by Susan Butler
Amelia was intrigued—the flight would be a great feather in her cap if it was successful, and Bobbi was a top pilot. An endurance record involving in-flight refueling would, as she said, be a “terrific” new type of record for women. But Ullman and Associates was a Los Angeles firm, the attempt would be made on the West Coast after the derby Bobbi was going for the world endurance-refueling record, which stood at four hundred hours—over two weeks in the air. Just getting organized would take months, the flight itself would take weeks, and she was committed to Cosmopolitan and TAT—all of which meant she had a lot of work cut out for her in New York City. Amelia thought it over, checked it out with George Putnam, and regretfully demurred. (She was carefully encouraging Bobbi in the process, however, and kept her as a friend; Bobbi ended up asking Elinor Smith, although “I don’t know why I didn’t ask Louise Thaden,” she remarked years later, regretfully.) On November 26 Bobbi and Elinor took off, but after forty-two hours their refueling plane developed engine trouble and they had to abort the flight, much to Bobbi’s disappointment, and after having devoted all of October and most of November to the effort, she called it quits. Even so it was a new women’s record.
By the time Bobbi and Elinor took to the air, Amelia was back out in California at the Madduxes’. A few days before Bobbi and Elinor took off, however, Lockheed gave Amelia a chance to make a record of her own. They put a gleaming white Vega Executive two days out of the shop at her disposal to play with—and asked her if she wanted to use the plane, equipped with a powerful 425-horsepower Wasp engine (almost twice the power of hers) to try and beat the existing women’s speed record of 156 miles an hour. She couldn’t refuse such a tempting offer. With bespectacled Joe Nikrent of the NAA as her official timer, on November 22 she ripped around the three-kilometer course at Metropolitan airport in Van Nuys averaging 184.17 miles an hour; on one leg she went much faster, writing jubilantly in her logbook, “Speed run, 197 mph on one leg. Hooray!”
It was an especially satisfying performance because she had been fighting for recognition for special records for women every chance she got (as she had mentioned in her congratulatory letter to Bobbi Trout) and had gone to Washington to appear before the NAA Contest Committee earlier in the year to press her case for their official imprimatur. Her argument had been that since there were separate women’s tennis, high-jumping, running, swimming, and golf records, separate aeronautical records made sense as well, “inasmuch as women haven’t traveled so far as men aeronautically.” Her point of view had prevailed; Joe Nikrent’s presence was necessary if the record was to be officially recognized.
There was a small ceremony at the new Grand Central Air Terminal in Glendale—a gathering of noted pilots to celebrate the new women’s speed record, probably organized by Lockheed. Amelia’s old friend Waldo Waterman attended, along with Pancho Barnes, Bobbi Trout, and Elinor Smith. For the event, which garnered newspaper coverage, Amelia was photographed standing holding a huge bouquet of flowers and wearing a cloche hat, chic dress, and scarf. She looked altogether feminine and demure, very much in keeping with the public relations image that airlines were fostering—that flying was such a cinch that a slip of girl could excel.
Her brief taste of flying the powerful recording-setting Vega Executive whetted Amelia’s appetite for a more powerful model of her own. On March 17 she traded in her plane to Lockheed for a five-passenger Vega powered by a 425-horsepower Wasp engine. It was state of the art. By April, as the weather warmed and she became used to her plane, she began thinking of the next Women’s Air Derby. She wanted the derby to be better run, naturally, and at the request of the Contest Committee (quite possibly she put the idea in their head), she began gathering thoughts from the other contestants and Ninety Nine members so that everyone who wanted to would have input, there would be consensus on the changes, and this time it would be run more to their satisfaction. The suggestions, Amelia noted, helped paint a picture of what the women had gone through the previous summer, racing in the first derby. The public relations demands had put them under too much strain. The women wanted at least two hours to be allowed at midday for rest and servicing their planes, “without scheduled entertainment” (no luncheons to attend), two free hours on the field before dinners, and dinners that ended by nine P.M. Finally they wanted a provision that not all the contestants had to turn up at each town’s entertainment in return for the prize money that local businessmen put up: they could rotate. A knottier problem to solve, as Amelia wrote Ruth Nichols, was how to divide the field into separate classes, so that no matter what kind of plane was entered—a powerful big model or a small, light displacement model—everyone had a chance at a prize. Amelia was chewing it over, undecided.
In the end, as she learned to her bitter disappointment later in the summer, all the work, all the time, all the effort she had put in was for naught. The men’s race committee decreed that this year the women had to fly planes with engines severely restricted in size. That meant Amelia, with her Vega powered by a 425-horsepower Wasp engine, was ineligible, as were Blanche Noyes, Elinor Smith, and Ruth Nichols, who also flew powerful planes. The race committee also decreed that two army pilots and a flight surgeon had to accompany the planes on their flights east—another slap in the face. The race committee turned a deaf ear to the objections of Amelia and the other fliers. Again delegated to be spokeswoman, speaking for Blanche, Louise Thaden, Elinor Smith, and Ruth Nichols as well as herself, Amelia went public in early August, announcing to the media that all five of them “definitely refused to compete” in the race, scheduled for later in the month. As The New York Times reported, “Miss Earhart explained that the women have outgrown the small craft used in last year’s race and take great pride in their ability to perform to higher standards of piloting ability.” The idea of being chaperoned she dismissed out of hand; it was “not welcome among women competitors unless similar precautions are taken with the men’s races.” The race was run, but with no one of interest competing, it was ignored as an event.
TAT began to have problems. The grandiose TAT style cost a great deal of money; coast to coast by train and plane in forty-eight hours did not appeal to enough passengers to begin to pay expenses. As a result, in spite of all the hoopla and glamour, in the first eighteen months of operation the company lost $2.75 million. Amelia continued working for TAT through the summer, but by October 1930 it had ceased operation.
By that time Amelia was working for the New York, Philadelphia and Washington Airway Corporation (NYPWA). It had been started by two wealthy Philadelphians, Charles Townsend Ludington and his younger brother Nicholas. She was made a vice-president, along with Gene Vidal and Paul Collins, her two good friends, both of whom had also worked for TAT, Paul as superintendent of operations and Gene as a member of the technical staff. Gene was general manager and Paul vice-president of the new line. The NYPWA flew between three high-volume cities—Newark, Camden (servicing Philadelphia), and Washington—every hour on the hour from eight to five, in Lockheed Vegas, Stinson trimotors, and Consolidated Fleetsters. The first flight was September 1, 1930. Stations of the Pennsylvania Railroad were used for picking up passengers and selling tickets.
The airlines were beginning to face the fact that they were not going to make money until and unless women flew; women—and their babies and young children—had to fill the seats, there was no alternative. Amelia, as the most famous female pilot, therefore became a valuable asset to an airline and was treated more seriously. Now she was given real responsibility, as opposed to being an adviser, as she had been at TAT. She was in charge of publicity and the complaint department. One reason behind making her the head of the complaint department was that passenger comfort and discomfort were two sides of the same coin and could be dealt with most efficiently by the same person. A woman’s touch, especially such a famous woman’s touch, could only help. Amelia flew over the line at least once every two days, doing everything from chaperoning a bird, to selling two seats for a pony (
which rode standing partly in the aisle), to trying to placate a gentleman who insisted they accept him and his thirteen bags, to dealing with a woman who claimed she would be traveling with a lapdog and showed up with what onlookers described as a young heifer, as well as dealing with the most common complaint—an oversold plane. She had to exercise good judgment, according to Paul Collins, “and get along with men; not only those who had never flown before and were petrified but the kind who wrote letters saying ‘I’m an old army flyer myself and yur engines sound punk to me.’ ”
The NYPWA was an immediate success, being the first airline to operate with the frequency and dependability of trains; the public loved it. Amelia’s bulletins of its progress were given maximum visibility. The New York Times even wrote a laudatory editorial on the new line and carried her letter on its progress, in which she stated that in the first thirty days of service, the line had carried 4,884 passengers, that weather had caused the cancellation of only eight flights, and that the ten daily scheduled flights had been increased to eleven because of demand. On the last day of 1930 Amelia happily announced to the press that in the four months the line had been in operation, it had carried 17,106 passengers, completed 2,150 trips, and flown 430,200 miles—all without problems.
She decorated the walls of her office with amusing old prints of the aircraft of long ago and collected articles on early attitudes—scorn, amusement, fear—that the first steam engines had caused before they became the accepted, normal, safe alternative to horsepower. In the spring of 1931 she gave up line responsibility for publicity and stopped dealing with complaints altogether, for she found her mail depressingly one-sided: “It is the disgruntled one who takes pen in hand and writes and writes and writes.”
From then on she did only publicity projects—writing articles, doing interviews, giving speeches where she thought she could be effective. Her salary was adjusted downward from the five hundred dollars a month she had been getting to whatever percentage of the month she expended on behalf of the airline. It was all very informal, and it was up to her to say what the amount, plus expenses, should be. “If you have spent one-fifth of your time on NYPWA work you will receive $100,” Gene Vidal, who adored her, wrote, leaving it up to Amelia to figure out what she should be paid.
The main reason she gave up line responsibility was that she just didn’t have the time. At the end of March she was off on a one-month lecture tour in the Midwest: one-night stands, each day a new city and a new speech. She started in Hamilton, Ohio, and ended in Meadville, Pennsylvania, twenty-five speeches and thirty-one days later.
By that time she was sufficiently worn down and bothered by sore throats to check into a hospital and have her tonsils out. The operation left her “almost inarticulate. Also the knees are a bit wobbly,” as she wrote her mother. But to the world she gave no quarter; she wanted to appear tough, and she did. When the press found out about the operation, a few days had already passed. They finally located her at noon on Thursday, April 30 in Washington, D.C., and thinking it was just the day after her operation (she didn’t disabuse them), they reported admiringly that she was recuperating by giving a speech—on “The Modern Woman”—to a Kiwanis Club there.
A week later she gave a no-holds-barred speech to 250 Barnard College students—far different from her usual diplomatic utterances. She told the assembled coeds they were as physically qualified for aviation as men but would have to work twice as hard to get the same amount of credit. She told them the educational system was based “on sex, not on aptitude,” and many girls therefore found themselves shunted off into cooking and sewing simply because they were girls. “As a matter of fact, I know a great many boys who should be making pies—and a great many girls who would be better off in manual training. There is no reason why a woman can’t hold any position in aviation providing she can overcome prejudices and show ability,” she told the rapt coeds.
There was a special reason for the forcefulness of her speech: it was exactly six years since she had left the Columbia-Barnard campus—broke, untrained, and facing an uncertain future. Returning brought back the pain, but it also brought home to her how far she had traveled. She wanted others to make the same trip.
13
Courtship and Marriage
• • • • Ameliawas still engaged to Sam Chapman, but in fact she had been drifting apart from him for some time. With the move to New York and her busy life, Sam hardly got to see her. Nevertheless he was waiting patiently—had been waiting patiently since the California days—and would have taken her on any terms, in spite of the fact that they had never set a wedding date. In the twilight days of the relationship, Amelia had burst out to her sister her annoyance at Sam’s continually putting her needs before his. “He should do whatever makes him happiest. I know what I want to do and I expect to do it, married or single.” Not even Muriel, in her heart, ever thought Amelia would marry him. The question, for Amelia, was how to tell him.
Amelia had arranged to be in Boston on November 13, 1928, following the Friendship flight, for a Zonta meeting (her first; she had received a radiogram aboard ship that she had been admitted to membership) and, the following evening, to speak at a fund-raising benefit for Denison House at Symphony Hall. It was at some point during this trip that she broke the news to Sam. She let two weeks pass to give him time to adjust; then, since she was such a celebrity, she announced her change of plans to the world via the newspapers. “I am no longer engaged to marry. You never can tell what I will do. If I was sure of the man I might get married tomorrow I am very sudden, you know, and make up my mind in a second.”
Sam Chapman, stunned, would live out his life in the Chapman family home in Marblehead and never marry; he never got over Amelia. They would remain friends for the rest of her life.
George had been pursuing Amelia—for professional reasons, then for personal reasons from the moment they met. He thought she was perfect, the height of chic. He was mad about everything to do with her, including “her beautifully tailored gabardine slacks.” He adored her hands and included a full-page photograph of them in his posthumous biography, writing, “The tapering loveliness of her hands was almost unbelievable, found in one who did the things she did.” (Gordon Selfridge thought the same, saying of her hands, “the most beautiful I think I ever saw, the hands of an artist.”)
George also wrote, “I think she really did not realize that often she was very lovely to look at (You’re prejudiced! she would jeer at me), and often felt sure that she was actually unattractive.... Perhaps her most notable physical characteristic was her slimness—a Washington newspaperwoman once commented on her: ‘incredibly slim hips and great femininity’—but evidently people seeing for the first time a woman who flew oceans and tinkered with motors expected a massive, mannish individual, big-footed and heavy-handed, and with a deep bass voice. And then when the anticipated Amazon turned out to be a graceful, lithe person, with a Peter-Panish figure, gray eyes with laughter lurking in them, her sensitive features lit with intelligence and friendliness and a placid, low voice, and hands notable in their beauty, it was all a little confusing.”
Not only was she the apotheosis of everything he admired, she was his creation—for if it had not been for him, Amelia would not have been on the Friendship. Not that Amelia’s fame turned his head; he was used to dealing with celebrities; but he had discovered her, and he was directing her business life.
With his irresistible energy and instinctive eye for public relations George became Amelia’s chief buffer and counselor, particularly since the moment Hilton Railey returned to the United States Byrd had snared him away to organize his Antarctic expedition.
George was simply always there for Amelia. He was part of the welcoming committee aboard the Macon, always by her side as she went to the various functions in New York. He was master of the small gesture as well as the large. He arranged and was on the Ford trimotor that flew her, the reporters, and a photographer from New York to Boston for th
at triumphal reception; he arranged to have her car (which he had christened on first sight the Yellow Peril after the sleek 1910 English Handley Page monoplane of the same name) brought, which she hadn’t seen since she had left. She needed someone to help her cope with her new status, and he was only too delighted to be that person. When she was traveling, he sent her reams of information. As he explained it, “In this period when our association was primarily a business matter, there were long intervals of communication only by letter or telegraph; a voluminous correspondence it was too! That is, it was from my end. The answers to my letters were usually my letters returned, with notations in pencil on the margin.”
Nothing she did escaped his eye, nothing she did was too trivial for him to comment upon. A few months after the Friendship flight, their relationship had progressed to the point that he could write, “Your hats! They are a public menace. You should do something about them when you must wear them at all! Some of them are cataclysms! But I hasten to add the Pittsburgh bonnet is a peach, as are several of the floppy ones with bits of brims.”
Their courage and prowess drew them together; their characters were very different; early on they took each other’s measure. Amelia enjoyed doing things thoroughly and carefully and calmly, one task at a time, whereas he rushed around from one project to the next. Following Amelia’s penchant for bestowing descriptive names on people, she had immediately dubbed George “Simpkin”—after the cat in The Tailor of Gloucester, for he reminded her of Simpkin who, not content with keeping only one mouse in reserve to toy with, always kept several, each under an inverted teacup, “against the danger of having time idle on one’s hands.” As George wryly admitted, “She early perceived that, important as the project of which she was the center became, it was really just then one of a group of enterprises in which I was engaged. One mouse was not enough.”
