Amelia (3 page)

Just over a decade after the
Wright brothers
' pioneering flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, daring young aviators, nearly all of whom were men, were exploring and expanding the boundaries of the sky. California was a preferred location because the climate allowed for flying year round. Soon the pilots discovered how valuable they could be to the nascent movie industry. With a little luck, a stunt pilot could be hired to fly in movies.

California's terrain also suited the new need for airfields. When Earhart's family lived in the Los Angeles area, the city boasted as many as twenty private airfields. Spectators could go to an airfield almost any weekend to see an air show. Always thrilling, these exhibitions could also be deadly. Along with dangerous stunts such as wing-walking displays, the meets promoted competitions and races. A big meet could feature as many as a hundred races, and experienced Army or Navy pilots usually came in first. Racing pilots supported themselves by barnstorming - flying stunt exhibitions and selling short rides in their planes.

Amelia Earhart, accompanied by her father, saw her first California air show at the famous Earl Daugherty's airfield just outside Los Angeles. Immediately entranced, she began seeing a different show nearly every weekend. And in Long Beach, on December 28, 1920, Edwin Earhart arranged to have
Frank Hawks
, a barnstorming pilot, take his daughter for her first flight – a ten-minute ride for the then-extravagant fee of $10. Since women rarely flew, Hawks assumed she would panic and hate the whole experience. But as she would write later, “By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground, I knew I had to fly.” Then and there, she began imploring her father to arrange flying lessons for her.

Edwin was understandably reluctant. Flying was extremely dangerous and instruction rudimentary. Of the forty pilots hired to begin a new aerial-mail service, thirty died. The planes themselves were primitive, and aerial maps or radio contact with the ground nonexistent. But Amelia was undaunted.

Amelia did, of course, win her father's permission to learn to fly a plane. But she didn't want Hawks to teach her. Sensing his condescension toward women, she sought out
Anita (Neta) Snook
, a pilot close to her own age, who was willing to teach other women to fly.

Snook had a reputation for sidestepping conventions. Besides being a pilot who taught others to fly and took passengers aloft, she was also a businesswoman who ran a commercial airfield. She owned her own plane and was the only woman south of San Francisco working in an aviation-related business. Like Amelia, she also loved working on engines.

Later in life, Snook remembered the day in December 1920 when Earhart strode into her life: “She was wearing a brown suit, plain but a good cut. Her hair was braided and neatly coiled around her head; there was a light scarf around her neck, and she carried gloves. She would have stood out in any crowd, but she reminded me of the well-groomed and cultured young ladies at the Frances Shimer Academy back in Mount Carroll, Illinois, my childhood home. The gentleman with her was slightly gray at the temples and wore a blue serge business suit. ‘I'm Amelia Earhart and this is my father. I see you are busy, but could I have a few words with you?'”

Snook stepped over to her, and Amelia asked, “I want to fly. Will you teach me?” The demand for flying lessons was high and allowed Snook to name her price, normally a thousand dollars. But when Earhart explained that she couldn't afford it, Snook agreed to let her learn first and pay later.

Earhart needed to learn everything, as Snook could see. Simple acts like checking the fuel gauge were deadly serious. Amelia also discovered that her waist-length hair was inconvenient - too much to tuck up under her cap. To avoid horrifying her mother who did not approve of short hair, Earhart started to trim it a little at a time. When she stopped, her hair was “bobbed” - at the time, a signature look for modern, independent women.

Women pilots had problems unknown to men, such as how to dress. Planes in those days had no doors; pilots threw their legs over the cockpits, then dropped into the seat. When Amelia showed up on January 3, 1921, for her first lesson, she was wearing her riding habit, an elegant solution that Snook approved.

Earhart loved wearing pants. They showed off her long legs and hid her chubby ankles. “In pants,” wrote biographer Susan Butler, “she walked unselfconsciously with a graceful, loose-joined stride, and as a pilot, she had a legitimate reason to wear them. So she seized the chance to wear first the breeks, as breeches were called and boots and then as flying styles evolved and ‘piloting clothes changed, ordinary trousers, until pants - beautifully tailored - became her signature outfit.”

For Earhart, learning how to make the plane fly was not enough; always the student, she wanted to know how the plane did it. She wanted to listen to the engine and know what it was telling her, notice how the plane climbed, what different temperatures did, what the engine “liked.”

Earhart flew in Snook's
Curtiss JN4
, a Canadian plane dubbed a Canuck, that was based at Kinner Airport, a small, one-hangar field in what was then farmland south of Los Angeles. To get there, Earhart took a bus to the end of the line and walked another four miles.

Earhart continued to read about aeronautics and glean whatever she could about the subject by talking to pilots. The detailed knowledge she acquired deepened her appreciation of the flying experience, leading her to think about the flow of air over the wing when a plane achieves lift, or how the engine and propeller keep a plane airborne.

It was soon obvious, to her at least, that she had to have her own plane.

To bolster her savings, she took odd jobs ranging from photography and truck driving to clerking at a local telephone company. By the summer of 1921, pooling her savings with funds her mother gave her, Earhart was able to buy a used biplane, a bright-yellow, two-seater
Kinner Airster
. It boasted a twenty-seven foot wingspan, a nineteen-foot-long body, had a range of 200 miles, and could climb as high as 13,000 feet. She called it “the Canary.” Earhart counted the plane as a present for her twenty-fourth birthday.

Within six months, she knew how to fly and needed only to log the air hours required before taking the test for a pilot's license. By December 15, she had qualified for the license from the National Aeronautics Association. But even before that, on October 22, she had set her first record for female pilots, flying the Canary to an unheard-of altitude of 14,000 feet.

Trying to fit into her new world, Earhart bought a leather jacket like those worn by male pilots, sleeping in it for three nights to make it look sufficiently worn. She also kept her hair cropped short, copying Neta Snook and other women pilots. But she was far from the traditional woman in a man's world; more than once, she tried to outdo her colleagues in swagger and accomplishments.

Earhart was determined to make a career aloft, but the obvious starting point, exhibitions at air shows, wouldn't support her. A woman pilot drew crowds, but few people were willing to buy rides in her plane. Making matters worse, women weren't allowed to compete against men in flying competitions. As Earhart saw it, aviation was just one more field in which women were unfairly treated. She started thinking about how to get around or over the barriers.

With Snook as a role model, Earhart considered giving flying lessons. But much as she liked taking risks, she was not foolhardy. She knew too well the dangers instructors faced. Training planes in those days lacked dual controls, so a student sometimes crashed a plane, killing both the instructor and the student.

Forced to postpone her career in the air, Earhart fell back on her brief experience with photography to earn a living. Methodical as always, she read everything she could find about cameras, lenses, and film developing, quickly becoming adept enough to set up a photography business with a friend, but the business never took off.

In 1924, after years of strain, humiliation, and instability, Earhart's parents separated. Edwin had remained sober and was doing well financially, but both Amy and Edwin were unhappy. Amy was still not ready to abandon the marriage, but Edwin was.

Finally, after twenty-nine years of marriage, Edwin prevailed and Amelia's parents divorced. At the same time, Amelia reconsidered her decision to drop out of Columbia.  She reasoned that a medical career would give her independence of a kind her mother had never achieved. It would also provide enough income for Amelia to keep on flying. Still in good standing at Columbia, she returned to New York, but the course load required a commitment she knew she didn't want to make. She dropped out once again.

With Amy now trying to function independently for the first time in her life, Amelia's sense of responsibility for her mother tugged at her more strongly than ever. Once she gave up her studies at Columbia, she moved back to California. Then, hearing her mother talk about moving back east, Amelia saw an obvious solution: She wanted to fly Amy back to Massachusetts. But air travel was still far from ordinary, and Amy, like most women of her generation, saw planes as unsafe.

In an impressively generous gesture, Amelia made a choice that must have been wrenching: She sold the Canary. With the money from the sale, she bought a flashy car - a Kissel with a retractable roof and wide running boards - for the cross-country trip she would make with her mother. Putting a brave face on the undertaking, Amelia playfully named her car the Yellow Peril.

Amelia and Amy's leisurely trip across the continent set no records for speed or efficiency. The path they took suggests they went out of their way, more than once, to enjoy scenic spots, such as Yosemite, Crater Lake, and Lake Louise.

After installing her mother safely with Muriel, Earhart tried to pick up her medical studies once more, spending another semester at Columbia before deciding that she could not see herself in a career in medicine. She went to Boston to be near her family, knowing that Amy would welcome having her close by. For Amelia, the move to Boston meant having to find a new job.

At the same time, Amelia had to deal with a health problem that she had been minimizing, ignoring, and all but denying for several years. She had started showing signs of wear from all those hours of flying. The planes she flew had open cockpits, which left her face exposed. She wore goggles, of course, to protect her eyes, but the goggles didn't did not cover much else. All that wind had a drying effect that hurt her already sensitive sinuses. Because Earhart was stoic – by nature, upbringing, and conviction – she rarely spoke about the ailment and certainly not in public. But sinusitis and related sinus trouble plagued her for years. Pain and chronic headaches were now severe enough to interfere with ordinary life and sleep.

In the 1920s, remedies were few, inconvenient, and only sometimes effective. That left only surgery. Amelia went to Massachusetts General Hospital for a small operation that provided relief.

Sinus issues abated, Amelia concluded that her experience working in a wartime hospital in Toronto made her a good candidate for social work, a field that was attracting some of the best and brightest women of the day. That's exactly what a career advisor had recommended. At that time, educated women in cities could find work to help alleviate the suffering of immigrant families who kept pouring into American cities.

Denison House in Boston, where Amelia found a position as social worker, had been set up a generation earlier by well-off, educated women who hoped to share their many privileges with people who had few. Inspired by Chicago's
Hull House
, founded by
Jane Addams
, it was founded in 1892 by three Wellesley professors and offered a clinic as well as classes in English, among other subjects.

A Denison supervisor took note of Earhart's playful personality and assigned her to work with children. But Amelia's leadership qualities also made her stand out. She was quickly placed in a supervisory position. Promotions meant an increase in pay, which Earhart clearly welcomed. All those years of having very little money had taught her how to make the most of small income. Careful management plus thrifty habits let her save enough money to buy a new plane.

Aviation helped Earhart supplement her income. She had stayed in touch with W.G. “Bert” Kinner, owner of the California airfield where she had her lessons with Neta Snook. Now Bert wanted Earhart to help him; he asked her to find someone to sell Kinner planes in Boston. Identifying the right person proved more difficult than either of them expected it to be, so she decided to try selling airplanes herself. The bonus for her: She got to fly the plane for prospective buyers.

Meanwhile, at Denison House, Earhart was becoming a favorite with the children. They loved when she would take them for a ride in her yellow car – a first-time experience for many of them. While making progress as a social worker, she also distinguished herself in aviation, becoming vice president of the Boston chapter of the American Aeronautical Society. Beyond pilots and flying enthusiasts, people in Boston were learning Earhart's name from the newspaper columns she wrote to promote flying. Her two jobs came together when she flew over Boston to drop leaflets to advertise a fundraising effort for Denison House.