by Susan Butler
But Cosmopolitan was not the right place for articles urging women to be pioneers, to open up new fields of endeavor to other women, or to further the cause of aviation for all by forming aviation country clubs, Amelia’s new interest. A gentle prod not to be scared was about all that Cosmopolitan could handle. Cosmo was for playgirls—it was about image rather than accomplishment. If Amelia was perfect for Cosmo, it was not perfect for her—its subject matter was too limited.
Although Amelia had made the decision to become a member of the staff of Cosmopolitan and live in New York, in her own mind she still thought of herself as a social worker—perhaps one temporarily on assignment, but a social worker for all that. Indeed, years later, when a reporter asked her if she missed social work, she replied that she had never left it. Actually, from the first day, she had been a bit self-conscious about working for such a high-profile magazine as Cosmopolitan. In early December, in a letter to a social worker she had known in Boston before the Friendship flight, she admitted as much. She had spoken at a New York State dinner for social workers, she informed her friend: “I talked at the Better Times dinner the day before yesterday in order to pay, if I could, the debt I feel I owe to social workers. I know it was not adequate, but it seemed as much as I could do.”
At some point before she flew west, Amelia had written to Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch—head of Greenwich House, a settlement house in Greenwich Village, who had come to the July settlement house reception given Amelia—asking if she could become a member of the Greenwich House staff, explaining that it wasn’t feasible for her to go back to Denison House. Mary recalled that Amelia had had it in her mind to maintain an association with social work, “as active as her altered way of life would permit.” Simkhovitch, knowing Amelia’s reputation as one of the most promising and respected of the younger social workers, undoubtedly aware of the dilemma Amelia found herself in, said that Greenwich House would consider itself privileged to make a place for her there, that she could be a resident. This situation allowed her to maintain as active an association with social work as her altered way of life would permit and be a member of the staff. So for the rest of 1928 and most of 1929, Amelia made her home in the handsome six-story brick Georgian house designed for Mary by Delano and Aldrich at 27 Barrow Street in the East Village.
Mary was an exceptionally capable as well as charming woman. A member of one of the Boston Brahmin families, which had been pillars of the church, public servants, and part of the literary establishment of the city for generations, she had graduated from Boston University (refusing to be shut up in a women’s college), studied at Radcliffe, then had gone to Berlin for further training. While in Germany, she met her future husband, Vladimir Simkhovitch, and Denison House founder Emily Balch. Mary, a contemporary of Emily and Vida Scudder, founded Greenwich House at roughly the same time as they founded Denison House. In the 1920s it was the most dynamic settlement house in New York. It reflected Mary’s vision of an unstratified society, a vision that extended even to the board, which was composed of workers and neighbors as well as the traditional wealthy upper-class donors that usually comprised all board members.
Amelia was a very unusual resident, the only person permitted by Mary Simkhovitch to use Greenwich House somewhat as a hotel. It provided her with the constant challenge of interesting company, the comforting presence of a world she knew, and perhaps more important, it shielded her from an overly curious world.
The needy and the interested, the sick and the well, literally in the thousands each week, came to the settlement house. Children flocked to Greenwich House to attend the public school Mary ran on the premises, then stayed to be part of the after-school clubs; the elderly came to be taken care of and to have their health checked by the nurses; the able came to acquire skills in the shops; all came to listen to Mary. Under her stewardship the house became such a catalyst for change that the movers and shakers of society were irresistibly drawn to its side and contributed funds. She had just launched a campaign to raise $150,000 for the Greenwich House Music School, and before she started, she already had $27,000 in hand from generous benefactors. The long arm of Mary Simkhovitch even extended to protect the illegal Patsy’s Barn, two blocks away, where behind a green door lived a horse, a goat, and chickens, which the settlement house children loved to visit.
Mary achieved a high degree of competence in all projects. She prevailed on the dean of American education, John Dewey, to set up the education department and be its first head; it remained affiliated with Columbia University and Teachers College, with four representatives on the Greenwich House board. The workshop-apprentice programs that Mary set up, based on those she had seen in Florence, flourished. The pottery workshop was so successful, it became self-supporting, selling wares at its own store on Madison Avenue—its pots were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum for its permanent collection as well as by J.P. Morgan. There was an equally professional stone-cutting shop. The music school students held recitals, and their choral groups competed successfully in city-wide songfests. The children’s theater gave Christmas performances on Broadway.
When Amelia moved in, the workshops were operating out of their own buildings down the street, as did the music school. What she encountered at 27 Barrow Street were the core residents: basically the administrators, headworker Mary, whose life was seamlessly intertwined with her work, her husband Vladimir, their children, and the staff. But leading social thinkers of the day from all over the world also came, to exchange ideas and see the life of an American city, or to attend a conference. They stayed for dinner or for several days or several weeks, which meant that Amelia would as likely as not end up talking to a leader of the British labor movement, a social worker from Japan or Russia, or a Russian revolutionary or Frances Perkins, then New York State commissioner of labor down from Albany for a lecture, or Emily Balch—any and all of whom might drop in for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It was all quite civilized; nor did the extra guests cause the slightest ripple, since as was traditional in settlement houses, meals were cooked by a cook and served by a butler who both took great pride in the settlement house.
Amelia felt at home and fitted in. Her impact on the children and adults alike was incalculable; she inspired them all and continually “got involved,” causing Mary to comment approvingly that she had “a very tender heart” and was “sensitive to injustice.” She was, however, a slow, careful writer who “sweated out her sentences,” observed Mary, herself a prolific writer, author of several books, who routinely dashed off perfect letters and statements to newspapers in record time.
Amelia found companionship not just with Mary but with Vladimir, a professor at Columbia who had a fine collection of ancient art. She could drop her defenses and relax with him. He was fascinated by her—and worried about her future. He admired her sincerity, honesty and gaiety of spirit; but he thought she gave too much of herself to the public side of her career and wanted her to concentrate on social work. He wasn’t sure she was tough enough, that she had the emotional fortitude to endure the notoriety that her new high-profile life demanded. “I felt scared for her, watching her lose her priority in herself. She seemed to have no plan for self-protection,” he told Janet Mabie; life on the outside would be very different. He was aware of how complex Amelia was, aware that she was driving herself to become a top pilot, the spokesperson for her generation of women, and at the same time had a great need to make money and it made him apprehensive. If she had stayed in social work, he mused, “she wouldn’t have made so much money, but then, a lot of it never did her any good anyway.” But the world was almost sucking her out of social work; she would move on.
It was to Vladimir that Amelia opened up a side to her personality that rarely showed: her restless desire for new challenges, wanting him to understand what drove her on. “Are you interested to know I shall try a parachute jump next week? I’ve tried to analyze my desire and find it’s the seeking of a new sensation. Why do we use the same ones
over and over again? We hold hands in the moonlight—and then spend the rest of our lives trying to repeat the moment.”
Amelia didn’t do a great deal at the settlement house, but her presence was enough to energize everyone, and she did her bit and made it count. She spoke at the children’s annual club council awards dinner and, to everyone’s delight, presented the cup to the senior Greenwich House basketball team, which defeated Denison House in the big annual grudge game. The junior girls’ basketball team, with Amelia watching over them, came out first in their local contest. She mesmerized a neighborhood gathering with a description of her transatlantic flight. She became a member of the committee for the children’s theater annual Christmas production at the John Golden Theater. She also arranged for her mother to give ten dollars to be a member of the settlement house—a respectable sum, not as much Eleanor Roosevelt gave that year but the same amount contributed by Condé Nast.
It seemed as if her life were in perfect balance: she was earning her living as a writer, flying when she had the opportunity, and contributing to the social work movement by living in a settlement house.
12
Dreams Come True
• • • • On July 1, 1929, Bill Stultz died.
He had been stunting in his own plane, a taper winged Waco that he had just bought from his employer, the wealthy sportsman John Hay Whitney, when he crashed. He had crammed two passengers, young men from Long Island who wanted some thrills, into the forward seat of the two-seat plane and taken off from Roosevelt field just past noon.
He started stunting at an exceptionally low altitude, but those on the field thought nothing of it because Bill was considered the most skillful pilot around. Then an observer in nearby Mineola saw the Waco dive at a house and pull up just before crashing into its roof. The next moment, back over the field, the plane started fluttering down tail first, leveled off at about fifty feet, then dove straight down into the grass. All three men were killed.
Because knowledge of Bill’s drinking was widespread, the wrecked plane was examined with particular care. It was discovered that Bill had not cut the switch, the procedure used to avoid fire, that the throttle was wide open, and that the passenger controls had not been disconnected, a violation of federal regulations. And, a bizarre touch, two shoes of different sizes and colors, twisted out of shape, were jammed under the rudder bar; it was impossible to move the bar until they were taken out. The shoes spoke of moments of sheer terror. Also because of Bill’s drinking, an autopsy was performed. A few days later everyone knew the chilling truth. He had been “very drunk,” the autopsy revealed. He was twenty-nine.
Amelia attended the funeral the next afternoon at three o’clock at the Reformed church in Manhasset, as did Lou Gower, the pilot who had gathered his gear and left the Friendship in Boston Harbor. After it was over, Amelia went into New York City to take her part in the radio show on station WRNY at five fifteen PM., lending her voice to the aviation industry effort to calm people’s fears—real enough, since there had been two other accidents at Roosevelt field in less than a week. It would have taken great self-control for her to talk calmly; she must have thought over those days in Trepassey and how they might have ended, then, for all of them.
The era of airline travel was just beginning. Jack Maddux had started Maddux Air Lines in July 1927, with one plane, a Ford trimotor, flying between Los Angeles and San Diego. By the end of 1928 the line had thirteen trimotors, two Lockheed Vegas, and two Travel Airs and had flown 9,443 passengers 386,736 miles all over the West. In the Midwest, Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT), put together by C. M. Keys, was growing even faster. In the summer of 1929 Keys and Maddux joined forces and started the first transcontinental service, with Jack Maddux as head of the western division. Maddux hired Charles Lindbergh to lay out the route (the line became known as the Lindbergh Line), and it was a combination air-rail trip—passengers flew during the day in sixteen-passenger Ford trimotors and slept at night in Pullman cars—in the East belonging to the Pennsylvania Railroad, in the West belonging to the Santa Fe. The planes flew between New York and Columbus, Ohio, and between Amarillo, Texas, and Los Angeles. It took a full forty-eight hours to span the continent from New York to Los Angeles. The total fare varied from a minimum of $337 to a maximum of $403 one way, depending on the standard of comfort on the trains. Special aero-cars transported the passengers from plane to train for the night rides.
Maddux hired Amelia as assistant to the general traffic manager, to work out of the TAT office at 959 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, but he thrust her back into a traditional woman’s role: her job was to supply the “woman’s angle,” which meant seeing that women’s comforts, luxuries, and needs were addressed. It was vital to fill those needs so that women would begin to buy tickets and travel by airlines. Ninety-five percent of airline passengers were men—and if the women didn’t join them, the airlines would fail. So since the trimotors had no toilet facilities and made fifteen-minute stops every two hours, a great deal of thought had to go into making the waiting rooms at airports attractive; airline officials ran the preliminary plans and color schemes by Amelia for her opinion. Each stopping area had to be perfect, each landing field and lounge a “show window” of aviation.
No effort was spared to make air travel seem like ocean voyaging or traveling by train. The planes were carpeted, there were curtains at the windows, the seats were deep, comfortable, adjustable, and upholstered in green leather. A male cabin attendant decked out in a white uniform served meals on a folding table set up for each passenger, complete with a lavender linen tablecloth and napkins. A typical menu consisted of tomato surprise, assorted cold meats, sandwiches, fruit cup, cake, and hot coffee. Passengers were offered a map of the route, postcards of places along the way, and writing paper.
In a flurry of publicity on Sunday, July 9, 1929, the line inaugurated service. On the East Coast, in Pennsylvania Station, Amelia christened the brand-new Ford trimotor the City of New York, hauled into the cavernous interior of the station for the occasion, while simultaneously on the West Coast America’s sweetheart Mary Pickford christened the City of Los Angeles. Then the next day Amelia got on the train and headed west, to join up with the Lindberghs on the last leg.
It was hoped that passengers would flock to TAT for the glamorous trip, but in spite of the excitement and interest (a crowd estimated at a hundred thousand watched Charles take off on the first flight from Los Angeles), it was a rocky road, fraught with accidents to the passengers and ultimately bankruptcies for the investors. Combining her two jobs, Amelia devoted a Cosmopolitan article to TAT and the other new airlines crisscrossing America. They all needed help; in spite of the elaborate planning TAT had done, there were soon empty seats. With reason: On the first day, as one of the trimotors taxied across the field at Albuquerque, it was hit by an unexpected gust of wind that caused it to ground-loop and brush a wing against the hangar office. No one was hurt, but the seven passengers had to continue on in another plane.
By the time Amelia’s Cosmopolitan article on the wonders of the airlines came out in October, TAT’s the City of San Francisco had crashed into a mountain sixty miles east of Albuquerque in broad daylight, killing all aboard. Amelia fretted that the press overplayed accidents, but there was nothing she could do about it; news was news. Scarcely had 1930 begun than Keys, in an effort to increase passenger traffic, slashed the price of a ticket almost in half. The effect was largely negated, however, because the week after the fare cut another TAT plane crashed, this time in bad weather, at Oceanside, California, again killing all aboard. Had the public known that the insurance industry considered flying so dangerous they wouldn’t write policies for pilots, there would have been even more empty seats.
It had been announced that for the first time ever a women’s race would be one of the feature events of the 1929 National Air Races and Aeronautical Exposition. The reasoning behind this surprising development was eminently practical: it would promote aviation
. If women flew, it might seem safer, and if it seemed safer, more people would fly. As Frank Copeland, the marketing director of what came to be known as the Women’s Air Derby, put it:
If the feminine is considered the weaker sex and this weaker sex accomplishes the art of flying, it is positive proof of the simplicity and universal practicality of individual flying. It is the greatest sales argument that can be presented to that public upon which this industry depends for its existence.
The derby was an exciting prospect for the fliers. The women would start out August 18 from Santa Monica and end in Cleveland, Ohio, where the National Air Races would be in progress. It would be a real race—a true test of navigational and piloting prowess, the first ever for women. The winner would get real money for thousands of dollars of prize money were being put up. But then various men on the race committee and some male members of the National Aeronautic Association began to have second thoughts. The specter of accidents bothered them; they didn’t want to shoulder the blame if a woman got killed. It was suggested that every woman carry a male navigator with her, and that the race start somewhere east of the Rockies, so that no women would crack up in the mountains. It began to look like it wouldn’t be a real race at all.
