Amelia Earhart

by Doris L. Rich

  She began to cut her long, honey-blonde hair, inch by inch, probably because she disliked doing anything that attracted too much attention if it could be avoided. She also bought a leather coat.* The first time she wore it the men at the airfield exchanged remarks about the “dude aviator.” The next time they saw it, it was wrinkled and oil-stained. The stains were easy to make, the wrinkles created by sleeping in it. Dressing as she did was not just youthful play-acting but evidence of her unerring instinct for making a physical statement of who and what she was. She was a woman and an aviator. The bobbed hair was thick and curly (with the aid of a curling iron), the jacket under the leather coat beautifully tailored and worn with a white silk blouse, a colorful scarf knotted at the neck.

  By the time Muriel came home in the summer of 1921, Amelia was one of the airfield crowd, “regarded by many people as slightly crazy.” She was invited to join them and did. “We shellacked the canvas wings, replaced struts … and when there was enough gasoline … took turns cruising over the bay and north a few miles along Malibu Beach.”

  After only two and a half hours of instruction in Neta’s Canuck, Amelia had decided “life was incomplete unless I owned my own plane.” The plane she wanted was one built by Bert Kinner. Originally a single-seater, it was cracked up in a test flight and rebuilt as a dual control ship to be used as a trainer. As usual, Amelia’s problem was money. Already working as a clerk at the telephone company and one day a week at her father’s office, she completed a course in commercial photography at the University of California and went into partnership with another young woman, Jean Bandreth. When the venture proved unprofitable, she bought an old Moreland truck and contracted to haul gravel for a construction company. Her father, who had taken her to her first air show, treated her to her first ride, and accompanied her to Kinner Field to arrange for lessons, had lost his initial enthusiasm and refused to help her buy the plane. It was Amy Earhart who came to the rescue, after a considerable delay that annoyed Cora Kinner. Bert had already agreed to let Amelia have his small, rebuilt plane in exchange for his right to it as a demonstrator while he waited for Amy to pay up. Cora wryly observed that Amy had “too much money with a string around her sock, and Bert couldn’t get her to take it out.” The sock was finally opened on July 24, 1922, Amelia’s twenty-fifth birthday. Cora said that Amy only paid on condition that Amelia “give up that truck and act like a lady.”

  The little plane, which Bert Kinner called the Airster, did not meet with Neta’s approval, nor that of the other pilots who frequented the field. Neta said its seventeen-foot wing span made it “fly like a leaf in the air,” that it lacked stability and was inclined to ground-loop if landed in a cross wind. She also noted that the third cylinder of its three-cylinder engine clogged frequently, dangerously reducing its already minimal sixty horsepower. Neta’s advice was ignored by Amelia who had the plane painted yellow and named it the Canary. Bert’s demonstration rights were again exchanged for hangar space and mechanical repairs and Neta volunteered to teach Amelia “all over again,” giving her four more hours of instruction without charge.

  There were accidents. Cora Kinner witnessed one. “Amelia set her little Kinner Canary down in my cabbage patch, but she walked away from it. She used to scare me to death.” In another mishap Neta was with her. They had taken the Airster to the Goodyear Field, six miles from Kinner’s, to see the huge, new Cloudster, designed by Donald W. Douglas, whose World Cruisers, flown by U.S. Army Service pilots, would circle the globe in 1924. On the return flight to Kinner Field, the Canary’s third cylinder failed immediately after takeoff. When Amelia tried to pull up over a grove of eucalyptus trees, the plane stalled and crashed into the trees, breaking the undercarriage and propeller. Neta crawled out of the wreckage and looked back to see if Amelia had been injured. She was standing by the plane, grinning and powdering her nose. They must look nice, she told Neta, when the reporters arrived.

  The accidents may have upset her more than she admitted. When Neta told her she was ready to solo, she procrastinated. The same woman who had wanted to fly between two high tension wires eight feet apart and who “scared” Cora Kinner “to death,” said she wanted more training. But solo she did. There is no official record of it but it was before December 15, 1921, not quite a year after her first lesson, because on that date she took and passed her trials for a National Aeronautic Association license.

  The solo flight that preceded these trials had been a shaky one. “In taking off for the first time alone,” she wrote, “one of the shock absorbers broke, causing the wing to sag just as I was leaving the ground. I didn’t know just what had happened, but I did know something was wrong and wondered what I had done. The mental agony of starting the plane had just been gone through and I was suddenly faced with the agony of stopping it.” After repairs were made she took off again, only to make “a thoroughly rotten landing.”

  Two days after her NAA trials she flew in an exhibition at the Sierra Airdrome in Pasadena. The official program listed the tenth event as the “Pacific Coast Ladies Derby, An Exhibition by Miss Amelia Earhart in her Kinner Airster and Miss Aloyfia [sic] McKlintock in her Laird Swallow.” Coming in for a landing the same troublesome spark plug that had failed before did it again. “Luckily I was over the field.… Otherwise I might have made my landing in a treetop.”

  In spite of joking about looking nice for the reporters after the crash at Goodyear Field, Amelia did not like exhibition flying. “The moment I flew up the field I began to feel like a clown, although happily there were two of us females to divide the honors and odium.” What the retiring, often secretive Amelia really wanted was to be alone and aloft, flying for her own pleasure. But publicity provided airplanes and the money needed to maintain them and she took what she could get.

  In May of 1922 Bert Kinner put out a flyer advertising the Airster. Headed “A Lady’s Plane as Well as a Man’s—read what Miss Earhart has to say after flying a KINNER AIRSTER two years,” a letter from Amelia followed:

  After flying my Kinner Airster for two years, it is a real pleasure to state that the performance has at all times been beyond my expectations.

  In placing my order with you for one of the new models I am taking advantage of the recently improved refinements but am glad to know that you have retained those fundamental characteristics that have always placed the Kinner Airster high in my regard.

  Scrupulously honest in other matters, Amelia stretched the truth for that Airster, and for a newer one she hoped to get from Kinner. She did not mention the fact that the third cylinder was too often “beyond her expectations.” Her claim that she had owned the Airster for two years was a false one. The letter was dated May 20, 1922, a time when she was still at Columbia University. It would be six months before her first airplane ride as a passenger, and when she wrote the letter her mother had not yet completed paying for the plane.

  Three months later, on August 8, 1922, a Los Angeles newspaper ran a story along with a two-column picture of her in leather coat and goggles, headed “Air Student-Aviatrix to ‘Drop In’ for Study”:

  Vassar College is primed for its thrill of thrills. Some sunny day next 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.

  “I just dropped in,” she’ll tell the faculty. “to take a post-graduate course.…

  “It’s my greatest present ambition,” said the winsome Miss Earhart yesterday. “I don’t crave publicity or anything, but it seems to me it would be the greatest fun to fly across the continent. I think I’ll do it.”

  Miss Earhart is popular in society circles here. She is the daughter of Attorney Edwin S. Earhart, 1334 West Fourth Avenue.

  The story is a typical tabloid fabrication of that era but there is no record of Amelia’s objecting to it.

  The same month the story appeared, Amelia changed instructors. Neta Snook’s flying career ende
d as Amelia had predicted it would. Married to William Southern and expecting her first child, Neta sold her Canuck and turned her student over to John G. “Monte” Montijo, proprietor of a flying school across the road from Kinner’s, on Long Beach Boulevard. The arrangement was a good one for Amelia. Pleased to have a woman teacher when she was a beginner, she was ready for aerobatic instruction from an expert. Monte Montijo was a former Army flier, barnstormer, and stuntman for Goldwyn Studios, a sturdy, broad-shouldered man with a handsome sun-bronzed face, his dark eyes beneath arched eyebrows commanding attention. One of the best pilots in the region and, like most, barely making a living, he flew for a local oil man, gave lessons to students and, to augment these meager earnings, ran a restaurant with his wife, Alta.

  Amelia was an eager, attentive student. After seven hours of lessons, she soloed for him. “She handled the ship like a veteran,” he said, “and made a perfect takeoff and landing.” When she took more lessons in advanced aeronavigation and aerobatics, “after each flight she wanted to know what the mechanical action of each movement was and she showed a keen interest in motors.”

  Her confidence greatly enhanced by Monte’s training, Amelia set her first flying record on October 22, 1922, at an air meet at Rogers Field. Edwin brought Muriel, who had dropped out of Smith College and was teaching at Huntington Beach, but neither of them knew what Amelia intended to do. She had asked a representative of the Aero Club of Southern California to seal a barograph in her Airster. In an open cockpit, with no oxygen supply, on her second attempt she climbed to fourteen thousand feet through fog and sleet before the Airster’s motor began to falter. Fearing a stall, she kicked the little plane into a tailspin, bringing it out only after she dropped beneath the fog line at three thousand feet. When one of the older pilots asked her what she thought might have happened if the fog had reached ground level she was embarrassed, but not enough to regret making the record, which was acknowledged by the Aero Club.

  Her approach to this first record would be repeated again and again. She was secretive about her plan to set it and insisted on calling it an attempt at “a calibration of the ceiling” (for that particular aircraft) instead of admitting she was trying to set an altitude record. She was meticulous in arranging for the barograph to prove what she had done but showed far less concern about the capabilities of the plane or her own safety.

  Seven months after her “calibration of the ceiling” at Rogers Field, nine weeks before her twenty-sixth birthday, on May 15, 1923, she received a license from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, the international aviation organization of which the American National Aeronautic Association was a member. She was the sixteenth woman in the world to receive one.

  * The leather jacket, which she wore on her solo transatlantic flight in 1932, is on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ceiling Zero but Lifting

  In 1924, less than nine months after she received her FAI license, Amelia Earhart was hospitalized for another sinus operation. She was not only ill, she was broke. Almost twenty-seven, she had spent the last three years racing on a treadmill of multiple, menial jobs to pay for flying. It was a matter, she said, of “no pay, no fly and no work, no pay.” Her only financial help had come from her mother, who gave her the money for the little Airster from the sale of the Otis house in Atchison.

  Amy Earhart had been spending capital as well as income ever since she gained control of her inheritance. By 1921 her capital had shrunk from more than sixty thousand dollars to twenty thousand dollars, at a time when a ten-room house could be built for ten thousand dollars. She decided to recoup her losses by investing in a gypsum mine managed by Peter Barnes, a young friend of Sam Chapman’s. It was a foolish venture, one in which both Edwin and Amelia became involved.

  Edwin bought a used truck for Barnes. When it broke down he asked Amelia’s friend, Lloyd Royer, a master mechanic at Bert Kinner’s, for his advice. Amelia told Royer not to bother. “I think,” she said, “that Dad imagines all mechanically inclined gentlemen like to play with broken-down automobiles.” The broken-down automobile was only one of the many misfortunes suffered by Barnes as he struggled to get all the gypsum he could out of the old mine before the rainy season began in February or March.

  In January of 1922 Barnes told the Earharts that production had fallen behind schedule and asked for their help. Amelia and Edwin took the train to Las Vegas, where Barnes met them and drove them to the mine site. Amelia shoveled gypsum into one of the two trucks Barnes had and Edwin lifted sandbags to shore up the approach to a small bridge over a gulley that the trucks had to cross. While they worked, a rainstorm swept over the area, creating flash-flood waters that rushed down the gulley, washing away its banks. Amelia, Edwin, and two of Barnes’s friends who were helping load gypsum escaped over the bridge in one truck, but when Barnes followed in the second, the bridge collapsed and he was trapped in the overturned cab. Amelia wrote to Muriel at Smith College: “There is no way I can soften the blow for you. We have to take these things as they come. Peter is drowned, the mine irreparably flooded and all of Mother’s investment gone.”

  During the next two years all the Earharts’ efforts to keep the family together and solvent failed. Muriel had to leave Smith at the end of her third year and take a teaching job in Huntington Beach. Amy Earhart gave up her attempt at reconciliation with Edwin and asked him for a divorce. By spring of 1924 both she and Muriel decided to return to New England where the latter had enrolled in summer school at Harvard. Amelia proposed to join her mother and sister there by flying the Airster to Boston. For once Amy flatly countermanded one of Amelia’s plans with one of her own—Amelia could drive her to Boston and Amy would pay travel expenses. Amelia accepted the offer.

  Before she left California Amelia sold the Airster to a novice flyer who crashed the first time he took it up, killing himself and his passenger, a young university student. Cora Kinner said, “The kid must have frozen to the stick … we had to pry his hands away from it … It looked like a bombing … fire all over the boulevard.” Amelia thought the accident tragic but unnecessary, the result of ignorance and overconfidence on the part of the pilot.

  With the money from her sale of the ill-fated Airster Amelia bought a car—not a cheap, practical Model T Ford like one Kinner lent her, but a 1922 Kissel Kar. A beautiful vehicle with a convertible top, big nickel headlamps, and a long, low, yellow body with black fenders, the car was the equivalent of a modern-day Alfa Romeo. The Kissel was named the Yellow Peril by its new owner, whose penchant for beauty preempted the threat of unemployment and unpaid bills. More aware of economic reality than Amy, Amelia was still her mother’s daughter, a member of the impoverished gentry. At Ogontz she copied a poem by “Moslin [sic] Eddin Saudi, Mohmmadan [sic] Sheik and Persian Poet”:

  If thou of fortune be bereft

  And in thy store be but two loaves left—sell one,

  Buy hyacinthe to find thy soul.

  The Kissel was her hyacinthe.

  When she packed up for the trip east she took an odd collection of books and notes. One small notebook contained notes from her photography class at the University of California, Los Angeles, along with her thoughts on two widely different subjects:

  Crossing a track while driving is much easier diagonally, i.e., so that each wheel strikes the raised surface at a different time—thus distributing and neutralizing the shocks. I think some kind of shock absorber could be devised on this principle. (Drawings later)

  Sowing wild oats is putting cracks in the vase of our souls which can never be obliterated or sealed by love. As GBS [George Bernard Shaw] says, “Virtue does not consist in abstaining from vice but in not desiring it.”

  The engineer and moralist also showed an interest in economic justice, copying this poem in another book:

  Stupidity Street

  I saw with open eyes

  Singing birds sweet

  Sold in
the shops

  For people to eat

  Sold in the shops of Stupidity Street.

  I saw in a vision

  the worm in the wheat

  And in the shops nothing

  For people to eat;

  Nothing for sale in Stupidity Street.

  Ralph Hodgson

  Amelia and Amy left Hollywood on a bright May day. Barely recovered from one operation and knowing another would be necessary as soon as she reached Boston, Amelia was determined to see something on the way. She drove to the Sequoia National Park, then to Yosemite and Crater Lake in early June. When Amy asked if they were ever going east, her daughter said, “Not until we reach Seattle.” After Seattle she drove to Banff, Alberta, and Lake Louise before crossing Calgary’s prairie land on her way to Yellowstone National Park where they arrived June 30. The seven-thousand-mile trip to Boston took six weeks. Two weeks later Amelia entered Boston General Hospital for more surgery. After her release she joined Amy and Muriel in Medford, a suburb of Boston, where Muriel was teaching at Lincoln Junior High.

  The house Amy rented at 47 Brooks Street was a large, turn-of-the-century, two-storied structure. The neighborhood, so near the crowded, urban center of Boston, was very like the one Amelia had lived in as a child in Atchison. Its large houses were set back from the street with shrubs and flowerbeds in the front yard and vegetable gardens at the rear. Tall trees arched over streets where children played and friendly dogs roamed without leash or owner. Unlike the Ford and Chevrolet sedans parked in nearby drives, the Yellow Peril left the neighborhood children awe-stricken.

  While she recuperated, Amelia set about trying to raise money to pay some of her bills. In August she wrote to Lloyd Royer, who was building a plane with Monte Montijo at Kinner’s new field in Glenwood. Royer had sold the old Moreland truck for her, left from the Earharts’ ill-fated mining venture, but the buyer was slow in paying. “I certainly wish the gentleman would come across,” she wrote. “I need the money.”