by Nancy Nahra
Every day after school, Amelia went straight home to attend to her increasingly depressed mother. Amy seemed to be going through a crisis. Technically she was married, but she had no husband. Legally she was an heiress, but she had no access to her inheritance. Socially she came from a respectable family, but she was living in rented rooms with her teenage daughters. By education and upbringing she showed every sign of refinement, but she could not participate in her rightful social milieu. Having to shoulder the heavy load of all those contradictions was starting to crush her.
An enigmatic fragment next to Amelia’s senior photo suggests the mystique that surrounded this socially invisible girl: “Meek loveliness is round thee spread.” The phrase comes from a poem by William Wordsworth, the English Romantic poet who was, probably by coincidence, one of Amelia’s favorites. In one yearbook comment the year she graduated, she was “A.E. – the girl in brown who walks alone.”
Fellow students described her as “reticent” and “diffident.” When it came time to graduate, she skipped the ceremony. Nor did she bother to pick up her diploma.
All through her childhood, with her mother’s encouragement, Amelia had been determined to have a career. She kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about women who had succeeded in fields dominated by men - advertising, law, management, film production, and so on. But Amelia did not need to look at clippings to see why women might not just want but actually need careers. She lived with the disastrous results of her mother’s dependence on an unreliable husband. Tight finances were one thing, but the embarrassment of being married to an alcoholic felt even worse. Amelia never considered money a worthy goal in itself, but she put huge stock in self-respect. A woman’s identity should, in her mind, come from her accomplishments. She knew she wanted achievements of her own, but she hadn’t quite worked out what kind.
After going to court, Amy finally was awarded her inheritance in 1917. Shortly after the court ruled, on April 16, her brother Mark died.
Now she could pay for Amelia’s education, she decided that what her daughter needed wasn’t Bryn Mawr but a finishing school. There is no record of Amelia’s reaction to this decree, but she did follow her mother’s wishes.
Given Amy’s background and mind-set, only an exclusive institution would do. She wanted refined teachers who could provide a genteel milieu, instilling young ladies with exquisite manners and good characters. So Amelia Earhart was sent to the Ogontz School, a junior college in Rydal, Pennsylvania, not far from Philadelphia.
A Call to Healing
Amelia’s great grandmother, Maria Graces Otis, had grown up in Philadelphia in a pacifist Quaker family. Maria had also chosen to marry a Lutheran, for which her family ostracized her (she was “read out of meeting,” in their words). She moved to Atchison with her husband, and, in time, she returned to the Episcopalian faith. Amelia Earhart would also embrace pacifism and independent thinking.
At Ogontz, Amelia went along with the program, observing every courtesy, but she could never bring herself to be docile. Letters home portray her as squirming:
Ogontz [November 1917]
Dear Mother,
Your letter and check came yesterday and I was very glad to get both. . . .
Then I must tell you that we are in the throes of student government and that I am on the governing board. . . . Miss Sutherland had some favorites she wished on [us] whom no one can abide and who have no influence in the school. She talked about them and said they were splendid girls and had the ability of leaders and I nearly had my head taken off when I told her the essence of true leadership was to have the girls behind you. . . .
By the way Eleanor and I as befits officers of the A.R.C. [American Red Cross] are taking a teachers’ course in surgical dressings and we will start it here. This is enough for now. . .
L.O.L [lots of love]
Amelia
A month later, Amelia could see for herself what war did. While spending the Christmas holidays of 1917 with her mother and sister in Toronto, where Muriel was studying, Amelia decided to apply her Red Cross training. World War I had been raging in Europe for three years before the United States joined the fighting in April 1917, but Canada was already engaged – and seeing more than its share of returning casualties. News of the war’s horrors had yet to ruffle the polite rituals of the Ogontz School, but Amelia learned by looking around. She was exposed to the trauma of war firsthand in downtown Toronto, where she saw amputees or otherwise injured men struggling to make their way down King Street.
About a month later, Amelia asked her mother’s permission to leave school without graduating: She wanted to go to Toronto to work as a nurse’s assistant helping the wounded. Putting her Red Cross training to good purpose, she also worked hard to enlist other young women to join in her efforts. (Her recruits included her sister Muriel.) Amelia wrote about her progress in letters home:
Toronto, [Spring, 1918]
Mummy dearest,
. . .I am a busy person. I entered into a class of home nursing, etc. and am going on with the class altho they are half thru. The first day I showed everyone how to bandage tho, of course, didn’t know myself. Mrs. Holland’s physician asked me to come to his clinic – where he diagnoses and prescribes to poor people and asks the class to diagnose before he tells what really is the matter. That is not compulsory of course but I am getting everything I can. Also all lectures possible. I am going to see an operation if I can wheedle anybody into letting me.
I went to hockey game last night and was awfully thrilled – the skating is superb. . . .
Affectionately
Amelia
L.O.L.
Amelia and Muriel talked to and sometimes made friends with their patients, who included British and French pilots. One day, a young captain in the Royal Flying Corps, who no longer needed medical care, got hold of a plane and did stunts for Amelia, Muriel, and other nurses on their day off. Amelia recounted that benchmark day in her book, Last Flight: “. . . [The captain] was bored. He had looped and rolled and spun and finished his little bag of tricks, and there was nothing left to do but watch the people on the ground running as he swooped close to them. . . .
Amelia and her sister stood watching off to one side of the small crowd. The plane dived, flying straight at them. Muriel, terrified, ran away, but something about that moment made Amelia hold her ground: “I remember the mingled fear and pleasure which surged over me as I watched that small plane at the top of its earthward swoop. Commonsense told me if something went wrong with the mechanism, or if the pilot lost control, he, the airplane and I would be rolled up in a ball together. I did not understand it at the time but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by.”
In 1918, the war came to an end with the Armistice. Amelia felt the excitement of the men coming home, but she also felt sympathy for the soldiers who, in her account of the wild festivities, were not shown the proper sense of gratitude toward the returning troops. Seeing the human cost of war made her question the sense of settling international differences with military force. She would not be the first in her family to have such a reaction. Her Quaker ancestors had come to America with William Penn partly because they didn’t believe in war either.
Questioning and Being Tested
Amelia’s pacifist convictions having been strengthened by her hospital job, she continued her work even after the war ended. Now, however, she was even more convinced that war of any kind was evil. But soon the volunteer nurse’s aide was doing battle with the Spanish flu, the disease brought home on troopships. Fortunately, she did not contract the flu. The outbreak would spread to become the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide, far more than had died in the recent war. Amelia, who was constantly exposed to the disease on account of her work, escaped it. However, a bacterial infection related to pneumonia attacked her sinuses. Since antibiotic drugs hadn’t yet been discovered, an already exhausted Amelia had to e
ndure a painful and complicated operation followed by a long recovery.
Consequently, Amelia had to give up her job, postpone her plans for a medical career, and go home to Muriel and Amy, who at the time were living in Massachusetts. Muriel was taking courses in Massachusetts to prepare her to enroll in Smith College; Amy was living nearby and could help her daughter. Amelia needed rest, which seemed easy to arrange in sleepy Northampton - so sleepy, in fact, that she soon found the town unbearably dull.
When Amelia heard about a class being offered to train ambulance drivers, she jumped at it. The ten-week course included training in mechanics and, in particular, engine repair. Amelia learned everything the instructor could teach her about how engines worked and how to fix the ones that didn’t.
Amelia would never recover fully from her infection. As a result, chronic sinusitis plagued her for the rest of her life. But after nearly a year of convalescence, she was ready to enroll at Columbia University in New York, planning to study medicine. She spent the winter taking courses and thinking about her future and her place in the world. At twenty-three, she was outgrowing her childhood faith and was beginning to question her choice of a career. As much as she loved the lectures, the science, and the reading, she could not imagine herself working with patients whose ailments were minor or even imaginary after having seen the grim realities of soldiers’ wounds.
Amy, who visited her daughter in New York, had concerns of a different kind about her daughter’s welfare. Amelia confronted her mother’s worries directly in a letter in the fall of 1919:
Dearest Mammy,
I was terribly disappointed not to see you off . . . I didn’t realize how [my] pipings of doubt had impressed you until you mentioned your worries today. Don’t think for an instant I would ever become an atheist or even a doubter nor lose faith in the [Episcopalian] church’s teachings as a whole. That is impossible. But you must admit there is a great deal radically wrong in methods and teachings and results to-day. Probably no more than yesterday, but the present stands up and waves its paws at me and I see – can’t help it. It is not the clergy nor the church itself nor the people that are narrow, but the outside pressure that squeeze them into a routine. . . . Final Injunction DON’T WORRY.
Before long Amelia, Muriel, and Amy learned of a turnaround that looked close to miraculous. Edwin was finally “cured” of his drinking. And the Golden State of California held the promise of starting over.
Edwin had been living in Los Angeles for some months when Amy decided to move there with Muriel. Then, when Amelia decided to drop medicine and leave Columbia, she joined the travelers. It was in California that Amelia Earhart finally discovered her vocation and her destiny.
Just over a decade after the Wright brothers’ pioneering flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, daring young aviators, nearly all of whom were men, were exploring and expanding the boundaries of the sky. California was a preferred location because the climate allowed for flying year round. Soon the pilots discovered how valuable they could be to the nascent movie industry. With a little luck, a stunt pilot could be hired to fly in movies.
California’s terrain also suited the new need for airfields. When Earhart’s family lived in the Los Angeles area, the city boasted as many as twenty private airfields. Spectators could go to an airfield almost any weekend to see an air show. Always thrilling, these exhibitions could also be deadly. Along with dangerous stunts such as wing-walking displays, the meets promoted competitions and races. A big meet could feature as many as a hundred races, and experienced Army or Navy pilots usually came in first. Racing pilots supported themselves by barnstorming - flying stunt exhibitions and selling short rides in their planes.
Amelia Earhart, accompanied by her father, saw her first California air show at the famous Earl Daugherty’s airfield just outside Los Angeles. Immediately entranced, she began seeing a different show nearly every weekend. And in Long Beach, on December 28, 1920, Edwin Earhart arranged to have Frank Hawks, a barnstorming pilot, take his daughter for her first flight – a ten-minute ride for the then-extravagant fee of $10. Since women rarely flew, Hawks assumed she would panic and hate the whole experience. But as she would write later, “By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground, I knew I had to fly.” Then and there, she began imploring her father to arrange flying lessons for her.
Edwin was understandably reluctant. Flying was extremely dangerous and instruction rudimentary. Of the forty pilots hired to begin a new aerial-mail service, thirty died. The planes themselves were primitive, and aerial maps or radio contact with the ground nonexistent. But Amelia was undaunted.
The Canary Sets a Record
Amelia did, of course, win her father’s permission to learn to fly a plane. But she didn’t want Hawks to teach her. Sensing his condescension toward women, she sought out Anita (Neta) Snook, a pilot close to her own age, who was willing to teach other women to fly.
Snook had a reputation for sidestepping conventions. Besides being a pilot who taught others to fly and took passengers aloft, she was also a businesswoman who ran a commercial airfield. She owned her own plane and was the only woman south of San Francisco working in an aviation-related business. Like Amelia, she also loved working on engines.
Thoroughly Modern Amelia
Later in life, Snook remembered the day in December 1920 when Earhart strode into her life: “She was wearing a brown suit, plain but a good cut. Her hair was braided and neatly coiled around her head; there was a light scarf around her neck, and she carried gloves. She would have stood out in any crowd, but she reminded me of the well-groomed and cultured young ladies at the Frances Shimer Academy back in Mount Carroll, Illinois, my childhood home. The gentleman with her was slightly gray at the temples and wore a blue serge business suit. ‘I’m Amelia Earhart and this is my father. I see you are busy, but could I have a few words with you?’”
Snook stepped over to her, and Amelia asked, “I want to fly. Will you teach me?” The demand for flying lessons was high and allowed Snook to name her price, normally a thousand dollars. But when Earhart explained that she couldn’t afford it, Snook agreed to let her learn first and pay later.
Earhart needed to learn everything, as Snook could see. Simple acts like checking the fuel gauge were deadly serious. Amelia also discovered that her waist-length hair was inconvenient - too much to tuck up under her cap. To avoid horrifying her mother who did not approve of short hair, Earhart started to trim it a little at a time. When she stopped, her hair was “bobbed” - at the time, a signature look for modern, independent women.
Women pilots had problems unknown to men, such as how to dress. Planes in those days had no doors; pilots threw their legs over the cockpits, then dropped into the seat. When Amelia showed up on January 3, 1921, for her first lesson, she was wearing her riding habit, an elegant solution that Snook approved.
Earhart loved wearing pants. They showed off her long legs and hid her chubby ankles. “In pants,” wrote biographer Susan Butler, “she walked unselfconsciously with a graceful, loose-joined stride, and as a pilot, she had a legitimate reason to wear them. So she seized the chance to wear first the breeks, as breeches were called and boots and then as flying styles evolved and ‘piloting clothes changed, ordinary trousers, until pants - beautifully tailored - became her signature outfit.”
For Earhart, learning how to make the plane fly was not enough; always the student, she wanted to know how the plane did it. She wanted to listen to the engine and know what it was telling her, notice how the plane climbed, what different temperatures did, what the engine “liked.”
Earhart flew in Snook’s Curtiss JN4, a Canadian plane dubbed a Canuck, that was based at Kinner Airport, a small, one-hangar field in what was then farmland south of Los Angeles. To get there, Earhart took a bus to the end of the line and walked another four miles.
Earhart continued to read about aeronautics and glean whatever she could about the subject by talking to pilots. The detailed
knowledge she acquired deepened her appreciation of the flying experience, leading her to think about the flow of air over the wing when a plane achieves lift, or how the engine and propeller keep a plane airborne.
It was soon obvious, to her at least, that she had to have her own plane.
To bolster her savings, she took odd jobs ranging from photography and truck driving to clerking at a local telephone company. By the summer of 1921, pooling her savings with funds her mother gave her, Earhart was able to buy a used biplane, a bright-yellow, two-seater Kinner Airster. It boasted a twenty-seven foot wingspan, a nineteen-foot-long body, had a range of 200 miles, and could climb as high as 13,000 feet. She called it “the Canary.” Earhart counted the plane as a present for her twenty-fourth birthday.
Within six months, she knew how to fly and needed only to log the air hours required before taking the test for a pilot’s license. By December 15, she had qualified for the license from the National Aeronautics Association. But even before that, on October 22, she had set her first record for female pilots, flying the Canary to an unheard-of altitude of 14,000 feet.
Trying to fit into her new world, Earhart bought a leather jacket like those worn by male pilots, sleeping in it for three nights to make it look sufficiently worn. She also kept her hair cropped short, copying Neta Snook and other women pilots. But she was far from the traditional woman in a man’s world; more than once, she tried to outdo her colleagues in swagger and accomplishments.
An Airborne Career Postponed
