by Susan Butler
The Aitchpe also listed college choices, and Amelia’s choice was Bryn Mawr; she was at least still holding on to her dream of going there with Ginger, as they had planned together for so many years.
She kept so much to herself that her Hyde Park classmates used the words “boy shy” and “reticent” and “diffident” to describe her. They would also remember that she did not attend graduation or bother to pick up her diploma and that she was the only one in her class who “dared to break the school tradition by refusing to attend the senior class banquet.”
Even though Amelia participated so little in school activities, she harbored no ill feelings toward Hyde Park. In 1928, within weeks of her return to the United States after the Friendship flight, she visited the school, in the process enthralling everyone with whom she came in contact. (She laughingly remarked that what she remembered most vividly was her German teacher always asking “Was meint das Fraulein?” because the teacher couldn’t understand her German.) And her picture was taken while she stepping onto a piano on her way down from the auditorium stage.
Edwin, meanwhile, after the disaster in Springfield, attempted to resurrect his law practice in St. Paul. When the lease on the house ran out, he moved to Kansas City, Missouri, to live with his elderly widowed sister Mary Woodworth, at seventy-two almost a generation older than he. Sometime in the fall of 1915, Amy and Amelia and Muriel left Chicago and moved there too, into a small house at 3621 Charlotte Avenue. Edwin joined them. It looked terribly good after all they had been through. But there was still no money, and Amelia wanted to finish her education in a proper manner at a private school or college. It was a difficult time for her. Her own plans had to be put on hold. Mitigating that state of affairs, however, was the positive change in her father: Edwin had pulled himself together and was again functioning.
Amy had never given up trying to get control of her inheritance. Now, with Edwin drawing on his knowledge of the law, his anger redirected into positive channels, husband and wife joined forces to fight Mark. Edwin began probing into the dealings of the Otis Real Estate Company, looking for evidence of financial mismanagement. At every turn Mark rebuffed him, and as he did so, Mark’s enmity toward Amy became more and more apparent. As Edwin pressed him, he and Amy became surer of their ground. In September 1915 Amy filed suit. Edwin’s brief sought an accounting from Mark, challenged the legality of the Otis Real Estate Company to function as a company in the state of Illinois, and demonstrated that Mark hadn’t had the courtesy to be civil to his brother-in-law: “... and he refused to show said books and records of said corporation, and said agent then wrote a letter to Mark E. Otis, demanding an inspection of said books, which letter was refused by said Mark E. Otis, and returned to the writer unopened.”
Things began to move, although at a glacial pace, in Amy’s favor. On February 17, 1917, the Atchison County District Court granted the petition. “Except for the funds in the hands of the Northern Trust Company,” the Journal entry stated, Mark had to turn over to his sister all the real estate legally hers—forthwith, upon presentation of her shares of stock, and “the Otis Real Estate Company upon receipt of said stock, [shall] deed to the plaintiff all the said property within two days thereafter.” The property involved “certain real estate described as follows”—listing more than thirty pieces of property in Kansas City, Kansas, and several in Kansas City, Missouri.
And then, finally, the long agony came to an end. On April 16, Amy was notified, her brother had died in Chicago.
That summer Amy sought control over the funds still managed by the Northern Trust Company, and with Mark dead, she encountered no opposition. On August 21, 1917, Amy’s inheritance was finally, totally, irrevocably hers.
It would take a while for Mark’s financial records to be unraveled, but when they were, Margaret Balis and Theodore Otis would find out that of the extensive holdings their father had so carefully built up, virtually nothing was left. Mark had wasted and spent it all—all except Amy’s portion. Margaret would be forced to recognize that Amy had been correct in her assessment of their brother and that she had been wrong. The sisters, reunited, would pick up the closeness they had once enjoyed, and their children would once again become friends.
In the fall of 1916 Ginger Park, but not Amelia Earhart, became a freshman at Bryn Mawr. Amelia became a student at one of the most exclusive finishing schools in the country, a school called Ogontz. A mix of factors were at work. Money was certainly a major consideration, as were location and academic background.
Ogontz had the attribute of being located in a suburb of Philadelphia, near both Bryn Mawr and Margaret Balis, who would be able to look after her niece. Amelia must have considered it temporary—assuming that in another year she would be at Bryn Mawr- and in the meantime she would be nearby, and near the Balis family, with whom she got along well.
But Ogontz was a particularly social school—so social that virtually everyone, including the Challiss family, thought it a great mistake for Amelia to go there. Rilla Challiss thought Ogontz “a very silly place for Amy to have sent her”—it was that dreaded thing, Rilla thought, “rather too stylish.” Lucy Challiss was going to Wheaton and would have liked her to go there; Edwin favored Kansas State. Nor did Ogontz appeal to Margaret Balis, who was strongly bound to the Quaker tradition of their great-grandmother Maria. She would send her daughters, a few years younger than Amelia, to Germantown Friends for their final years and then to Bryn Mawr.
Amy had always had social pretensions. She alone, of all her aunts and uncles and cousins, in her description in the family history book of the large ancestral Harres home in Philadelphia, where her mother and Mary Ann Challiss had grown up—she alone claimed the house was on Chestnut Street, the most fashionable street in the city, when in fact it had been on more modest South Third Street, by no means as fine. Her yearning for gentility, her insistence on patrician ancestry would impress Muriel (but not Amelia, who never made any such claims). When Muriel wrote her biography of her sister, she made much of their supposed grand lineage, claiming that they were descended from a niece of a king of France through Edwin, as well as being direct descendants of the Revolutionary War hero James Otis.
The years of being snubbed, of being so poor in Chicago that rooms in a dismal apartment were the best she could do, had taken their toll on Amy. After what she had endured in St. Paul, social standing became not just one interest among many but a serious goal in life. While in earlier years her efforts had been directed at maintaining the family position, now she felt they had slipped, and she and her daughters had to regain their place. With such a goal, an ultrasocial finishing school would help—it would add a certain cachet to her daughter’s social standing.
Margaret and Clarence Balis lived a few miles away from Ogontz, at 137 East Johnson Street, in a big house with their five children—fifteen-year-old Otis, eleven-year-old Mark Edwin, ten-year-old Clarence, and the twins, Nancy and Jane, six—plus niece Annie, by then grown and about to be married. The Balises were a happy, normal family, something Amelia, except during her brief visit with the Challisses, had not been around in years. It would have been comforting for Amelia to be near her first cousins and her aunt, always the family caregiver, now devoted to taking young relatives under her wing. (A few years later Margaret would even gather into her fold Charles Otis’s son James, and James’s children, whom Amy had so desperately tried to become friendly with in St. Paul.) Margaret managed to accomplish so much even though she was almost totally deaf—something her own children were made aware of only when they started school and their classmates asked them, “Why are you shouting?”
Margaret was undertaking the education of her twin daughters Nancy and Jane at home, but unlike Amy’s feeble attempt, which had so quickly ended in failure, Margaret, in the forefront of educational change, was deep into the new Montessori method and a highly successful teacher. “I can still remember the big boxes from Italy, and the big colored letters,” Nancy, one of t
he twins, would say many years later. Keeping an eye on another niece was for Margaret the most natural thing in the world. As a matter of course, particularly since money was still short, Amelia spent vacations with her aunt.
What Margaret had not expected, however, were the jams Amelia got into—especially those caused by her penchant for climbing. Margaret as parent-in-place was held accountable and telephoned by school authorities whenever there was a problem. Several times she had to deal with the school when Amelia was caught climbing on the roofs of the school buildings, “I remember Mother wearing a gray dress and a very snappy hat,” Nancy would recall, “I remember Mother putting on the hat, her mouth full of hat pins [holding the hat pins in her mouth] and saying, ‘I have to go out to Ogontz to see about Amelia. She has been climbing on the roof in her nightie again.’ ” But at the beginning of the term the Balis house was off limits to Amelia, because, as her cousin Annie Otis was deputed to call and tell her, Jane was sick and the house in quarantine until mid-November—necessitating even Clarence Balis’s enforced absence.
Ogontz was a school with a strong conservative tradition. It had begun life in 1850 as the Chestnut Street Female Seminary in Philadelphia. By Amelia’s day, it was a finishing school located on the Jay Cooke estate outside of Philadelphia and had a new name: Ogontz, the name of an Indian chief after whom Cooke had named the house. The headmistress, Abby Sutherland, originally from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, fluent in French and German, a cum laude graduate of Radcliffe, began her career at Ogontz in 1902 teaching English. In 1913 she became head of the school, which under her stewardship grew rapidly and shed some of its more austere traditions. It was, however, still the goal of the school to seek out and educate what the headmistress proudly described as “the jeunesse dorée,” by which she meant, as she put it, those from “the best social stratum.” However, if Ogontz was consciously filled with the children of families of the “best” American lineage and culture, it did at least seek geographical diversity; almost every class included students from all over the United States and usually from foreign countries as well. And if it had no black students, it did have at least a few Jewish ones. As Abby Sutherland delicately put it, “In 1903 the then head of the school, Miss Eastman, with conscientious Christian scruples, decided to accept a few individuals of the Jewish race and fit them into the group, thus solving the problem empirically.”
Abby Sutherland was less interested in spoiling her young charges than in inculcating sound values; less interested in shielding them from the world than in instilling healthy habits. During her years as headmistress, “the training in neatness and thriftiness; the beautiful surroundings, and above all the Christian atmosphere” would overwhelmingly impress the girls.
Under Miss Sutherland’s stewardship, Ogontz paid good salaries and provided excellent housing, with the result that the teachers were of a very high caliber; many were college graduates or had unusually varied backgrounds. Abby Sutherland, herself rather worldly, insisted on the constant interaction of faculty and students with what was going on in the world. During the summers teachers were expected to travel abroad and otherwise keep in touch, and guest lecturers were constantly sought out and brought to the school. Throughout the year the girls made trips to art centers in New York, Washington, and Chicago.
The result of all this was that Ogontz did a very good job of educating its jeunesse dorée—more than half of its students went on to institutions of higher learning, and many of those institutions gave college credit for Ogontz courses. Ogontz students became singers at the Metropolitan Opera, heads of civic organizations, doctors, lawyers, State Department officials, teachers, and artists. But being a wife and mother came first; it was a rare Ogontz girl who did not marry.
The physical well-being of the girls was considered to be just as important as their mental health, and therefore vigorous exercise was an integral part of the school day. Fencing was taught by a fencing instructor from the Drexel Institute, field hockey by an English lady who coached at Bryn Mawr, and dancing by (among others) Martha Graham; the horseback riding program ended with a horse show each June. There were also tennis and basketball. For the “unathletic” who, according to the diligent Abby Sutherland, “were always with us ... the required hours of exercise ... could include a walk, not a stroll, in the open country.” During military drill, obligatory at many of the girls’ schools of the period, the girls marched in uniform, complete with wooden guns, to the orders of the headmaster of Bordentown Military Institute. Miss Sutherland attributed the fine carriage and walking manner “characteristic of all alumnae” to the marching, and it was evidently very popular with the girls, although not with Amelia, who informed her mother, “Drill is awful,” in her first letter.
Amelia took to Ogontz quickly. Putting distance between herself and Amy was like a tonic. Able at last to put down the burden of caring for her mother, Amelia became once again the teenager, the child, the student—she could act her age and enjoy life. She threw herself into everything.
As she wrote her mother:
I don’t have a minute for anything because I want to get all possible. Weekdays this is the program.
7:00 Get up to a cow bell.
7:30 Prayers and afterward setting up exercises.
8:00 Breakfast and morning walk till school begins at nine. Classes until two. One fifteen in my case. Then, Hockey, b. ball or drill in turn with an hour or two for tennis.
4 to 5:30 Study hall 5:30—6:30 Dress for dinner.
6:00 Dinner and prayers immediately after. Then spelling. Then every evening we have something to do. Thursday and Tuesday conversation classes in French German etc. Wednesday a lecture or something like that (Joseph Hoffman this Wednesday) and Friday always something else. Saturday and Monday are our free nights. Sunday prayers and a lecture take up the time till luncheon. Then everybody takes two hours of exercise out-doors. Then Study at four as usual. You see every minute is accounted for and you have to go by schedule.
Amelia immediately excelled in field hockey, informing her mother, “I played hockey yesterday and made two goals, the only ones made. I am continuing this letter Monday evening. I played Hockey again to-day and made a goal thru my legs.” As a result of her prowess, she was invited to become a member of one of the secret societies, Alpha Phi, the athletic sorority. She also did well in her studies and was pleased to be placed in French III her first term. (“Did I tell you that I have a reputation for brains?” she writes her mother.) By Christmas she had dropped the chemistry lab she had started.
In all her classes in the year and a half Amelia spent at Ogontz, her marks varied within a very narrow range from G (good) to G+ to E (excellent), even in drill and punctuality, subjects on which the girls were also meticulously marked (although she did get two fairs in Bible). In light of Amelia’s habit of deliberately misspelling and otherwise fooling around with words for her own amusement, it is interesting and informative to note that after two semesters of spelling class, in both of which she received a grade of excellent, she was exempted from spelling for the rest of her time at Ogontz. In her literature class that first year, among other authors she read Wordsworth, Byron, Burns, and Shakespeare; in Latin she read Horace; in her French class, George Sand. Even so, she found time to devour books on her own—so many, it came to the notice of Abby Sutherland, who wrote, “Amelia was always pushing into unknown seas in her reading.”
There were still worries about money, though. Compared with the other girls, Amelia was poor. She tried to reassure Amy and not complain. “I can wear an old suit with a little alteration so it will be more reasonable. I hate to spend money for things I never will need nor want.” She bought a pair of used high-heeled pumps from a friend for five dollars. At the end of a letter to her mother in the spring, she wrote: “Dearie, I don’t need any spring clothes so don’t worry about sending me money. I have a few dollars still in the bank and I know you all need things more than I.” The next fall she is apologizi
ng to her mother for needing twenty-seven dollars for senior caps and gowns, an obligatory expense and the alternative was that she must borrow from Miss Sutherland “if it is not convenient to send me some cash soon as is the custom.” Abby Sutherland thought she handled the situation with aplomb. “Her style of dressing was always simple and becoming. At that period her purse as well as her innate taste required the fewest and simplest clothes. But she helped very much to impress the overindulged girls with the beauty and comfort of simple dressing.”
Carefully supervised, Ogontz girls were encouraged to go on cultural expeditions into Philadelphia. In the fall Amelia went to a concert performance of the Philadelphia Symphony. In the spring she went on excursions to hear Ian Hay, to visit the Victor Talking Machine Company, and to see theatrical productions of Treasure Island and Joan the Woman. Then there were the cultural events brought to Ogontz, such as the Orpheus Club, a phenomenon she described to her mother as “a musical organization of Philadelphia, composed of about twenty men aged from twenty-five to eighty.” They “came out to dinner here and gave us a concert. There were some magnificent voices caged in very unprepossessing exteriors and one German Baron looked as tho he would burst his earthly shell when he sang, but his voice was a wonderfully clear barytone. He sung from Faure and Die Walkyrie (I know how to spell it.)”
