by Susan Butler
Often when Amelia was alone she would while away the time reading tales she knew by heart, then after a time she would put her book down and dream. She wrote a poem about one dream.
I watch the birds flying all day long
And I want to fly too.
Don’t they look down sometimes, I wonder,
And wish they were me
When I’m going to the circus with my daddy?
Often she constructed her own tale. One path her imagination took her on—preoccupied as she would be for hours with fantasies of traveling into the past, into the future, and always out of Atchison—eventually turned into a game called Bogie. Present in the game is Amelia’s sense of adventure, the thrill of embarking on a long dangerous voyage; demonstrated is her inherent personal magnetism.
Bogie was played in the barn on the bluff above the river which—once full of horses and carriages—now contained just one carriage, complete with carriage lamps. Amelia, with her vivid imagination, turned this vehicle into a magic chariot in which she, accompanied most often by Katch and Lucy and Muriel, traveled the world. They placed sawhorses in front of the carriage in place of real horses, equipped themselves with wooden pistols, and then settled down in the carriage and went on an adventure. Katch’s favorite voyage was a trip to a town called Pearyville, so full of exciting and dangerous happenings, so encrusted with tradition, that Katch drew a detailed map of the journey, complete with distances. In this make-believe world they all (naturally) took the roles of boys. According to Katch, it was Amelia who saved them when, along the way to Pearyville, the carriage was attacked by hairy men. They shouted, “Oh hairy men hairy men,” at the same time pointing the pistols and yelling “bangbang,” but if Amelia hadn’t remembered that the hairy men “were afraid of red” and produced a red gumdrop, they would have been carried away forever, according to Katch. There were all sorts of other dangers, too, along the way to Pearyville—night riders, giant spiders, and snakes, as well as witches, a Man of the Woods, ghosts, and corpses. There was a Bridge of Skeletons to pass over, the Old Gallows to pass, the Cave of Sighs, the Witches Cave, the Red Lion, the Robber Bridge—so many things, in fact, that although it was clearly drawn on the map, they never ever reached Pearyville. And that was part of the game, too.
In the more sophisticated version of the game, it becomes apparent that Amelia’s later fascination with long-distance flying is just the adult, real-life version of Bogie. In youthful Bogie they would be in a carriage “dashing wildly across country to London, Paris, and Berlin” or careening down the post road to Vienna. “A knight in armor came galloping swiftly toward us. ‘Dispatches, Sir Knight!’ I shouted.” Amelia, with maps “that fell into our clutches,” embarked on “imaginary journeys full of fabulous perils.... The map of Africa was a favorite.” The carriage became an elephant or a camel, as the need arose. “We weighed the advantage of the River Niger and the Nile, the comparative ferociousness of the Tauregs and Swahili. No Livingstone, Stanley or Rhodes explored with more enthusiasm than we,” Amelia would write as she waited for her Lockheed Electra to be repaired in 1937 on her round-the-world flight.
She loved poetry, but that didn’t stop her from appreciating the comics. They were words, too, and she was above all a wordsmith, as virtually all the letters she wrote to friends throughout her life demonstrate. Her favorite comic was “The Katzenjammer Kids.” This strip, featuring words phonetically spelled to capture the German accent (“I tell der kink uf Sveden! ... I got a liddle bizness vot iss important! ... Lets take a ride in der airyplaner!” are representative sentences) amused Amelia so much that she appropriated the idea of phonetic spelling and for the rest of her life would weave deliberate phonetic bloopers into her letters. In 1932, when she gave Katch a copy of her book The Fun of It, she wrote on the flyleaf, “To mine angel cousin Katch from her darlink cousin Mill.” And Amelia, who had written her first poem when she was four (dedicating it “especially” to her mother), opened that world also to her playmates. She recited from memory passages from Alice in Wonderland, or Lear’s “Owl and the Pussycat,” or “Horatius at the Bridge,” and a bit later verses from Browning.
But her favorite poem was “Atalanta in Calydon” by the popular English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and so, inevitably, Swinburne became Katch’s favorite poet and that poem became her favorite, too. Amelia always memorized great chunks of her favorites, so before long Katch, too, memorized the poem. It made such a deep impression upon Katch that seventy years later, she could still recite passages from it.
It is a fascinating tale. The poem is a rarity in English literature—an epic poem about a warrior maiden. Its images are beautiful, but its message had a special appeal to Amelia. Atalanta was a role model Amelia could relate to. She had no patience with the passive princesses of mythology; Those heroines she read about in the fairy tales who could have had everything but managed only to get themselves into distress bored her. Like Ariadne marking her way in the labyrinth, Atalanta found a path to Amelia’s soul.
Atalanta is a virgin huntress—ueet of foot, deadly with bow and arrow, and very courageous. She joins the Greek warriors hunting a boar that the gods have sent down to menace the kingdom. Meleager, leader of the hunt, adores Atalanta; he is “beyond measure enamoured of her” and calls her to his side:
“Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers Maiden most perfect, lady of light.”
All the great warriors of Greece are hunting the boar, but it is Atalanta whose arrow first finds the beast, and Meleager who deals it a mortal blow. When Meleager awards her the slain boar as spoils, the warriors become furious. Meleager slays his uncles, who are in the forefront of those who would destroy Atalanta. In the ensuing struggle, Meleager dies.
The poem is both a celebration of Atalanta and a warning of the dangers to such females who compete in the male world. Swinburne makes plain that men and women feel equally threatened by her. Thus Meleager’s mother:
“A woman armed makes war upon herself.”
And Meleager’s father:
“Not fire nor iron and the widemouthed wars
Are deadlier than her lips or braided hair.”
And Meleager’s uncle, who rails that it is against the natural order of things,
“and the bride overbear the groom.”
Atalanta tries to blunt the censorious attitude, telling of her sacrifice, that she has given up so much. That too is an integral message of the poem—that she shall have
“no man’s love
Forever, and no face of children born
nor being dead shall kings my sons
Mourn me and bury,
and tears on daughters’ cheeks burn.”
She asks them to understand her.
“yet in my body is throned
As great a heart, and in my spirit, O men,
I have not less of godlike.”
In the end Atalanta is shunned by all except the dying Meleager. No literary work could more eloquently or plainly spell out the dangers that exist for the woman who competes in male pursuits.
From first grade on Amelia attended the private College Preparatory School along with Ginger and Ann Parks; the Fox sisters, Marjorie and Virginia; Mary Campbell, a neighbor whose mother had been a friend of Amelia’s mother; and Balie Waggener, whom she had known forever—her grandfather had given Balie’s father his first job. The coeducational school was just a short walk for all of them. It had been founded by Helen Schofield in 1896, in what had been a stable. Sarah Walton, the headmistress, a gifted educator and an active member of Trinity Church, assisted by Yale graduate Charlie Gaylord prepared “her” children so well that most went on to top colleges.
The College Preparatory School was tiny, having between thirty and forty students spread out in the twelve grades. The stable had become two large rooms, one upstairs and one down. The lower forms—through the eighth grade—studied upstairs, grades nine through twelve studied downstairs. Classes in the various
subjects for the diverse grades were taught in one corner of each floor, while the children studied in the other part. It worked because the grades were so small—Annie Park remembers days when she was the only one in her class.
It was comfortable and intimate and friendly. The desks were the kind with chairs attached, so that as the children slid in and out, there was a minimum of disruption. When their class was over, students would take their belongings off to a corner to read and study, and the next class would slide into place. At the end of the day Amelia and Ginger and the others packed their belongings into their string bags and walked or biked home.
Amelia was a good student, but bright as she was, her strong streak of independence did not go unremarked. In seventh grade she missed the arithmetic honors that were hers for the taking because, according to Headmistress Sarah Walton, “Amelia’s mind is brilliant, but she refuses to do the plodding necessary to win honor prizes. She deduces the correct answers to complex arithmetic problems, but hates to put down the steps by which she arrived at the results.” Sarah Walton also noted that prizes were not of great interest to Amelia—not the carrot they were for many children : that she listened to a different drummer. She did manage to receive one prize from the headmistress, though—a beautiful copy of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome.
In the time-honored fashion of the day, girls didn’t play team sports. Their role was to cheer on the boys at the school basketball and baseball games by yelling the school chant:
Rickety X
Co Ex
Co Ex
Bully for you
CPS
It wasn’t enough for Amelia; she wanted more. She wanted to play basketball too, although being a realist, she probably didn’t expect to play at school, only on her own with her girl friends. To play, she needed to know the rules. If she had been a timid child, she would probably have asked her friend Balie Waggener. But no; she went to the top of the school world—to team captain Frank Baker, who was older and whom she barely knew. One day during basketball practice, she approached him. They had never talked because she was so much younger and because boys hung out with boys and girls with girls; in approaching him, she was breaking custom. “We girls would like to play,” she threw out, which startled him, but he agreed to teach her how to hold a ball and shoot for the basket. Amelia thereupon taught Ginger Park and Lucy. This game, too, they played across the road in Charlie’s Park, where there was a single basketball hoop on the side of a barn—all their game required. (The boys at the school also played with just one hoop.) Under Amelia’s guidance, they also played a form of baseball they called One-O-Cat that required only three people—pitcher, catcher, and batter—each out for themselves—another game the boys played.
Her activist nature is perfectly caught in two photos in Lucy’s 1911 photograph album. In one picture Amelia and three friends—Katherine Dolan (referred to as Dolan), Lucy (Toot), Virginia Park (Ging) are lying on their stomachs, their chins cupped in their hands, staring at the camera either before or after a basketball game; it is Amelia who is holding the ball. In another photo Amelia is standing with her Challiss cousins—but the photo is being taken from too far away, she notices: Amelia’s arm is stretched out toward the camera; she is beckoning the photographer to come closer.
On cold winter days, when ice floes ten inches thick bubbled on the river and the land was covered with snow, the children—cousins, school friends—would meet at the top of the North Second Street hill with their sleds and coast down to the bottom in waves, the boys lying face-down on their models, the girl sitting upright on theirs. Amelia had a boys’ sled, one of her prize possessions, a gift from her father, and she was the only girl who could lie down while coasting down the hill. She credited it with saving her life, recounting that once, zipping down an icy hill, she found herself heading straight for a junkman’s cart and horse. The junkman didn’t hear her yells so, unable to stop, she aimed for the space between the horse’s front and back legs. Head down, she made it. Other winter days, they all went ice skating on the pond at Jackson Park.
When Muriel was in Atchison, she played with Ann and Katch. She had a bit of a difficult time, not only because she was only an occasional participant but also because Amelia was so dramatic, so clever, and so inventive that both Katch and Annie infinitely preferred her over “Moonie,” as they called her. “I didn’t care for her as much as Millie,” Ann would recall. Katch would say, “I always seemed to get stuck with Muriel.”
Clearly Amelia was a hard act to follow. She was the glamorous, daring one—Muriel was the younger, timid, plump, solemn younger sister. Amelia was always dreaming up new activities and yet, a natural teacher, always managed to be kind and patient to the younger girls. Naturally they all wanted to be with her—so did Muriel. So deep an impression did Amelia make on Ann Park, one of the younger sisters, that seventy years later Ann, over eighty years old, still remembered clearly that “Millie was always the instigator.... She would dare anything; we would all follow along.” Katch said, “I just adored her.... She was not only fun ... she could do everything.”
Amelia had a passionate interest in animals, which manifested itself, more often than not, in those preautomobile times, on that most ubiquitous animal in North America-the horse. Anna Sewall’s Black Beauty had made a great impression on her, and the result was that Amelia believed she had a personal mission to intercede on behalf of any horse she saw being mistreated. This inevitably led to confrontations with delivery men, when they found she had loosened the taut check reins of their horses, which kept them from being able to relax their necks, and once to a fight with her mother, when she refused to be polite to a neighbor in Kansas City who was cruel to his horse Nellie. Nor did she change as she grew older; her love for animals never left her. She never forgot Nellie, who died as a result of mistreatment. In the 1930s she would read Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Broncho That Would Not Be Broken of Dancing” to her husband, and he would know she was thinking of Nellie. Blanche Noyes, friend and fellow pilot, driving out west with Amelia many years later, remembered, “If there was an animal hit along the road, no matter whether she had an appointment or not, she’d stop and either take the animal to the next town, or we’d find someone to take care of the animal ... or we’d check to see if it was dead.”
Amelia remained close to her parents and her sister through the summers spent in Kansas City. Amy seems to have done a superb job of making each of her children content with their disparate lives, for both sisters seemed perfectly happy with the arrangement. Amelia in Atchison had Virginia Park, Toot, and Katch, a school she “loved,” her own very special room, and her grandmother Millie, whom she could wind around her finger; Muriel had her mother and father and her own room in Kansas City. Amy would make frequent short visits to her family on North Terrace, always bringing Muriel.
Muriel enjoyed Atchison, but she wasn’t as comfortable there as she was at home. For her there was “no comparison” between Atchison and Kansas City. “My family was in Kansas City; I liked Kansas City better,” she would recall. One reason Muriel felt strange in Atchison was that she had to be on her best behavior for her grandparents. But another more important reason was her status as a visitor, which was underscored by the sleeping arrangements: Muriel slept with her mother in her mother’s old bedroom. Muriel, recalling that sleeping arrangement, seventy years after the fact, still had a tinge of resentment in her voice as she continued, “Amelia had her own room.” The special room—Maria’s.
Summertime life in Kansas City was simpler, less structured than it was in Atchison. Because Amelia had no network of school friends and cousins as in Atchison, she was thrown back on the company of her family—her sister, her mother, and particularly her father, who rarely, if ever, visited Atchison. There was more freedom in the Earhart house; Edwin particularly believed in letting young girls do what they wanted, whether it was proper or not. Amelia seems to have adjusted and benefited from the change. In particular, it
gave her a chance to be with her father, whom she adored. Amy read Amelia and Muriel to sleep at night with selections from Dickens and Sir Walter Scott, but it was Edwin’s knowledge that impressed Amelia. “I thought that my father must have read everything and, of course, therefore, knew everything. He could define the hardest words as well as the dictionary, and we used to try to trip him and he to bewilder us. I still have a letter he wrote me beginning, ‘Dear parallelepipedon,’ which sent me scurrying for a definition,” she wrote.
Both in Atchison and in Kansas City from the time they were tots, Amelia and Muriel were taught by example and by lesson that it was the obligation of the rich to help out the poor. Well into the 1900s there were black shantytowns outside of Leavenworth, Atchison, and Kansas City. The blacks had come in huge numbers in the 1870s because the railroads, in an effort to encourage travel by rail, had distributed circulars promising good land and plenty of work in the state. It was a cruel joke, one that had left many impoverished blacks stranded. By the first decade of the 1900s the names of the white families whom they could turn to were being passed along among the desperately poor. Amy’s name was on that list. “We watched, wide-eyed, the pathetic procession of decrepit Negroes, often crippled and scarred from their days of slavery, who stopped to beg.... Mother always gave them a few pennies or some bread and bacon, and this sent them on their way blessing her and perhaps a little strengthened in hope and faith.”
