by Susan Butler
In June Amelia would be admitted to membership in the Aeronautical Hall of Fame, the worldwide honor roll of men and women “influential in advancing aeronautics.” In July she would get public recognition of her unique flying status-it would be duly noted by Daisy Elizabeth Ball in the prestigious Aeronautical Digest, the magazine of the Aero Club of America, that “Miss Earhart, who resides in Los Angeles, is the only woman licensed by the N.A.A. since its organization last October.” As Daisy Ball, herself a member of the Women’s Press Club of New York, would note, the new association, the National Aeronautic Association (NAA) “has declared its intention of including women in its membership.” It was one of the few professional organizations in the United States that would.
Amelia, at the age of twenty-five, had already become one of those early mythical heroes of the sky whom people came to see at air meets and dreamed of emulating. She was one of those exotic beings whom popular songs commemorated, the subject of flying having become a favorite in the early 1920s:
Tis a wonderful thing to be a King
Not a monarch of Royal Birth
But a sovereign of Air in a realm so fair
That Covers the wide, wide Earth
By 1924 Bert Kinner was so successful that he was floating another issue of stock in his expanded company and, spending all his time at Glendale, had become field manager of the airport, which was averaging almost a thousand flights a month. Amelia continued to fly out of Glendale in the Airster, which Bert now advertised as so well designed that it was still “essentially the same sport plane, with the exception of a few minor details, that was designed by this company more than five years ago.” When her old friend and fellow pilot Aloysia McLintic Huzar came back from China after a year-long honeymoon, the two women would go flying in Amelia’s Airster, an event notable enough to be worthy of mention in flying circles and written up in the press.
By this time Amelia had been dating Sam Chapman for two years. They appear to have settled into a comfortable if not exciting relationship largely controlled by Amelia. Sam was patiently waiting for her to give up her career plans, deeply in love with her. Amelia had no intention of giving up her career plans, but she was certainly fond of him, and before the year was out she had agreed to be engaged.
7
Breaking Through
• • • • Once Amy and Edwin’s divorce was final, once it was clear that family life as they knew it was over, Amelia was free to lead her own life. She decided to return east and resume her studies at Columbia—to pick up her life where she had left off. One by one, those around her also decided to go back east. Sam Chapman returned to Marblehead, the sea-port town north of Boston where he came from, and went to work for the Edison Electric Company in Boston. Muriel, still intent on getting her undergraduate degree, enrolled in Harvard summer school and set off by train for Boston; the plan was that she would find a place to live for herself and Amy. Edwin was the only one in the family who felt at home in Los Angeles and remained there.
Amelia was laid low by a return of the infection in her antrum, the result of the strain of packing up all the Earhart possessions, trying to sell her truck, tying up the loose ends of four suddenly dislocated lives, and again taking care of her mother. The main problem was Amy, who was so devastated by the ordeal of divorce, so obviously miserable, that Amelia was sure that once they left, her mother would never set foot in California again.
An operation was called for to drain the pneumonococcal infection. The procedure cost five hundred dollars, which Amelia left unpaid. She could have scraped together the money, particularly since she now proceeded to sell her plane, but she had other plans for her slim resources; she bought a rakish yellow touring car made by the Kissell Company. Her action made her fair game for nasty letters from a collection agency, to whom the debt had been turned over; undeterred, she went about her business.
Amelia had always planned that, when she returned east, she would fly there in her own plane; the maps and data for such a flight had long been ready. But that idea had been superseded by Amy’s needs. The Kissell was so that she and Amy could drive across the country, stopping to see the famous national parks of the West on the way—an adventure of a different sort on the unpaved roads of the 1920s. “Which way are we going?” asked Amy as they left Hollywood that first morning. “I am going to surprise you,” replied Amelia and headed north. They visited Sequoia, then continued north to Yosemite, farther north into Oregon to Crater Lake, then north into Canada to Banff and Lake Louise, after which, turning southeast, they began heading back, stopping on the way to see Yellowstone Park in Wyoming. It was a long, leisurely trip, and by the time they reached Boston, they had covered more than seven thousand miles. The last part of it was a labor of love for Amelia, for the operation had not completely drained out the infection, and there was pressure and pain in her sinus.
Three days after their arrival in Boston, Amelia checked into Massachusetts General Hospital, where yet again doctors opened up her sinus and drained the infection. This time her recovery was excruciatingly slow. She spent the months in Medford, a suburb of Boston where Muriel had found a teaching job and a house nearby for herself and her mother to live in.
Sometime in the late fall, Amelia felt well enough to go to New York. By that time, however, the combination of the move east and Amelia’s medical expenses had eaten such a hole in the Earhart finances that Amelia departed for New York in her Kissell with hardly any money in her pocket.
Amelia had a terrible time that winter. It was not until the spring term, which started in February, that she enrolled at Columbia, and even then she entered after the term had started. Before that, she stayed for weeks at a stretch with her old friend Marian Stabler out in Great Neck, Long Island. Marian observed that Amelia was so severely debilitated that the least strain or exertion exhausted her. Her convalescence was as unduly slow as before, and for the same reason—there were still no potent drugs with which to fight the infection.
But she was still game. Ailing as Amelia was, Marian remembered, she still went on at least one winter picnic. Nor had she lost her nerve, as evidenced by her conduct one night when Marian heard a strange noise. Marian’s impulse was to run for the bedroom and lock the door until the servants came home. Amelia refused, insisting upon searching the house until she had allayed Marian’s fears.
Marian realized years later that, as close as they were, Amelia never really confided in her. By Marian’s admission, it becomes apparent that Amelia’s habit of concealment extended even to her closest friends, for Marian would remember that although they talked for hours on end for days and nights on end “about everything under the sun,” Amelia never mentioned her parents’ problems. Even when she divulged their divorce, it was in such a manner that she gave away no real information. “It seems odd that a family could be broken up by geography but my mother hates the west and my father hates the east,” Marian remembered her saying. And that was all Amelia ever said on the subject. She never admitted that Edwin was an alcoholic, never talked about the pain and suffering his drinking had caused the family. When, years later, Marian finally learned about Edwin’s drinking, it was from another source.
Nor did Amelia complain about her lack of money. And yet Marian couldn’t help but notice it—Amelia was virtually penniless. The only thing she spent money on was her car, remembered Marian; in order to maintain it, she “went without everything but essentials.”
By January of 1925 Amelia felt better, and on January 25 she climbed the dome of Low Library to watch the eclipse of the sun, bringing with her a “known biologist,” as she wrote in her second book—undoubtedly her old professor, Dr. James McGregor, whom she couldn’t name without bringing the wrath of the university down upon his head.
Five years before, Amelia had carried five courses one term and six the other. Now Amelia enrolled in only two, an intermediate course in algebra, Mathematics eX6, and an elementary course in general physics, Physics eA4. Two
courses were probably all she could afford. And she had difficulty scraping together the fifty-six dollars due for these two courses, for she couldn’t register without paying, and so she didn’t register until February 10, six days after the term started. She rented a room in an apartment at 50 Morningside Drive.
But having taken those crucial steps, almost immediately she felt her prospects brighten and a science degree to be within her reach. She had registered as a nonmatriculated student, but in March she reregistered in the University Undergraduate Matriculated Program. In the interim, having been exposed to the engineering profession through Sam Chapman, her focus had changed; she was now planning, she wrote on the form, to take a degree in engineering.
Then, on April 20, she withdrew from Columbia. One month after she had gone to the trouble of changing her status from a nondegree to a degree candidate, more than a month before the term was over, she was gone.
The problem was again money. Sometime in March she had received a letter from her old partner Lloyd Royer, in which he informed her he had finally sold the Moreland truck she had entrusted to his care and put the money into her bank account. But it was evidently nowhere near as much as Amelia expected. And strapped as she was, she knew he was equally strapped, having netted only a hundred dollars after building a plane in partnership with John Montijo. He had just gone into the aircraft repair business and owed money for the space he had leased. Amelia insisted he keep part of the money She wrote him back: “Please hold out something for yourself; I want you to. Heaven knows you’ve had enough trouble with the thing. Please.” She closed with the sentence, “Write me when you have time,” giving as her return address 50 Morningside Drive. She mailed her letter on March 22; doing it with flair in spite of her straitened circumstances, she sent it airmail, setting her back twenty-six cents. To Lloyd no more than to Marian would she reveal distress.
In spite of her precipitous withdrawal and missed classes, she received a B in physics, which may be taken as an indication of unusual industry and talent. (Later she could joke about her brief stint, noting that when she couldn’t think of the answer to the weekly physics quiz, “I inserted a little French poetry.”) But she almost failed the intermediate algebra course—“planned especially for students who have had a course in elementary algebra to quadratics”—which would certainly have challenged her even if she hadn’t missed so many classes, since she hadn’t had a math course since high school. She received a C—which meant, in addition to not receiving credit, that her standing as a matriculated student was in jeopardy, for her acceptance as a degree candidate had been granted “conditional on Intermediate Algebra.”
If ever she needed money, it was then. If ever her independence was threatened, it was then. The Stabler family, comfortably well off with their big house and servants, could have helped her if she had asked. She didn’t ask. She was too tough and too proud. Instead, she drove to Boston and settled into the small, neat, decidedly modest two-story wood-frame house at 76 Brooks Street in West Medford, where Amy and Muriel lived.
Grimly determined to erase the blot on her academic record, she enrolled at Harvard summer school—but only for one course, Math S-1, a trigonometry course that assumed a grounding in algebra “through Quadratics and Plane Geometry.” It was exactly the material she had covered so badly at Columbia. Yet if she wanted to pursue her goal of a degree in engineering, she had to remove the blot and pass with flying colors. With nothing to distract her, she performed with her usual thoroughness, earning three credits and an A.
Taking just the one course left Amelia with plenty of time to learn about her new academic institution. Harvard summer school would have been a tantalizing experience for her. Assiduous tracker of achieving women that she still was, she must have taken comfort in the fact that for the first time there was a woman on a Harvard faculty, Dr. Alice Hamilton, assistant professor of industrial medicine, the pioneer investigator of industrial pollution in the United States, author of the just-published Industrial Poisons in the United States, which would shortly prompt the surgeon general to initiate a study of the dangers in tetraethyl lead.
But the inclusion of Alice Hamilton on the Harvard faculty in those years was an anomaly. Nowhere at that time was there an institution that gave out a more conflicting set of messages for the aspiring female than Harvard. In winter Harvard was exclusively a male domain. Only during the six-week summer school were women permitted to enroll, although even then they were excluded from courses in architecture, engineering, and geology. They were welcomed in the library (in the summer), but not in the recreation areas, or the dormitories. In the winter women went to Radcliffe, where Harvard professors taught them in special classes. During this time the libraries were restricted to men. And not even Professor Hamilton was immune to slights—she was barred from marching in commencement exercises, barred from the Harvard Club, and not permitted to claim the usual professorial quota of football tickets. For Amelia, the conditional status of females would have ruled out Radcliffe.
And so, in pursuit of a scientific career, Amelia applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the fall term. MIT, in contrast to its rival institution up the Charles, accepted women as well as men without reservation. What made it especially attractive to Amelia was that it was in the process of forming a department of aeronautical engineering.
But being short of funds, she needed a scholarship to go, and in spite of her Columbia and Harvard credits, she was turned down. It put an end to her dream of earning an engineering degree in the Boston area—and because her mother’s funds were so slender, and because living with her mother and sister in West Medford, where Muriel was teaching in a junior high school, was rent free, Boston, however depressing, was Amelia’s only choice.
In later years she would claim that she had never tried to get a degree in engineering, categorically stating, “During my collegiate experience I never sought a degree.” Failure was not allowed to intrude upon the seamless past Amelia presented to the world.
It was truly a terrible time. Amelia was twenty-eight and farther from a career than she had been at twenty-one. None of her plans had jelled. What was worse, she had nothing to build on. Her state of mind that fall was desperate; she was on the verge of despair, as she admitted to Marian Stabler. “Thanks for your as usual delightful letter(s). I am ashamed I have tried to write but every time I didn’t finish.... No, I did not get into M.I.T. as planned, owing to financial difficulties. No, I can not come to New York, much, ah much as I should like owing to when I leave Boston I think I’ll never come back.”
She, who had always effortlessly helped her friends, who was the rock everyone leaned on, now had to admit that she was useless. She couldn’t even promote Marian’s woodcuts for Christmas cards, she admitted to Marian. “Do you want your samples back? I haven’t decided yet and may not be able to send anybody anything. Isn’t that sad?”
She couldn’t get out of the habit of giving advice, however, admonishing Marian to read Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. But even her choice of this book indicated a negative frame of mind. For if Anderson’s brilliantly realistic writing managed to capture the atmosphere of middle America and lay bare the midwestern soul, what he uncovered was a very bleak landscape indeed. He wrote of the shy, the lonely, the defeated, the dreamers: a boy who never grew up, a doctor who dared not practice, an artist who gave up painting, a mother who drove away her son, a young woman resigning herself to spinsterhood, a man who finds himself robbed even of his dreams.
There was one remotely positive note: never one to be idle, Amelia had begun teaching, she confided to Marian. “I am tutoring blind guys in Trig. Did I tell you before?”
The problems of the unassimilated immigrant, particularly the non-English-speaking immigrant, were very much on the minds of Boston’s educators and politicians. Massachusetts had begun a crash program to teach English to foreign-born adults working throughout the state, setting up for the purpose a program in
the University Extension Department of the State Board of Education. Harvard summer school offered classes specifically tailored to this specialized need, a program that almost immediately was broadened to include classes in citizenship, classes for the blind, and classes in English for the children of the foreign-born.
When Amelia began teaching, 27,759 foreigners were enrolled in the state program in 104 cities and towns throughout the state, 2,987 of whom were blind. The evening classes were usually held in the schools, while day classes were held in homes or in factories during lunch hour and after work. An average class met three times a week for twenty weeks. She would have been teaching in Lynn, Lawrence, Quincy, Salem, and even farther afield, driving to outlying immigrant enclaves in her Kissell. But the pay was low, most of the classes met in the evening, and the traveling allowance was minuscule. She decided to take a break and try and do it on her own.
By now it was spring. Building on her experience, Amelia persuaded the Biddle and Smart Company in Amesbury, Massachusetts, which employed a great many foreigners, of the wisdom and the practical advantage of letting her run “an office class in the Miller Course of Correct English.” The course ran for fifteen weeks, from March 16 through June 22. Although Biddle and Smart were pleased with her (“She has a pleasant and pleasing personality and handled her work and the class well”), before many weeks were out she quit. She didn’t find teaching English to foreigners challenging or stimulating.
