Amelia’s most formidable rival was her friend and neighbor in Rye, handsome socialite Ruth Nichols. After Nichols bettered Smith’s altitude record on March 6, 1931, ascending to 28,743 feet, she broke Amelia’s speed record a month later in Detroit, flying 210.683 miles per hour. That spring both Nichols and Ingalls were planning solo transatlantic flights. Amelia needed something to keep herself in the news. She found it in an odd new aircraft—the autogiro.
Amelia was eager to fly this new ship, which could take off and land without a runway. Its Spanish inventor, Juan de la Cierva, claimed that if it were mass-produced it would bring flying safely to the suburbanite at a price no higher than that of an average car. When his American partner, Harold F. Pitcairn, needed to create a market for this predecessor of the helicopter, it was G. P. who saw the opportunity for Amelia to demonstrate this spectacular oddity. The autogiro differed from the modern helicopter in that the four rotor blades over the pilot’s head were not motor-powered but turned when the aircraft moved forward, powered by a conventional motor-driven propeller at the front of the fuselage.
James G. Ray, Pitcairn’s chief test pilot, gave Amelia her first and only lesson at Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, at the company field in December, 1930. He flew her around the field for fifteen or twenty minutes, made two landings, and then climbed out. “Now,” he said, “you take it up.” She did, but she said later, “I began to feel exactly as I had when I made my first solo in any airplane eleven years ago.” She was not certain “whether I flew it or it flew me.”
A week after their marriage, G. P. ordered one for her. There was a waiting line of corporate buyers who saw the publicity value of the plane, among them the Detroit News, Coca-Cola, four oil companies, and the Beech-Nut Packing Company, producers of tinned foods and chewing gum.
While Amelia waited for her own plane, she flew for a few hours in the fourth aircraft made by the Pitcairn-Cierva Autogiro Company of America, Model PCA-2. By April she was ready to try for an altitude record, which she insisted was only an attempt to “determine the aircraft’s ceiling.” Nevertheless, she arranged for NAA official Luke Christopher to bring a sealed barograph from Washington and G. P. invited Movietone News, the wire services, and New York newsmen to cover it.
Watched by five hundred spectators on April 8 she ascended to 18,000 feet but she was not satisfied. “I’m going to try again,” she said. After most of the crowd had gone home she made a second, three-hour attempt, returning at dusk. The NAA barograph showed 18,415 feet, an autogiro record for men and women. Actually, no one had tried it before. For Pitcairn’s benefit she told reporters that the plane was a “standard job,” with a regulation three hundred-horsepower Wright Whirlwind engine, an aircraft identical to the one she had ordered.
Soon after, she cancelled her order when Beech-Nut offered her theirs (serial number B-12) for a transcontinental flight. Although she was hospitalized for a tonsillectomy in late April and wrote to Amy that she was “almost inarticulate,” with “knees a bit wobbly,” she started the flight on May 29 from Newark. She was accompanied by a mechanic, Eddie de Vaught. At the helm of this giant and fragile grasshopper leaping its way across the country, she needed to take off and land as often as ten times a day. Every time she did she reinforced her identity as America’s “Lady Lindy” by the best means possible—the personal appearance.
At that time none of the media could match a personal appearance. Radio coverage was still poor and newsreels so primitive that even the president of the United States had to be asked to repeat his lines for retakes. At every stop Amelia acquired more admirers, as she lifted up children to see the cockpit, shook hands with spectators, and gave interviews to local reporters.
When she stopped in Zanesville, Ohio, for fuel the interview was given beside the bright green plane. Sitting on the grass she fashioned a ring from a daisy for a little girl while she answered the questions of a reporter who asked if she had always been so thin. She said she had, that she weighed 119 pounds and was trying to gain after a tonsillectomy. Although her face was raw from sunburn and her nose peeling, she was described as small-boned, delicate, and very feminine. Her voice, the reporter wrote, was musical, her manners, “quiet and refined.” About her marriage she said, “I have stopped off once in marriage and I intend to live always with him for I think one husband is enough. I will never leave him.”
Since writing her prenuptial views for G. P., she had either tempered them or knew what Zanesville’s citizens wanted to hear. When she landed there again on her return flight she reinforced local opinion that she was a genuine American heroine—brave, intelligent, well-mannered, modest, cheerful, and interested in Zanesville. Ralph Lane and his wife and three children who lived near the field offered her and mechanic de Vaught lunch while they waited for a fuel delivery. In a house without a bathroom Amelia washed her hands in a basin and, after the meal, helped with the dirty dishes. She also gave the children a carton of gum.
Not all of the stops were in small towns. On June 3 thousands of admirers jammed the streets of Denver to see her fly over the city. She arrived at eight in the morning from Cheyenne, where she had left de Vaught with tools and luggage, so that the passenger seat would be available for guest rides. Her schedule, arranged by the Women’s Aero Association, included a quick breakfast at the Brown Palace Hotel before returning to the airport where she took off and landed four times, “a sandy-haired goddess” whose ship “jumped from the ground like a scared rabbit … over the heads of the awe-stricken crowd.”
She knew how to “work a crowd.” A year later her mother received a letter from Denverite Fannie Kaley who wrote: “One of the happiest moments of my life was when I met your wonderful daughter in Denver and shook hands with her, the time she came in her autogiro.”
Amelia crossed the continent in nine days, arriving on June 6 in Oakland, where fans broke through the barriers to see her. She had not set a record. Professional pilot John Miller had been first to cross the country two weeks before her. For a record she would have to make a round trip, which she did, returning by a southern route.
On the way back Amelia had her first accident in the autogiro, at Abilene, Texas, on June 12. When she failed to rise quickly enough on takeoff the plane dropped thirty feet, hitting two cars and damaging its rotor and propeller. “The air just went out from in under me,” she said. “Spectators say a whirlwind hit me. I made for the only open space available.” Ever mindful of the plane’s builder, who dispatched a second giro to her immediately, she added, “With any other type of plane the accident would have been more serious.”
That was probably true but the autogiro was neither a safe nor easy-to-fly plane. Amelia’s friend, Blanche Noyes, who was hired to fly one for an oil company, scoffed at Pitcairn’s claim that “a ten-year-old boy” could fly it. Blanche said that the trial ship was called the Black Maria by pilots because almost all of them cracked up in it. “I think ten hours was the longest any pilot flew it without cracking it up,” she said.
In Abilene Amelia stayed with Mr. and Mrs. D. H. Oldham, Jr., who received a belated thank you note in which she referred to the accident as “nothing, really,” and added, “You might be interested to know that five or six hours [her emphasis] after I turned the second giro over to the regular pilot he cracked it on landing.” The second giro had been rushed to Oklahoma City where Amelia told members of the Lions Club that the accident was not a “crash.” “I came down where I could do as little damage as possible,” she said.
The Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce‡ did not agree with her. It issued a formal reprimand for “carelessness and poor judgment.” R. W. Delaney, their inspector at Abilene, made the report. Amelia, who was in Tulsa when the story broke, insisted that she had to land where she did to avoid hitting spectators and claimed the inspector had never flown an autogiro or even seen one in flight.
She did not mention the accident in a magazine article published in mid-July but did admit the tr
ip was tiring. The crowds, she wrote, came to see the plane, not the pilot, but the autogiro could not talk, eat chicken, make radio speeches, or be interviewed. She had flown nineteen days out of twenty-one, was airborne an average of five hours each day, and gave exhibition flights along the way.
She was tired but she needed the money, so when Beech-Nut offered it, G. P. booked her for two more tours, the first of them to begin on August 12. “Here I am,” she wrote to a friend, “jumping through hoops just like the little white horse in the circus!”
Young Jim Weissenberger, who was attending a school picnic in Toledo, watched the autogiro descend in a nearby field. He was wide-eyed when Amelia climbed out, her white silk scarf blowing in the wind. Pointing to the interurban tracks she asked, “Young man, do these tracks go to Cleveland?” He assured her they did, then watched the plane until it disappeared over the horizon before he ran back to tell his classmates he had actually seen Amelia Earhart.
The third time she stopped at Zanesville she took reporter Clair Stebbins for a ride. Before they took off, he was asked to sign away his rights to sue in the event of an accident. “If any death warrants are to be signed,” Stebbins wrote, “they couldn’t be issued under more desireable circumstances.”
Amelia cracked up the autogiro a second time at the Michigan State Fair in Detroit on September 12. She was attempting a slow landing near the grandstand when she failed to level off soon enough and dropped twenty feet to the ground, not unlike the slammer she made in a glider at the 1929 air races, also in front of the grandstand. The aircraft went into a ground-loop before coming to rest in a cloud of dust. Amelia emerged smiling, but G. P., who had accompanied her on this second tour and who sprinted toward the scene, tripped over a guy wire, crushing his ribs and spraining his ankle. While he was hospitalized in Detroit she went on to another county fair in Saginaw.
Amelia wrote to Amy that the second crash was a freak accident in which the landing gear gave way from a defect: “G. P. fell over a wire running to pick me up and as he limped up I said, ‘It was all my fault,’ meaning he was hurt. The papers got it that I said the crack was mine which isn’t accurate.” With the exception of her crash in the Vega at Norfolk Amelia had yet to admit that any crackup was her fault.
On a third tour through the South, in November, she spent two to four days in each of almost a dozen cities. Between these tours Amelia worked on other projects—lectures (from which she derived most of her income), magazine articles, and her job with Ludington which was now only part-time after the airline failed to win an airmail contract. After her re-election as vice-president of the NAA on July 23, she dashed to New York to meet aviation enthusiast King Prajadhipok of Siam (now Thailand) at Yankee Stadium, a typical Putnam arrangement. Back in Washington the next day, she was photographed with President Hoover and NAA president Hiram Bingham, who had pleaded her cause to the Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce after officials threatened to ground her for ninety days for the Abilene crash. He won the lesser penalty, a formal reprimand.
Amelia was never too busy to help her colleagues find work in aviation. In September of 1931 she was elected president of the Ninety-Nines, which continued to lack both structure and enough members. She recruited new members, wrote to old members, started work on a constitution, bargained for optional coverall uniforms and membership pins, and contributed to the newsletter.
Never a joiner, she accepted membership in only two other women’s organizations, Zonta International, and the Society of Woman Geographers, an adventurous, learned group whose members were called “my gang” by anthropologist Margaret Mead. Society president Harriet Chalmers Adams, welcoming Amelia in a letter wrote: “Tell Mr. Putnam that the book I was writing … was sidetracked when I broke my back in 1926. As soon as I got up, after two and a half years, I went to Arabia and Libia [sic] for the National Geographic; and to Ethiopia last year … [A]s soon as I ‘get over’ being President … I hope to get to work on the belated record of my adventures.”
In a year during which Amelia succeeded with most of her projects, she still could not resolve Amy and Muriel’s financial problems. She strongly disapproved of Muriel’s having a second child in a marriage she considered to be miserable. After her advice on birth control was ignored, she referred to Muriel’s pregnancy as the “second coming,” and hoped, she told Amy, that Muriel would have learned enough about anatomy to prevent “further trials for a while.” She wrote to Amy: “Why don’t you suggest to her that Albert go to Dr. Rock and get a little information? Surely if Pidge can’t manage things it is important for him to do so.… I think he should share the mechanics of being a husband.”
Amelia was also annoyed with her mother, who continued to give most of her allowance to Muriel. “I am not working to help Albert, nor Pidge, much as I care for her. If they had not had that money [given them by Amy] perhaps they would have found means to economize before.” Amelia’s solution was to send Amy half of her allowance of one hundred dollars a month (the equivalent of fifteen hundred dollars today). She banked the other half in Amy’s name. Amy countered with the suggestion that she pay the Morrisseys for her room and board, but Amelia said this was “unthinkable” when Amy did all the housekeeping.
Amelia was not heartless. Theodore, or “Theo,” Amy’s brother who was retarded, had been bilked twice—once by his brother, Mark, who had also lost some of Amy’s inheritance, and again by Margaret Balis who borrowed Theo’s life savings of two thousand dollars and died leaving nothing in her estate to repay him. Amelia was disgusted. “No enemies could have treated him worse than his own family,” she wrote. She would send him a check every month until Margaret’s son, Mark Ed Balis, “a good boy,” sorted out matters.
The grim caretaker of family finances was a different person in the company of colleagues, an uninhibited, often exuberant companion. Early in 1931 she met with two of her closest friends and rivals, Ruth Nichols and Louise Thaden, at Nichols’s house in Rye to draw up a constitution for the Ninety-Nines. All three women were in their thirties. Thaden, married to aeronautical designer Herbert von Thaden, was her husband’s business partner. Nichols, ex-banker, airplane salesperson, and organizer of the Long Island Aviation Country Club, was already planning a solo transatlantic flight. But when they finished their work on the constitution they had a wrestling match, described by Nichols: “Probably as the result of the strain of our labors, we three had a grand rough house in my room and on the beds to see who was the strongest physically. As I recall, Louise was able to pin both Amelia and myself down. It certainly was a circus.”
Sir Harry Brittain, English balloonist and visiting representative of the British Chamber of Commerce on Air Transport, met with Amelia in 1931. She invited him to tea at the Putnam apartment in the Wyndham Hotel, where the telephone rang constantly while she was trying to make the tea. Seeing she had to take the calls in the adjoining room, Sir Harry offered to do it for her:
She agreed. The bell rang again. Sitting on the bed I picked up the receiver and called out, “Miss Amelia Earhart’s secretary speaking. Who is that?”
“Her husband,” came the reply.
I need only say that Miss Earhart was roaring with laughter. She was a great lass.
For the “great lass” 1931 had been a good year, the best part of it still a secret. She was planning the most important project of her life—a solo transatlantic flight.
* Among those he saw regularly were humorists Will Rogers, Robert Benchley, and Don Marquis, critic Alexander Woollcott, cartoonist Percy Hammond, and novelists Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Louis Bromfield. He had given artist Rockwell Kent financial backing. His cronies at the Explorers Club were Martin Johnson, William Beebe, Roy Chapman Andrews, and Sir Hubert Wilkins. His banker was Edward Streeter, a vice-president of the Fifth Avenue Bank but also author of a bestseller, Father of the Bride, later a successful film. G. P. listed as some of the best conversationalists in America, all of whom he knew well, conductor Leopold
Stokowski; editors Clifton Fadiman, Frank Crowninshield and Clare Booth (not yet Mrs. Henry Luce) and Helen Rogers Reid, who took over as editor-publisher of the New York Herald Tribune after the death of her husband, Ogden; historian Hendrik Willem Van Loon, and Hollywood dress designer Gilbert Adrian.
† That night in Washington she received a record-affirming certificate from the NAA stating that she had flown more than 181 miles per hour for a new women’s speed record.
‡ Renamed, in 1934, the Bureau of Air Commerce.
PART THREE
FLYING HIGH
CHAPTER TWELVE
Victory and Vindication
On a January morning in 1932 Amelia Earhart lowered the morning paper she had been reading at the breakfast table and asked G. P., “Would you mind if I flew the Atlantic?” She knew he would not. No one knew better than he that aviation celebrities were as well known as their last record and Amelia’s last was her round trip in the autogiro. Soloing the Atlantic had been done by only one person—Lindbergh. Amelia could achieve two “firsts.” She could be the first woman to fly it alone and the first person to cross it twice in a heavier-than-air craft.
Even more than records Amelia wanted collegial respect. For four years she had faced repeated insinuations that she was not a competent professional. Eight pilots had crossed since the Friendship’s flight, none of them alone. Two who had tried it solo were lost. Four with partners had also died. But, Amelia said, failure and death could be avoided by meticulous planning and total concentration. And the Atlantic solo would silence her critics.
Only four persons knew of the project. G. P. was the first. The next to be told was Bernt Balchen, Arctic flier and transatlantic pilot for Byrd, who agreed to refit and test the Vega for her. Repaired in September 1930 after her accident in Norfolk, the plane was rebuilt a year later into a Vega 5B by the Detroit Aircraft Corporation. The fuselage was scrapped and replaced with one from another Vega, serial number 68, but the original serial number, 22, was retained. Painted a deep red with trim striping in gold and black, the plane was then chartered to Ludington Airlines. It was released by Ludington on March 5, 1932, registered as NR7952 by Amelia and turned over to Balchen. Just as the curious had supposed the Friendship was intended for Byrd’s Antarctic expedition in 1928, they now assumed that Amelia’s Vega was to be used by Balchen in a transarctic flight with Lincoln Ellsworth.
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