by Nancy Nahra
When she took off on her epic flight around the world on June 1, 1937, Amelia Earhart had already earned her place in twentieth-century history. She was the first woman (and second person) to fly solo over the Atlantic Ocean. She set more than a dozen records in the hazardous early days of aviation: She was the first pilot to fly nonstop across the continental United States and the first to fly from Honolulu to California.
Despite those accomplishments, she remained modest, self-effacing, and charming, counting mechanics, rival pilots, and America’s First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt among her close friends. But our enduring fascination with her stems largely from the mystery of her final flight. When Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean more than seventy-five years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt immediately ordered a search that lasted seventeen days and cost $4 million.
That was only the first of dozens of attempts to find out what had happened to Earhart and her plane. The mystery has given rise to wild legends and conjectures - for example, some maintain that she and Noonan were captured and executed as spies by the Japanese. It is a search that never ends.
Earhart’s disappearance has come to overshadow her life, but she was more – much more.
Though Amelia Earhart’s name is firmly linked with aviation, she was born at 11:30 p.m., on Saturday, July 24, 1897, when Queen Victoria was still on the throne and human flight unknown. Earhart’s birthplace, Atchison, Kansas, on the Missouri River, was not without notoriety, having gained fame as the last stop for stagecoaches headed east from the still Wild West. Bringing the railroad to this Kansas town of 15,000 souls was just one of the triumphs of Earhart’s grandfather, Alfred Gideon Otis, a former federal judge and the patriarch of one of the three families that more or less ran Atchison.
Otis had founded the local bank, the railroad line, and the gas company, all buffing his ever-growing wealth and social standing. His eldest daughter Amy, Amelia’s mother, was pencil-thin with thick chestnut hair. More intellectual than other members of her family, she distinguished herself by starting the local Dickens society, and she foreshadowed her daughter’s quest for records by becoming the first woman to reach the 14,115-foot summit of Pike’s Peak in Colorado. Also like her daughter, Amy shrugged off her triumph, explaining modestly and matter-of-factly that she just liked to finish what she began.
Amy had dreamed of going to Vassar College, but the judge, as everyone called Otis, would not hear it. By his lights, women should not work outside the home so they had no need to go to college; he valued education but only for men. His daughter had her way, however, when she chose her husband. And because the judge so rarely faced a challenge, he never recovered from Amy’s rebellious act. Against her strictly Episcopalian parents’ wishes, she married Samuel “Edwin” Earhart, a German Lutheran from Pennsylvania. Even though Edwin’s ancestors had fought alongside George Washington and his father had been an industrious and respected missionary, none of those facts carried weight with Otis. The in-laws were still Lutherans, and, in Atchison in those days, Lutherans rated at the low end of the social ladder.
A Brilliant Father
Except for Alfred Otis, anyone who met Edwin Earhart easily could see why Amy married him. True, he was not as wealthy as the Otises - few people were. Without exaggeration, Edwin could be called brilliant. After four years of study, he graduated at age eighteen from Thiel College, a Lutheran school in Pennsylvania. No other Thiel graduate ever matched his accomplishment.
Edwin went on to study law at Yale, where he met classmate Mark Otis, Amy’s brother. Mark invited Edwin to attend Amy’s coming-out party in Atchison. She was charmed, and, in time she fell in love with the witty man with the winning smile. Everyone other than Judge Otis agreed that Edwin was destined to succeed. The judge remained obdurate when Amy insisted on pursuing the relationship and still wouldn’t give in when Edwin converted to the Episcopal faith. Amy’s parents did not attend their daughter’s wedding, a small affair given the weight of the judge’s disapproval.
Amelia Mary Earhart was born in her mother’s childhood bedroom on the second floor of the large Gothic house built by her parents. Her sister Muriel arrived three years later. Amelia adapted quickly to the role of elder sister. She taught the neighborhood children, including her many cousins, how to ride a bicycle and play games she invented. Nicknamed Millie, she was a natural leader, and Muriel – known as Pidge - was among her dutiful followers.
Peppy and imaginative, Amelia loved the outdoors, running and doing what the boys did - climbing fences, shooting rats with a .22 rifle, and taking running starts instead of waiting for a gentle push at the top of the local sledding hill. Amy encouraged her daughters to be active by outfitting them in bloomers rather than skirts. The judge, of course, harrumphed gravely.
At age seven, Amelia saw a roller coaster on a trip to St. Louis, but she wasn’t allowed to take a ride. Back home, she and her uncle Mark constructed a track made of two-by-fours running down from the roof of a tool shed. Amelia rolled down the track in a wooden box outfitted with roller-skate wheels. She emerged from the wreckage with a torn dress, a bruised lip, and what she later described as a “sense of exhilaration.” “Oh, Pidge,” she exulted, “it’s just like flying!”
A Two-Room School
Amelia’s grandfather Otis was right on one score: Attorney Edwin Earhart wasn’t living up to his potential. He took a low-level job handling damage claims for the Rock Island Railroad. When the railroad transferred him to Des Moines, Iowa, Edwin and Amy left their daughters with her parents.
Amelia, who had learned to read at the age of five, spent hours in her grandparents’ library. She got early home schooling from her mother and was sent to a tiny private school pretentiously called The College Preparatory School. Operating in a former stable, the school had about thirty students in classes going up to grade twelve. There was just one teacher. Amelia loved it - most of the time.
All the classes were in one space, divided into zones for each grade. The result: While the teacher was explaining a lesson to sixth and seventh graders, the younger children were given work to do. But they could hear the more advanced level lessons that awaited them, which encouraged a quick study and natural learner like Amelia.
By 1907, when Amelia was in the fifth grade, Edwin Earhart’s prospects had improved. He could afford better quarters and even employ two servants, allowing Muriel to join her parents in Des Moines. But Amelia stayed behind with her grandparents in Atchison, where events had taken a turn for the worse. Whether the judge suffered a minor stroke or some sort of “nervous breakdown,” he turned inward and remote. His wife, deprived of his companionship, was lonely, prompting the family to leave the intelligent and lively Amelia in Atchison to provide company for her grandmother.
Living in the elegant home where her mother also had been born, with its view of the Missouri River, stock of books, opportunities for privacy, and the love of her grandmother enabled Amelia to flourish as a thoughtful and inquisitive girl with a mind of her own. Spending time with her grandmother meant hearing stories about places far from Kansas. Surrounded by books, Amelia was reading everything she could; novels by Sir Walter Scott, favorites of the grandmother’s generation, helped develop her imagination and a desire to test her limits.
But Amelia’s grandmother didn’t understand her granddaughter’s taste for adventure. More than once during Amelia’s grade-school years, Mrs. Otis explained to her that when she was a girl back in Philadelphia, the most vigorous activity she ever undertook was to roll her hoop in the park. Amelia was unimpressed.
Amelia wanted to be outdoors as much as she could, which often meant playing with boys. Tall, strong but not muscular, other children called her “Skinny.” But name-calling didn’t s
top Amelia.
“We Girls Would Like to Play”
Like most schools at the time, College Preparatory had a sports program that excluded girls. It was all but universally accepted that girls were delicate and had to be protected from rough play and danger of any kind. Girls could participate only as cheerleaders for the school’s teams.
Predictably, Amelia Earhart scoffed at that notion, especially since the school had so few students and needed all the athletes it could get. So she rounded up other girls who wanted to play sports, not just watch them, then she told the captain of the basketball team, “We girls would like to play.” Thinking that no girl had probably ever asked before, it didn’t occur to Amelia that she would be denied permission. But she was a half-century ahead of her time and could only fume when the school refused.
Summers were spent with her parents and sister, but Atchison remained Amelia’s school-year home. As much as she loved Atchison, Amelia missed seeing her father, who almost never called on his disapproving in-laws. But when she was eleven, Amelia left Atchison to join her parents and sister in Des Moines. There, for the first time, she went to public school.
The Earhart family changed houses often while in Des Moines, moving four times in four years. The homes got better and better, a benefit offset by Edwin’s frequent business trips that kept him away from his family. But his job also provided them with free train travel, a perk the Earharts used often. They took in the Iowa State Fair, for instance, and it was there that ten-year-old Amelia came away less than impressed by her first encounter with an airplane. She described it as “a thing of rusty wire and wood and looked not at all interesting.” The roller coaster looked like much more fun.
A Father’s Failures
Despite Edwin’s apparent success, his free-spending ways kept him in financial distress. But a more serious problem was his drinking, which was exacerbated by his travels. Alcohol abuse and absence from home increasing strain on his marriage.
Casting about for a way out of his slump, Edwin came up with an invention. His idea was for a signal-flag holder attached to a train’s caboose. Edwin saw it as a potential bonanza. At that time, the only way an inventor could learn whether anyone else was already claiming the same idea was to travel to the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., to see if the idea had been registered.
Full of hope, Edwin made the trip using Amy’s money from her parents to pay his travel expenses. He found out that the idea had been registered two years earlier. Crushed and penniless, he returned home and to more drinking.
By this time, Amy welcomed Edwin’s frequent trips, considering his absence a blessing and his return something to be endured. Aware that she could assume no longer that her marriage would last, Amy still couldn’t give up on it any more than she could have quit the Pike’s Peak climb. Furthermore, in those days, a broken marriage promised social humiliation that she simply couldn’t face.
A threshold was crossed, however, when Amy couldn’t pay the property taxes on their home, forcing her back to Atchison to seek help from her parents. They advised her to break off all dealings with Edwin. Like other women of that time, Amy had no experience handling money. Women couldn’t open checking accounts on their own, nor could married women earn money – respectably, at least.
Amy’s parents offered financial support but only if she would agree to separate from Edwin. Disappointing and defying her father yet again, Amy went back to her husband in Des Moines.
Because Amelia was not keeping a diary, only her actions remain to suggest and possibly reveal her reactions to the discord that kept fraying the ties that held her parents together. She knew her father had been happy while working on his invention; she had seen that for herself. But now he was plainly unhappy and not confronting his disastrous personal situation. Amelia, barely a teenager, could see her mother becoming more depressed. A child as observant as Amelia surely figured out, at least in part, why her parents were hurting, and soon there would be no doubt. When Edwin’s hopes for the invention fell apart, so did his life - definitively. A broken man defeated by his own raging alcoholism, he had to acknowledge what no one could ignore.
Neighbors saw him stumbling home drunk. Before long, he was out of a job. Amelia was fourteen when her father left the family, seemingly for good. But six months later, he was back, still drinking and once again hoping to find a job.
It looked and felt as if the family’s prospects could not get worse, but they did.
Amelia’s seventy-five-year-old grandmother died early in 1912. The loss of Amelia Harres Otis, the grandmother Amelia was named for, deeply saddened teenage Amelia. In the quiet of her grandmother’s home, young Amelia had spent long hours happily reading, playing the piano, and writing poems. But sad as she was, she also grasped that her own mother needed support.
Amy Earhart was bequeathed what was then a fortune, more than $170,000, and grandfather Otis left an even larger estate when he died the following year. Both of Amy’s parents had redrawn their wills with complex provisions to make sure Edwin couldn’t squander Amy’s share of their bequests. Amy’s brother Mark acted as trustee of his parents’ estate, but, by this time, his warm feelings for Edwin had turned to contempt, even spilling over to his feelings for his sister for staying with Edwin as long as she did. As a result, Mark refused to give Amy her inheritance.
The sting of Mark’s harsh action both surprised and hurt his sister and her children. Amy became estranged from her sister Margaret, too. Amy no doubt understood Mark’s emotional stake in the situation: After all, it was Mark who had introduced her to Edwin, but she could not forgive him for cutting her off.
Uprooted Again
Eventually, Edwin did make a new start. He found a job as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he moved with his family in the fall of 1913. But it would be a short-term reprieve for his wife and daughters.
At Central High School in St. Paul, Amelia had to adapt to a different world. She had no trouble academically. When it came to math, she could outshine anyone. Numbers made sense to her. Also, she easily identified patterns and she was analytical in her thinking. Systems of any kind appealed to her, even complicated systems of grammar, such as Latin, another of her favorite subjects.
But Amelia showed little interest in making new friends at Central High. Other students didn’t go out of their way to exclude Amelia; they seldom saw her. That suited Amelia fine; with all the anguish at home, she preferred to keep to herself.
From letters that she wrote to friends back in Kansas, it is clear that, without question, she still thought of Atchison as home. In a 1914 letter to a friend in Atchison, she sounded upbeat and happy, although she wasn’t.
How goes everything mit Innen (mit governs the dative). . . . Of course, I am going to B.M. [Bryn Mawr) if I have to drive a grocery wagon to accumulate the cash. You see, I’m practicing growing boy language because if I use up all my money going to grand “Hopery” why - Ill be minus later that’s all. I wish you were up her because Parsifal and I don’t know what are coming here. I suppose they will be in K.C. I’m all thrills. Did you hear Paderewski. . . . I wonder if he played Chopin Funeral March down at St. Joe as he did here.
All the girls are so nice it’s a joy to be with them don’t you know. I am doing my best to get some of them to go B.M. with Ginger and Millie.
Your letter was scrummy. So long and joysome. I’ll send you the translation of your Cicero. I’m a shark. That Maulian law is the hardest old mess I’ve had in ages. Your letter was very funny.
I lawffed ex-cessively.
Speaking of funny things, my dear fresh of a sister spoke very importantly of “forum” in their class meeting. (All those lambs attend their meeting religiously) completely mystifying the family until mother had the happy thot she meant quorum. . . .
It’s so hot today I am just baked. I want this reading matter to go off on the next mail so I’ll cease.
Love, Mill.
I’ll write you a sensible letter someday. You needn’t ans. this communication unless you have nothing else to do. All contributions, however, are thankfully received at this end.
To some extent, money problems exacerbated the awkwardness the Earhart family experienced in St. Paul – they did not have the means to participate in proper society. They had strong family connections, but just about any social activity - clubs, dances, lessons - required money that they didn’t have.
In the long, severe St. Paul winters, teenagers from good families relied on curling (an ice sport) for exercise and to meet and see friends. But the Earharts’ meager financial resources made a curling-club membership impossible. But joining a club was the one and only way to be part of athletic activities, exactly the kind of thing Amelia would have loved.
Amelia’s grades in St. Paul began to slip because of her unhappiness with the continuing drama unfolding at home.
In 1915, Edwin lost his job again. Amy, despairing of the situation, took her daughters to Chicago to live with friends. Looking for the best high-school science program, Amelia eliminated the school nearest her home, dismissing its chemistry lab as being “just like a kitchen sink.” If Amelia wanted to go to a different school, Amy would have to move with her daughters to a different neighborhood, so they moved.
Amy and her daughters moved into rented rooms so Amelia could attend Hyde Park High School, Chicago’s most academically prestigious secondary school. At Hyde Park, Amelia stood out academically, yet again made few friends. Later in her life, when she spoke about those years, she made the moving from place to place sound painless.
The family rolled around a good deal during my father’s railroad years. Kansas City, Des Moines, St. Paul, Chicago - forward and back. What we missed in continuous contacts over a long period, we gained by becoming adapted to new surroundings quickly. I have never lived more than four years in any one place and always have to ask “Which one?” when a stranger greets me by saying “I’m from your home town.”