by Susan Butler
Margaret Balis had arrived for a visit—and Margaret, whose desire to become a doctor had been thwarted when she had been Amelia’s age, apparently now reinforced Amelia’s desire to study medicine. “The life of the mind, combined with a life of purpose and action” was how Amelia, at about this time, described the kind of life she wanted to fashion for herself. She’d been a nurse; she’d learned a lot; she felt she had an aptitude for medicine. Her next logical step would be to begin studying when the summer was over.
And Margaret brought her twins Nancy and Jane, eight; Clarence, thirteen; Mark, fourteen; and Otis, eighteen. Amelia had come to the conclusion that she would be like a doctor. Undoubtedly Margaret helped strengthen her resolve.
In the meantime, it was Amelia who ruled the family roost. Marian Stabler, vacationing in the same community, was amused to watch Amelia installing her sister and various combinations of her young cousins—Margaret’s five children—in a canoe, putting the cousins in the bow and the stern to do all the paddling and allowing Muriel to lounge with her at ease amidships.
Marian, tall, slender, well spoken, and bright, a graduate of Vassar the previous year, was spending the summer studying to become an artist at the New York School of Fine Arts (later the Parsons School of Design). Before she arrived at Lake George, Marian had been the recipient of endless letters from her parents, Walter and Clara Stabler and her brother Frank, about life there. She especially kept hearing about the interesting new family that was renting the cottage just across the road, and especially about one member.
When Marian finally arrived in August, she too was drawn to Amelia, whom she found “very poetic,” with “serious, aesthetic ideas.” Frank, who had served in the navy during the war, and was about to be a senior at Williams College in Massachusetts, was equally taken. Playing a game of Truth with her brother, Marian realized that he had a crush on Amelia. The four of them—Amelia, Marian, Frank, and Muriel—spent a lot of time together reading, canoeing, playing hide and seek, dancing to phonograph records on the porch, and toasting marshmallows around a campfire—usually trying to evade the young male Balis cousins who loved spying on Amelia.
All the Stablers were impressed with Amelia’s looks and temperament. Marian was amazed at her limber body. She could, according to Marian, balance on her hands with her knees drawn up close to her chest. She could also curl within the area of one cushion on a three-cushion couch “with nothing hanging over,” and take a nap of indefinite length, in no apparent discomfort. Another favorite position of Amelia’s was sitting on one foot.
Unlike Margaret, whose desire to be a doctor had been thwarted all those years before, no one who could block Amelia’s plan to become one now. Indeed, Margaret had undoubtedly urged her on. And so, the summer over, Amelia registered at Columbia University in the University Extension Program, which was designed for men and women like her, with practical as well as educational backgrounds. The Columbia program was enjoying enormous popularity because it offered the widest possible latitude both in studies and in its entrance requirements.
It was an exciting time to be at Columbia. The Extension had been founded in 1915 “to afford extraordinary educational opportunities ... and to serve the University by introducing and testing new educational schemes and plans.” Out of the Extension would grow the university’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Business School, the School of Journalism, and the School of General Studies.
In the fall of 1919, swelled by the great postwar rush, the Extension was in a state of flux—its 12,873 students were by far the largest student unit at the university, completely dwarfing the undergraduate Columbia College enrollment of 1,001, the Barnard enrollment of 755 girls, and the 6,548 students enrolled in the existing graduate and professional schools.
The Extension teaching staff ranged from the pedestrian to the extraordinary. Among the famous professors in the program were Rexford Tugwell, who was teaching economics; Raymond Moley, government; Franz Boas, anthropology; and Thomas Merton, author (in 1948) of The Seven Storey Mountain, English. The science department boasted a Nobel Prize winner; the philosopher John Dewey and the journalist Heywood Broun were also on the staff.
Female students under twenty-one were required to live in dormitories or approved residences. Amelia, twenty-two (admitting to twenty-one), was therefore free to live where she pleased. After checking out Whittier Hall (“some dump,” she thought it) she rented “a fairly well furnished room” in a large apartment at 106 Morningside Drive, a nine-story stone-and-brick structure on the south corner of 121st Street and Morningside Park. She then signed up for the maximum allowable course load of sixteen points, taking EA, an elementary biology and zoology course, and EB, Vertebrate zoology and evolution, both taught by Dr. James McGregor and H. J. Muller; French 3, Psychology 1, and Chemistry 3, all in the Extension Program. For spring term she got special permission to add Chemistry 42a at Barnard to her schedule, which meant she was carrying an unusually heavy course load of twenty-two points.
There were only two blond coeds in the elementary biology and zoology classes, Amelia and Louise de Schweinitz, and they were assigned desks next to each other. Louise, three weeks younger than Amelia, a graduate of Smith College, tall and blondish, was taking courses at Columbia to fulfill the requirements necessary for entrance to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, from which she would take a degree in 1924. The two of them immediately became fast friends. They were great favorites of Professor McGregor, managing to get two of the four A’s he gave out among the sixty-four students in that elementary biology and zoology class. McGregor thought Amelia was particularly suited by temperament for scientific work because she had such a lively interest. This interest, he recalled, was especially noticeable during the ten-minute breather he allowed his students during the course of the long Saturday-afternoon lab session. During those breaks tea was brewed over Bunsen burners, and he sat back and answered questions. Louise and Amelia were also both enrolled in an inorganic chemistry course at Columbia and an organic chemistry course at Barnard.
When they were together, according to Louise—who thought Amelia “so capable she could have done anything”—Amelia was always the leader and she the follower; Amelia was the “keen, electric one,” while she herself was “the steady plodding worker.” Amelia, who “wanted everyone to be treated fairly,” involved Louise in an effort to get a promotion for a professor whom she believed had been wrongfully passed over.
From the time she was a little girl, Amelia had been a climber—climbing up and out and into things. She was geographically curious, one might say. Above the earth, below the earth, on the earth, like Alice, curiouser and curiouser. Now she did a very curious thing: she explored all the subterranean passages connecting the Columbia buildings. Louise came with her. Another time, on a mild May afternoon, Amelia was taken with the idea of sitting in the lap of the Alma Mater, the famous gilded statue by Daniel Chester French that guards the front steps of Low Library. It was not a difficult climb, but was certainly an unusual thing to do. Louise recalled that they sat on the statue’s lap eating cherries out of a paper bag and taking turns reading Browning’s “Pippa Passes,” which Amelia had in her pocket—at the same time trying to look nonchalant as people walked by staring.
Low Library was also the scene of Amelia’s most famous Columbia exploit—climbing to the top of the dome, the highest point on the campus. No one else would have even considered it. The route to the dome is an interior spiral stairway behind a locked metal door—but Amelia appears to have had no problem securing the key. The dome is paved with what look like descending overlapping fish scales, designed to make snow and ice and everything else slip downward. Amelia talked Louise into accompanying her on this escapade too, and they took photos of each other, with Louise’s Brownie, lying and standing on the dome. The photo shows plainly their hats and long skirts; it doesn’t show their shoes—low-heeled, with slippery leather soles. Some students saw them that spring afternoo
n and clapped. Then they had to slither their way down—no mean feat. But all their exploits and explorations suddenly came to an abrupt end.
At the end of spring term, having maintained a B+ average for the year and earned thirty-eight course credits, of which eighteen were in chemistry, Amelia quit. It was very sudden. She had changed her goals, she later maintained; she was now leaning more to a life of laboratory research rather than pure medicine. She gave a number of reasons for her change of plans: “after a year of study I convinced myself that some of my abilities did not measure up to the requirements which I felt a physician should have.” She also wrote: “It took me only a few months to discover that I probably should not make the ideal physician” because she was bothered, “among other possibilities of sitting at the bedside of a hypochondriac and handing out innocuous sugar pellets to a patient with an imaginary illness.”
None of these explanations ring true—particularly after the heroic courseload she had just so creditably shouldered. In fact it was her parents who suddenly derailed her. Amelia was on the receiving end of what she described as “pleadings” from her mother and father to come live with them in Los Angeles. It was not a free choice. In the 1920s young unmarried women still did what their parents wanted. Amelia felt obligated and went, albeit unwillingly.
She still intended to pursue a career in medical research and planned to enroll in college in the fall, but Los Angeles during summer vacation was a whole new world. Came September, she never signed up, because “aviation caught me.”
6
California
•••• For early fliers, belonging to the Caterpillar Club was the ultimate badge of honor—proof that they were brave and seasoned, serious and lucky at the same time, for only fliers who had parachuted out of their planes and lived to tell about it were eligible for membership. As one of the founders explained, the club took the name Caterpillar because it seemed so appropriate “for several reasons: The parachute main sail and lines were woven from the finest silk. The lowly worm spins a cocoon [out of silk,] crawls out and flies away from certain death.”
Lieutenant Harold R. Harris of the U.S. Signal Corps was the first person to parachute out of a crippled plane and live to tell about it—and the first member of the club. His jump, on October 20, 1922, made front-page headlines across the nation because it seemed unbelievable that someone could leap free from a doomed plane and live.
Flying a plane was not at all a safe proposition in the early 1920s—things always went wrong. The Curtiss Jenny and the Canuck were among the safest planes flying, which was the reason the United States and Canada had extensively used them as training planes during the recent war. But they were far from safe; the Curtiss handbook that accompanied each new plane worriedly advised fliers to “never forget that the engine may stop, and at all times keep this in mind.”
That summer of 1920, when Amelia moved to Los Angeles, Laura Bromwell, the most famous American female pilot, the “foremost American aviatrix” as the newspapers styled her, holder of the women’s speed record, got into her plane for the last time. A few weeks earlier, she had enthralled the crowd of ten thousand assembled for the opening of Curtiss field on Long Island by completing an incredible record-breaking 199 loop-the-loops. Now, on a June day, as she was halfway through a loop, she fell to her death. The plane, upside down with Laura still in it, fluttered downward “like a falling leaf,” crushing her under the wreckage. Her body was badly mutilated, the newspapers reported. She was exactly Amelia’s age. A few weeks later, Owen Locklear, “greatest of all daredevil fliers,” the first pilot to do aerial stunts for the movies, while working on a film sequence, put his plane into a tailspin he never came out of, and crashed within the environs of Hollywood.
Of the first forty pilots hired by the post office to deliver the aerial mail, as it was called in those days—all highly trained, the best of their day—all but nine died. In the one year, 1920—the year Amelia fell in love with flying—fifteen aerial mail pilots died.
No doubt it was a deadly pastime in those years. George Dade, growing up near Curtiss field, became a pilot even though he knew the dark side of aviation in the 1920s. He kept a diary of those killed: “I stopped counting when the list reached one hundred.”
“In those days the motor was not what it is today. It would drop out, for example, without warning and with a great rattle like the crash of crockery,” wrote the novelist and aviator Antoine de Saint Exupéry, “and one would simply throw in one’s hand: there was no hope of refuge.” Clarence Chamberlin, one of the best pilots, was in ten plane crashes, due either to faulty engines or to poor landing fields; he walked away from them all.
But the risk was part of the magic of those early years—the fact that every pilot had narrow escapes, near misses, that Chamberlin’s experience was the norm. There were no walking wounded, no agonized hospital stays, no maimed pilots to mar the scene. Suffering was not part of the picture—there was only excitement and daring to balance against sudden, clean death.
When Amelia learned to fly in 1921, Lieutenant Harris’s parachute jump was still almost two years in the future. There was no Caterpillar Club yet, no way out of a doomed plane.
The danger was part of the fascination.
It was not surprising that Amelia went to an air meet soon after she arrived. California was preoccupied with flying, and new airfields were opening virtually every week. It was the promised land for this newest outdoor sport: the temperature was balmy, the climate dry, the land flat and open. The movie moguls were taking it up. Stars, directors, writers, and studio heads, including Will Rogers and Cecil B. DeMille, bought planes and hired pilots to teach them how to fly. DeMille went on to buy his own field, and thereafter countless stars began flying or posing in flying clothes to get noticed. Colleen Moore, a starlet as wise in the ways of the world as she was pretty, put it best: “It’s the fashion and I cannot afford to be out of fashion.”
When Amelia evinced a desire to go to an air meet, whatever her father’s private reservations, he had to admit it was just about the most popular outdoor activity around. There were twenty fields in the Los Angeles area alone, and each weekend something was going on at at least one of them. The most famous airfield, the one with the biggest runway—500 feet wide and 4,000 feet long—and the busiest, was Earl Daugherty’s airfield, just west of Los Angeles. It was there that Amelia saw her first California air meet.
The meet featured a hundred-mile free-for-all and shorter handicap races, most of which were won by army and navy pilots. As a matter of course, it included the standard heart-stoppers that drew the crowds: plane-changing and wing-walking, which looked and sometimes was incredibly dangerous. And because the lighter-than-air machines were still in the running as rivals for the heavier-than-air airplanes, there were also dirigible races, and rides were available in a blimp.
Amelia went to every air meet she could. By December, she had talked Edwin into making inquiries about instruction. The first step was to get someone to take her aloft.
Earl Daugherty, thirty-three, had been flying since 1911 and was the acknowledged dean of flying in the United States. He had rolled up more hours in the air than any other pilot. Undoubtedly Edwin would, given the chance, have preferred that Amelia make her first flight with him. “Experience is insurance” was Earl’s motto. Instead, she took her trial hop a few days later at Rogers airport, run by Emery Rogers, a personable, young, handsome ex-army flier. Emery, whose field lay across from DeMille’s Mercury field at the intersection of Fairfax Road and Wilshire Boulevard, had new Pacific Standards, two Curtiss Jennys, and a Curtiss Oriole, which seated three. The day was “characteristically fair,” as Amelia remembered, when she and her father arrived at the field. It fell to Frank Hawks, also a young ex-army officer, short and stocky, good looking, with curly hair, to take Amelia up for her first ride. Frank, who had learned to fly at the army’s Brooks field in San Antonio, Texas, would later become famous for setting all kinds o
f speed records, but at that moment in his life he was still merely a “local air thrill maker” whom Rogers paid fifty dollars a week to fly wing-walkers, teach flying, and occasionally give rides to passengers.
Amelia loved her trial hop. Nothing could spoil it for her, not even that Frank had another pilot aboard because he was afraid that, being female, she might jump out. It was instant infatuation—she “knew” she had to learn. But not with Frank, whose attitude bothered her. His boss, Emery Rogers, was at the time teaching at least one other woman how to fly—Cornelia McLoughlin would get her license that June. Nevertheless, Amelia went to another field where there was a female instructor, Neta Snook, because she felt that she would learn more quickly and easily from a woman.
Neta, twenty-four, who owned a Canadian Canuck, had left Iowa for California the year before so she could fly in the winter as well as the summer. That fall she had leased commercial rights to Kinner airport and immediately became notorious as the only female flier in southern California who was in the business of carrying passengers and giving lessons.
A thin young woman with a mop of curly red hair, when she was flying she dressed in the universal fashion that pilots had adopted—which is to say in variations on the uniform of the cavalry: high boots and jodhpurs and a leather coat. But she spent a great deal of time working on her plane, which she serviced herself, so more often than not, she was in grimy overalls.
