by Susan Butler
On the outskirts of Atchison was the large red brick Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home that had been built after the Civil War for the indigent and orphaned offspring of Kansas veterans. The Home, by Amelia’s day, was open to all dependent children in Kansas, including those who were physically disabled; it was one of the causes that civic-minded Atchison took to its heart, providing free tickets when the circus came to town, presents at Christmas, and various other contributions to make the orphans’ lives happier. The Home was special to the Harres family; the library had been named the John A. Martin Memorial Library in honor of Ida Challiss Martin’s husband, and Ida maintained a particular interest in its well-being. As a matter of course, Amy invited children from the Home over to play. The favorite of these visitors was a girl named Lily who had a badly scarred hand. Amelia befriended her, treating her as she did her other friends, introducing her to all her friends—imaginary as well as real—involving her in whatever endeavor she was pursuing, with such effect that Lily lost all trace of self-consciousness about her status or her hand. In Kansas City, too, poor children were invited over to play with Amelia and Muriel and to dine with the family Amy took particular care to set her table with nice china and glass at such times, to expose them to an environment they would not ordinarily see. Occasionally she gave each child a small purse containing a few coins and sent them off with Amelia and Muriel to shop at Emery, Bird & Thayer, the big Kansas department store. Once one of the little boys became totally unreasonable and demanded that he be allowed to buy one of the elevators. Amelia told him that it was almost impossible to buy an elevator. The little boy jumped up and down with rage, saying that he had been told he could buy what he wanted, and what he wanted was the elevator.
Amelia’s cleverness and her imagination and her sure touch with people enabled her to come up with a solution.
“This particular elevator isn’t for sale,” she said. “But,” she continued, looking secretive and mysterious, “I know how we can rent it for the afternoon.”
“You do? Sure?” the little boy asked.
“I do. Dead sure. Shall we rent?”
“Sure. Let‘s,” said the boy.
They spent the afternoon in the elevator, and except that the elevator operator was a little stunned, everything went off very well.
Amelia suffered through the self-conscious phase as most preadolescents do. Bloomers were much easier to move in than the ruffled pinafores over long full-skirted dresses that they usually wore, as Amy’s sister Margaret had proved as a young girl, when she had secretly had a pair of bloomers made and gone bike riding. Amy had not joined Margaret’s bloomer escapade, but it had made a deep impression on her; now she had dark blue flannel bloomers made for Amelia and Muriel to wear while pursuing their more strenuous activities. But the dress code in Atchison was still rigid—so rigid, a girl at school a few years older than Amelia was branded as “fast” because three or four inches of calf above her ankle became exposed when she crossed her legs. So Amelia’s bloomers, being unusual, even though a generation later than her aunt‘s, still drew comment. Amelia observed that “though we felt terribly ’free and athletic,‘we also felt somewhat as outcasts among the little girls who fluttered about us in their skirts.”
Edwin gave the girls baseballs and bats and, in response to Amelia’s request one Christmas, a football. Another of his Christmas presents was a .22 rifle. The girls already possessed a BB gun, with which they popped bottles off the back fence; the .22 was to shoot rats in the barn. There were a lot of rats, for according to the faithful Charlie Parks, the grain bins and side walls of the harness room got to look “pretty much like a sieve” by the time they were through.
Amelia was a collector. She had a special trunk in which she kept a collection of bones, including a cow’s skull that Amy wanted her to throw out, and spiders. A particular species of spiders—trap spiders—were the ones she particularly cherished, for they had hinged backs. “That,” Amelia pointed out to her mother, referring to the hinged backs, “is efficiency.” She collected various moths, including a luna, a regal, and a cecropia, as well as katydids, toads, and a praying mantis. Sometimes with Muriel’s aid she held worm races. For this novel activity Amelia would make a harness of a blade of grass, a sulky out of a small leaf, and mark out a course that she tried to make the worms follow.
Another occupation to which Amelia applied her penchant for the unusual and the inventive was cooking. Because there was no outdoor cooking facility at her grandparents’ house, on nice days she and Katch and Lucy made their Saturday lunches outdoors “on a brick oven of our own construction.” Most of what they cooked was basic: “Fried eggs were the principal dish, as I remember,” Amelia admitted. But she also tried to make manna, after hearing in the Trinity Church Sunday school how it dropped down from Heaven on the children of Israel. She decided it “should be small, white, round muffins, a cross between a popover and angel food cake,” and she “expended a good deal of energy and flour and sugar in trying to reproduce it,” but it never did come out anything close to what she wanted.
A few years later in Des Moines, Amelia was drawn to food experiments of a different kind. She loved radishes and, on the premise that if small ones were good, big ones might be even better, she decided to experiment. The result of her labor was radishes that were, when harvested, the size of potatoes—slightly pink, with porous centers. She ate a morsel of one of the firmer specimens and “concluded then that overgrown radishes were inedible.” A while later she persuaded her mother to cook a quart of peas in their pods. The cooked peas were also a failure, forcing even Amelia to agree that it would probably be better to shell them first. “I had hoped,” Amelia recalled of her attempts to find new foods, “to create original and palatable dishes.” Whether Amelia named the radishes Eardishes and the peas Earpods or the family hung those names on them is not known. It was not for years, not until Amelia was living at Denison House and working with Chinese children and ate her first Chinese pea pods, that she felt vindicated.
Whether it was cooking or collecting or shooting, each activity was shaped by Amelia’s creativity. Just as when she was a baby and “talked into her own ears” for hours on end to amuse herself if her mother wasn’t around, the older child, left to her own devices, created imaginary playmates Laura and Ringa, who “came frequently to call; there were long, earnest conversations.” She introduced Muriel to Laura and Ringa, and then the four of them would decide what games to play. She also invented some small black creatures, a cross between the Krazy Kat comic strip figures and a miniature jabberwocky whom she called deejays, who “took the last piece of candy, lost clothes, and talked out of turn.” She doodled pictures of these creatures in her books—exotic knights fiercely mounted on what look like cats. (In later years, if she was being interviewed by someone whom she believed to be unduly prying about the personal side of her earlier life, she would make a quick and confusing allusion to “my little girl Ringa” to throw them off course.)
Her lively imagination led her to do interesting things. At least once she turned herself, running around her grandmother’s garden in Atchison, into a galloping horse—not just any old horse, naturally, but a complicated horse she named Saladin after a favorite character in a Walter Scott novel who liked to assume disguises. She transformed the twin maple trees in the front yard of their Kansas City home into Philemon and Baucis, the couple in Ovid’s Metamorphoses whom Jupiter, after having promised to keep them together after their death, turned into an oak and a linden tree, with their top branches intertwined. Her moody cat she named Von Sol, after a grouchy German officer in a story she happened to be reading at the time. She called the level area near the barn where they sometimes played croquet Charlie’s Park—a play on Charlie Parks’s name.
Her friends adored her. Katherine Dolan observed, “We always waited for her to decide what we were going to do.” Lucy Challiss would recall, “All I knew was that Amelia was more fun to play with than anyone else
—I admired her ability, stood in awe of her information and intelligence, adored her imagination, and loved her for herself—and it held true always.”
3
The End of Childhood
• • • • To a midwesterner, the laying of the rails across the United States and the formation of the companies that controlled them was the most compelling spectacle of the latter part of the nineteenth century. For a midwestern lawyer to be associated with one of those companies—the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, the Union Pacific, the Rock Island—was to have achieved success—always on the assumption, however, that the association was at the management level. The best lawyers of the day inevitably became involved with the railroads. So it was with Judge Otis: he and his brothers and his associates were intimately part of this powerful new corporate world. Alfred’s brother Charles had set the railroad rates for the state of Minnesota, while his partner George Glick was a director of the Union Pacific.
Edwin Earhart was a railroad lawyer, but his job was too inconsequential to count—he was a claims agent, the lowest rung on the ladder. Even Edwin’s brother-in-law Clarence Balis, Margaret’s husband, whom everyone agreed was an unusually gentle, tolerant man, rarely judgmental, referred to Edwin as “a claims chaser” and did so in such a cutting tone that his children never forgot it because the way he said it made it “the worst thing Clarence Balis was ever heard to say about any man.”
Casting Edwin’s situation in an even worse light, the two Atchison men of his age, close friends of Amy’s since childhood, Mary Ann’s son James Challiss, Katch and Lucy’s father, and Senator Ingalls’s son, Sheffield, brother of Amy’s friend Constance, both lawyers, were partners in an Atchison firm and shared a good, solid practice. Edwin had started out at about the same time as they, and if he had been of a different mettle, he might have—should have—been their law partner, for a bright, steady son-in-law of Alfred Otis would have been a perfect addition to the firm; in glaring contrast there Edwin was, struggling in Kansas City.
Not that Edwin didn’t get along with James and Sheffield; he did have a relationship with the two men, but it was a social and drinking relationship. Sheffield and James enjoyed his convivial nature, his storytelling ability, and most particularly his appetite for alcohol. When Edwin visited Atchison, the three men would retire to the Challisses’ basement, drink bathtub gin, and trade tall tales. Edwin was at his best at those times, the Challiss women remembered ruefully.
All of which made him less and less popular with Rilla Challiss, James’s wife, who from the beginning had taken a dim view of him. She conceded he was handsome, she was aware he was bright and had done well at school, she even understood how Amy had fallen in love with him—but from the first moment she had known about it, she had thought the marriage unwise. For her, and for everyone except Alfred, it was a matter of character. The swings in his moods were too much even for the children. “I didn’t like him,” Katch recalled.
And though he was charming even at the best of times, there was a dark side to his character. After all, what manner of man would use as a nickname for a severely pigeon-toed daughter “Pidge,” as he did Muriel? And force her not only to accept but to like it.
A generous, creative, impulsive man, bright enough to go through Thiel College on scholarship, industrious enough to tutor his fellow law students while still a student himself, he was temperamentally unsuited for the law, and once out of school, he never really applied himself.
Even worse, he was extravagant—money ran through his hands like water. In spite of the fact that the Otises had given Amy the house on Ann Street free and clear, that they were paying for Amelia’s education at College Preparatory School, leaving Edwin only the expense of Amy and Muriel (whom Amy was tutoring at home)—in spite of the fact that her parents continually gave Amy pocket money, still Edwin couldn’t make ends meet. By 1903 his law practice was going so badly, he literally ran out money. If his heart had been in the law, he would have redoubled his efforts to succeed at it. Instead, clever with his hands and imaginative, he threw his energies into being an inventor, and dreamer that he was, he was already counting on the money he would make as he worked at his invention. Significantly, it was not Edwin bent over law books spread out on the dining-room table but Edwin intently bent over wires and wood and pieces of metal that Muriel would remember—and even more significantly, she would remember with such clarity across the years those times he was tinkering because when so occupied, he was always in a wonderful mood—which made them for her “the happiest of times.”
Edwin eventually designed a flag holder to hold the signal flags that always flew from the last car, the caboose, of a railroad train. He planned to patent the flag holder and then sell it, and he was so sure he would make a fortune that he poured every cent he could lay his hands on into the project—and still he needed more money, so he sold the valuable law books Alfred had given him. Then he dipped into the money Amy had given him to pay the property taxes due on their house (undoubtedly given her by her parents).
He finally went to Washington, D.C., in May 1903 with the completed models of the flag—only to discover that such a device had been patented two years previously. He was devastated, as he wrote Amy from Washington. “This news is a terrible blow, because I had been counting on receiving several hundred dollars from the railroad for my flag holder. However, spilled milk and out-dated patents are two things equally useless, so I shall catch the late train tomorrow. Give love to our small daughters, and much to your own sweet self.”
The letter, which he signed, “Ever thine Edwin,” was charming, but when the tax collector came to the house with a delinquent tax notice, secure, innocent Amy was stunned. Then, because in a small professional community it is natural for gossip to get about, Alfred found out that Edwin had sold the law books he had given to him. And so now not just Amy but her parents and anyone else who was interested knew how bad a provider he was.
The next summer, 1904, was the St. Louis World’s Fair. It was the miracle of its time, a magnificent spectacle that provided a glimpse of the future by showcasing the possibilities of steam power and electric light. Edwin, in spite of his precarious financial situation, was one of the thousands who couldn’t stay away. He had received a hundred dollars for legal work; he used it to take Muriel, Amelia, and Amy to St. Louis, a trip they would never forget. He had a wonderful time. He rode on an elephant and on the Ferris wheel, taking only Amelia with him. Since Edwin apparently could do no wrong in her eyes, Amy not only the first woman to ascend Pikes Peak but a fearless horsewoman, stood, seemingly contented, and watched, with four-year-old Muriel at her side. It was at the fair that Amelia, seven, became so mesmerized by the roller-coaster ride that she later constructed her own.
To escape the worst heat of the summer, it was the pattern for midwestern families that could afford it to escape to the cooler lake areas to the north. The Earharts managed to do this for the years 1907 to 1911. They went to a vacation spot in Worthington, in southwestern Minnesota, a small farming community on the shores of Lake Okabena. There, periodically joined by various Challiss and Park children, and by Amy’s brother Carl Otis and his wife, they took rooms at a farm home on the lake belonging to Clinton Mann and took their meals at Mrs. Twitchell’s boarding house nearby. Amelia and Muriel became friends with the Mann daughters; at both places they were made to feel part of a great extended family. They loved it.
Amelia had always been wild about horses, even to the point, as she admitted later, of being “obsessed” with the idea of riding. But the only riding she had succeeded in doing had been in Atchison on the back of the butcher’s draft horses.
In Worthington, for the first time, Amelia could ride to her fill on Prince, a twelve-year-old Indian pony owned by the Manns, who although small made up in spirit what he lacked in size. She and Muriel rode bareback because there was no saddle, and “half the time my sister’s and my riding consisted of walking home,” recalled Amelia—j
ust the kind of challenge she thrived on. “He could be bribed by cookies to do almost anything,” wrote Amelia. According to Lucy Challiss, the cookies were very special, one might almost say Amelia-special creations; Lucy called them horse pies. The bottom layer was composed of “the tenderest of grass,” covered by a layer of Mrs. Twitchell’s sugar cookies, covered by a layer of clover leaves, on top of which reposed Prince’s name spelled out in mulberries.
The girls helped out on the Mann farm with the haying, and milked the cows, and on some tennis court in Worthington—whose is unknown—Amelia learned to play tennis. And they swam out to the raft in the lake. Nearby there was a pasture in which lay the bleached bones of three cows that had died in a blizzard. Amelia, fascinated, spent hours trying to sort out the bones to form one complete skeleton—so many hours that the locals took to calling her Dr. Bones. It was there in Worthington that Amelia also had her first ride in a car. The occasion was a picnic, and the twenty-mile ride to the picnic site in the Mann car, a Reo, with the Mann daughters, took almost two hours.
