by Susan Butler
She was declared an official guest of Mexico, given a private audience with President Lázaro Cárdenas, and invited to a presidential garden party, and she took part in the regular Foreign Office Sunday radio show. She received a platinum medal from Amalia de Cárdenas, wife of the president, inscribed, unfortunately not to Amelia Earhart but to Amelia Earhart Putnam. A gold medal from Aida de Rodriguez, wife of the ex-president, was also presented to her with a degree of pomp. Both ceremonies left her underwhelmed—she felt frustrated at not getting an opportunity to talk to less privileged women or find out what Mexican law and tradition permitted them to do outside the home.
Having set down in Nopala on the way down, Amelia’s resolve to make the return trip to Newark nonstop was uppermost in her mind. Because Mexico City is at 7,500 feet and the air at that elevation is thin, taking off with sufficient gasoline—470 gallons, weighing thousands of pounds—necessitated a very long runway that would enable the Vega to get up to a speed of a hundred miles per hour or better. None existed; both the civil and the military fields were too short. The heavily loaded Vega needed three miles to become airborne.
Again a government put an army at her disposal. Mexican soldiers under the direction of Colonel Roberto Fierro, chief of Mexican Military Aviation, filled ditches and shaved off hummocks on the mud-caked but mostly level flats of what had been Lake Texcoco, until they had fashioned a three-mile runway, which they even staked out with flags. The Mexican government also transported the requisite drums of gasoline to the lakebed, located six miles outside Mexico City, and provided soldiers to guard them and her plane. The soldiers would remain on duty to clear the area of cows, people, horses, and goats when she was ready to take off. Pan American Airways also helped: Her plane had been housed in the Pan Am hangar at the Mexico City airport and worked over by Pan Am mechanics.
Her stay in Mexico City stretched to eighteen days before weather permitted her to take off. James Kimball, at his post in New York, was in charge, as usual. Amelia was impatient to get off and made more than one abortive trip to the field. Her comment after an unexpected weather delay forced her to return to the hotel can be taken as a commentary on the too-elaborate ceremonies the Mexican government was putting her through: “Nature does as thorough a job as man.” George did leave, by means unknown; the following day he was in Dallas, on his way home.
A few days later, finally the weather cooperated. Casasolo, Pan Am’s star mechanic, drove out to the makeshift field for the last time, and by the light of automobile headlights, gave the Vega’s engine a final check. General Samuel Rojas, commander of the First Air Regiment, not to be left out of any ceremony, bade her a formal good-bye, as did Mexican foreign affairs officials. The leavetaking was interrupted when Amelia noticed that for some reason there was only one gasoline pump at the field and dashed off in a car to the nearest airport to borrow another.
The takeoff itself, at just after six A.M. went smoothly, although it took almost four minutes and most of the length of the dusty lakebed before her wheels lifted off the ground; Amelia was relaxed, almost ecstatic to be airborne—finally. “Slowly I climbed to 10,000 feet, to skim over the mountains that hem in the high central valley where the city lies, separating it from the lands that slope down to the sea. Majestic Popocatépetl raised its snowy head to the south, luminous in the rays of the rising sun. A fairyland of beauty lay below and about me—so lovely as almost to distract a pilot’s attention from the task at hand, that of herding a heavy plane out of that great upland saucer and over the mountains that make its rim.”
Wiley Post practically dared Amelia to fly over the Gulf of Mexico on the Mexico City—Newark leg—a distance of some seven hundred miles—by saying to her that she shouldn’t.
Wiley, onetime barnstormer, parachute jumper, oil field roustabout (where he had lost an eye), and superb flier, so casual, confident, and thorough that on long-distance flights he habitually drained each tank until the engine quit before switching to another (“that way I know exactly how much gas I’ve got in each tank,” he explained), who with Harold Gatty had flown around the world in eight days in 1931, did not make idle comments about important things.
“Did Wiley Post, the man who had braved every sort of hazard in his stratosphere flying, really regard a simple little flight from Mexico City to New York across the Gulf as too hazardous? If so I could scarcely wait to be on my way,” declared Amelia. After the Atlantic and the Pacific, it seemed to her eminently feasible. She didn’t give it too much thought and, following the Pan American Airways route, headed northeast for Tampico, on its western shore, where she shot out over the Gulf.
Six hours and ten minutes later she was over New Orleans, where she made radio contact with the Department of Commerce radio station. “Everything O.K,” she reported. From there north she followed the air route of Eastern Air Lines. The manager of Eastern, Eddie Rickenbacker, the famous World War I ace, had broadcast instructions to all landing fields of the system to be on the watch for her and to have weather reports ready. Tuning in, she heard the Eastern radio operators reporting adverse winds below 7,000 feet, so she was flying at 10,000 feet, where the wind was behind her. Mobile, Alabama, reported her over the city at 3:02. Two hours later she passed over Atlanta, 305 miles away, going 150 miles an hour. She was over the Spartanburg, South Carolina, airport, a distance of 169 miles, one hour later.
Charles Lindbergh had flown nonstop between Mexico City and Washington in twenty-seven hours seven years before. Others had tried to fly from Mexico to the New York area nonstop, but heretofore the rarefied atmosphere of Mexico City had prevented fliers from loading their planes with enough fuel to make it possible. As Amelia’s progress north was broadcast, a crowd gathered at Washington’s Hoover airport. She roared across Hoover airport 13 hours 6 minutes after takeoff—cutting nearly fourteen hours off Lindbergh’s time. As her green and red navigation lights flashed overhead, Gene, waiting and watching below, radioed her to land, even though as he and everyone else knew, if she made it on to Newark, it would be a big first. “You’ve done a splendid job, so come down,” Gene pleaded, to which Amelia composedly replied, “Thanks for the invitation. I’m going through.”
By nine P.M. when it became apparent that she would be the first person to fly from Mexico City to Newark, a line of cars headed toward the Newark field to join the hundreds of cars already parked and waiting there. One hour and 23 minutes later, the Vega appeared over the airport and made a great half circle. The floodlights caught it in their beam, and she made a perfect three-point landing. Fourteen hours and 18 minutes after takeoff, having covered a distance of 2,100 miles, she was down.
The huge, excited multitude broke through police lines and rushed onto the field. Police cars tried to cordon off the plane, but when Amelia emerged from the cockpit, tousleheaded and smiling, she was entirely surrounded by the onlookers. There was an incredible amount of jostling. Policemen grabbed her, almost pulling her apart in the process; then, protected by the policemen and flanked by police cars, she walked, laughing, toward the hangar reserved for her; George met her partway there. Reporters noted that he was upset and “raged vainly” at the aviation fans who appeared bent on tearing Amelia limb from limb. But Amelia appeared to be enjoying every minute. Observers found it hard to believe that she had just finished such a punishing flight—“her face was tanned and ruddy but there were no lines of fatigue.” She had set three new records: a new intercity nonstop record between Mexico City and Newark, a new women’s nonstop speed record for the distance, and a new speed record from Mexico City to Washington, where she was timed at 13 hours, 5 minutes, 52 seconds. Paul Collins was at the field with George. “That’s a flier!” he said softly, to no one in particular.
Never had her stamina shown more clearly. The energy and conditioning that allowed her to go without sleep for long periods of time—that allowed her to be fully functional rather than overcome with fatigue—made this, her third long flight, look almost easy.
The newspaper coverage of the flight eclipsed the message King George sent to Adolf Hitler, on the occasion of the king’s silver jubilee, promoting the interest of peace.
18
New Frontiers
• • • • The day after Amelia landed, she gave an interview sitting in her flower-bedecked suite at the Hotel Seymour. Still smarting from the criticism she had endured for the Hawaiian flight, she wished to clearly explain why she had accepted money at all—why there had to be a commercial aspect to her flights. The country was still in the grips of the Depression, and practicality was the order of the day. After all, $1,348 was the average income, and ninety-eight percent of American families lived on less than $5,000 a year. “Flying with me is a business. Of course I make money. I have to or I couldn’t fly. I’ve got to be self supporting or I couldn’t stay in the business,” she told the reporters.
But the “business” she was referring to was the lecture tours, magazine articles, and books she had written. The reporters still poked at her, asking if the Mexican flight was a setup similar to the Pacific flight. “I received an invitation from the Mexican government. I spent my own money to get there. I wasn’t paid a cent. They were most charming and gracious. They issued a special stamp in my honor” was her reply.
It wasn’t that there was any disapproval of pushing products—that kind of commercialism was an accepted part of flying and adventuring. All the famous fliers, including Lindbergh, endorsed the tools of the trade. Admiral Byrd, the acknowledged master fund-raiser of them all, endorsed everything from Grape-Nuts cereal to bacon. At various times Amelia endorsed Chrysler cars, Essex Terraplane cars, Longines watches, the Eastman Kodak movie camera, and of course Beech-Nut, when she flew their autogiro. Newspaper and magazine advertisements as well as radio commercials were at the time extolling the sturdy virtues of lightweight Amelia Earhart air travel luggage. And as everyone was aware, after the solo transatlantic flight, she endorsed the plane, the engine, the propeller, the engine’s spark plugs, its fuel and oil, and its radio and navigational instruments.
The reporters just wanted to make sure that she was still the straightforward, adventurous, uncomplicated standard bearer of her sex—that she wasn’t being used by special interests to push hidden agendas. Promoting products for money was acceptable to the American public: promoting causes for money was not, particularly foreign causes. After all, she was America’s heroine, as female heroes were then called.
The problem was, of course, made infinitely worse because the standards for women were arbitrary and foolish. Thus McCall’s magazine had refused to hire Amelia after she endorsed a cigarette (even though she didn’t smoke) because “nice” women didn’t smoke—although every man could.
Plenty of men, as well as plenty of women, still weren’t at all sure that females should be doing long-distance flying in the first place. There were those who thought Amelia might be an anomaly. There were those who thought she merely hid the “female” problem: the menses. In the 1930s and on into the 1940s most men and many women thought that menstruation impaired a woman’s mental as well as physical performance. In 1941 two army doctors wrote a handbook called Fit to Fly, in which they set forth the accepted thinking: “During the menstrual period women tend to become emotionally upset and it is believed that several aircraft accidents have been due to this cause. It also should be obvious that a woman who is pregnant should not be allowed to pilot an aircraft.”
In 1942 the Civilian Aeronautics Administration put out a Handbook for Medical Examiners, in which it is stated, “All women should be cautioned that it is dangerous for them to fly within a period of three days prior to and three days after the menstrual period.” In 1943 the Air Transport Command ordered its women pilots grounded for the week they menstruated. The order only became moot, according to Sally Keil, who wrote their history, because the men were afraid to ask. It would take the United States Army until 1945 to do a study demonstrating that menstruation had no effect on pilot performance.
Amelia had already begun working on the problem of men’s misperception of women’s ability to function during the menses. A great deal of the male opposition to Helen Richey serving as a regular pilot for Central Airlines could be laid to this one cause. The knowledge that girls with menstrual problems didn’t choose a career where such a disability would sideline them, and that women who did choose such careers had no problems of any kind was, in those years, shocking to men.
Amelia was assembling evidence. She had the statement of Dr. Alexis Carrel that there was no more reason to assume that menstruation threw women off balance “than there is for assuming that men, being men, are always nervously and mentally on an even keel.” She had the statement of the wardrobe mistress of a circus, who in her youth had been a trapeze artist, whose daughter was a trapeze artist then working in the circus, that trapeze and high-wire women worked without regard for their periods: “Good gracious. If my life depended on it I couldn’t remember when any of my girls had to take any time out for that!” She had the statement of Florence Rogge, ballet mistress at Radio City Music Hall: “We never think about it. It has been my experience that any such periodic handicap in a girl comes from a structural cause and that such a girl would naturally not enter a career of dancing. I would think the same thought would apply to a woman who wanted to be a professional pilot. The girl with any important deficiency wouldn’t attempt to be a pilot.”
But providing anecdotal evidence and proving something beyond the shadow of a doubt are two very different things, particularly when the conclusion not only flew in the face of accepted wisdom but challenged a major rationale for keeping women out of the workplace. Amelia thought Purdue coeds would be the perfect subjects to study—she would be able to go before boards of medical officers and prove that women’s performance was not affected by menstruation and that strictures against women serving as airline pilots were baseless. As it was, unchallenged, the medical establishment took a long time to change its mind.
Another less serious problem that air women had was how to relieve themselves. When Gore Vidal revealed that Amelia wore men’s underwear when she flew, it indicated a practical approach to the situation. (Ladies’ underwear—usually silk—was not only impractical but uncomfortable under slacks.) Women on long-distance flights urinated through a funnel into a pail, according to Jacqueline Cochran. Wearing men’s underwear made it slightly easier. But with Purdue coeds as willing collaborators, Amelia could pull together studies and statistics that would demolish the menstruation myth, and as practical as she was, she would probably have fine-tuned women’s flying clothes in an effort to make the problems they faced in relieving themselves less onerous.
1935 was Amelia’s most productive and most hectic year. In between her solo flights she spoke 136 times before eighty thousand people. At $300 a lecture, that meant she was grossing some $40,000 a year—at a time when the average stenographer was being paid $20 a week, telephone operators $15, and when half of the men and two-thirds of the women in the country earned less than $1,000 a year. And in spite of the endless number of times she spoke about women seizing job opportunities when and where they could, still the men who listened tuned out her feminist message—simply didn’t seem to register it. Even George.
By summer she was run down, understandably. At the end of June her sinuses were kicking up so badly, she landed in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in L.A., then got pleurisy. It threw all their plans off schedule and meant they would not get to the Double Dee ranch that summer after all.
Meanwhile another man had entered Amelia’s life: Paul Mantz. It was he who had tuned up her Vega for the transpacific and Mexican flights. It wasn’t a love interest—purely professional.
Paul Mantz, a superb flier, six years younger than Amelia, was the best-known and most successful stunt pilot in H
ollywood. But he was also a supersalesman, a promotor, and a very different kind of person from those Amelia usually chose for friends. With dark brown eyes, slick black hair, and a cropped, narrow moustache, he had a penchant for brilliant ties, loud sport coats, gold jewelry, cigars, frosted martinis, and women. He was also, according to fiction writer Irving Wallace, empty-headed and shallow, a man of no real perceptions or sensitivity. And yet he and Amelia got on very well, at least in the beginning.
He had watched the famous flier Lincoln Beachey, whom Orville Wright had called “the most wonderful flier I ever saw,” put his plane into the dive he never came out of and end up dead in San Francisco Bay. As a young man in love with flying, he watched his instructor, in a Jenny, go into a controlled spin that suddenly became uncontrollable and deadly the day he was to solo. He gave up flying for five years after that; then, after Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, he decided it had to be his life. He lied about his academic background and sneaked his way into the army aviation training program. He broke into the movie business by flying a biplane clear through a small hangar when no one else would; for another movie, When Willie Comes Marching Home, he ripped both wings off a Stearman biplane flying between two trees. He would do anything, but careful planning underlay his stunts. In pursuit of movie stunt work he had picked up various vintage planes, then branched out into the charter business; in a typical Mantz touch he called his charter plane the Honeymoon Express. It was famous for taking stars to Yuma for impulse marriages (California had a three-day cooling-off law), gambling sprees, and illicit weekends.
Paul Mantz thought he was a law unto himself. The day before he was to graduate and get his wings from the army, he was thrown out for buzzing a train and missing the locomotive stack by inches. That was in 1928. In September 1934 he buzzed Redwood City, “in memorable fashion,” to cheer up his bedridden mother—in the process scaring everyone else and earning a reprimand from the Department of Commerce. Once he landed on and then quickly took off from the deck of an aircraft carrier he saw steaming along beneath him in San Francisco Bay, for which he was lucky not to be put in jail. While testing Amelia’s Vega he dive-bombed on film star William S. Hart’s ranch; again he was reprimanded by the Department of Commerce. Later he would almost crash a twin of Amelia’s Lockheed Electra, losing control of a spin for a movie called Lockheed.
