Amelia Earhart

by Doris L. Rich

  Amelia needed money, for her half of the household expenses at Rye, for the maintenance of an airplane, for Amy’s support, and for the limited luxuries she had begun to enjoy—a good car, a simple but expensive wardrobe, and an impressive library. On July 20 she went to Detroit to a three-day introductory celebration for a new automobile—the Essex. Produced by the Hudson Motor Car Company, the first Essex off the line was christened by Amelia on July 22 when she broke a bottle of gasoline over its hood, then watched a parade of two thousand new cars pass by, each driven by a Hudson or Essex dealer. Amelia was given an Essex Terraplane, a stylish little coupe.

  Amelia was thrifty. She never left a hotel room without taking all the stationery in it. For years she used whatever came to hand, including Bert Kinner’s, Dennison Airport’s, Cosmopolitan’s, and the NAA’s. She once wrote to Amy on the back of a Ninety-Nine bulletin and Marian Stabler received a letter on tiny pages from a notepad. In London she used Lady Astor’s, and some from the U.S. embassy which caused considerable embarrassment. She had written an endorsement of a Swiss watch used on her flight. When the letter with the embassy’s address showing clearly appeared in a trade paper, a jeweler complained to the State Department. A department spokesman said that the use of the ambassador’s stationery did not constitute a government endorsement. After that, although she wrote a note to her mother on White House stationery, she was very careful.

  Amelia as a child. (Source: The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College)

  Amelia and Wilmer Stultz, pilot of the Friendship, being congratulated by Mr. and Mrs. Harry Moore after the 1928 transatlantic flight. (Source: American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming)

  Amelia, wearing the wings presented to her in 1928 as an honorary major in the 381st Observation Squadron, U.S. Army Reserve, at Cressey Field, Presidio of San Francisco. (Source: Margaret Haviland Lewis)

  Conclusion of the first westbound flight of Transcontinental Air Transport, July 9, 1929. Pictured are Amelia (third from left), Dorothy Binney Putnam (fourth from left), and Charles and Anne Lindbergh (third and fourth from right). (Source: Trans World Airlines)

  Amelia in the cockpit of the Lockheed Vega that she flew in the Women’s Air Derby, August 1929. (Source: Harvey C. Christen)

  Amelia with Joe Nikrent, official timer of the NAA’s Los Angeles chapter, after breaking the women’s speed record in November 1929. The plane was a borrowed Lockheed Vega with a wooden fuselage. (Source: Office of Public Information, Lockheed-California Company)

  Amelia with polar flier Bernt Balchen, the man who outfitted her “Little Red Bug” for the Atlantic solo crossing in 1932. (Source: W. M. Tegerdine)

  Amelia and George Palmer Putnam shortly after their marriage in February 1931. (Source: Marcia-Marie Canavello)

  Amelia greeting film star Mary Pickford, the honored guest, at a Fourth of July celebration during the 1933 National Air Races in Los Angeles. (Source: Trans World Airlines)

  The avid amateur airplane mechanic was fascinated by all mechanical devices not just airplanes. (Source: Office of Public Information, Lockheed-California Company)

  The power, speed, and beauty she loved, in the air or on the ground, are all here in her new, twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10E and elegant 1936 Cord Phaeton. (Source: Office of Public Information, Lockheed-California Company)

  The original plan for the ’round-the-world flight, from Oakland westward. In her second attempt she reversed directions, flying east from Oakland to Miami, leaving the Pacific stretch last. (Source: Office of Public Information, Lockheed- California Company)

  With Amelia, in one of the last informal photographs taken of her, is Lily MacIntosh, whose husband W. Bruce MacIntosh took Amelia and navigator Fred Noonan fishing off the Miami coast. (Source: Clinton and Marian Morrison)

  At the Karachi airport with navigator Fred Noonan. (Source: Margaret Haviland Lewis)

  Front page of the Chicago Herald and Examiner, Monday, July 5, 1937.

  Amelia not only needed and wanted work for herself, she looked for jobs and wrote letters of recommendation for her colleagues. Before networking among women began, she was trying to make the Ninety-Nines a central exchange of information on the qualifications of its members and job opportunities. During the National Air Races in August of 1932, when she was re-elected president of the organization, she spent hours in her hotel room writing proposals and letters to enlarge and strengthen it.

  She also helped individual members in any way she could. When Nancy Hopkins Tier, who had competed in the 1930 races, had neither a plane nor even a pass to the field in 1932, Amelia gave Tier her pass, remarking with a grin that she thought she could get in without it.

  Amelia proposed that the Ninety-Nines have a magazine with Clara Trenckman Studer, a newspaper reporter who had lost her job at Curtiss Wright in a depression cutback, as editor. Amelia would pay her salary until the magazine could raise it through advertisements.

  She also found work for Helen Weber, another woman fired by Curtiss Wright, first at Ludington Airlines as her temporary assistant and later as co-author, with G. P., of a boy’s book. In 1932, when Weber was recuperating from surgery, she was the Putnams’ houseguest and in November of that year Amelia hired her as her secretary.

  Amelia certainly needed one. In a letter to Clara Studer on November 11, Weber gave a vivid picture of Amelia’s work while she was based at Rye:

  AE left early-early today [Saturday] for Hartford for luncheon, peerade [sic] and lecture tonight, thence by horse car to Williamstown … to speak over nation-wide hookup on Sunday night—thence to Keene, New Hampshire, thence to Waterbury, Connecticut, and I am to have a candle in the window sometime after midnight on Tuesday night. Wednesday is the big SECRET, of course, not more than 6,000 people know about it—don’t tell Walter Winchell—but AE is to get the AWA award at a dinner at the Penn Hotel. She will speak on Thursday, the 17th, at McMillan Theater, Columbia University. So I should think she would stay at the Seymour Hotel on Thursday … in case you are hankering to see her.

  On Friday she was in Portland, Maine, and on Saturday, in Poughkeepsie, New York.

  Life was even more hectic when she left Rye for the lecture circuit. She flew when the weather permitted, drove at other times, often alone and at night, and took trains under protest. In the last half of October she was based in Chicago and ranged as far west as Lawrence, Kansas, and Des Moines, Iowa, as far north as Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Marquette, Michigan. After a week at home she spent most of November and December on the road again, often with two lectures booked for the same day. Along with the lectures, there were autographing sessions in book stores to promote sales of The Fun of It.

  When she drove she took her favorite car, the big, powerful, black Franklin sedan that G. P. claimed handled like a truck. After taking it to Chicago for a lecture to more than one thousand 4-H Club members, she became so ill with either influenza or food poisoning that she had to leave it in Cleveland a day later. The next day she was flown from Cleveland to Erie, Pennsylvania, where a Ninety-Nine friend, Helen Richey, met her and took her to Williamsburg for her next lecture. A day later she gave two in Detroit before moving on to Cincinnati. Richey again met her and drove her, in the Franklin, to Johnstown, where Amelia had to insist to an eager arrangements committee that she could not join them for coffee but had to have a rest before giving both afternoon and evening lectures. On December 6 she was in Ithaca, on the eighth, in Springfield, Massachusetts, to speak at a luncheon along with Dr. Mary Woolley, president of Mt. Holyoke College. That night she made a network broadcast. On the ninth she was back in Cleveland and on the tenth, in Detroit.

  Returning to Cleveland to pick up her car, Amelia drove to Greenville, Pennsylvania, to receive an honorary degree from her father’s alma mater, Thiel College. She left early the following day in a blinding sleet storm for Toronto. After returning to Rye for forty-eight hours, on December 17, she gave another National Geographic Society lecture in Washington. Although s
he still needed at least fifteen minutes alone before each appearance to prepare for the ordeal, once on stage she spoke with the assurance and grace of a professional actress.

  The same assurance was reflected in changing personal relationships. At thirty-five, with no children of her own and no desire to have any, Amelia displayed genuine affection for her nineteen-year-old stepson. She kept open house for his friends and pleaded his cause when he aroused G. P.’s fearsome temper, a fairly frequent occurrence. A handsome, intelligent youth, David was cheerfully impetuous, breaking enough rules to warrant several changes of boarding schools. While he was in California with his father and Amelia, she arranged a job for him with Paul Mantz, stunt man, master pilot, owner of an aviation garage at Burbank, and choreographer of the dog fights in Howard Hughes’s great war film, Hell’s Angels.

  Mantz also gave young Putnam flying lessons. After only a few weeks of instruction, David soloed “in a Kinner Fleet, a hot stunt plane in those days.” Practical joker Mantz did not make it easy for the young explorer and author. To a crowd waiting to see a Mexican Olympic team arrive at the field, Mantz announced over the public address system, “You will now see a young American make his first flight.” Mantz rattled the novice for a moment, but David pulled himself together, took off and soloed successfully, receiving his license not long after.

  Amelia gave him his first aeronautical textbook and later, his first automobile, in what she called a “trade.” In exchange for the Essex Terraplane she had received in Detroit, she took his raccoon coat, a wardrobe staple for Ivy League students. In spite of her heavy lecture schedule that fall, she found time to accompany G. P. to Providence to see David play on the Brown University freshman football team.

  While her relationship with her stepson grew closer, she became increasingly estranged from her mother. Before the solo Atlantic flight there had been disagreement over Amy’s expenditure of her allowance on Muriel and other members of the family. In September Amelia suggested that Amy accompany her on at least part of one lecture tour. “It might be just one hotel after another,” she warned but if Amy didn’t want to tour then she might like to spend a week in Rye that month or the first part of October. She had not yet been to the house in Rye.

  This letter was followed by one on September 18 in which Amelia asked her mother to come to Rye for “a day or two” to work out the details for accompanying her on a tour. With the invitation she enclosed only half of Amy’s allowance explaining that “if I sent the whole you would spend it on someone else and not have anything left for yourself by the first of the month.” The someone else was Muriel.

  The invitations to Amy were not renewed. On November 4 Amelia wrote that she had finished her first tour and that G. P. would go with her on the next to New England. When Amy suggested she come along, Amelia replied, “I don’t know what to say about your coming.… You said maybe it was just as well that you didn’t go so there would be no chance of your disgracing me or words to that effect.”

  She followed this with a halfhearted promise to try to work something out if Amy really did want to come along “for a few days” but nothing came of it. On Christmas Eve Amelia wrote Amy a long letter describing her visit to Thiel College on December 11. If Amy were jealous of Amelia’s affection for Edwin the letter would have done nothing to placate her. The devoted daughter who had never stopped loving her father wrote:

  I met several people who were in Dad’s class and others who knew him. I found his record for scholarship, ie., age of graduation has never been equaled. He was fourteen when he entered college and only eighteen when he got his degree.…

  Everyone remembered Dad as so handsome and bright.…

  She could not extend to Amy the childlike love she felt for Edwin. As a youngster she had expected and received affection and guidance from her mother. As as adolescent she had followed Amy’s example in withdrawing from an alcoholic Edwin and turned to her mother for the money for college fees and her first airplane. But from the time she became a self-supporting adult she romanticized her father while assuming a caretaker’s role toward her mother.

  Neither Amelia’s gratitude for past support nor her voluntary assumption of financial responsibility for Amy could overcome other differences—in personality, values, and generational perceptions. The mother whom the child Amelia had thought intelligent and determined seemed to have become opinionated and stubborn. Amelia disagreed with Amy’s focus on the extended family as the center of life. To the older woman, anyone within the family, no matter how inept or even dishonest, deserved her consideration and, often, assistance. After a miserable adolescence caused by a father she refused to condemn, Amelia was a confirmed loner, no longer tied to the family, reserved even with friends.

  On the surface, the conflict between mother and daughter centered on money. Amelia had had so little until after she was thirty that she spent it carefully and invested wisely. Never stingy, she enjoyed giving it to her mother as well as to a number of friends in need but, having given it, she was angered by Amy’s use of it. Her mother lived in an ill-kept, often cold house with Muriel and the husband Amelia despised. Amy was co-housekeeper, cooking, sewing, cleaning, and baby-tending. When she was not giving her money and labor to the Morrisseys, she went to Philadelphia to tend her dying sister, Margaret Balis, a woman who had borrowed and spent the life savings of their retarded brother without a hope of repaying him.

  In addition to withholding half of Amy’s allowance and banking it for her, Amelia bought her clothing and asked that doctor bills be sent directly to her, because either Amy did not have the money to pay them or, worse, would not see a physician when she really needed one. If Amelia’s letters seemed domineering and insensitive they were in response to a determined and evasive mother who pretended acquiescence and then did as she pleased. Nevertheless, Amelia wrote frequently, more than to any other person, remaining a concerned, dutiful, and frequently exasperated daughter.

  Amelia’s relationship with G. P. also changed. He remained her publisher and agent as well as her husband, but she was no longer his student or prodigy. He himself affirmed this when he first heard she had landed in Ireland, telling a reporter, “This is her stunt. She’s doing it under her own name, Amelia Earhart. That’s the name she made for herself.”

  If he slipped back into his previously domineering role, she did not hesitate to correct him. During a press conference aboard the Riverside a reporter noted that when G. P. continually interrupted her she turned to him and said, quietly but firmly, “Just a minute, dear,” then continued to give her account of the Atlantic crossing. Later, when G. P. again interrupted to say, “Tell them about your lunch with the king and queen of Belgium,” she ignored him, describing instead how admirably the British press had treated her. She was confident but not angry with him. Two hours later, speaking to the Flag Association, she said that much of the credit for her flight belonged to her husband. “It was much harder for him to stay than it was for me to go,” she said.

  She repeated this praise in a magazine article, written with G. P., entitled “My Wife—My Husband,” reminding the reader that her husband was a publisher, writer, and explorer, who was not accustomed to stand on the sidelines while others played the game. Yet he had cancelled an important business engagement when she called and asked him to come to England and help her with appointments and correspondence. For his part, G. P. wrote that they had from their “bargain of partnership” mutual independence of action. When she told him the chances of getting across the Atlantic were one in ten, he was not happy about it but it was her show, he said, and if the engine held out she would.

  They could hardly be critical of one another in a magazine article but their claims of compatibility were confirmed by friends. Amelia’s confidante of college days, Marian Stabler, was not so sure at first. She disliked G. P. intensely, calling him a “lion hunter” who discouraged Amelia’s friendship with anyone except the famous. Marian had also heard a story about them so
on after their marriage, told her by a friend who worked in an automobile agency. The friend said that Amelia had come to the salesroom before G. P. and accepted a demonstration ride. While she was gone, he arrived and “fussed and fumed, walking up and down like a caged lion.” When Amelia returned, “he took her to task in a very humiliating way in front of the two salespeople … for not waiting for him.”

  Marian was certain that G. P. was responsible for the infrequency with which she saw her old friend. On one of the rare occasions she dined with them, Marian said that Amelia’s warm cordiality was not enough to compensate for her host’s rude, patronizing manner. Yet in spite of her dislike of him, Marian said, “That night I was there, after dinner they settled down together and I could see that she cared for him and he cared for her. I’m quite sure they were in love.”

  If G. P. was as rude to Amelia as the car story indicated, her calm manner and growing assertiveness put a stop to such scenes soon after. In commenting on G. P.’s unrestrained profanity during one of his frequent temper tantrums, Bradford Washburn, a young author who was sitting in the office one day during a typical outburst, later remarked, “Putnam would never speak like that in front of Amelia.”

  Whether she was in love or not, the marriage Amelia had told Marian was one of “convenience and necessity” proved very convenient and not nearly as confining as she had anticipated. Much of their limited time together was spent at the house in Rye where they shared an avid interest in gardening. Helen Weber looked out the window one day when she was working as Amelia’s secretary and saw G. P. giving Amelia a ride in the wheelbarrow, racing up and down, tipping and tilting the vehicle while his passenger alternately squealed in delight and roared with laughter.