by Susan Butler
He attended the Gunnery School in Washington, Connecticut, where, interested as he was in trout fishing, rock climbing, and hunting and uninterested as well as untalented in the team sports that were so important to the school, he found himself a loner. He went to Harvard, where he found himself similarly out of sync, stayed for just a short time, then went adventuring—heading for what was then the fringe of the desert south of Los Angeles in a fruitless attempt to acquire gold mine claims. Undoubtedly pressured by his father, he then enrolled at Berkeley, lasted just one term, and then again succumbed to the call of the wild. He was, he said, “an easterner in the far reaches of the roaring west” who wanted to find the “roar.” He chose to settle in Bend, Oregon, because it was in the center of the largest area in the United States not penetrated by the railroads.
Bend in 1909 was a town of twelve hundred mostly unruly people, who supported twelve saloons and countless gambling and whore houses. When the mayor, in the midst of a brawl, fell to his death out the window of one of the houses, George, by then married to Dorothy Binney, a Smith girl with a taste for adventure and the great outdoors herself (they had met at a Sierra Club outing) and the father of a baby boy, became mayor. He succeeded in cleaning up the town to some extent, then became publisher and editor of the Bend weekly newspaper The Bulletin and, from 1914 to 1917, secretary to the governor of the state. He cut such a wide swath in Oregon history that he was deemed worthy to be the subject of a college thesis (Frontier Publisher) in 1966. He enlisted in the army when World War I started, and by the time the war was over, his father as well as his elder brother had both died, as a result of which, instead of heading back out west after the armistice, he moved back to Rye, New York, and took his elder brother’s place in the family publishing firm. By that time he had written four books—two about Oregon, one about his travels in Central America, and one about Field Artillery Training School.
Ensconced in New York, he gave publishing his all. He concocted a bit of literary pastry for which he wrote a detailed plot and then corralled Louis Bromfield, Rube Goldberg, Frank Craven, Alexander Woollcott, and various other authors each to write a chapter. Bobbed Hair, as the finished work was called, appeared first as a novel serialized in Collier’s magazine, then as a book, then as a movie. He published Alexander Woollcott’s first book and collected for the Putnam imprint Heywood Broun, Louis Bromfield, Edward Streeter, and James J. Corbett. Having established his credentials with the literary community (or at least made them take notice), he went back to his metier—adventure stories by real-life adventurers. He became more than just a publisher of adventurers’ tales—he became a participant. And if their dreams needed organizing or their expeditions required financing, he was there ready to help out. His great friend from childhood was the artist Rockwell Kent. As a young man, he had done Kent an unusual favor—he had masqueraded as Rockwell’s wife when Rockwell had built himself a house on Monhegan, an island off the coast of Maine, where tradition decreed that after a bachelor built a house, he brought home a bride. Rockwell brought George, dressed in bridal finery, whisked him into the house, and kept him “under wraps” inside until the islanders’ attention turned to something else and the presumed bride could disappear to the mainland—forever. So it was quite natural that when Rockwell Kent needed financing for a trip to Alaska, George would arrange it in return for the rights to the chronicle of his life there. Rockwell’s Alaska years evolved into the book Wilderness—published, naturally, by Putnam’s.
His brashness, energy, intelligence and showmanship soon made him the most talked-about publisher in New York. His métier was the adventurers—the explorers of the far reaches of the planet and the new explorers of the skies who were unlocking the secrets of the world; they were his greatest success. He cornered the market in heroes, as it were. He published (and wrote the foreword for) Winged Defense by General William Mitchell, head of the U.S. Air Force as well as a famous pilot. He published Roy Chapman Andrews’s treks into the Gobi desert, and the explorations of William Beebe, Knud Rasmussen, Lincoln Ellsworth, Bob Bartlett, and Fitzhugh Green. He was responsible for the publication of Skyward, the account of the flight over the North Pole (since disputed) by then—Naval Lieutenant Richard E. Byrd. (He put the plane on display at Wanamaker’s department store in New York and Philadelphia, and it drew thousands.) Nor did he neglect his first love, boyhood adventurers. He sent his twelve-year-old son David off to the Galapagos with William Beebe and published David’s journal as David Goes Voyaging, the first of a string of books Putnam’s published by boy explorers that would also include Among the Alps with Bradford by the then-young and unknown explorer Bradford Washburn, and Derek Goes to Mesa Verde by the son of the superintendent of Mesa Verde National Park.
Nor did he neglect himself. Having organized another adventuring expedition, in which David would accompany Bob Bartlett, Peary’s skipper to the North Pole, aboard a hundred-foot fishing schooner bound for Greenland to collect live specimens of narwhal, walrus, seal, and other Arctic fauna for the American Museum of Natural History, George succumbed to the lure of the wild and signed himself on.
Addressing his restless, unconventional mind to the problem of rounding up specimens, he drew on what he had learned in his western days and came up with the novel idea that the best way to capture the animals would be to lasso them. He then persuaded his old friend, Carl Dunrud, a western guide whom he had met on pack trips through Yellowstone who was a crack artist with a lariat, to come along to rope the sought-after animals. Carl thus became the first and possibly the only man ever to successfully lasso musk ox, polar bears, and walrus.
In a nod to Carl Dunrud, George titled the resultant book, by expedition historian Edward Streeter, An Arctic Rodeo; his son’s second book was David Goes to Greenland.
Adventuring was simply in his blood. The summer before he entered Amelia’s life, George organized and went on an expedition to Baffin Island, off the west coast of Greenland, that given his irrepressible nature, became known as the George Palmer Putnam expedition. The result of his energy and the well-trained team of workers he had assembled was that the expedition corrected numerous errors in the map of Baffin Island. Just that past winter he had chosen to spend Christmas on top of Mount Washington, the highest mountain in New Hampshire, with Bradford Washburn and David.
The most impressive feat he had performed for Putnam’s was snaring the greatest hero of the age, the courageous sky explorer who had conquered the Atlantic and flown into the hearts and imagination of the world, Charles Lindbergh. For that coup George became a celebrity in his own right.
George had snared Charles Lindbergh by the seemingly simple expedient of prevailing on the Paris office of The New York Times to place his telegraphed request for publishing rights into the hands of the harassed and still-exhausted flier. One of George’s virtues, as far as his adventurers were concerned, was that he made things as painless as possible for them by finding, at the drop of a hat, suitable ghostwriters to flesh out their tales. In his highly unusual but for him normal fashion, efficient George had the writer for Lindbergh’s book, with an already partially written manuscript, on the ship Lindbergh took home. George assumed that Lindbergh, like Richard Byrd and the others, would accept the finished work presented to him—but he didn’t know his man. Lindbergh didn’t like having words put in his mouth. He decided to write the book himself. Bound by the terms of his contract, Lindbergh holed himself up at a friend’s and wrote the agreed-upon forty-thousand-plus words. The book went on sale the month after the flight.
For George this was the normal way of doing things; he himself wrote his book about the tragic death of the balloonist Salomon August Andrée in the space of ten days. George didn’t think it was anything special to crank out a book with such speed—he had the whole thing down to a formula; in the normal course of events, without rushing, start to finish, he would get a book out in two or three months. When pressed, he did it in less. Bradford Washburn, boy mountain cli
mber, was astonished in later years to recollect that under George’s guidance he actually wrote his first book in fourteen days. The secret to the speed was very little editing and almost instantaneous printing by the Knickerbocker Press, the Putnam printing plant in nearby Yonkers (for which George had designed as logo Henry Hudson’s ship the Half Moon, which appeared on all frontispieces). The books were beautifully illustrated, superbly promoted, and efficiently distributed. In that heady era when the oceans were being flown across for the first time, great mountains scaled, deserts spanned, and the hitherto mysterious poles explored, these bare-bones accounts—pedestrian, unadorned—of the doers, usually beefed up with a little autobiographical information, were all that was needed. The haste of his publications sometimes showed, but George didn’t care.
Amelia’s book must be seen in this light; it is very much of a piece with all George’s adventure books. For the foreword George efficiently lifted, verbatim, the description of Amelia by Denison House headworker Marion Perkins that had just appeared in the July issue of Survey magazine. More to the point, he prevailed on Amelia to write the text in a matter of weeks. She returned from England on July 6, and did not have a chance to settle down to work on the manuscript until after the midwestern tour. But she had 20 Hrs. 40 Min. finished by mid-August. “My book goes to press very soon,” Amelia self-mockingly wrote her friend Marian Stabler. “I should like to have made it better but time was short and I done as good as I could.” She phrased the same thought more elegantly in the foreword:
In re-reading the manuscript of this book I find I didn’t allow myself to be born. May I apologize for this unconventional oversight as well as for other more serious ones—and some not so serious? I myself am disappointed not to have been able to write a “work”—(you know, Dickens’ Works, Thackeray’s Works), but my dignity wouldn’t stand the strain.
Even in the brief time she supposedly was devoting herself exclusively to the manuscript, she was doing other things. There was the odd matter of her endorsement of Lucky Strike cigarettes (even though she didn’t smoke). Hilton Railey and George Putnam, both involved with Byrd, who was poised to embark on his expedition to Antarctica, cooked the idea up between them. Hilton had become Byrd’s public relations adviser, fund-raiser, and general manager; George had the contract to publish his book on the expedition. Now Hilton arranged for Amelia to be paid fifteen hundred dollars to endorse Lucky Strike cigarettes, the brand Bill and Lou had smoked on the trip, specifically so that she could publicly donate it to the Byrd expedition—which would give added hype to his trip. Amelia agreed to the arrangement in gratitude for Byrd’s unstinting public and private support of the Friendship enterprise. She wrote a formal, lengthy, gracious letter to Byrd that George and Hilton released to the newspapers simultaneously with his equally lengthy reply. The timing was perfect: the gesture received more press coverage than President Coolidge’s vacation activities in Wisconsin.
Amelia’s gesture had two consequences, both of which also took time to deal with. Otis Wiese, editor of McCall’s, had come out to Rye to see if Amelia would write for his magazine, and she had enthusiastically agreed, but he was put off by the Lucky Strike endorsement and withdrew the offer. David Layman, too, was dumbfounded, although for a different reason when he read about the endorsement. In his eyes she had broken word never to endorse a product; he wrote her a “stiff” letter to which she never replied.
After the McCall’s disappointment George arranged a meeting with Ray Long, the dynamic, dapper editor of Cosmopolitan, at his office on Fifty-seventh Street and Eighth Avenue, out of which came a contract for Amelia to be aviation editor of the magazine—the first ever; she was to devote her time to writing about “the popular phases of aviation.” On top of these activities, there was her social life—suddenly very full, what with lunches, dinners, theater performances, fascinating people to meet, groups to talk to, and old friends to see. In addition she agreed to fly to Sea Girt, New Jersey, the second of August, to be present when the governor awarded Wilmer Stultz a major’s commission in the national guard, so there was another day gone.
It was a miracle the book got written at all.
Amelia seemed to have no trouble coping with George or with anyone else. She appeared to have walked into the eyes of the world fully formed, so relaxed and at the same time so in control did she appear. Only to Amy did she admit how triumphant she felt, and how vindicated. A letter that fall to her mother opens, “The night’s activities. Byrd’s dinner, Theater, Jimmy Walker’s. Hooray.”
She felt triumphant about her new financial state as well. The long dark days of penurious living had weighed her down—and only with the burden lifted did she admit how heavy it had been. Now, with her earnings as an author and editor, she paid off her debts—and still there was money left over. Caring and family-minded as she was, she saw to it that Amy and Muriel shared in her good fortune; whatever Amy—and in the beginning Muriel—wanted from then on, they could have. She notified Amy, “Sent package to P [Muriel]. If you know something she wants get it for her and I’ll pay. Also you. My treat, at last.” And a short while later, in the same vein, she is imploring her mother, “Please throw away rags and get things you need on my account at Filene’s. I’ll instruct them. I can do it now and the pleasure is mine.”
She even had a plane again. At the various social functions in England, Amelia had met England’s most famous aviatrix, Mary Heath, the wife of Lord James Heath. Lady Heath, a formidable woman who held the first transport license ever granted to a woman in England (the law was changed for her), had just returned from a long and difficult twelve-thousand-mile flight: solo in her Avro Avian, she had flown from Croydon, England, to Cape Town, South Africa, and back, returning to England that May. The year before, she had set a new altitude record for light planes in the Avian. Lady Heath had rushed home after meeting Amelia to send her her address and phone number and assure her that “if you phone me I’ll throw down whatever I’m doing to come and fly with you or talk.”
As they finally arranged it, Amelia slipped out to Croydon early one morning to try out the famous plane, its fuselage covered with plaques and medals from its travels. The flight was a great success; Amelia thought it the best machine of its kind in the world. To her delight, Lady Heath offered to sell it to her. Such a sale was a leap of faith on both their parts, for by no stretch of the imagination could a settlement house worker (over a thousand dollars in debt) come up with $3,200—the price they agreed upon. What they both must have had in mind was a different future for Amelia—one much more lucrative than her past. It bothered Lady Heath not at all that Amelia had agreed not to profit from the flight and would turn over the money The New York Times paid for her story to her benefactor—through syndication they would earn $12,460; it established her earning power. And so it was decided—Lady Heath had one more plaque made and affixed to the Avian before it was shipped. It read, “To Amelia Earhart from Mary Heath. Always think with your stick forward.”
The British registration for the little plane was G-E Bug. Avro Avians were highly respected both for dependability and performance. This particular plane, manufactured in 1924 by the A.V Roe Company of Manchester, was powered by an 85-horsepower, 4-cylinder air-cooled Cirrus engine. Amelia would have felt quite at home in it, for like her old Airster, which it rather resembled, it was a 2-seater open biplane. It was almost as small, at 24 feet 3 inches only 5 feet longer, with a wingspan of 28 feet, just 1 foot wider, and at 880 pounds almost as light.
The Avian was crated and shipped to the United States, and by the end of July, as Amelia returned from the West, it was being assembled at Curtiss field on Long Island. Amelia was flying under her 1923 FAI certificate issued by the NAA. In those years it wasn’t really necessary for a pilot to have a license—one could fly for sport, non-commercially in a plane, as long as the plane was unlicensed. But if the plane was licensed, then the pilot had to be too. The Avian was not licensed in the United States. George a
sked Porter Adams, vacationing in Thetford, Vermont, to help, and particularly to see if a license for the plane and a new pilot’s license for Amelia could be issued without any publicity. As the director of aeronautics informed Porter, Amelia could simply identify the Avro Avian and fly it “non-commercial” as an unlicensed plane, in which case she wouldn’t need a new pilot’s license, or she could opt for licensing the Avian, which involved submitting complete engineering data in accordance with Air Commerce regulations, in which case she would need a new license for herself.
Amelia decided the time and circumstances demanded a new pilot’s license and therefore a license for the plane as well. While waiting for the registration, a complicated and lengthy procedure, Amelia applied for a simpler but more restrictive Department of Commerce identification for the Avian that would at least let her fly it legally. On the application Amelia made one significant change: she scratched out the “his” underneath her signature on the affidavit, changing the phrase so that it ran: “Amelia Earhart, being first duly sworn, says that the foregoing statements are true of [her] knowledge.”
While Amelia had been in Boston for her triumphal homecoming, she had told her friends at Dennison airport to prepare for the arrival of the Avian, then still on the high seas. She had said it with the full intention of returning there herself, picking up her old life at Denison House, and flying out of her old airport. Then she had holed up in Rye and realized that her life had changed and that she was never going back, so she had sent it to Curtiss field on Long Island to have it assembled and hangared. Whether from embarrassment or oversight or a combination of both, she neglected to tell Harold Dennison of the change in plans, with the result that into the beginning of August, Dennison airport officials were still waiting for the crated ship and anxiously inquiring of the Department of Commerce as to its classification.
