The first and most threatening problem would be raising her fuel-heavy Vega off the ground at an altitude of seven thousand feet. G. P. persuaded the chief of the Mexican air force, Roberto Fierro, to have a three-mile-long runway built for her on the bed of Lake Texcoco.‖ Mexican soldiers with picks and shovels did the work while Putnam returned to New York to telephone weather reports back to Amelia and arrange for her arrival at Newark.
Delayed by bad weather, Amelia did not leave until the morning of May 8, when she sent word to fill the tanks of the Vega, which had been moved from the Pan American hangar to the improvised runway. Fears and doubts never kept her awake. She went back to sleep for two hours, ate breakfast at the hotel, and drove to the runway.
Dawn was just breaking when she closed the cockpit cover and waved for takeoff. The three-ton plane was loaded with 472 gallons of high octane fuel, a potential Molotov cocktail if she were to deviate from the course marked by white flags on the runway or fail to gain enough airspeed before the end of it. She did neither. Engines wide open, the Vega roared down the narrow path marked by the white flags and rose slowly up and over the snowcapped mountains enclosing the makeshift field.
The route Amelia chose was as dangerous as the takeoff. To reach New Orleans she could either fly around the Gulf of Mexico or over it. Before she left Los Angeles she told Wiley Post she could save an hour by crossing the Gulf. When Post said, “Don’t do it, it’s too dangerous,” he had made the choice for her. If the great Wiley Post thought it too dangerous, then she would have to prove she could do it. She did, maintaining an altitude of ten thousand feet for most of the twenty-one hundred miles over water, then headed north for the last thousand to Newark.
Gene Vidal was waiting for her at Hoover Airport in Washington.a When she flew over he radioed, “You’ve done a splendid job, so come down.” She answered, “Thanks for the invitation. I’m going through.”
That night at Newark a crowd of three thousand swarmed past police onto the floodlit field as the Vega rolled to a stop. Police cars, sirens blaring, inched through the throng while other officers formed a cordon around the bare-headed, smiling woman emerging from the cockpit. One of two policemen attempting to escort her to safety took her right arm and the second, her left leg, and, she said, “the arm holder started to go one way while he who clasped my leg set out in the opposite direction.” Dragged along by this animated “torture rack” Amelia was met halfway by G. P., who had already lost his temper, shouting that compared to this crowd “the lowliest peons of Mexico were more civilized.” Amelia, who had always loathed the touch of strangers, kept right on smiling.
Eight hours later the “legitimate returns” G. P. sought for Amelia began to pour in. Publicity came first. Photographers were taking her picture while she was still eating breakfast. By midday she had been interviewed by reporters, attended an informal reception at City Hall, and eaten lunch with her friends and fellow directors of National Airways, Paul Collins and Sam Solomon. At the Newark airport where the Vega was parked in a Standard Oil hangar, one thousand persons came to see it before the end of that day.
Vidal sent her an official message praising her “complete knowledge of aircraft operation and cross-country navigation.” He exaggerated. Her courage was far greater than either her knowledge of aircraft or of navigation. Two other friends, Helen and Ogden Reid, sent a personal telegram and ran an editorial in the Herald Tribune stating that Amelia had demonstrated “how closely dignity stems from modesty and courtesy from a warm heart. The country could not have a better ambassador-at-large.”
Amelia was back at the Newark Airport five days later to christen the new Douglas Dolphin amphibian plane (and dowse herself with champagne while the newsreel cameras rolled and Frank Hawks doubled up with laughter). Twenty-four hours later she was in Chicago to receive a medal from the Italian government during a conference of two thousand women’s club presidents and program chairmen—two thousand potential subscribers to an Earhart lecture.
Preaching her gospel of air travel, she made a convert of Helen Reid after both women received honorary degrees at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. Until then Reid had been a frightened passenger who also worried about her amateur-pilot son, Whitelaw. On the way back from Atlanta she sat with Amelia, then wired Whitelaw, a junior at Yale, “Skies fine between Atlanta and New York.… Perfectly competent to do blind flying. Love. Mother.”
While Amelia was almost universally admired, G. P. was not. To describe him his critics used adjectives like overbearing, snobbish, fast-talking, scheming, and acquisitive. The press homed in on the stamp deal that paid for the flight. Of the 300 stamps remaining after 480 went to the Universal Postal Union, G. P. was said to have purchased 240. Some were on covers. The Gimbels’ department store claimed, “by dint of great effort,” it had secured three of the 35 autographed covers brought from Mexico, priced at $175 each when Byrd’s covers from the South Pole sold for 90 cents. The three covers were sold by Putnam to Jacques Minkus of Gimbel Brothers. Irate stamp collectors wanted to know why Putnam was permitted to control most of the 300. Newsweek magazine claimed that 24 went to six Mexican philatelic associations, 35 to the Mexico City post office, one to President Roosevelt, and the rest were G. P.’s.b
G. P. insisted there was nothing wrong with the stamp deal. Newsweek countered by calling three other of his financing schemes greedy, verging on dishonest: the autogiro tours for Beech-Nut, the rumored financing of the Hawaiian flight in exchange for publicity against sugar quotas, and a radio campaign by the Mexican government to promote tourism that coincided with Amelia’s flight. The magazine claimed that while G. P. was in Mexico he proposed an even more ambitious tourism campaign for a price at which one Mexican official gasped, “There isn’t that much money in Mexico!”
Undaunted by his critics Putnam scheduled a ten-day round of personal appearances for Amelia, starting on May 30 when she became the first woman referee at the Memorial Day race in Indianapolis—the twenty-third “Indy 500.” He also booked her for a lecture in Indianapolis the night before the race and another in Muncie the night after. The next day President Elliott of Purdue announced that Amelia had accepted an appointment at the university as a consultant on careers for women and that same day, June 1, Forum magazine was on the stands with an article by G. P. entitled, “A Flyer’s Husband.”
Forty-eight hours later Amelia made her first parachute jump—off a 115-foot training tower in Propertown, New Jersey. In a note to Gene Vidal, who also jumped, G. P. reported: “In case you missed the Tribune, it was on the front page and first page of the second section. All the papers are correspondingly good. All four newsreels, I think, will carry a yarn.… Publicitywise [sic] it was just about 10 percent success—far better than I dared expect.” In most of the photographs Amelia looks faintly embarrassed.
To conclude the publicity blitz Amelia went to Atchison, Kansas, on June 7, the guest of honor at the Kansas Editorial Association’s convention. The hometown heroine rode in a mile-long parade on a flower-decked airplane float and that night spoke at Memorial Hall where she was introduced by Gov. Alfred M. “Alf” Landon. (Landon was the Republican candidate for president the following year, losing to FDR by a landslide.)
Mary Brashay, who looked after Uncle Theo, reported to Amy that there were twenty-five thousand people watching the parade and hundreds were turned away from the hall after every seat had been taken. She wrote: “Theodore was sure proud of the turnout. I dress [sic] him up and he looked real nice. Amelia came up on Saturday afternoon … to see Theodore. He was so tickled to see her.”
Amelia seemed a veritable goddess to many of her young Atchison admirers. Twelve-year-old Louise Bode, who brought roses for her to the Challises’ home where Amelia was staying, wrote to Amy that “Miss Earhart was so gracious as to shake hands with me.” Luanna Hartsock was too shy to introduce herself but told Amy, “I think she is the most famous, most greatest, most pleasantest, most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
Late Saturday afternoon a family friend, Balie Waggener, took Amelia and G. P. to the Kansas City Airport to catch a plane for St. Louis where she had left the Vega. Although they sat at a table in the back of the airport restaurant, “the kids found her there,” Waggener said. “She treated the children wonderfully and was just as sweet about giving each of them her autograph.” If G. P. was at the table he had learned to be more patient with young fans than Amelia’s friend, Marian Stabler, remembered him at a New Jersey school. There he had shooed them away, saying, “Now, come on children, if you want Miss Earhart’s signature, write to her office.”c
From the West Coast Amelia wrote to Amy that they had rented a house in Hollywood for one year and she would stay there but did not know when G. P. would return from New York where book and picture negotiations were keeping him. “We are still hoping,” she wrote, “to get to Wyoming for July and August.”
They did not. Exhausted by three long-distance flights and three lecture tours in six months Amelia was hospitalized with a severe sinus infection. On June 25, the day after her last lecture, she entered Cedars of Lebanon Hospital for surgery. She told her mother she was “tired of being beaten up with washings out” (in which a syringe was used to pump a solution into the atrium to flush out the debris of suppurating tissue which then drained from the patient’s mouth. The alternative was surgery to enlarge or correct blocked nasal passages for normal drainage).
From the hospital she went to the Oceanside ranch of G. P.’s friends, the Louis Lightons, to recuperate. She was bedridden there when a backache she assumed was caused by a strained muscle was actually pleurisy. When G. P. arrived on the Fourth of July she was still in bed with her ribs strapped, but her nose was healing.
Illness did not prevent her from giving more advice than her mother wanted about where Amy should spend her vacation. Amelia had already sent $250 for a three-week stay at a resort—“not a cheap hotel,” and Amy was not to go any place where she had to do housework. Amy went where she pleased, to an inexpensive place in Rockport, Massachusetts, taking Muriel and the children with her. Amelia gave up and sent more money for another week after Amy said they planned to leave on July 15.
While they were at the Lightons, G. P. persuaded the editor of the Oceanside paper to print extra copies with an article he had written on the front page:
Mrs. George Palmer Putnam (nee Amelia Earhart) … has announced her retirement from cross-country riding. “I used to think parachutes were hard to sit on,” was her only comment. The horse had nothing to say.
Among the guests are Mr. Putnam who lately has often (about every six months) been seen with Miss Earhart; Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell and Paul Mantz who is taking flying lessons from Mr. Putnam and Mrs. Mantz who is taking lessons from Mr. Mantz.
G. P. was in high spirits. Amelia was on the mend and he had just received news of the birth of his first grandchild on July 6, a daughter born to his son David and wife Nilla. However Putnam’s announcement to the press said more about Amelia than it did about Baby Binney, starting with “Amelia Earhart is now a grandmother.” He noted that the twenty-one-year-old father was a dispatcher for the Boston and Maine Airways of which Amelia was a vice-president, and that Amelia would soon begin work on her third book.
Three weeks after her operation, Amelia was photographed with three other Lockheed owners at the Lockheed plant. Her Vega was being remodeled nearby at the Union Air Terminal into a pleasure craft by Paul Mantz.d A reporter who saw her go to a corner of the hangar between photo sessions took a picture of her “sitting on a pile of rags … permitting her tired eyes a few minutes rest.”
She looked terrible but nothing could keep her away from the Union Air Terminal after she decided to lease the Vega to Mantz. She would receive 50 percent of the profits from it until the first two thousand dollars for its repairs was paid. After that, revenue from it would go into a corporation that would include Mantz’s maintenance and movie stunt services, his fleet of planes for charter and a new Earhart-Mantz Flying School. They also wanted to stage an air circus in September. The restless Putnam was soon drawn into their plans and bought a house in the Lake Toluca district on July 28, minutes before he boarded a plane for New York.f There he prepared news releases and advertising copy for the most recent Earhart franchise, Amelia Earhart luggage.g
G. P. also sent a contract to Mantz for the incorporation of United Air Services, Ltd., which gave Mantz a controlling interest of 51 percent of the stock to be issued, but made Amelia the other principal shareholder and a member of the board of directors. Along with a payment of ninety-five hundred dollars Amelia’s chief contribution was the use of her name. The agreement required that both Amelia and Mantz put part of their stock in escrow along with written instructions so that in case either died the deposited stock would go to the survivor or survivor’s heirs.
The assumption that a partner might die was not unusual for pilots at the time. A few days later in Washington where Amelia was in the Capitol building with Sam Solomon they heard that Wiley Post and Will Rogers had just been killed in a crash at Point Barrow, Alaska.h Amelia was visibly shaken. “There was something in her reaction,” Solomon said, “that made me feel she had a premonition of her own end.”
Just eleven days before his death Rogers had written a column for his 40 million readers in which he said, “This Amelia, she would be great in any business.… The thing I like about her is that she always has a fine word to say about all other aviators.”i
Amelia liked Rogers but her feelings for Post were much deeper. Although she had always avoided discussing the death of colleagues in accidents, she wrote an obituary for Post in the Forum and Century that was both sensitive and sentimental. In it she said:
I met him first when he was a test pilot for Lockheed in 1929.… Six years is a long time for pilots doing the kind of flying Wiley did for us to know each other.…
Lost to the world are his ability, his humor, his conquering spirit. Lost to his friends are his tales of adventure, told while he denied he had had any.
Back in California by the end of August Amelia decided to fly the Bendix air race before her nine-month lecture tour. She wired G. P. in New York, “Paul and I in Bendix entered for fun since ship only stock model.”
Mantz thought she could place fifth in her aging plane for a prize of five hundred dollars, which would pay expenses. Amelia flew most of the way while mechanic Al Menasco and Mantz sat in the back playing gin rummy and sharing a pint of whiskey. “Amelia couldn’t smell it back there,” said Mantz. They came in fifth, as Mantz had predicted. The next day police had to be summoned to protect her from autograph hunters who stormed the grandstand where she sat.
On the return trip G. P. joined her, Mantz, and Menasco. While Paul flew the Vega, Amelia noted in her private log that men liked to have a male confederate fly. “It is my ship, …” she wrote, “but when principal is not at stake, I let them have their way.”
The fall lecture tour began a month later. In 1935 Amelia was on stage 135 times, before audiences totaling more than eighty thousand. At three hundred dollars a performance, the lectures not only provided her principal income but also gave her the chance to air her convictions about commercial aviation, equal rights for women, and pacifism. On stage she entertained with stories of her own flights, then closed with a pitch for commercial air travel.
Her insistence that it was safe and convenient was justified. But air travel was far from comfortable. Planes flew at less than two hundred miles an hour in altitudes under ten thousand feet, their closed cabins occupied by passengers who were frequently airsick. However, Amelia predicted a great future for aviation, with stratospheric flights “bringing nations to the physical status of neighbors.” At one time she criticized the lack of coordination of transportation in the United States, saying that Russia—“the new, young Russia—is already ahead of us in some ways as far as aviation is concerned.” But Amelia changed her tune at Senate hearings
in August on a bill putting airlines under the control of the Interstate Commerce Commission, giving the ICC power to require certificates of convenience and necessity for scheduled airlines. This was going too far. She recommended competition, “and let the best survive.” The admirer of “the new Russia” was not ready for state control.
Offstage, through newspaper and magazine interviews she aired her other views. She continued to advocate the military draft for women, combining pacifism with feminism as she declared, “To kill, to suffer, to be maimed, wasted, paralyzed, impoverished … to die ‘gloriously.’ There is no logic in disqualifying women from such privileges.” If women were strong enough to scrub offices, stand at washtubs, and work fields, she said, then they were strong enough to fight. She planned to go to jail along with traitors, cowards, and other conscientious objectors.
At Chatauqua she told an audience of five thousand that a woman was flying a regular airmail schedule. The pilot was her friend, Helen Richey, who flew for Central Airlines, the only woman of 72 with transport licenses piloting for a scheduled airline carrying mail. That was in August. Three months later Richey resigned. Although she said she left in “a very friendly spirit,” Amelia claimed otherwise, accusing the all-male airline pilots’ union of ignoring Richey’s application for membership, which she needed to keep her job. The Department of Commerce did not permit a nonunion member to fly passengers in bad weather. Richey confirmed Amelia’s statements.
Amelia once said that she never took a man along on a recordbreaking flight because even if he slept all the way, when he crawled out of the plane he would be credited for the flight. But she soon reverted to less militant speech regarding Richey. In thanking Clarence Chamberlin for defending Richey, she said that her initial statement was “premature” and she had intended to wait for a ruling from the Air Line Pilots Association as to admission of woman pilots before commenting. Convinced that the carrot was more effective than the stick, she advised Mabel Britton, president of the Ninety-Nines, to include stories in the newsletter about individuals and companies giving opportunities to women. There was no need to be “terribly feministic,” only to “show a little character.”
Amelia Earhart Page 25