East to the Dawn (6 page)

Edwin was so bright that he entered Thiel College, a Lutheran institution in Greenville, Pennsylvania, that gave scholarships to the children of Lutheran ministers and teachers, at the unusually young age of fourteen. There the religious instruction started by his father, who for all the lean years had been his schoolteacher, continued. Since it was one of Thiel's goals to make sure that this American-born generation knew the Lutheran catechisms and creeds in German, Edwin was also force-fed the German language. He received his degree at eighteen, the youngest graduate in Thiel history. Edwin's oldest sister, Harriet Earhart Monroe, twenty-five years his senior, was the success in the family. A formidable lady, she had founded the Atchison Institute, a private school for young ladies and gentlemen in Atchison. When the Lutheran Synods were looking for a site for a college west of the Mississippi, they bought the Institute buildings and opened Midland College of the General Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Upon his graduation from Thiel, Edwin became the first head of the Preparatory Department at Midland. He was twenty years old, tall and good-looking, with straight dark hair, a great deal of self-possession, and a disarming manner. He had been hired to teach at Midland at least partially because of his family connections, but he was well qualified for the work: he was an extremely literate young man with an extensive vocabulary, well grounded in the classics. A copy of the college catalogue lists the seven faculty members, presumably in their order of importance. Of the seven, Edwin is fourth: “Edwin S. Earhart, A.M., Instructor of Preparatory Classes.” Edwin taught those students who lacked academic credentials “all the studies of a thorough English education”—which included Latin, Greek, German, algebra, geometry, and outlines of history. Edwin taught at Midland for a year, then he went off to study law at Kansas State at Lawrence. He
worked his way through law school, according to his father, by “assisting the professors in Belletres and in tutoring slower but more affluent students.”

One's religion was a serious matter in those years in that part of the world, and Lutherans didn't rate at all high in the social pecking order in Atchison. They were nowhere near “the top of the pole” with the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, and the Methodists. Socially they were down somewhere with the Catholics. One of Ida Challiss Martin's daughters married a German-speaking Lutheran, Paul Tonsing, about this time, much to the annoyance of the rest of the family. Of course the older generation (after all, Maria was alive and Gebhard had been a Lutheran) would have been kind to this couple, but kindness wasn't enough—others in the Challiss family would permanently look down on this branch because it stayed so persistently German.

Alfred, a man concerned with social and class distinctions, a man who had worked hard to achieve financial success and social standing for himself and his family, was not at all happy with Amy's choice of Edwin for a husband; in his eyes it wasn't enough that Edwin's father David Earhart was one of the most respected Lutherans in the state—Lutheranism was the wrong religion. Nor did Edwin's sister Harriet count for much in Alfred's eyes, even though she was important enough for the local paper to chronicle her comings and goings. (“Mrs. Monroe will not leave the city before the middle of July” ran a typical social note in
The Atchison Globe.)
Alfred's wife and daughters were as he wanted them to be—cultured (finished, that is, but not educated as in college-educated), and idle. “Energetic” and “useful,” the two adjectives
The Atchison Globe
used to describe Harriet, were not admirable from the Judge's point of view. The desired role of the upper-middle-class woman at the turn of the century was not the woman who worked—rich women were supposed to be literate, well read, and genteel, and idle—only poor women worked. It was for exactly this reason that Alfred made Amy give up all thoughts of Vassar and made Margaret, who had plotted so industriously with her doctor to prepare herself, give up notions of medical school.

Furthermore, any conceivable status that Harriet might have conferred upon the Earharts was decidedly offset by the lack of status of Edwin's brothers, three of whom listed themselves in the Atchison Directory as roofpainters for all to see and hire. It was not Alfred's kind of family.

When, later in the summer, Alfred went west in search of a new minister for the church, in the classic manner he took Amy with him, hoping that the western air would clear her head. Amy had a marvelous
time; it was on this trip that she became the first woman to reach the top of Pikes Peak (much to the chagrin and embarrassment of several men in the climbing party who were forced to turn back because of altitude sickness) and returned to Atchison more determined than ever not to give Edwin up. There followed for Amy several years at home when she kept herself busy helping her father and cultivating her “literary” tastes. All the while she and Edwin were courting.

There may have been something else at work. Family accounts that come down to us suggest that Alfred simply didn't trust the tall, dark-haired young man. Whether it was Edwin's religion that was the sticking point and, rather than admit it, Amy's family made up other compelling reasons why the marriage was unwise cannot be known. But others besides Alfred were against the marriage. Rilla Challiss, married to Amelia Otis's nephew James, also thought it a mistake. Edwin was long on charm but short on substance, was the feeling; he told tales a bit too deftly. This minister's son was very different from his stern father; he had fallen, Rilla thought, too far from the tree.

Alfred wanted Amy to marry someone in their own social circle, as their eldest, William, had done. William had married Grace Hetherington, who was not only of impeccable Yankee stock but the daughter of his good friend William Hetherington, the wealthy founder and chairman of the Exchange Bank of Atchison.

But finally, in the face of Amy's persistence, Alfred agreed to the marriage if and when Edwin proved himself—specifically, when he achieved an income of at least fifty dollars a month. It was not an unreasonable sum—it was less than Alfred had earned when he had first hung out his shingle in Louisville, Kentucky, where he had briefly practiced after graduating from law school.

Edwin started practicing law not in Atchison but in Kansas City, Kansas, setting himself up with an office on Minnesota Avenue with a partner, Mr. J. E. Barker. In 1895 his income reached the level stipulated by Alfred, and the young couple made plans to marry. By that time Amy was twenty-six.

The wedding was held in Trinity Episcopal Church in Atchison on Wednesday, October 16, 1895, at eleven A.M.. Although there were two ministers—the Reverend John Henry Hopkins, the popular minister who had left just that summer and came back especially to marry Amy, and Reverend John E. Sulger, who replaced him—and the altar was bedecked with palms and white roses, the wedding was a very restrained affair. Amy and Edwin entered the church unaccompanied; the church was mostly empty; only relatives and “their most intimate friends” were present. Edwin's
father, Reverend Earhart, probably wasn't there, not just because following the death of his wife Mary he had returned to Pennsylvania, but because as a devout Lutheran minister, he would have been bound by Church doctrine to disapprove of a marriage where the Lutheran religion did not prevail.

There was no reception after the ceremony. The bride and groom went from the church to the station and were on the noon train for Kansas City, Kansas, where they would make their home. Their destination in Kansas City was a rather ordinary white frame house on a small lot only twenty feet wide, but the house was new, it was furnished, and it was all theirs—for the Otises had given it to them as a wedding present. They sent out proper engraved announcements that they would be “At Home after November First” at 1021 Ann Street.

There is a wedding photo of the bride and groom. Amy looks happy and confident, her chestnut hair piled elegantly on her head, a curl accentuating her high Harres forehead, her large eyes under her arched eyebrows staring off into the distance as she smiles ever so slightly. Edwin, dressed impeccably, his dark hair neatly parted, stares straight into the camera with a look that is at once self-conscious, guilty, and pleased, rather like the cat that has swallowed the canary.

By the time Amelia Earhart was born, her parents were living in an undistinguished house in the undistinguished suburb of a large town. She never witnessed the legendary days of her parents and grandparents and later regretted it—she would miss the excitement, the “wooliness” as she called it, that had vanished. She heard about the Indians in Atchison that Amelia Otis had found so frightening, that “lifted the lid of her basket and peered within, and felt the fabric of her dress, until she was quite terrified.”

When she was a child, Amy Otis had seen the last vestige of the Old West—the stacks of buffalo bones by the sides of the railroad tracks. Once, picking berries near a tree, she looked up and saw a bear picking berries on the other side. She was thirteen when Jesse James, the last of the famous gunslingers who roamed Kansas, was shot and killed in St. Joseph, just twenty miles away.

There were no Indians for Amelia to see; the old rotting robe made from buffalo hides that she found in her grandparent's barn was the only trace left. She would remember as an adult of thirty-five how as a little girl in Kansas she had kept her eye out for Indians—had “hoped for many a day some would turn up.”
She
would never have been terrified, as her grandmother told her she had been.

2

Kansas Girl

• • • • As Amelia Earhart recounted it in later years in
The Fun of It,
she had been sent off to live with her grandmother in Atchison because Amelia Otis was “very lonesome.” “I ... was lent her for company during the winter months,” as Amelia put it, “... until the eighth grade.” There is a certain charm about it—the little girl named after her grandmother sent to live with her, even acquiring the same nickname. It didn't even seem that unusual an arrangement, for as everyone concerned knew, her grandfather had lived with his grandparents for a number of years.

But Amelia was bundled off at the age of three to North Terrace because her grandmother needed companionship and distraction to cope with the trauma of the deaths, in three years, of her mother, her eldest son William, and William's wife. First Maria, for the first time ever, took to her bed on a summer day; eight weeks later she died. Then Grace Otis, William's wife, died of unknown causes in Colorado Springs, where she and William and their daughter Annie Maria had gone to live. The following summer William died of diphtheria.

And then Margaret, Amelia Otis's younger daughter, upon whom not just she but everyone else in the family relied, left taking with her Annie, Amelia's first grandchild. That was just as great an immediate emotional
loss. Not only Amelia but everyone in the family relied on Margaret. It was she who had cared for Maria and then, on a visit to her brother in Colorado Springs, had nursed first Grace and then William. Margaret had then returned to North Terrace bringing with her Annie, who had become her ward. But Margaret had no intention of staying—she was twenty-eight and engaged to Clarence Balis, a Philadelphia businessman who had been patiently waiting for years for her to set the date. Now, having done all she could for her family, there was no further reason to postpone the wedding. The thought of losing their kind daughter, their ray of sunshine, and in addition the orphaned granddaughter who would go wherever Margaret went (including her honeymoon, Margaret's own children always suspected) was more than Amelia Otis could stand. Even Alfred was dismayed.

As the years passed, he had become increasingly withdrawn. “Dignified and of aristocratic bearing” was the way a reporter for
The Atchison Globe
delicately described Alfred, but to his children and grandchildren he was cold, remote, and impatient at best. At sixty-four he had suffered a complete mental breakdown. Mental illness was little understood at the time;
softening of the brain and neurasthenia
were the usual words used to describe the condition. Hospitalized in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1892, fully expecting to die, he went so far as to make a will, but within two years he had recovered and was managing his own affairs. But from then on he suffered recurrent bouts of depression. “He realizes fully, to use his own language, that he has passed the three score and ten and that the autumn leaves are thick about him. He seems to have no bodily ailments like so many old folks have, but there is nothing I wouldn't give or do to give him ‘a quiet mind and a contented spirit,' ” wrote a younger brother sorrowfully after spending time with him.

Now Margaret's departure weighed heavily even on Alfred, who confided his anguish to another brother, Charles: “It grieves me to tell you but it is a fact all the same that if nothing unforeseen happens she will be married in the late spring or early summer to a Philadelphia man.... He has been here and gotten our consent as we believe him to be noteworthy and everything a gentleman ought to be but I feel pretty badly about it though I do not mean to be selfish at all.”

Margaret married Clarence Balis on June 5, 1900, and moved to Philadelphia. Alfred became increasingly morose, and Amelia Otis increasingly lonely. Amy was relatively nearby, only fifty miles distant in Kansas City, but she was again pregnant and so could not help; on December 29 Muriel was born. With her new infant to care for and Amelia just three, Amy had more than she could handle. The solution was at hand to
lighten Amy's chores in Kansas City and Amelia Otis's spiritual burden in Atchison—to send Amelia, her namesake grandchild. Again young laughter would fill the house. And so at three Amelia Earhart was bundled off to Atchison. There, as her mother had, she puttered around in the kitchen mindful of Mary Brashay, the Irish cook, grown fatter as well as older over the years, and prowled the grounds under the watchful eye of the gardener Charlie Parks, who had strung the lanterns for her mother's coming-out party. She learned to stay away from her crusty grandfather. It worked beautifully for everyone concerned.