Amelia Earhart

by Doris L. Rich

  As a career counselor at Purdue, Amelia distributed a questionnaire that anticipated present-day problems of career women. If the woman student intended to work and her husband agreed to become the home-maker, would she consider his work the financial equivalent of hers? Amelia favored shared housework for working couples but had doubts about careers for mothers of young children. When she told Muriel “there was never enough time” to have a child, she did not mean the pregnancy itself but the need of the child for full-time mothering. With this exception she assured her students they could be physicians instead of nurses, business executives instead of secretaries. At the same time she warned them that they would have to face discrimination, legal and traditional.

  She also warned them that sexual attraction was often mistaken for love and was not enough to preserve an incompatible marriage. “Surely we must have something more to contribute to marriage than our bodies,” she said. “We must earn true respect and equal rights from men by accepting responsibility.”

  At Purdue she lived in a women’s dormitory, where she often sat after dinner, elbows on the table, chin resting in cupped hands, listening intently to the students. When they began to imitate her, the dean of women, Dorothy C. Stratton, told them to sit up and get their elbows off the table. “If Miss Earhart can do it,” one asked, “why can’t we?”

  “You can,” Stratton answered, “as soon as you fly the Atlantic.”

  The townspeople of Lafayette were not as impressed as students with this woman who was the first to wear slacks “downtown.”j Her defenders replied that she was glamorous, chic, and very feminine.

  One of the students, nineteen-year-old Frances Merrit, said she was afraid of the tall, slim women in impeccably tailored slacks and mink coat until Amelia spoke to her. “She talks right into your eyes and you forget who she is,” Merrit said, “… and when she goes by in that car of hers and waves I feel like somebody.”

  Another student, Marian Frazier, whose room was next to Amelia’s, thought their mentor did not get enough sleep. “I hear her typewriter clear up to midnight.” Frazier was right. By April of 1936 Amelia had worked and traveled at a frantic pace for eighteen months. Amy, who was living in the new Hollywood house, said that after each lecture and question-and-answer period “thoughtless” people would hold a reception for her. “She came home dead tired, saying to me, ‘No talkee, Mother. My cocoa and good night’ … One look at her face was enough.”

  Amy understood Amelia’s need for rest and privacy but Muriel did not. She wanted to give a dinner in a restaurant for friends in Boston while Amelia was in the area. Amelia wrote that she and G. P. would be glad to eat at Muriel’s house “with just the family,” and if Muriel would let her pay, to hire a maid to help. G. P. told Amy that “for self-protection she simply has to be hard-boiled about getting away … this is a problem repeated two and three times every day for the last few months.”

  Amelia seldom showed her fatigue to the public or press. After a lecture in Zanesville where the high school auditorium was so noisy she had to shout until the audience settled down, she was uncharacteristically short with a reporter who asked a question when she had left the stage. “Why didn’t you ask me that during the lecture?” Amelia snapped. When the reporter reminded her of her promise to give an interview, Amelia apologized and talked with her interviewer until after midnight, then left at four o’clock to drive to Buffalo for a lecture there that night.

  At private parties Amelia showed no interest in purely social conversation. One hostess who thought her a disappointing guest was Dorothy Fleet, whose husband, Reuben, was the founder of Consolidated Aircraft. Mrs. Fleet described Amelia as “a tall, thin-faced woman whose obsession for aviation dominated the conversation.… she spoke of engines and fuel mixtures and flight patterns until I knew I was under no obligation to lighten the dinner-table chatter with any feminine observations.”

  Amelia may have been a disappointing guest but she was a loyal, generous friend. At a dinner party given by the Lotus Club of New York the night before she left for a Florida vacation, she was forced to listen to the principal speaker, New York socialite Mrs. Preston Davis, assail the Roosevelt administration as “neither honest nor honorable.” In Florida the next day Amelia said she was unaware politics were to be discussed and was embarrassed by the attack on the administration that she thought had done far more than any of its predecessors to recognize the rights of women. She agreed with Mrs. Davis’s contention that women should take an active part in politics but added, “with nearly everything else she said, I disagree.”

  She had defended Helen Richey as much out of friendship as feminist convictions. When Frances Marsalis was divorced and penniless, Amelia wrote to her frequently and sent her clothing. She hired Helen Weber when Weber was ill and unemployed. She backed Clara Trenckman Studer as editor of Airwoman because Clara needed the job. She wrote the foreword to a children’s book by Estonian pilot Elzy Kalep and lent her money to set up a business.

  Soon after Blanche Noyes’s husband, Dewey, was killed in a plane crash in December of 1935, Amelia asked Blanche to join her and G. P. on a trip to the West Coast. Amelia still had eight more lectures to give along the way but she and G. P. stopped frequently so that Blanche could sightsee or have dinner in a good restaurant. They also stopped, Blanche said, whenever Amelia saw an injured animal beside the road. “She’d either take the animal to the next town or find someone to take care of it.”

  A few months later Amelia asked Gene Vidal if there might be a job for Blanche in the Air Commerce department. If there were, she wrote, she would pay Blanche’s fare to Washington for an interview (although he was not to tell Blanche). Vidal gave Blanche a job marking air routes.

  Although no close friend ever betrayed Amelia, Paul Mantz’s wife, Myrtle, named Amelia a co-respondent in a bitter divorce suit she brought against her husband. Myrtle told a crowded courtroom that when she left on a trip to Texas Paul had promised to ask Amelia, who was staying in their house, to leave. But he did not. A witness testified that Myrtle was angry when Mantz flew to Cleveland with Amelia for the Bendix.

  In New York, G. P. said that both he and his wife had stayed with the Mantzes in Hollywood on several occasions and the Mantzes had been the Putnams’ guests in Rye as well as on the trip to Honolulu a year ago. It was his idea, G. P. claimed, for Miss Earhart to bring Mantz and Menasco along on the Bendix race. G. P. did not mention that Amelia wired him first, but he obviously had no doubts about her conduct.

  Mantz told the court Amelia stayed at his place while waiting to move into a new house and said he was never alone with her, “not even for a meal.” Several of the Mantzes’ friends testified that the red-haired, freckle-faced Myrtle was insanely jealous and emotionally unstable. On one occasion she had stood outside a bedroom window and pointed a gun at her husband who was reading in bed. After she fired, but missed, Mantz said, “I ran outside … took the gun away and slapped her face.”

  Although the divorce trial generated rumors of a love affair between Amelia and Mantz and predictions of divorce for the Putnams, Amelia made light of the whole affair. To Amy she wrote, “Poor old Myrtle Mantz had to get nasty at the trial.… I cannot but feel she will eventually do something so disgraceful the whole world will know what she is.… I really have been fortunate, for anyone who has a name in the paper is a target for all sorts of things.”

  At that time Amelia wrote frequently to Amy who was back in Medford with Muriel. She confided in her that she had paid three thousand in back taxes on Edwin Earhart’s house, along with a purchase of half lots nearby, and that she would try to help Muriel and Albert financially after they lost their house in Medford. She also reported that she and G. P. had finished renovation plans for their new Hollywood house. But like most daughters writing to their mothers, Amelia skipped the bad news. In February she was in an automobile accident in Los Angeles; a driver “reading a newspaper” crossed her path at the intersection of Hollywood Way an
d Burbank Boulevard. Her car overturned but she was not injured. Soon after she wrote to Amy from Dallas that she had come by air, “leaving my ship and auto and husband in L.A.” She did not mention why she left the car there.

  Amelia also told Amy that if she heard a rumor about her making a world flight in June, it was just “applesauce.” She was going to have a new “airyplane” to play with by then but, “it would take months to prepare such a trip—maybe a year.”

  It would take eleven months. The “airyplane” had been ordered from Lockheed on March 20, 1936, a powerful, two-motored monoplane, the Electra 10E. Winner of a second Harmon trophy for her Honolulu-Oakland flight in 1935, Amelia was ready to try for another record. She would fly around the world at its equator. No woman—or man—had ever tried it.

  * In twelve days she had lectured one or more times in Neenah, Battle Creek (Michigan), South Bend and Indianapolis (Indiana), Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha, Rockford (Illinois), and Detroit.

  † Amelia was fascinated by the Dymaxion, which could go more than one hundred miles an hour. She had already driven it from Rye to Ophir Farm to demonstrate it to Helen and Ogden Reid.

  ‡ Amelia was in distinguished company with Nobel Prize winner Jane Addams, feminist Carrie Chapman Catt, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, and novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

  § “Amelia Earhart Vuelo de Buena Voluntad Mexico 1935.”

  ‖ Fierro and his mechanic, Arnulfo Cortes, had flown from New York City to Mexico City in 1930, in 16 hours and 33 minutes.

  a She reached Washington in thirteen hours and six minutes, besting Lindbergh’s 1932 record in the slower Spirit of St. Louis by fourteen hours.

  b Walter Curley, librarian at the Cardinal Spellman Philatelic Museum, Regis College, in Weston, Massachusetts, wrote that Putnam kept 250, not 240, 83.3 percent of the 300.

  c Putnam’s children and grandchildren said he was a wonderful companion who liked all small children. He may have been trying to meet a tight schedule that night in New Jersey.

  d The others were Laura Ingalls, Roscoe Turner, and Amelia’s old friend, Wiley Post. Ingalls had broken the women’s cross-continental speed record the week before. Turner, holder of the Distinguished Flying Cross and winner of both the Harmon and Thompson trophies, wore a natty pseudomilitary uniform and flew accompanied by a four-hundred-pound lion named Gilmore. Gilmore had once chased a terrified Lockheed employee up several flights of stairs but Amelia was not afraid of him. Post, who had flown around the world twice—once solo in 1933—disliked stunts and the publicity required to earn a living as a pilot. The one-eyed oil field roustabout claimed that the only aviator who ever made any “real money” was Lindbergh.

  f Amelia updated her will so that the house, which was in her name, would go to G. P. in trust for Amy Earhart during the latter’s lifetime with any income from it going to her.

  g Amelia Earhart luggage is still being sold. She helped to design the first line of lightweight, waterproofed, canvas-covered plywood. The original franchise was held by the Real Aeroplane Luggage Company, a division of the Orenstein Trunk Corporation of Newark.

  h Post did not want to make the flight but he had to, he told his friend, Harry Bruno, because he was broke. The crash occurred moments after takeoff when the plane stalled at three hundred feet. Bruno claimed Post turned downwind trying to reach deeper water, a choice most pilots avoided. Lockheed aeronautical engineer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson thought the plane was nose-heavy with an engine too large for the mixed construction of Orion body, Sirius wings, and floats instead of wheels.

  i Rogers was an enthusiastic booster of commercial air travel who had flown 300,000 miles even though he was airsick much of the time. Gene Vidal said that by the end of 1934 Rogers was using only one airsickness bag for every five hundred miles, compared to one for every fifty miles ten years earlier.

  j Earhart and film stars Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich were primarily responsible for the acceptance of women’s slacks as suitable streetwear by the close of the 1940s.

  PART FOUR

  POINT OF NO RETURN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A Threatened Partnership

  T he world flight was Amelia’s idea, one that met with George Palmer Putnam’s enthusiastic approval. He immediately proposed arranging everything for her—a new plane, the permits and licenses, the landing fields, the refueling depots, the publicity, and the profits. Critics who saw G. P. as Pygmalion to Amelia’s Galatea claimed that without him she would have been just another woman aviator hustling for a living in a male-dominated world. After all, wasn’t her 1928 flight a Putnam scenario, the leading lady selected for her looks and her manner rather than her piloting? Didn’t Putnam arrange for her to write a book before her 1932 flight across the Atlantic on the fifth anniversary of Lindbergh’s crossing, a book that needed only a final chapter after the flight before it was rushed to the bookstores while the feat was still news? Didn’t he find the Hawaiian sugar money and get the invitation from the Mexican government, as well as that government’s special stamp issue? She could never have made her flights without G. P., they said.

  It is possible Amelia might not have become the world’s best-known woman pilot without G. P., but he needed her as much as she needed him. No other woman pilot had the necessary combination of courage, intelligence, looks, and charm. No other was so obsessed with showing the world that women were the equals of men. Certainly no other woman aviator had the patience and self-esteem required to be G. P.’s wife and business partner. It was Amelia who described their marriage as “a reasonable partnership … conducted under a satisfactory system of dual control.”

  It was not always clear that the control was dual, nor who was in charge, particularly in their relations with the press. The dynamic G. P. seized every opportunity to publicize Amelia and when no opportunity existed, he invented one. However, most journalists accused him of interrupting and disrupting their interviews with Amelia and photographers claimed he pushed his way into their pictures of Amelia. Without him Amelia charmed her interviewers, providing them with enough material for a good story while artfully steering them away from questions she did not want to answer. So far dual control had worked for G. P. and Amelia. This flight would test the arrangement to its limits.

  Early in the fall of 1935 Amelia told a reporter in St. Paul that she couldn’t break any more records because her Vega was too old. “I’d like to find a tree on which new airplanes grow,” she said. “I’d certainly shake myself down a good one.”

  A month later G. P. did it for her. The tree was Purdue and he knew how to shake it. Accompanying Amelia to Purdue for her first stint as a student counselor, G. P. persuaded President Elliott and a group of alumni to contribute fifty thousand dollars for a new airplane for Amelia. The money was to be placed in a fund managed by the Purdue Research Foundation but actually Amelia would have complete ownership and control of the aircraft. This done, G. P. began shopping for the plane, using Paul Mantz as his agent on the West Coast.

  The impatient G. P. wired Mantz during the Christmas holidays, asking the price of a new Lockheed model. When Mantz failed to answer immediately, G. P. sent a second telegram on January 4 and wrote a letter the same day. He wanted data on a small Lockheed Electra, a cheaper version of the new Electra 10 which was a twin-engined, ten-passenger aircraft already in use by commercial airlines. He thought the junior Electra would be about thirty thousand dollars without engines, propellers, or instruments. Mantz, who was bogged down in the divorce proceedings instigated by his wife, was slow to answer. G. P. could not wait. If Mantz couldn’t cope, he would go to Lockheed.

  Three days later G. P. wrote again, two letters—one for Mantz’s eyes only and a second for him to show at Lockheed—a typical Putnam scam to suggest that Mantz was revealing confidential information from G. P. In the letter Mantz was to show at Lockheed, G. P. included a copy of Mantz’s telegram suggesting that a Sikorsky S-43, a seaplane, would be ideal for
Amelia’s flight, a suggestion he would certainly investigate. He also asserted that Lockheed’s price of thirty thousand dollars to put pontoons on the plane in place of wheels was ridiculous. A New York man had offered to provide and install pontoons for only ten thousand.

  G. P. followed his threats with enticements. The money was there and he wanted to buy immediately. Pratt & Whitney had already agreed to supply the engines, and the flight would be sponsored by Purdue University and, perhaps, the National Geographic Society. He was certain, he wrote, that Lockheed would not attempt to make money out of A. E., not when an Electra on floats making the first round-the-world flight at the equator would be such a “uniquely valuable exploitation bull’s eye” for its makers. After all, he insisted, Amelia was recognized by commercial airlines as “the most important single agency in America today popularizing air travel.” In a reversal of the carrot and stick, he added in a postscript that he had been to see the Sikorsky people. Their plane was probably the safest, he thought, but Amelia would not want to use a Sikorsky after the world flight. She would want an Electra.

  G. P. settled for the larger Electra but with wheels instead of the more expensive pontoons. When Lockheed agreed to turn over a partially built Electra in March, Paul Mantz sent G. P. a list of the equipment he thought Amelia should have. It included a Sperry Robot pilot, a special rear hatch for the navigator’s celestial sightings, and Western Electric radio equipment that would receive all wave bands and transmit in both voice and code. Mantz also asked Clarence Belinn, chief engineer of National Airways, to design a cross-feed system for ten gasoline tanks to be placed in the wings and fuselage with one master valve in the floor of the cockpit. The tanks would give Amelia’s ship a range of twenty-five hundred to three thousand miles. Belinn did the work, although he thought Amelia was already living on borrowed time. The four wing attachment brackets on her old Vega, which he examined right after her Atlantic flight, had all cracked to the yield point. She was lucky to be alive, he told Mantz, without tempting fate again.