by Nancy Nahra
Earhart was determined to make a career aloft, but the obvious starting point, exhibitions at air shows, wouldn’t support her. A woman pilot drew crowds, but few people were willing to buy rides in her plane. Making matters worse, women weren’t allowed to compete against men in flying competitions. As Earhart saw it, aviation was just one more field in which women were unfairly treated. She started thinking about how to get around or over the barriers.
With Snook as a role model, Earhart considered giving flying lessons. But much as she liked taking risks, she was not foolhardy. She knew too well the dangers instructors faced. Training planes in those days lacked dual controls, so a student sometimes crashed a plane, killing both the instructor and the student.
Forced to postpone her career in the air, Earhart fell back on her brief experience with photography to earn a living. Methodical as always, she read everything she could find about cameras, lenses, and film developing, quickly becoming adept enough to set up a photography business with a friend, but the business never took off.
In 1924, after years of strain, humiliation, and instability, Earhart’s parents separated. Edwin had remained sober and was doing well financially, but both Amy and Edwin were unhappy. Amy was still not ready to abandon the marriage, but Edwin was.
Finally, after twenty-nine years of marriage, Edwin prevailed and Amelia’s parents divorced. At the same time, Amelia reconsidered her decision to drop out of Columbia. She reasoned that a medical career would give her independence of a kind her mother had never achieved. It would also provide enough income for Amelia to keep on flying. Still in good standing at Columbia, she returned to New York, but the course load required a commitment she knew she didn’t want to make. She dropped out once again.
With Amy now trying to function independently for the first time in her life, Amelia’s sense of responsibility for her mother tugged at her more strongly than ever. Once she gave up her studies at Columbia, she moved back to California. Then, hearing her mother talk about moving back east, Amelia saw an obvious solution: She wanted to fly Amy back to Massachusetts. But air travel was still far from ordinary, and Amy, like most women of her generation, saw planes as unsafe.
In an impressively generous gesture, Amelia made a choice that must have been wrenching: She sold the Canary. With the money from the sale, she bought a flashy car - a Kissel with a retractable roof and wide running boards - for the cross-country trip she would make with her mother. Putting a brave face on the undertaking, Amelia playfully named her car the Yellow Peril.
The Long Way Home
Amelia and Amy’s leisurely trip across the continent set no records for speed or efficiency. The path they took suggests they went out of their way, more than once, to enjoy scenic spots, such as Yosemite, Crater Lake, and Lake Louise.
After installing her mother safely with Muriel, Earhart tried to pick up her medical studies once more, spending another semester at Columbia before deciding that she could not see herself in a career in medicine. She went to Boston to be near her family, knowing that Amy would welcome having her close by. For Amelia, the move to Boston meant having to find a new job.
At the same time, Amelia had to deal with a health problem that she had been minimizing, ignoring, and all but denying for several years. She had started showing signs of wear from all those hours of flying. The planes she flew had open cockpits, which left her face exposed. She wore goggles, of course, to protect her eyes, but the goggles didn’t did not cover much else. All that wind had a drying effect that hurt her already sensitive sinuses. Because Earhart was stoic – by nature, upbringing, and conviction – she rarely spoke about the ailment and certainly not in public. But sinusitis and related sinus trouble plagued her for years. Pain and chronic headaches were now severe enough to interfere with ordinary life and sleep.
In the 1920s, remedies were few, inconvenient, and only sometimes effective. That left only surgery. Amelia went to Massachusetts General Hospital for a small operation that provided relief.
Sinus issues abated, Amelia concluded that her experience working in a wartime hospital in Toronto made her a good candidate for social work, a field that was attracting some of the best and brightest women of the day. That’s exactly what a career advisor had recommended. At that time, educated women in cities could find work to help alleviate the suffering of immigrant families who kept pouring into American cities.
Denison House in Boston, where Amelia found a position as social worker, had been set up a generation earlier by well-off, educated women who hoped to share their many privileges with people who had few. Inspired by Chicago’s Hull House, founded by Jane Addams, it was founded in 1892 by three Wellesley professors and offered a clinic as well as classes in English, among other subjects.
A Denison supervisor took note of Earhart’s playful personality and assigned her to work with children. But Amelia’s leadership qualities also made her stand out. She was quickly placed in a supervisory position. Promotions meant an increase in pay, which Earhart clearly welcomed. All those years of having very little money had taught her how to make the most of small income. Careful management plus thrifty habits let her save enough money to buy a new plane.
Aviation helped Earhart supplement her income. She had stayed in touch with W.G. “Bert” Kinner, owner of the California airfield where she had her lessons with Neta Snook. Now Bert wanted Earhart to help him; he asked her to find someone to sell Kinner planes in Boston. Identifying the right person proved more difficult than either of them expected it to be, so she decided to try selling airplanes herself. The bonus for her: She got to fly the plane for prospective buyers.
Meanwhile, at Denison House, Earhart was becoming a favorite with the children. They loved when she would take them for a ride in her yellow car – a first-time experience for many of them. While making progress as a social worker, she also distinguished herself in aviation, becoming vice president of the Boston chapter of the American Aeronautical Society. Beyond pilots and flying enthusiasts, people in Boston were learning Earhart’s name from the newspaper columns she wrote to promote flying. Her two jobs came together when she flew over Boston to drop leaflets to advertise a fundraising effort for Denison House.
In 1924, Earhart became engaged to Sam Chapman, a chemical engineer at the Boston Edison Company and onetime boarder in her parents’ house. Like most young American men at the time, he assumed that any woman he chose to marry would make a home for him, start a family with him, and consider her role as homemaker to be an honorable and sufficient career.
The couple had been dating for two years. He was tall and thin with dark brown hair and kind eyes. They became engaged, but Earhart never truly expected to give up any of her independence. It took a little while for Sam to understand that Amelia was never going to fill the role he cast for her. He eventually understood that their romance was becoming mainly epistolary.
Exploiting Lindbergh’s Triumph
Aviation became a national obsession in 1927 when Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean to Paris, doing what no other pilot had ever done. Lindbergh’s flight had been meant to promote air transport as a fast, affordable, and reliable service for airmail. But the wild publicity that ensued got the business community thinking about passenger airlines and the future of air commerce in general.
Should another man repeat Lindbergh’s feat, it would not be enough of a spectacle to hit the publicity jackpot. But what if a woman, an aviatrix, were to attempt an ocean crossing in a plane? What a story!
And, of course, in the summer of 1927, rumors were already floating that the next transatlantic flight would include a woman. Since no firm plan had been announced, speculation grew in scope and sometimes in credibility. That summer, Thea Rasche, a well-known woman flyer from Germany, started showing up in competitions and airshows in the United States.
The young blond flyer instantly had a regular presence in the news. Rumors circulated that she planned to fly the Atlantic with Lindb
ergh. They were taken so seriously that Rasche had to issue a denial.
That summer, American audiences experienced horror when they saw her plane go into a nosedive at an air show. Rasche survived, saving her plane and her life, by landing in the Hudson near Poughkeepsie.
The press and the public saw the accident as evidence that women weren’t fit to fly. In fact, the fault was in the aircraft, which knowledgeable aviators appreciated.
With that experience behind her, Rasche made a far more serious nosedive when the very same mechanical failure happened again, in September of that year in an airshow at Dennison field near Boston. Once again Rasche was able to pull out of a dive; this time she survived by choosing a crash landing in a marshy area next to the field. Amelia Earhart was in the audience.
Seizing the moment, Earhart helped herself to a plane belonging to the field and successfully distracted – and calmed – the crowd by going through her own air maneuvers as an improvised stunt flying demonstration. Later detractors cited Amelia’s actions as opportunistic self-promotion. But such critics missed the much more significant point: Earhart hoped most of all to obviate the criticism of women pilots. She appreciated what Rasche had to do and admired her fellow aviator.
Not wanting to upset her mother, Earhart took pains not to let on that she was even thinking of playing a part in planning a transatlantic adventure. Amy swore her sister to silence, as well.
In some circles, the people who imagined the excitement of a woman pilot’s success story had already arranged a way to use it: New York publisher and publicist George Palmer Putnam and pioneer aviator Richard Byrd had long hoped to back just such a flight. Putnam appreciated the public’s attraction to dangerous undertakings. He had taken part in museum-sponsored Arctic adventures himself, and learned of them through his friendship with Byrd, who had tried to fly over the North Pole just two years earlier.
The two men thought they had found their woman in the American socialite Amy Guest, a member of the Henry Phipps family, who was successfully introducing herself to high society in England. Daring in many ways, Guest wanted to be the first woman to cross the Atlantic and would finance the trip herself, but family matters prevented her from making the crossing.
The planners needed a substitute, and, by 1928, the name Amelia Earhart had become known beyond California and Massachusetts. Her reputation as a pilot and a resourceful leader was on the verge of becoming national. Earhart was at work at Denison House when she got a call from Hilton Railey, a Boston friend of Putnam. Amy Guest was insisting that the woman they chose be able to maintain her composure around British aristocrats, and Railey wanted to get a look at Earhart before he made his offer. He wanted to make sure she was well-bred and presentable, matching the modest, charming Lindbergh model.
Railey told Earhart that he was looking for a woman to fly the Atlantic, but he was so evasive about the details that she balked at meeting him. She demanded more information before she would agree to discuss anything. But when his references checked out, Earhart asked a woman colleague to accompany her to meet Railey. When she heard the full offer, she wasted no time in agreeing to fly with others across the Atlantic.
The plane for the historic flight had been custom-designed and built for Richard Byrd, who had hoped to make the first Atlantic crossing but was beaten by Charles Lindbergh. It was a bright orange, Fokker trimotor seaplane, set on oversize pontoons that enabled it to take off and land on water. Byrd had sold it to Amy Guest to finance other adventures he was planning. Guest named it Friendship to evoke the relationship between the United States and England.
After a short hop from Boston up to Trepassey, a small fishing village in southeastern Newfoundland, the plane was in place for takeoff. The pilot, Wilmer “Bill” Stultz, and the mechanic, Louis “Slim” Gordon, weren’t planning to let Earhart do any work since they would have to fly mainly on instruments she was not yet qualified to use. They had hoped to have an auxiliary pilot, Lou Gower, but a crew of four and the extra fuel needed to make the trip made the plane too heavy for takeoff. Gower would have to be left behind.
George Putnam, the experienced publicist, knew the value of surprise, so the crew worked to keep Earhart hidden until takeoff. Nevertheless, rumors about her part in Friendship’s flight were buzzing around Boston. One false tale that made it into the newspapers claimed that Earhart had joined the crew to help cover her family’s financial losses. When she heard about it, she cabled Putnam in New York:
PLEASE GET THE POINT ACROSS THAT THE ONLY STAKE I WIN IS THE PRIVILEGE OF FLYING AND THE PLEASURE OF HAVING SHARED IN A FINE ADVENTURE WELL CONDUCTED WHOSE SUCCESS WILL BE A REAL DEVELOPMENT AND PERHAPS SOMETHING OF AN INSPIRATION FOR WOMEN.
Putnam made sure to leak her message to New York reporters. And when Earhart returned to the United States, she continued her to emphasize the vital of women in the future of aviation.
As for her own career, she didn’t expect the flight to have much impact. Thinking the adventure would be relatively short, she asked for just two weeks off from her job at Denison House, paying a colleague to take her place. Further indicative of her thoughts about the trip’s consequences, Amelia agreed to a financial deal that promised her nothing of value, not even the right to make commercial endorsements.
Wilmer Stultz was to receive $20,000 for piloting the plane, and Lou Gordon, the mechanic, would get $10,000. Earhart could write about the flight and use it as fodder for her lectures, provided she protected the “dignity and integrity” of her benefactress, Amy Guest. But if any writing or lecturing fees happened to come Earhart’s way, she would be expected to donate them to the heiress to help offset the expenses of the flight.
Foggy Notions
In the early years of aviation, pilots had scant information about any weather they might encounter over the ocean. The reports they did received were radioed from ships. Any such messages were handed to meteorologists, who, in turn, compared them to historical records, hoping to deduce seasonal patterns. Earhart and the Friendship crew only could pray that the information they got while waiting in Newfoundland was accurate.
Meanwhile, the weight of fuel and people continued to bedevil - and worry - the pilot and his crew. Some of the journalists awaiting the historic takeoff finally gave up and left before Stultz decided to take off with Gower standing on the runway.
On June 17, 1928, Friendship finally in the air, the weather continued to pose a problem, the limited visibility forcing the pilot to depend on instruments. The flight was proceeding smoothly, but, after hours on instruments and expecting to see land at any moment, Stultz dropped to a lower altitude. He wasn’t quite sure where he was. All he and his tiny crew could see was a ship. Their radio was unable to send messages, but it could receive them. Flying low, they attempted to drop a note, asking the captain to radio them his position.
Such a maneuver sometimes worked, with ships cooperating by writing their longitude and latitude on the deck itself. But the Friendship’s note missed the boat, and with thick fog making it impossible for them to see, the crew didn’t know that they were only a mile off course. When they did spot land, they came down in a bay that they thought was off the Irish coast or perhaps off Cornwall. It was neither. They had landed at Burry Port, a small village in southwest Wales.
On that rainy day, no one noticed the plane. Stultz took advantage of the low tide to push it to the railroad docks. He found the offices all closed up, and when he knocked, he got no answer. Earhart, Stultz, and Gordon, exhausted from the flight and having spent some time waving from the plane without attracting attention, decided to get some sleep. The flight had lasted a total of twenty hours and forty minutes.
An Unwelcome Welcome
Once the word was out, Earhart was appalled to see the press awarding all the credit for Friendship’s flight to her, giving Stultz and Gordon scant mention. She tried to set the record straight, telling interviewers, “Stultz did all the flying - had to. I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoe
s.”
Thanks to the Boston newspapers – and no other source – Amy Earhart first learned that her daughter had been on the Friendship. Out of consideration for her mother’s nerves, Amelia had kept the news about her activities to herself. Amelia’s friends shared her happiness, but some women pilots, who considered her a rival, found the success bittersweet. Ruth Nichols, Earhart’s colleague and George Putnam’s neighbor, felt snubbed, but she and Earhart would find ways to repair their friendship over the years as their sky paths continued to cross.
The press chose to focus on Earhart’s afterthought: “Maybe someday I’ll try it alone.” Then she went shopping at Selfridges, met with the Prince of Wales, and bought an Avro Avian airplane from Lady Mary Heath.
On the Friendship crew’s return to the United States, the hoopla was even more pronounced. There were parades everywhere, cheering crowds, a visit with the president, and a tidal wave of media attention - and all in Earhart’s honor.
When The New York Times introduced Earhart to its readers, the headline said: “Student, Worker, as Well as Flier - Miss Earhart Is Striking in Physique and Personality and Decidedly Feminine.” The article itself opened by reassuring readers:
Feminine to her fingertips is Amelia Earhart, but the desire to be the first woman to complete a successful flight from America to Europe had in this instance outweighed her natural shrinking from the limelight. . . .
The newest entrant in the transatlantic sweepstakes is striking both in personality and physique. She is tall and slender, with a head surmounted by wavy, curling blonde hair, which is surprisingly short when it is plastered down, but unless she has been in swimming, never is.
Serene eyes, which can show a humorous twinkle on occasion, gaze out calmly on a world which has never failed to interest Amelia Earhart. Her face has an attractive contour and the effect is heightened by a slightly pale complexion – unusual in view of her outdoor life. . . .
