by Susan Butler
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
PART ONE
Chapter 1 - Colonial Heritage
Chapter 2 - Kansas Girl
Chapter 3 - The End of Childhood
Chapter 4 - Teenage Years
Chapter 5 - A Life of Purpose and Action
Chapter 6 - California
Chapter 7 - Breaking Through
PART TWO
Chapter 8 - Dreams of Glory
Chapter 9 - Vortex
Chapter 10 - Trepassey
Chapter 11 - Golden Girl
Chapter 12 - Dreams Come True
Chapter 13 - Courtship and Marriage
Chapter 14 - The Lindbergh Trail
Chapter 15 - Having Her Cake
Chapter 16 - Role Model
PART THREE
Chapter 17 - New Records
Chapter 18 - New Frontiers
Chapter 19 - The Plan
Chapter 20 - The Beginning
Chapter 21 - The Flight
Chapter 22 - Lost
Chapter 23 - Later
Notes
Sources
Acknowledgements
Index
Copyright Page
To my mother
Preface
• • • • Like many young girls looking for a role model, I became interested in Amelia Earhart at an early age. After all, she was so appealing: she was courageous, glamorous, and mysterious. She was that rare bird—an American woman who had achieved fame and fortune by virtue of her own natural talents.
She appealed to me for an additional personal reason as well. My mother was a pilot in the 1930s, when most people were still afraid to get into an airplane, much less fly one. Her parents bought an airplane and hired a pilot to fly them around. The pilot had a lot of downtime, and my mother, Grace Liebman, in her early twenties, wanted to fly. So he taught her. Before long she was a pilot, had her own plane—an open-cockpit Waco biplane, dark green with white trim—and was a member of the Ninety-Nines, the women’s flying organization of which Amelia Earhart was the most illustrious member. Flying out of the airport, in Red Bank, New Jersey, my mother had a wonderful time doing what the early pilots did in those days—buzzing friends, flying under the bridges that link Manhattan with the rest of the world, and landing in cornfields, hay fields, and on beaches.
Those were the days when there was something magical about flying. There was the incredible thrill of being in the air, the heady sense of accomplishing something people had been dreaming about at least since Icarus.
To women, though, flying was something more. Still hemmed in by all sorts of restrictions, still valued for looks and decorative skills, still steered toward passive accomplishments, for women it was the ultimate escape: total freedom, total mastery—no interference. Total liberation. Women who became pilots won something additional along the way: respect.
Amelia Earhart was the looming, absent genius of our household. When her name came up, it usually caused a reflective pause in the conversation—she was obviously so special. My mother had known her only slightly. I always wanted to know what kind of a person she was, why she was so famous, what kind of a life she really lived. I read Amelia’s books, and the books about her. They didn’t satisfy my curiosity. They just whetted my appetite. I decided to research her life, and I found out that not only was Amelia an amazing flier, easily the greatest female pilot of her time, but that she was a person of judgment and integrity with a strong sense of mission—that she had started out as a social worker and had gradually become as single-mindedly dedicated to improving the status of women as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Sanger.
Appearances are deceiving. Her contemporaries knew Amelia Earhart in all her permutations: as fashion plate, as lecturer, as educator, and of course as flier. But the passage of time has winnowed away everything except “pilot,” so that what comes down to us across the years is the image of a tousle-haired androgynous flier clad in shirt, silk scarf, leather jacket, and goggles. Those alive when she was saw much more—the famous Steichen photo that appeared in Vanity Fair showing a chic, slender, contemplative woman; the news photos of her as she testified before congressional committees; and clips of her on the lecture circuit, where she spent the greater part of her time. Although it was her piloting skills that made her famous, Amelia was much more than just a pilot—that was why she was so much missed.
So I started on her trail. I spent days at the Schlesinger Library, where the Earhart papers are. I interviewed Fay Gillis Wells, one of the original members of the Ninety-Nines. I pored through the old newspapers she gave me. In one of them I found a reference to Amelia’s beloved cousin, Kathryn (Katch) Challiss. It gave Katch’s married name, and through that I tracked her down. I interviewed her for the first time ever, and when she died, her daughter Pat Antich gave me her diaries and the diaries of her sister Lucy, who lived with Amelia for several years. In the diaries were endless entries mentioning Amelia. Another cousin gave me the personal history of Amelia’s mother’s family, which had been gathered into a book and never unearthed. I tracked down another branch of the family with the help of Amy Kleppner, whose mother Muriel, Amelia’s sister, is still alive. The cousin that chase led me to was Nancy Balis Morse, who gave me the gut-wrenching correspondence between Amelia’s mother, uncle, and brother: through those letters I learned how desperately poor the Earharts were in Amelia’s growing-up years.
Gore Vidal, whose father was one of Amelia’s closest friends, told me of an unpublished biography written by a journalist friend of Amelia’s. He knew only that it had been submitted to Putnam’s and been turned down. I pestered Putnam’s for the names of old-timers. I went through Boston and suburban Boston telephone directories, for Janet Mabie wrote for The Christian Science Monitor, and I queried the newspaper as well. And then one day, as I was leaving the Schlesinger Library, in the information rack just inside the front door, Janet Mabie’s name popped out at me—and I saw that the Schlesinger now had her papers. In the papers was Mabie’s unpublished biography. It is full of gems.
Those were the big finds—there were many smaller ones. Flipping through the A’s in one of the big black books that contain the New York Public Library’s older, non-computerized holdings, I came upon a publication called The Ace, The Aviation Magazine of the West. I pulled it out and found it was a monthly covering Los Angeles in the early 1920s—and that Amelia flitted in and out of the pages. I found, in Boston newspapers, articles on her flying and on her feminist activities before her flight in the Friendship. I interviewed pilots who had known her. I went up to Newfoundland to see for myself what Trepassey was like, and to walk on that famous field in Harbor Grace built especially for the first transatlantic flights. I heard of someone who heard of a woman Amelia’s navigator Fred Noonan wrote letters to while they were flying around the world; I tracked Helen Day Bible down.
I started wearing brown clothes, because Amelia did.
Peeling away the layers, the cobwebs the years had laid on her, I found a capable, caring, energetic woman who had succeeded in life beyond her wildest dreams. Yet she never lost sight of her beginnings, and took it as her mission in life to show other women how to climb the ladder as she had, rung by rung, so that they could have a piece of the good life, too. That didn’t mean rejecting men, far from it. She was married to a bright, successful entrepreneur who adored her and gave up his career to manage hers. She wanted women to develop themselves to their fullest potential, as she had. Her fame came from her flying exploits, but she was one of the most successful businesswomen of her day. She made her living on the lecture circuit, was one of the four founding stockholders and vice-president of the ai
rline that became Northeast Airlines, was involved in various air-related businesses, was the author of two books and countless magazine articles, was under contract to the New York Herald Tribune, and was on the staff of Purdue University as consultant in careers for women. She gave her students positive reasons to succeed:
I advise them all to identify themselves with some form of economic activity. I believe that a girl should not do what she thinks she should do, but should find out through experience what she wants to do. For that reason I ask the girls to measure themselves against others who are earning their living. I endeavor to find out why girls select particular subjects for study, what other interests they have, and to let them see what other women are doing in these various fields.
I try to help them understand that it is just as important to give work to women as men, for they have an equal need for mental stimulus and feeling of accomplishment and economic independence.
She was a feminist who appealed to men as well as women because she used her position to promote not women’s causes but women’s self esteem.
At the same time she was a bit of a romantic, a bit of a dreamer. And she loved taking chances. There is an old English saying: all things are sweetened by risk. That was the way she felt.
PART ONE
1
Colonial Heritage
•••• Atchison, Kansas, situated on the banks of the Missouri River at the farthest point of a great lazy western bend in the river, was a small town with a population of some 15,000 in 1897. The earliest settlers, those who had arrived during the 1850s and 1860s, who had the taste and the means, had built their houses on the bluff overlooking the river, on a street then known as First Street, later as North Terrace.
It was in one of these houses, a fine Gothic structure that pioneer settler Alfred Gideon Otis had built for his bride, Amelia Harres Otis, that their daughter Amy Earhart waited to give birth on July 24, 1897, in the midst of a heat wave that had kept the temperature hovering near a hundred degrees for days. Amy had come from Kansas City, Kansas, where she and Edwin Earhart made their home, and now was installed in her childhood bedroom on the second floor, watched over and cared for by her parents and the servants, the cook Mary Brashay, and the old coachmangardener Charlie Parks, both of whom had worked for the Otises since before Amy was born. Next door was Amy’s aunt, Amelia Otis’s older sister, Mary Ann Challiss, dubbed the “Queen” by her husband William for her imperious ways, who was so different from retiring Amelia.
Amy, a reed of a woman with wonderful thick chestnut hair, looked frail but was not: before her marriage she had been a fine rider and the first woman to reach the summit of Pikes Peak. Her mother, a plain-looking stout lady who claimed never to have done anything in her life more strenuous than rolling a hoop, was by contrast timid. But there were plenty of people around to help her see her daughter through the ordeal.
Nearby lived Mary Ann’s and William’s numerous progeny—Amy’s first cousin and childhood friend James Challiss and his wife Rilla; and half a block away James’ elder sister Ida Challiss Martin, stolid, competent widowed wife of the governor, with her seven children. Other relatives—cousins, nephews, nieces, relatives by marriage—were spotted about the town. There was a doctor in attendance. Amy’s younger sister Margaret, who had cared for their recently deceased great-grandmother Maria so well and carefully, was also home. It was as nurturing an environment and as safe a situation in which to give birth as nineteenth-century America could provide.
For those who believe in omens, the signs were propitious for the birth, for one of the sharpest electric storms in a long while hit the town that afternoon and cracked the heat wave. “The sky turned the color of tin, the air stood stock still,” Rilla Challiss recalled, and there was no twilight, for a violent rainstorm began as night fell. By late evening the storm was over, the stars were out, the air clear and cool. The break in the weather made it easier for everyone. At eleven thirty P.M. on that last July Saturday, Amy gave birth to a strapping, healthy infant, nine pounds—a lot for a girl.
The baby was baptized Monday, October 10, twelve weeks later, also in Atchison rather than in Kansas City, and for that event, too, there was a memorable weather change. This time it was rain, breaking a six-week dry spell that had threatened the harvest. “The blessed rain,” proclaimed the headline in The Atchison Globe. It would have put everyone in a good mood. The site was the Otises’ place of worship, Trinity Episcopal Church at Fifth and Utah Street, a handsome Gothic church faced with irregular limestone blocks with great arched doorways and soaring stained-glass windows designed by Richard Upjohn. A twin of Upjohn’s Trinity Church at the foot of Wall Street in Manhattan, it still made an imposing statement as the century was drawing to a close. It was the handiwork of Amy’s father ; he had been the prime mover as well as the largest contributor in the parish, and Amy and her brothers and sister had all been baptized there. The gray light that filtered through the stained-glass panes of the church barely illuminated the black walnut beams and pews fashioned from trees that grew in the Missouri River valley; no one cared.
It was a small, intimate gathering that was assembled, as was the custom among nice Atchison families. The baby was dressed in the same lace christening dress her mother had been baptized in twenty-eight years before. When the Episcopal minister, the Reverend John Henry Molineux, pronounced the chosen names, Amelia Mary, then intoned, “I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” and sprinkled the infant with holy water, placing her in the Episcopal Church, the Otises must have been pleased but relieved as well, for they had managed to symbolically erase all vestiges of the Lutheran religion in which Edwin Earhart had been raised and all influence of his father, the Reverend David Earhart, who was one of the most revered Lutherans in Kansas. If Alfred’s aim had been to make it look as if the Earhart heritage didn’t exist, he succeeded.
As Amy had been baptized Amelia (but always called Amy) after her mother, now her daughter, too, was baptized Amelia. Edwin was recognized in one detail only, his daughter’s middle name: Mary was for Edwin’s mother.
It was perhaps inevitable that in all these early choices, it was Amy’s family rather than Edwin’s that prevailed. Hers was a powerful family. Along with their relatives the Martins and the Challisses, they were the powers in the town. Her austere father, “the Judge,” as he was called, one of the first Atchison settlers, had had a hand in organizing and running just about every institution in the town, including the banks, the rail lines, and the gas company. Now, at seventy, he was still a force.
Undoubtedly the thoughts of many, as the christening ceremony progressed in the muted light, would have turned to another of Amy’s family—her grandmother Maria Grace Harres, extraordinary both for her vigor and her intelligence, who had lived with the Otises at North Terrace and died just months before. This baby was the first of Maria’s issue to be born after her death. Maria had set her stamp on her amazingly numerous progeny, providing a network of sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles and cousins—four generations of descendants centered in Atchison, radiating across Kansas, reaching all the way to the governor’s mansion, the governor’s wife being her granddaughter Ida. It was through Maria that the Otises were related to all the people that mattered, most of them the offspring of Amelia Otis’s sister Mary Ann. Maria had lived to see the birth of twenty grandchildren, thirty great-grandchildren, and two great-great-grandchildren. Over the years the generations had gotten into a chronological muddle; Amelia Earhart, born less than a year after Maria died, was merely a great-grandchild.
Amy, sweet, compliant, pretty, even though in love with Edwin, was totally preoccupied with her own family. Now, that preoccupation showed in the way she entered the presents Amelia received in the baby book. She listed the gifts: three silver spoons, three gold pins, an entire wardrobe, a gold ring, a bracelet, a silver comb and brush, a pillow. And then, tellingly, “Best of all her grandmother’s undying “l
ove and devotion.”“ And then the very last entry, her own gift, the crib quilts her grandmother Maria had made for her when she had been born. There is no mention—no mention at all—of any Earhart gift. And yet one must presume that the Reverend Earhart would have given something, and certainly that Edwin would at the very least have given his “love and devotion’”—he was a very affectionate and demonstrative father, but Amy didn’t think it worthwhile to mention.
Amy did think it important to write down the old truism regarding the day of the week a baby is born. What she inscribed is such an accurate description of her daughter’s future life that one must speculate upon the possibility that an early family myth, strongly reinforced, can influence the subsequent personality development of a child. Amelia was a Saturday child. Amy, who never worked a day in her life, daughter of Amelia who never worked, and of Amelia’s mother Maria, who never worked, carefully wrote down, “But Saturday’s bairn must work for a living.”
Maria Grace Harres was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1796; she died in Atchison September 17, 1896. Her parents, the Graces, ship-owners, were English Quakers who came to America with William Penn. Maria attended the dame school; legend has it that she was chosen to throw flowers in General Lafayette’s path when he visited Philadelphia. She had married a Prussian, Gebhard Harres, who fled to America to avoid being pressed into the army. Gebhard, six foot four, with curly hair, was a tool-maker, designer of steam-powered pistons, and such a good craftsman that, according to family legend, he had impressed Robert Fulton. There is no photograph of Maria as a young woman, but a photo of her in later years shows her distinctive high forehead, which her daughters and their issue inherited, and piercing eyes. Gebhard must have been quickly drawn to her; she certainly was to him. Amy Earhart wrote, “He thought Grandmother the most beautiful woman in Philadelphia and I judge she must have been very good-looking, as he was. Mother said people used to turn and look at him often, as he walked along the street.
