing, boating, and swimming. She also attended the Iowa State Fair, where she saw her first airplane, six years after the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk. She was not impressed. “It was a thing of rusty wire and wood. I was much more interested in an absurd hat made of an inverted peach basket which I purchased for fifteen cents,” she said.

  A year later, when Edwin became head of the claims department, the family moved to another, larger house and Amy hired a maid. She also supplemented the public school education of her daughters with informal lessons of her own. While preparing a chicken, she taught anatomy and she encouraged both girls to bring home garden toads, spiders, stones, and wood, all to be used in informal lessons.

  Although Edwin had been promoted and the Earharts seemed to enjoy a very comfortable standard of living, there was never enough money to meet expenses. Amy had never learned to economize and Edwin did no better. He bought a set of Kipling’s works for Amy on the installment plan, but after making the initial payment he had to ask Amy to meet the remaining ones out of her household funds. Past fifty, and ashamed that he could not provide a better living for his wife and children, Edwin began to drink.

  In the fall of 1910 Amelia returned to school in Atchison, where she helped care for her ailing grandmother. Grandmother Otis died in February of 1912, leaving an inheritance of a half million dollars to her four living children, to be divided equally. Amy’s share was left in trust for twenty years or until the death of Edwin Earhart. Humiliated by the Otises’ obvious lack of trust in him, the handsome father whom Amelia adored became a surly, drunken stranger to her, a man who released his fury in repetitive, caustic criticism of the Otises, the railroad, and Amy’s handling of household funds. Amy withdrew in silence, barely acknowledging his presence. Amelia and Muriel followed suit. The railroad fired him.

  It was a year before Edwin found another job, this time as a clerk in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the freight office of the Great Northern Railway. The family moved in the spring of 1913 into a large but shabby rented house on Fairmont Street. A few days later a wealthy uncle of Amy’s paid them a formal call, an opening, Amy assumed, for familial introductions to St. Paul society. Always aware of her social position as an Otis, she expected him to propose Amelia for membership in the skating club or arrange for her attendance at the sub-debutante cotillion. However, after he had made polite inquiries about the Otises of Atchison and sipped his tea, he took his hat, cane, and gloves and departed. The snub was yet another step in Amy’s descent into unhappiness. It never occurred to her that if the man had offered what she wanted for Amelia, she still would not have had the money to pay for club fees or a wardrobe for her daughter.

  Edwin continued to make sporadic efforts to overcome alcoholism but lapsed again and again. On one occasion he rushed home with news that he was to leave immediately for the site of a railroad accident and to act as legal representative for the company if any passengers chose to file suit. When Amelia went to his room to pack his suitcase, she found a bottle of whiskey hidden among his socks. Edwin found her angrily emptying the bottle into the kitchen sink. He raised his arm to hit her when Amy stopped him. Pale and shaken, he begged Amelia to forgive him and promised he would stay sober. He did for a while, until he realized that the company was not going to promote him from clerking to a place in the legal department.

  That Christmas Amelia and Muriel decided to attend a Twelfth Night dance at the church Amy had joined. The two girls decorated the living room and agreed that they would invite the two boys who were expected to escort them home to come in for cocoa and cookies after the dance. Fathers were expected to bring their daughters to the party and Edwin had promised to do so, but he came home too late and very drunk. Amelia pulled down the holiday decora
tions, tore up the paper Christmas napkins, and threw out the marshmallows already in the cups, then stormed up the stairs to her room. She sat in bed reading until she heard the boys walk past the house, then turned out the light and put her head down on the pillow.

  The flare-up at Christmas was Amelia’s last. If there was to be no help from others she would manage on her own. In March of 1914 she wrote to one of her friends in Atchison, “Of course I’m going to B.M. [Bryn Mawr] if I have to drive a grocery wagon to accumulate the cash.”

  In the winter of 1915 Amelia learned about poverty firsthand, a lesson she would never forget. Half the rooms in the Fairmont Street house were closed off to save fuel. She and Muriel walked in the bitter Minnesota cold to save carfare. Edwin was hit by a car and medical bills added to Amy’s worries. Amelia made Easter outfits for herself and Muriel, old blouses trimmed with new ribbon and skirts from silk curtains stored in the attic. Thread, ribbons, and buttons were bought with $3.40 earned by selling empty bottles she and Muriel found in the cellar. That fall, when Edwin heard about a job with the Burlington Railroad in Springfield, Missouri, he moved his family without any confirmation from the company. There was no permanent job, only a temporary one. They lived in a dingy boarding house for a month before Edwin gave up and went to Kansas City to live with his sister. Amy left for Chicago with Amelia and Muriel to stay with friends while she looked for rooms. She found some near the University of Chicago, the living room to be shared with two other women. Amelia enrolled in Hyde Park High School.

  In the yearbook Amelia, no longer “Meelie” or “Millie,” was now “A. E.—the girl in brown who walks alone.” Her favorite color was brown, and she did remain aloof from her classmates, but not by choice. She was spurned because she had alienated most of her classmates. She attempted to have an incompetent English teacher who was deaf and rumored to be an aunt of the corrupt mayor removed from her post. The woman did not teach at all, but only sat at her desk and left her pupils to do whatever they wished during the daily fifty-minute lesson. A. E. drew up a petition demanding a change of instructor and asked her classmates to sign it. They not only refused, but tore it up, preferring their daily gratuitous recreational period. Disgusted, A. E. convinced the librarian that she had been assigned a paper that required her to spend every English period in the library and did not return to class for the entire semester. The incident was a striking example of her stubborn adherence to principle, one that would surface repeatedly in later years.

  When she graduated, she refused to attend commencement exercises and instead left immediately with Amy and Muriel to meet Edwin in Kansas City. He had discovered that Amy’s brother, Mark, trustee for her portion of the estate, had already lost fifteen thousand dollars of it in ill-chosen investments. Amy contested the will and, when Amelia Otis’s physician testified that she was incompetent at its signing, the court ruled against continuance of the trust. Once in possession of her capital, Amy made Amelia and Muriel the first recipients of this bonanza. By September of 1916 Amelia was enrolled in the Ogontz School at Rydal, Pennsylvania, and Muriel entered St. Margaret’s College, a Canadian preparatory school in Toronto. While the Earhart girls might never again be wrapped in the cozy blanket of social and economic security they knew as children in Atchison, they were to be reinstated in the society familiar to their mother—for as long as the money might last.

  Amelia was ecstatic. By then an enthusiastic scholar of both arts and sciences, she would be given the first-rate education she wanted. Leaving home was an adventure, not a threat, because there had been no real home for her for seven years. They were crucial years, from thirteen to nineteen, in which she had learned that to depend on those she loved could be disappointing, to confide too much in others might lead to humiliation, and to expect her standards of achievement or honesty to be shared by her peers was naïve. Along with Amy’s money came an inheritance of determination and a strict sense of honor. Edwin’s gifts of wit, intelligence, and imagination were also hers. The round-faced little girl of eleven, in the crisp, white, high-collared dress, long blonde hair tied back by a huge bow, that uninhibited, outspoken child from Atchison, had grown up. In her place was a tall, very slender young woman who moved with the grace of a dancer and spoke softly, almost hesitantly, with a deliberate thoughtfulness. The haunting gray eyes remained unchanged. They were the eyes of a maverick.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Arrow without a Target

  In the fall of 1916 Amelia Earhart traveled by train from Kansas to Pennsylvania across a nation on the brink of entering a world war, a country beset by struggle between advocates and opponents of neutrality, universal sufferage, prohibition, “trust-busting,” and organized labor. The “new girl” from Kansas arrived on the morning of October 3 at Ogontz School, then a few miles north of Philadelphia on what is now a campus of the Pennsylvania State University. Enrolling girls for elementary grades through what would now be junior college, Ogontz was owned and managed by one woman, Abby Sutherland.

  Abby Sutherland did not record her first impression of Amelia but the new student promptly dispatched hers of the headmistress to Amy Earhart. Dr. Sutherland (the degree was an honorary one from Temple University) was “come up from the depths,” Amelia wrote. “A hard cold woman.” A few weeks later Amelia changed her mind. “She is a very brilliant woman, very impressive as she is taller than I.” (At five feet, eight inches, Amelia was a tall woman for her generation.) Attending a Philadelphia Symphony concert with Miss Sutherland and four other students, Amelia thought her “so charming that I can’t feel my first impression was correct altho I have watched her closely. She has had many chances at matrimony because she is brilliant but she passes them all by. She has read very widely and has very good ideas about a lot of things.”

  There were elements of truth in both Amelia’s positive and negative assessments. Miss Sutherland was a strong-willed disciplinarian who had worked her way through normal school by teaching before she went to Radcliffe, where she was in the same class as Gertrude Stein and Helen Keller. Not brilliant but well read, she had a remarkable memory, quoting page after page of material on a given subject of discussion. She was a formidable person, literally as well as figuratively, and although her faculty had been exposed to her charm, which they admitted existed, they had also been subjected to imperious demands and unnecessary meddling in their work.

  If Amelia was not intimidated by Miss Sutherland, most of her classmates were. One recalled, “We treated her like a queen. She looked like a queen. She was a big woman, very attractive and you never turned your back on her. When you left a room, you’d go up to her and you would bow and then you would bow out in a backward position.”

  At Ogontz there were no idle hands to do the devil’s work, not under the regime established by Miss Sutherland. On weekdays Amelia rose at seven, participated in group prayer, and did setting-up exercises before breakfast at eight, which was followed by a walk until nine when classes began. After classes, which ended at two, she played hockey, basketball, or tennis until four, then went to study hall until five-thirty when she was allowed an hour in which to dress for dinner. Dinner was followed by more prayers, spelling lessons, and instruction in French or German. On Saturdays prayers and lectures occupied her until noon and two hours of exercise after lunch preceded more study until four o’clock. Sundays brought more prayers and another lecture. Saturday and Monday nights were free.

  Although Ogontz was primarily an institution that prepared its students for further higher education, it also provided lessons in correct social behavior. Amelia described “a drawing room evening” in a letter to Amy: “Miss Pughsey’s evening they call it. She has us walk bow sit stand shake hands etc. etc.… the funniest thing was sitting. She put a little chair out in the middle of this huge room and we all aimed at it and tried to clammer [sic] on it gracefully. It was a scream. One of the girls landed with her legs crossed, on the extreme edge. I got on but not with noticeable grace as there was no co
mment made.” A decade later these lessons would serve her well at state dinners and receptions given by royalty.

  At nineteen, Amelia was older than most of the students at Ogontz. With the exception of girls whose fathers were Army or Navy officers, many came from affluent American families, along with a few from Latin America or Europe. Lacking both the financial resources and stable family life enjoyed by the majority of her fellow students, Amelia showed none of the effects of previous poverty, her father’s alcoholism, or the rift between her parents. After the first term, Miss Sutherland reported to Amy that her daughter’s “charm of manner has made a warm place for herself in the hearts of schoolmates and teachers.”

  Among her new friends was a former student, Leonora Hassinger, who was visiting the school. “They are of a very fine family, the Hassingers of Birmingham. They come from New Orleans and Leonora is going to make her debut this winter altho she has been presented in Birmingham … she leaves tomorrow with her father for New York.… I may be able to go and visit her for one night at the Waldorf.”

  It is difficult to determine if Amelia had social ambitions or was only telling Amy what her mother wanted to hear. Ambitious or not, she faced the realities that Amy tried to avoid. At six hundred dollars a term, school fees left Amelia with very little for recreation or clothing, a fact she accepted cheerfully, hastening to reassure Amy that these needs could be met. “I can wear an old suit with a little alteration so it will be more reasonable. I hate to spend money for things I never will need or want. I bot a pair of Leonora’s black high-heeled slippers. They fit me and I needed some.… She had only worn them since Wednesday a week ago.” In another letter she told her mother, “Dearie, I don’t need spring clothes so don’t worry about sending me money.… I know you all need things more than I.”