She was the best-known—and perhaps the greatest—female aviator in American history...which is all the more remarkable because of the age in which she lived. Born in 1897, Amelia Mary Earhart began her flying career in 1921, at a time when few women had careers of any kind and had only won the right to vote a few years earlier.
She took her first flying lessons at the age of 24, and, after 2½ hours of instruction, told her teacher, “Life will be incomplete unless I own my own plane.” By her 25th birthday she’d saved enough money working at her father’s law firm, as a telephone company clerk, and hauling gravel, to buy one. Within another year she set her first world record, becoming the first pilot to fly at 14,000 feet.
In 1928 Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean when she flew with pilot Wilmer Stultz. Ironically, she was asked to make the flight merely because she was a woman, not because of her flying talent. Charles Lindbergh had already made the first solo transatlantic flight in 1927, and Stultz was looking for a way of attracting attention to his flight. So he brought Earhart along...as a passenger.
That was the first—and last—frivolous flying record she would ever set. In 1930 she set the speed record for women (181 mph); in 1932 she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic; on another flight became the first woman to fly solo across the continental United States; and in 1935 became the first pilot of either gender to fly from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland. (She also set several speed and distance records during her career.) By the mid-1930s, “Lady Lindy” was as famous as Charles Lindbergh. But her greatest flying attempt lay ahead of her. In 1937 she tried to circumnavigate the globe along the equator.
For Lone Ranger fans: Kemo Sabe means “soggy shrub” in Navajo.
She never made it.
THE FINAL FLIGHT
Earhart described her round-the-world flight as “the one last big trip in her.” Taking off from Oakland, California, on May 21, 1937, she and her navigator, Frederick Noonan, flew more than ¾ of the way around the world, making stops in South America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the South Pacific. But when they landed in New Guinea on June 28, the most difficult part of the journey lay ahead: the 2,556-mile flight from New Guinea to Howland Island, a “tiny speck” of an island in the middle of the Pacific. It would be difficult to find even in the best conditions.
Monitoring the flight from Howland Island was the Coast Guard cutter Itasca. The Lady Lindy, Amelia’s airplane, rolled off the runway at 10:22 a.m. on July 2. She remained in contact with the radio operator in New Guinea for seven hours, then was out of contact until well after midnight.
• Finally, at 2:45 a.m., the Itasca picked up her first radio transmission. Another short message was picked up at 3:45 a.m.: “Earhart. Overcast.”
• At 4:00 a.m., the Itasca radioed back: “What is your position? Please acknowledge.” There was no response.
• At 4:43 a.m., she radioed in again, but her voice was too faint to pick up anything other than “partly cloudy.”
• The next signal was heard at 6:14 a.m., 15 minutes before the plane’s scheduled landing at Howland. She asked the Itasca to take a bearing on the signal, so that Noonan could plot their position. The signal was too short and faint to take a bearing. At 6:45 a.m., Earhart radioed a second time to ask for a bearing, but the signal again was too short.
• A more ominous message was received at 7:42 a.m.: “We must be on you but cannot see you but gas is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at altitude one thousand feet. Only one half hour gas left.” One radio operator described Earhart’s voice as “a quick drawl like from a rain barrel.” She was lost, panicking, and nearly out of fuel. She would radio two more times before 8:00 a.m. asking the Itasca to take a bearing, but each time her signals were too weak.
The average person sweats 2½ quarts of water a day.
• Her next message was received at 8:44 a.m.—a half hour past the time she predicted her fuel would run out: “We are on the line of position 156-157. Will repeat message...We are running north and south.” Operators described her voice as “shrill and breathless, her words tumbling over one another.” That was the last confirmed message she would broadcast.
Then Amelia Earhart vanished.
UNANSWERED QUESTION: WHAT WENT WRONG?
Theory #1: Noonan’s erratic behavior and faulty navigation sent the plane off course, dooming it.
Suspicious Facts
• Noonan was an alcoholic. A former Pan Am pilot, he’d been fired from the airline because of his drinking problem. He claimed to have gotten his drinking under control, but during a stopover in Hawaii he’d gotten drunk in his hotel room. According to one reporter in Hawaii, Earhart didn’t want him to continue with the flight.
• The episode in Hawaii may not have been the only one. During a stopover in Calcutta, Earhart reported to her husband that she was “starting to have personnel trouble,” but that she could “handle the situation.” Paul Collins, a friend of Earhart’s, overheard the conversation. He took this to mean that Noonan had gotten drunk again. Whatever it meant, Earhart was still having “personnel trouble” when she phoned from New Guinea, the last stopover before she disappeared.
• Why would Earhart have used Noonan as her navigator in the first place? According to one theory, the reason was financial: unlike other navigators, “the reputed alcoholic would work for very little money.”
Theory #2: Earhart herself was to blame. Despite her fame as America’s premier aviatrix, according to many pilots who knew her, she was actually a poor pilot—and an even worse navigator—who was unfamiliar with the plane she was flying.
Suspicious Facts
• Earhart had very little experience flying the Lockheed Electra she used on the trip. It was her first twin-engine plane, “a powerful, complicated aircraft loaded with special equipment” that was different from any other plane she had owned. Even so, in the eyes of the pilots who trained her to fly it, she didn’t spend enough time getting to know it.
Human kidneys weigh about five ounces.
• In fact, her round-the-world flight was delayed after she crashed the plane during takeoff on March 20. Paul Mantz, her mentor and trainer, blamed the accident on her, claiming she had “jockeyed” the throttle. Paul Capp, another pilot who knew her, described her as “an inept pilot who would not take the advice of experts.”
• Earhart’s skills as a Morse code operator were atrocious—even though Morse code, which could be transmitted in the worst of conditions, was the most reliable form of communication. Earhart preferred to transmit by voice, which required a much more powerful signal and was harder to intercept. (In fact, she preferred voice communication so much that partway through the flight she abandoned some of her Morse code radios and flew the rest of the trip without them. She also dumped a 250-foot-long trailing antenna, which made the remaining radios far less powerful.)
• Earhart was also a poor navigator. During the flight to the African coast her miscalculations set her 163 miles off course—a mistake that would have been deadly if the plane had been low on fuel. Some theorists speculate that if her navigation and Morse code skills had been better, she might have survived.
UNANSWERED QUESTION: WHAT HAPPENED?
Theory #1: Earhart ran out of fuel before sighting land, ditched her plane in the sea, and drowned.
Suspicious Facts
• This is the most popular theory...and it’s supported by the fact that no conclusive proof has ever been found indicating what really happened. According to one newspaper report, “nothing has been found that can be traced irrefutably to the plane or its crew: nothing bearing a serial number, for example, such as the plane’s engines or propellers, nor any numbered equipment known to belong to the aviators.”
• However, the islands in many areas of the South Pacific are scattered with the wreckage of 1930s-era planes. A lot of the major sea battles of World War II were fought in the Pacific; many fighter pilots ditched on
nearby islands. This makes it next to impossible to confirm that any given piece of wreckage belonged to Earhart’s plane, unless it contains a serial number or includes a personal effect of some kind.
Esquire magazine nominated Billy Carter “Primate of the Decade” in 1980.
Theory #2: Earhart was captured by the Japanese.
• According to this theory, Earhart and Noonan were using their flight as a cover for a number of reconnaissance flights over Japanese-held islands in the South Pacific. The Roosevelt administration believed that war with Japan was inevitable and may have asked Earhart to help gather intelligence information. Some theorists suggest that after one such flight over the Truck Islands, they got lost in a storm, ran out of fuel, and were forced to land on an atoll in the Marshall Islands (which at the time were controlled by Japan). Earhart and Noonan were captured, imprisoned, and eventually died in captivity.
Suspicious Facts
• In 1967 CBS reporter Fred Goerner met a California woman who claimed to have seen two captured Americans—one man and one woman, matching the descriptions of Noonan and Earhart—on the Japanese island of Saipan in 1937. Acting on the tip, Groener went to Saipan, where he found more than a dozen island natives who told similar stories about “American fliers who had been captured as spies,” including one man who claimed to have been imprisoned in a cell next to an “American woman flyer.”
• Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander of U.S. naval forces in the Pacific during the war, reportedly also believed that Earhart and Noonan had been captured and killed by the Japanese; in one statement in 1966 he said, “I want to tell you Earhart and her navigator did go down in the Marshalls and were picked up by the Japanese.” The Japanese government denies the charge.
• Goerner believes that when the Marines recaptured Saipan in 1944, they unearthed Earhart and Noonan’s bones and returned them to the United States. He thinks the bones were secretly turned over to the National Archives, which has kept them hidden away ever since. Why? The reason is as mysterious as the disappearance.
• Alternate theory: Joe Klass, author of Amelia Earhart Lives, also believes that Earhart was captured by the Japanese. But he argues that Earhart survived the war and may have even returned to the United States to live under an assumed name. According to his theory, the Japanese cut a deal with the United States to return Earhart safely after the war if the U.S. promised not to try Emperor Hirohito as a war criminal. The U.S. kept its promise, and Earhart was allowed to return home. She may have lived as long as the 1970s, protecting her privacy by living under an assumed name.
The average person sheds a complete layer of skin every 28 days.
Theory #3: Earhart and Noonan crash-landed on a deserted island in the South Pacific, hundreds of miles off course from their original destination, where they died from exposure and thirst a few days later.
Suspicious Facts
• For three days after Earhart and Noonan disappeared, mysterious radio signals were picked up by ships looking for Earhart’s plane. The signals were transmitted in English in a female voice; some radio operators familiar with Earhart’s voice recognized it as hers. They were misunderstood at the time, but if they were indeed broadcast by Earhart, they gave several clues to her whereabouts.
• One signal said, “We are on the line of position 156-157”; another said, “Don’t hold—with us—much longer—above water—shut off.” Others had similar messages. At the end of the three days, the signals abruptly stopped.
• If those signals were indeed sent by Earhart, she must have landed somewhere to have been able to broadcast them. Nikumaroro Island, 350 miles north of Howland Island, is a likely candidate for the crash site. The mysterious broadcasts offer several clues:
Nikumaroro is one of the few islands within range of Earhart’s plane—and it was in their “line of position 156-157.”
One of the last transmissions described a “ship on a reef south of equator.” For years afterward researchers assumed that the “ship” being described in the transmission was Earhart’s plane. But perhaps it wasn’t: one of Nikumaroro’s most prominent landmarks is a large shipwreck off the south shore of the island—four degrees south of the equator.
Why were those final broadcasts separated by hours of silence? For more than 40 years it was assumed that they were broadcast at random intervals. But in the late 1980s, Thomas Gannon and Thomas Willi, two retired military navigators, proposed a theory: Nearly out of fuel, Earhart and Noonan landed on a part of the island’s coral reef that was above sea level only during low tide. This meant that they could only broadcast during low tide, when the radio’s batteries weren’t flooded and the plane’s engine could be used to recharge them.
Real estate news: 81% of Alaskan territory is owned by the government.
To test their theory, Gannon and Willi compared the times the signals were broadcast to a chart listing high and low tides on Nikumaroro Island on the week of the disappearance. All but one of the signals were broadcast during Nikumaroro’s low tide.
Other Evidence
• In 1960 Floyd Kilts, a retired Coast Guard carpenter, told the San Diego Tribune that while assigned to the island in 1946, one of the island’s natives told him about a female skeleton that had been found on the island in the late 1930s. According to the story, the skeleton was found alongside a pair of American shoes and a bottle of cognac—at a time when no Americans lived on the island.
When the island’s magistrate learned of the skeleton, he remembered the story about Earhart and decided to turn the bones over to U.S. authorities. So he put the bones in a gunnysack and set sail with a group of native islanders for Fiji. But he died mysteriously en route—and the natives, fearing the bones, threw them overboard.
• Many aspects of this story were later confirmed; in 1938 Gerald Gallagher, the island’s magistrate, did fall ill while en route to Fiji and died shortly after landing. But it is not known whether or not he had any bones with him when he died.
UPDATE
To date, Nikumaroro Island and nearby McKean Island (thought to be another possible crash site) have been searched extensively. In March 1992, a search team on Nikumaroro found a sheet of aircraft aluminum that they believed was from Earhart’s plane...but that theory was later disproved. Other artifacts recovered include a cigarette lighter manufactured in the 1930s (Noonan was a smoker) and pieces from a size-9 shoe (Earhart wore size 9). But no conclusive evidence has been found. The search continues.
Five hundred cubic feet of air pass through your nose every day.
Uncle John’s
SIXTH
BATHROOM
READER
First published October 1993
UNCLE JOHN’S NOTES:
This is my favorite of the three books.
While we were working on it, my brother Gordon commented that the articles ought to be edited better. I challenged him to do it himself... and to my surprise, he did. Then he taught us how to edit.
The result, from my point of view, is that we made a transition from trivia to stories. Sure, there are still plenty of bits o’ information. But take a look at the piece on the Salem witches...or the Mona Lisa. They’re very different from anything found in the previous book. Pages on subjects like Sibling Rivalry and Three Memorable Promotions are tighter and better-organized than before, too.
We added new formats and regular features in this book. Our “Q&A: Ask the Experts” is something we now include in every new edition. So is “Oops.”
Some of our favorite pieces (we like a lot of this book, though):
• Henry Ford vs. the Chicago Tribune
• Myth-America: The U.S. Constitution
• Barnum’s History Lesson
• The King of Farts
• Start Your Own Country
YOU’RE MY
INSPIRATION
It’s fascinating to see how many pop characters—real and fictional—are inspired by other characters. Here’s a
handful of examples.
TINKER BELL. Walt Disney’s animators reputedly gave her Marilyn Monroe’s measurements. (Some say it was Betty Grable’s.)
JAFAR, the Grand Vizier. The villain in the 1993 animated film Aladdin—described by the director as a “treacherous vizier...who seeks the power of the enchanted lamp to claim the throne for his own greedy purposes”—was inspired by Nancy Reagan. The Sultan, a doddering, kindly leader, was inspired by Nancy’s husband.
THE EMPEROR in the Star Wars movies. In early drafts of the Star Wars scripts, George Lucas portrayed the emperor as “an elected official who is corrupted by power and subverts the democratic process.” Lucas modeled him after Richard Nixon.
MICK JAGGER. Studied the way Marilyn Monroe moved, and learned to mimic her onstage.
THE STATUE OF LIBERTY. The face of Miss Liberty, sculpted by Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, was inspired by his mother. Ironically, although the statue has welcomed immigrants to New York City since 1886, Madame Bartholdi was “a domineering bigot.”
DR. STRANGELOVE. Dr. Kissinger, I presume? According to Penny Stallings in Flesh & Fantasy, “[Director] Stanley Kubrick... made a special trip to Harvard to meet Dr. Henry Kissinger while researching the title role for his screen adaptation of Dr. Strangelove.”
DR. JEKYL & MR. HYDE. Inspired by Dr. Horace Wells, celebrated inventor of modern anesthetics. He got hooked on ether and went mad; he was jailed for throwing acid in a woman’s face while under its effects.
William Moulton Marston, creator of Wonder Woman, also invented the polygraph.
FAMILIAR PHRASES
Here are the origins of some well-known sayings.
A LOOSE CANNON
Meaning: Dangerously out of control.
Origin: On old-time warships, cannons were mounted on “wheeled carriages.” When they weren’t being used, they were tied down. “Now imagine a warship rolling and pitching in a violent gale.” A gun breaks loose and starts rolling around the ship—”a ton or so of metal on wheels rolling unpredictably about the deck, crippling or killing any sailor unlucky enough to get in the way and perhaps smashing through the ship’s side. Human loose cannons are equally dangerous to their associates and to bystanders.” (From Loose Cannons and Red Herrings, by Robert Claiborne)
Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader Page 26
