by Susan Butler
Amelia’s Chinese girls soon were enthusiastic basketball players and fielded a team that “had a fine year,” even venturing to play a New York City team from Greenwich Settlement House, run by an ex-Bostonian, Mary Simkhovitch. The girls also had a fencing team, popular at the time, a sport Amelia tried and enjoyed. Amelia took it upon herself to open up the American experience to the first-generation Syrian and Chinese girls who were reared by their families “under racial traditions that cut them off from the freedom our American girls enjoy.”
Within the year Amelia had moved into Denison House. Her room was on the second floor and simply furnished, but it had windows overlooking the busy scene that was Tyler Street. She took her meals in the dining room with the other resident workers, who usually numbered four, Amelia, Marion Perkins, Vernis Shuttleworth, and George Ludlam, the latter of whom was in charge of the boys. She prevailed on George Ludlam, who became her good friend, to make the boys, who used the linked backyards as their own private gym, to allow the girls to play there too. Vernis, too, became her friend and would eventually buy her car.
The staff were freely encouraged to invite interesting guests to share their repast, for as was usual in settlement houses, there was a housekeeping staff who cooked and served the residents. Amelia endeared herself to the other resident workers by braving down the housekeeper, who insisted upon serving the staff breakfast precisely at seven thirty A.M. and then only if they were fully dressed, even though there were days when the residents, working late, were tired. The punctilious housekeeper relented to the extent of telling the residents she didn’t care what they wore as long as they were on time. On the first morning after this pronouncement, Amelia, looking terrible, her hair in curlers, dressed in a “disreputable” borrowed bathrobe, and headed into the dining room first; the housekeeper relented on the time, also.
The settlement house, because of its mission and its clients, was neighborhood- and street-oriented and always full of people. Neighborhood groups such as the Syrian Ladies’ Aid Society, the Syrian Relief Association, the Syrian Junior League, the Chinese Students of Greater Boston, and the Loyalist League of America (a group of Greek businessmen) all met at Denison House in the afternoons, evenings, and weekends with some degree of regularity. Friday night was “open night” for adults, as well as the night Mademoiselle DuPont taught French.
Amelia fitted in a visit from Nancy Balis, her sixteen-year-old cousin, in transit to summer camp, late because of a broken ankle. The last time Nancy had seen Amelia had been several years before, when Amelia had pulled up in front of the Balis house in Germantown one day in her long, low, glamorous yellow car with the top folded back (“a marvelous contraption,” thought Nancy), accompanied by a beau. Now, teenage Nancy was so dazzled by Amelia and her stay at Denison House that it almost made up for the broken ankle—nothing quite equaled her cousin, who was so nice to her, who “always made her feel like her equal,” who, better yet, “insisted we call each other cuz.”
Six hundred boys and girls attended classes and activities and clubs ranging from cooper-working and ship-model building to sewing, embroidery folk dancing, handicrafts, dramatics, choral singing, scouting, table games, and storytelling, which met through the day and into the evening. Sometimes after dinner, for those so inclined, there would be volleyball games in the street with the neighborhood children, or a performance at the Chinese theater. If Amelia found a free moment she could always play the piano—there was an excellent music program, with twenty-four pupils studying piano; twelve, violin; and six, harmony and rhythm.
By 1928 Amelia was a member of an intersettlement committee working on child-study records and, even more impressive, had become a director of Denison House, a signal honor for a new staff worker; she was one of the very few on its board. She was as well made secretary.
It is from this period that Amelia’s poem “Courage” dates. It embodies the sentiments of a person who has found herself.
Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not, knows no release
From little things:
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings.
How can life grant us boon of living, compensate
For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate
Unless we dare
The soul’s dominion? Each time we make a choice, we pay
With courage to behold resistless day,
And count it fair.
Within a short time her influence in the field of social work spread beyond the confines of Denison House. Regarded by the elders “as one of the most thoughtful and promising of the younger group,” she became a Denison House delegate to the Conference of the National Federation of Settlements held in Boston. There she impressed a wider group of social work leaders with her seriousness. She was one of the few of the younger generation who took the time to take seriously a conference questionnaire. Her thoughtful and insightful answers, wrote one of the older social workers, began to cause ripples.
To the question “What keeps you in settlement work?” she answered,
A personal thing which would keep me in any job—i.e., the feeling that I need more time to make good on several issues I am not meeting adequately; and the satisfaction of any scientific work which opens unexplored fields and presents problems to solve; and the realization that a thumb must be stuck in the dyke to prevent the flood of ideas and actions which threaten modern living—that is, old ideas of the inevitability of suffering, and many which destroy the happiness and peace of the world. There is a feeling of self-preservation here; for what shuts out happiness for some does so for me and mine.
To the question “How would you replace settlement traditions which you believe no longer have functional values?” she responded with a condemnation of meddling donors.
The philanthropy of the good old days—the tradition of giving clothing, service, etc., free—has to be supplanted gradually. The task is materially helped if responsibility can be shared by House members (in a self-governing body, perhaps) who can be made to see the situation.... Cultivating an “angel” and letting him or her dictate policies because of money given is one of the most reprehensible forms of bowing to tradition.
She ended on a brusque note, answering the question, “Have you any suggestion to offer for discussion at next year’s conference?” as follows. “Next year’s Conference should be a discussion, not an experience meeting. A subject like ‘Cooperation’ or any topic of interest to staff workers should be discussed in such a manner as to get ‘somewhere’”.
Had Amelia been a participant at the 1929 conference, she would have been asked to take a more active part—the older workers were casting their nets, looking for keen young leaders whose thinking was not “paralyzed by their reverence for the pioneers.”
Not only did Amelia have Vida Scudder, Emily Balch, and Katherine Coman as role models to help spur her on and reach her potential, she had the climate of Boston itself. Cleveland Amory remarking on the qualities of the proper Bostonian female would touch on “her incredible vitality... tradition of hardihood ... a zeal for reform.” Boston gloried in its unique women. Boston women exuded energy. In Boston the notion of “decent” women keeping their names out of the papers except when they were born, married, or died was a truism observed in the breach. Boston women reveled in being news—as long as it was done tastefully. They raised money for charities through publicity in the papers, they partied in the papers, and their sporting exploits were written up in the papers.
As it happened, Amelia’s two activities—settlement work and flying—dovetailed, and as in Los Angeles, she began to be noticed. It began May 26, 1927, when she flew over the city scattering free passes to the upcoming Memorial weekend country carnival at Cedar Hill in Waltham for the benefit of Denison House. Amelia was merely a passenger—the pilot was Harvard student C
rocker Snow, member of the Harvard Flying Club, which owned the plane. Nevertheless as a female pilot, she was news, and photos of her in her flying garb—goggles, helmet, fur-trimmed flying jacket—sitting in the open cockpit of the plane promptly appeared in the Boston newspapers. Amelia had planned to do the stunt incognito, but Marion Perkins, aware of Boston’s thirst for female achievers, alert to the publicity a female flier might create for Denison House, talked her out of such an action. Marion was right; the newspapers wrote it up: “Miss Amelia Earhart Flies in a Plane over Boston; Advertises Cedar Hill Carnival” ran one headline, going on to give details of the carnival. “Flies over Boston Despite Rain” ran another.
That summer a new airfield opened on the banks of the Neponset River in nearby Quincy. The ambitious enterprise was started by Harold T. Dennison, an architect from Quincy who had promised himself that when he made his first $100,000, he “would begin to realize his dream” of establishing a great chain of flying fields across New England. Dennison had gone to California looking for planes to sell at his field, met Bert Kinner, and became the Boston agent for Kinner Airsters. Bert suggested he contact Amelia when he returned to Boston. When Harold met her, he was impressed with her assurance and authority (certainly not by her money), for he made her a director and one of the five incorporators of the enterprise, put her on the staff, and sought her help with the interior decoration.
Harold Dennison designed the main hangar in the Spanish style, with an exterior finish of stucco and brilliant tile. There were two airplane show-rooms and a tower that served as a classroom for student fliers, on top of which was a revolving beacon that could be seen at night for twenty miles. Dennison instituted an air charter service as well as regular service between Hyannis and Boston. There were two full-time pilots, Allan P. Bourdon and Franklin Kurt; Amelia was on the flying staff, although her duties were not defined, but when the article on the new airport came out, it would have been hard for anyone to guess that Amelia was the only one of the three who was not a full-time employee. Two paragraphs were devoted to her: “Woman on the Staff” ran the subhead, going into her being “social worker at Denison House college settlement, professor of English in the State Extension ... sportswoman ... held the altitude record.” The men were briefly mentioned.
Among the more unusual jobs Amelia took on at the airfield was decorating the public rooms. She sent off a hastily typed letter to Marian Stabler, vacationing at Lake George. “The field opens on Tuesday next for flying in full force,” she wrote. “I am having a great time selecting hangings and furniture for the main hangar. I certainly wish I had you here to consult as the thing will approach the bizazz (Heavens, I am trying to write bizarre) as the colors are orange black and blue, with a few spots of lavender and green thrown in.”
The opening on July 2 drew twenty-five hundred spectators. Airplanes—army, navy, national guard planes flying in formation—as well as private planes from the greater Boston area flew overhead throughout the day. The mayor of Quincy ran a flag up the flagpole to signal the official opening of the airport; the ubiquitous Bernard Wiesman gave a speech on behalf of the mayor of Boston. A reporter from The Boston Herald sought out Amelia. The language in the interview, obviously one of her first, is stilted, awkward, self-conscious: “New England has some of the best yachtswomen and sportswomen in the world. I am surprised that more New England women have not gone into flying as a sport.... when one thinks of all the splendid sportswomen New England has produced ... I think any normal woman should be able to learn to fly, with planes perfected as they are today, in a very short space of time and with but little application.”
That summer, on July 24, Amelia turned thirty. A decade-marker birthday, a jolt to anyone, a really serious birthday for someone who regularly took years off her age, as Amelia did. It was at that time that she moved out of the house at 76 Brooks Street, where she had been living with Amy and Muriel, and into Denison House—which must have seemed an act of desertion to Amy and caused her to move with Muriel into a small apartment at 27 Princeton Street in South Medford, near the Lincoln Junior High School, where Muriel taught.
Amelia and Sam Chapman were still engaged. He was working as an engineer for Boston Edison, still patiently waiting for Amelia to settle down and marry him. As far as he was concerned, his courtship, and their relationship continued as before and nothing had changed, even though she had moved into Denison House. He was hopeful because he had before him the example of Amelia’s friend from Columbia days, Louise de Schweinitz, and Daniel Darrow. Louise, a doctor, had spent her residency in Boston at the New England Hospital for Women and Children (staffed exclusively by women—not her first choice, but three Boston hospitals turned down her application), while her fiancé, Dr. Daniel Darrow, spent his residency at Boston City. Sam and Amelia had whiled away many hours with them prowling around Boston, listening to Amelia’s “enormous” collection of phonograph records, driving out to Marblehead, Sam’s territory, in Amelia’s Kissell, to swim and picnic on the beach. Clearly Louise’s devotion to her work hadn’t interfered with their relationship—Louise and Daniel had just gotten married. So there was every reason for Sam to be supportive of Amelia’s desire for a career, even if it involved living at Denison House. But still, Sam was a little dismayed by Amelia’s move. To him it might have seemed a desertion, even if he wouldn’t admit it—and a threat as well—for as it was only too easy for him to see, Amelia’s activities were taking more and more of her time. Of course he also knew that if and when they married, he too could move into the House—married couples often did, and there was a married couple living at the House now. But particularly for someone like Sam, trained as an engineer and not, except for Amelia, interested in social problems, it couldn’t have held much allure. In any case, he couldn’t press her, for the more he did, the more she shied away.
His dismay would have deepened if he had known that Amelia was laying the groundwork for a trip to California the following summer that did not include him. Bert Kinner had delivered a new Airster to Dennison airport, flying it solo across the country to demonstrate the plane’s dependability. Maybe, Amelia proposed after he left, she should head west “and spend next summer learning the Kinner motor. It seems such a shame that no one here really knows it.”
But then, she was always doing things on her own, so Sam was used to it. It wasn’t just the flying and the social work that Sam had to contend with. Her Sunday mornings were taken up horseback riding in Middlesex Fells with Vernis Shuttleworth, her Denison House co-worker. Half in love with her himself, full of admiration for her riding prowess, Vernis would recall she was invariably on time, boots and all, and ready to go no matter what the weather. Her preference was for a tall, prancy horse, and the colder it got, the more the wind blew, the wilder the horses, the more she liked it. “That was good,” he remembered her saying, as she grinned and blew on her freezing fingers after one brisk winter ride. Sometimes Amelia even brought Vernis back to Brook Street, and Amy would lay on a breakfast of fruit, oatmeal and cream, wheatcakes, and sausages—“the works.”
In fact, now that she was finally on her own and financially independent—not by any means rich, but independent—now that she had at last broken out of the track followed by ninety-nine percent of the women of her day, the track that led straight from parental home to husband’s home, just about anything and everything seemed possible. If she had never gotten in a plane again, still she would have made her mark in social work, she would have had as high a profile, as influential a position in Boston as any professional woman of her day.
She was, after all the lean years, fairly bursting with plans. That summer a photo of Ruth Nichols, of Rye, New York, ran in The Boston Herald. The famous aviatrix was identified as a member of the Federation Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) and “the only one of twenty seven commercial pilots in New York state to be licensed by the Commerce Department.” In mid-September Amelia wrote to her, “May I introduce myself as a fellow EA.I..
.. Because your picture has been appearing lately in Boston papers, I make you the victim of an idea which has been simmering for some time. What do you think of the advisability of forming an organization composed of women who fly? ... If you think the idea worth pursuing, won’t you let me know your ideas.” It was the first of many letters the two women would exchange.
It was, naturally, the Boston papers that gave Amelia her first notoriety. The perceived moment of change was precipitated by a German girl.
There was a sensational young German aviatrix by the name of Thea Rasche in the United States, touring the Northeast, giving exhibitions of stunt flying. She was good copy—pretty, twenty-three years old, the sister of two German fliers killed in the war, the leading female stunt flier in Europe. On one of her flights earlier that summer in New York, when the engine of her Flamingo suddenly went dead, she skillfully nosedived her plane into the Hudson River. She was such a good pilot neither she nor the plane, which briefly sank before being towed to shore, was much the worse for wear for the experience.
By the time she was scheduled to appear at Dennison Airport the end of September, Thea was such a sensation that more than two thousand people showed up to see her fly. On the appointed day her demonstration was going well until, over Neponset, the Flamingo engine once again went dead. Thea briefly went into a nosedive trying to start the engine (like pushing a car with a dead battery), then banked. Then, having no choice, she put the plane into a glide. She was over the airport, had just cleared the hangar by fifteen or twenty feet, and was in the process of making a dead stick landing—when she saw she was heading straight into the waiting crowd. She veered away and, with no alternative site in view, crashed into the swamp abutting the landing field. But she did it so skillfully that again neither she nor her plane was seriously damaged. The spectators undoubtedly were more shaken up than she.
