Amelia Earhart

by Doris L. Rich

  G. P. wrote to Hunter in June, looking for a “mutually advantageous” deal. He told Hunter it was time to push for the new route and to work toward recapturing “some of the airline’s stock.” He also implied that he and Amelia were responsible for the appointment of Vidal, by then a certainty although not official.

  Vidal’s son Gore later claimed that Amelia and Eleanor Roosevelt did some “backstage maneuvering” for the appointment. Certainly Amelia thought Vidal ideal for the job. Soon after it was confirmed in September she sent him a photograph of herself inscribed, “To Eugene Vidal whose greatest fault in aviation is thinking too far ahead of the industry.” Gore thought Amelia was in love with his father who shared her belief in the boundless future of commercial aviation. Always a romantic, Amelia could have loved him for that shared faith but there is no evidence that she shared his bed, then or later.

  In 1932 Amelia, Vidal, and Paul Collins, their friend and fellow employee in Ludington Airlines, had invested in a salt-water swimming pool at the Washington-Hoover Airport. It was a losing proposition when Amelia met Washington real estate man Sam Solomon who offered to bail them out. A handsome ex-Army officer and amateur basketball star, Solomon sold their lease to a New York man, taking his first airplane ride to close the deal. Sam liked the ride and he liked all three aviators. Amelia, Vidal, and Collins then asked him to find them another investment.

  In the summer of 1933 when they met at Amelia’s house in Rye, she said, “Let’s start an airline.”‡ Vidal and Collins agreed immediately, but Solomon said he didn’t know anything about airlines. Collins, who had already been approached by officials of the Boston and Maine Railroad about starting an air service operation, said Solomon’s financial skills were what they needed. He knew operations and Vidal was both salesman and administrator. Amelia could handle public relations.

  Solomon was convinced. “Count me in,” he said, “and I want to be a vice-president.” Each of the partners contributed twenty-five hundred dollars for a total capitalization of ten thousand dollars, enough for two used airplanes and a few month’s operating expenses. They named their new company National Airways.

  When Boston and Maine officials asked Collins how he knew the line would cover all the proposed stops with safety, he said he didn’t know yet, but he and Amelia would find out. If they were given a car and driver at Portland, Maine, they would have an answer at a meeting in Boston by two o’clock the next afternoon. The designated stops were at Portland, Rockland, Bangor, and either Waterville or Augusta. Collins said, “We met the driver and car as planned at the Portland station, drove to Rockland where we walked over the field in darkness, studying the length, width, approaches and surface. There was not a runway or aid to navigation as we know them now north of Boston.” Working all night Collins and Amelia stopped at all five fields, inspecting each before driving back to Portland where they caught the train to Boston and met the railroad officials promptly at 2 P.M.

  They got their contract, signed on August 6, an agreement to start five days later with at least two round trips a day for which the railroad would pay National Airways forty cents a mile. Tickets would be sold by the railroad at its stations and by the airline at the airports. To the public the airline would be known as the Boston and Maine Airways, with a railroad official, Phillip F. Payson, as president.

  G. P. deserted Northwest for the Boston and Maine, announcing to the press that Collins and Amelia would operate the new line. To Putnam’s statement one newspaper added that Mr. Putnam “was said to be one of the principal stockholders.” It is possible that Amelia’s twenty-five hundred dollars was actually G. P.’s.

  In three days Collins hired his staff and bought two Stinson ten-seater airplanes from Eastern Air Transport—the same planes he had flown for Ludington, now secondhand and cheaper. On August 9, Amelia joined him in Boston as a passenger on one of the planes, which was moved to Portland’s airport at Scarboro. Along with all hands on both planes, she helped to unload equipment for the home office, a tiny room in the hangar, headquarters of what may have been the world’s most underfinanced airline. The next day they took off from Portland for Rockford where a crowd of one thousand had been waiting for more than two hours to see Amelia. The pilot circled the field several times, a move he soon regretted as eager admirers overran it, forcing him to land at the very edge. This time Amelia, who ordinarily disliked these mass demonstrations, was delighted. “You will see me often,” she told the crowd, “for I shall be down here to sell tickets to all of you.”

  She meant it. When she believed in any cause she was inexhaustible, possessed by the same exuberant energy manifested in the fragile young Columbia student who sat up all night translating French poetry and then rose, as if from the dead, after a twenty-minute nap. This energy fascinated Helen Weber’s eight-year-old daughter, Marcia-Marie. One day while the child played in the living room at Rye and Amelia paced up and down, explaining to Helen her hopes and plans for the new airline, Marcia-Marie saw Amelia leap up on the sofa, laughing, her head thrown back and arms extended, still talking to Helen. “I thought she wanted to be high in the sky,” Marcia-Marie told her mother.

  Amelia sought help for the new airline wherever she could find it. When Jimmy Mollison sailed to England with the remnants of his aircraft Amelia asked Amy, staying on at Rye as a houseguest, to lend a hand. The two women flew and drove through New England, giving talks on the women’s club and tea circuit. Amelia also cabled her stepson, David, who was a member of a team exploring British Guiana and Northern Brazil, to come home. She had a job for him as dispatcher at the Augusta airport.

  On August 21, the day after David returned, Amelia called a press conference, combining David’s latest adventure with a boost for the airline. The tall, moustached explorer, not yet twenty-one years old, exhibited a dead tarantula, which he placed on Amelia’s hand for photographers, then told a few stories of odd behavior in animals facing death. Amelia added a story of her own. It concerned a Ludington Airline pilot who encountered a flock of pigeons during flight and, after landing, found one of the birds alive, sitting between cylinder heads. It had passed through the propeller blades moving at fifteen hundred revolutions per minute, she said. When reporters hooted, she said, “Now you tell me one.” After everyone did, they elected her president of the Monday afternoon Exaggerated Narrative Club. For a cause she espoused, Amelia could run rings around G. P. gaining press coverage.

  After an impressive start, the operation of the infant airline became a nightmare. During a cold fall and subzero winter, snow often blocked the roads into airports for an entire day before it could be cleared. Mechanics worked in unheated hangars. With only limited use of city snow plows, Collins had to put snow chains on the airplanes’ tires to get sufficient traction for landings made in cross winds. To raise enough money for operating costs and salaries, he completed flights from Boston to Portland and back on which there were no passengers at all, so that he could collect the subsidy paid by the railroad for each completed flight.

  Amelia, who received a check for one dollar, marked “salary,” from National Airways, Inc., on December 30, helped whenever she could. Between one lecture tour for six weeks, starting in October, and a second one in the southwest in December, she traveled the line, selling tickets, talking with passengers, and posing for photographs with them, wrapped in her sable coat, a hat pulled over her ears to prevent frostbite. On the lecture circuit she never failed to mention her affiliation with the airline.

  After Vidal left the line in September to become chief of the Bureau of Air Commerce, Amelia represented it in Washington. At congressional hearings on the National Recovery Act’s code for pilots she protested a section of the code stating that “members of the code agree not to initiate service between cities already served by another member over an identical route.” She claimed the rule would create monopolies and prevent establishment of new airlines.

  If Harry Bruno was wrong about Amelia’s total lack of in
terest in money, he was not about G. P.’s efforts to “cash in” on her name. Since 1928 G. P. had arranged for the most direct method—product endorsement—with Amelia testifying to the excellence of a certain spark plug, airplane engine, automobile, gasoline, or oil. In April of 1933 she did the text for a two-page magazine advertisement extolling Kodak cameras and film, entitled “Part of the Fun of It.” It was a clever pitch merging Kodak’s products with her latest book in the disguise of an illustrated magazine article.

  However, her principal source of income was from lectures, which both enhanced her fame and made it pay. Within a year of her Atlantic flight the word “aviatrix” brought an automatic response of “Earhart” from the average American. On the road again in October, she had a schedule of thirty-nine lectures, extending into the first week of the new year. With winter weather too uncertain to fly she drove her twelve-cylinder Franklin, often leaving at midnight for the next town on her schedule. Checking into a hotel at dawn, she frequently gave newsmen an interview while she ate breakfast, then caught a few hours of sleep before the next lecture.

  On the October tour Amelia brought Amy as far as Chicago where she left her with friends. From there Amelia made seven stops in the Midwest before spending a weekend in Atchison with Lucy Challis’s parents, Jim and Rilla. In a letter to Amy, who was still in Chicago, Amelia wrote, “Everyone is very cordial and it seems ‘Millie’ [Amelia] hasn’t changed at all—heaven help her.”

  In many respects she had not. She found time in her tight schedule to visit her Uncle Theo, Amy’s brother, and Mary Brashay, the woman who had looked after him (and Amelia, when she was a child) for thirty years. Theo hauled freight with a horse and wagon. Later, when the horse died, Amelia bought him another, and she sent a monthly check regularly as part of his support after relatives had lost what little capital he possessed.

  While Amelia was with the Challises, Rilla also wrote to Amy: “I tried to forget she was a celebrity and treat her as just Millie Earhart, for she looked a bit tired and I know she needed relaxation. She seems to stand up under her strenuous program, but I really wanted to put her to bed for a day.”

  Tired or not, Amelia kept to her schedule, drawing record crowds—fourteen hundred in Mason City, Iowa, and two thousand in Kansas City. After working her way back through the Middle West to Toledo, Lansing, and Detroit, she had a day of rest at home, then left for Wheeling and Huntington, West Virginia. She drove back from Huntington to Rye, stopped there for two days, and left again by car with G. P. for lectures in Watertown, New York, and Ottawa. She traveled more than seven thousand miles by car, much of it alone, in six weeks, giving at least one newspaper interview as well as a lecture at each stop.

  In Alton, Illinois, a reporter who couldn’t find her after the lecture waited in the hotel lobby until he saw her return, then called her room. “All right,” she sighed. “If you can stand it, I can.” In Toledo the duration of the press conference was “one omelet, six pieces of toast, a canteloupe and a pot of hot chocolate” in a hotel suite after an all-night drive from South Bend. She spoke at eleven o’clock that morning, then left for an evening lecture in Lansing, Michigan.

  At the end of the tour she was near the breaking point when Huntington reporter Mary Yvonne Scales walked into her dressing room and saw her sitting in a chair, her hand over her eyes. No one had told Scales that Amelia always asked for five minutes alone before going on stage. However, Scales was forgiven and told to wait in the dressing room until after the lecture. After her talk Amelia was mobbed by men, women, and children who rushed the stage, some crowding behind the curtain to stare at her. “Oh,” one woman shouted, “I got a good look at her that time!” as if Amelia were an exotic animal. Fighting her way back to the dressing room, Amelia saw Scales waiting there. “Oh, yes,” she said. “There’s still you.” But Scales got her story before Amelia left at midnight for Pittsburgh.

  She left again in early December for the Southwest. In Fort Worth she borrowed a car from a friend and drove to Amarillo, Wichita Falls, then Lubbock. On December 8 while she was in Lubbock a magazine of that date published an article on “Mrs. and ‘Mr.’ Earhart” in which G. P. was described as: “a fellow who will get an idea at the dinner table, drop his fork and begin calling San Francisco, Chicago, Denver and all points.… The whole project may fizzle out before the coffee is cold, or it may net him a hundred thousand dollars in a week.”

  G. P.’s newest project for Amelia would not net one hundred thousand dollars in a week. Amelia was to be a fashion designer. He may have had the idea for a year, ever since they entertained Elsa Schiaparelli, world-renowned designer, at a Sunday lunch the previous February. Already known as one of the best-dressed women in America, Amelia talked with Elsa about functional clothing for what she defined as “active living.”

  This newest project was pursued by G. P. with his customary vigor. Three days after the article on “Mr. Earhart” appeared Macy’s department store announced the presentation of a new line of women’s clothing designed by Amelia Earhart and to be sold exclusively by Macy’s in the New York area. Amelia, the announcement stated, was lecturing in Texas but she had already completed fifty outfits for outdoor, sports, travel, and spectator wear. The clothing would be sold under franchise by only one store in each metropolitan area, with thirty stores already under contract. Manufacturing rights were sold by G. P. to four New York firms, with hats to be made by a fifth.§

  This first announcement opened a country-wide sales blitz. With Amelia on tour much of the winter G. P. had already closed the house in Rye and moved into their suite at the Hotel Seymour on 45th Street. Between lectures Amelia worked on the clothing in the living room where one corner was occupied by a fitting dummy and a seamstress who worked at a sewing machine. G. P. issued an open invitation to the press to drop in and interview Amelia about her new career.

  Associated Press feature writer Sigrid Arne was one of several who wrote just what G. P. wanted. The neophyte designer “uncurled from an armchair” to greet Arne, fastening the needle she held in the collar of her tailored lounging pajamas. The other chairs in the room were draped with dresses and the sewing machine hummed in the corner. Her desk was piled high with swatches of silk and fan letters. Why, asked Arne, this new career? “I just don’t like shopping very much,” Amelia told her. The sewing machine, she added, was hers at Ogontz where she made most of her clothing. (There was never any mention of this in her letters to her mother.) Of course, she added, she would like to fly again. Her plane was parked only an hour’s drive from the hotel room but “some other girl should be breaking my records,” she added wistfully. “I don’t have the equipment and planes don’t grow on bushes.”

  If bushes wouldn’t produce airplanes Amelia was willing to cultivate other sources created by G. P. During the first four months of 1934 articles with photographs of Amelia modeling clothing she had designed received nationwide news coverage. Her concept of style for function was emphasized, the clothing made of wrinkle-proof, washable materials with simple lines, broad shoulders, ample sleeves, and natural waistlines. Several of her ideas were revolutionary for 1934. One was making matching “separates” in which sizes could be “scrambled” so that a woman could buy a size 12 blouse and a size 14 skirt or slacks. Another was a coat of Harris Tweed with a zip-in, washable lining.

  G. P.’s clothing sales campaign got off to a good start by mid-December when a United Press dispatch affirmed Amelia’s title as “Queen of the Air” for another year. Four days later, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Wright brothers’ Kitty Hawk flight, she gave the dedication speech at the opening of the new aviation hall at the Franklin Institute Museum in Philadelphia. The red Vega she had sold, without its motor, to the Institute was also unveiled.‖

  A perfect example of the publicity G. P. sought appeared in a Boston newspaper announcing she would be the principal speaker at a Rotary Club luncheon January 24. The picture was of Amelia modeling one of her suits, the caption stat
ing she had designed a whole new line of clothing. The story said she was a vice-president of the Boston and Maine’s National Airways and that her talk on modern aviation would be broadcast by NBC. Here he had a combination of Amelia’s interests as leading aviator, airline official, lecturer, and clothing designer.

  Nevertheless, Amelia was not willing to do everything G. P. asked. On a day she lunched at the Biltmore with him and Hilton Railey, he displayed a hat he had ordered, a cheap article with a silk band bearing a facsimile of her signature. She took it from him and examined it, eyes narrowing in disapproval. It would not do, she said. They were already being made up, he told her. “Tell them to unmake them. Now,” she said, pointing to a telephone at the table. He held out until she threatened to sue him.

  The phenomenal endurance she displayed in pursuit of a flight record or a cause she believed in gave out selling clothing. By the end of January she was bedridden with laryngitis and forced to postpone a lecture tour. Her mother claimed that designing and promoting the clothing was “one of the hardest strains she ever went through, because she was doing so much at the time.”

  Amy was probably right, but after a few days in bed Amelia was off again, driving alone to Atlanta. Arriving on a Saturday, she gave a long interview to the press, flew a Bellanca monoplane for its owner and his guests, and met four members of the Ninety-Nines’ Georgia chapter at Candler Field so that they could get their picture in the papers along with a description of the organization. On Sunday she gave her lecture. From Atlanta she drove to Rome to visit a school for handicapped children, then to Tuscaloosa and Birmingham for more lectures before returning home via Chattanooga and Washington. She did it all in one week.