Chapter IV: Part ONE: The Friendship Flight (1)

1. _Boston Social Worker_

A low-slung yellow Kissel roadster with top down, a grinning tousle-haired girl at the wheel, rounded the corner, sped down Tyler Street in Boston, and screeched to a stop in front of Denison House. Before the girl could get a leg out of the car, a swarm of children from the settlement house gathered about their favorite teacher. Jumbled greetings accosted her on all sides.

“Miss Earhart,” said one of the older Italian boys, “you been flyin’?” His black eyes sparkled. “Gee, I wish I could fly.”

Amelia Earhart smiled at the boy and pulled his cap down over his eyes. “Your mother would send you back to Italy if you did.”

The others laughed and followed the tall and slender English teacher into the front door, a polyglot wake of Armenian, Syrian, Greek, Chinese, Jewish, and Italian childhood. She herded them down the hall and corralled them into one of the classrooms.

Finally settled down in the classroom, the children listened to simplified explanations of English grammar. They screwed their faces in disbelief and squinted their eyes in helpless confusion.

The Italian boy of the cap looked at his little brother to see if he understood; he didn’t. The older boy raised his hand. Miss Earhart recognized him. “Me and Gino,” he said, fingering his tight black curly hair, “we don’t....”

“Gino and I,” Amelia corrected him.

“Gino and _you_?”

Amelia pushed back her hair with a quick sweep of the hand. “No, no. You and your brother. You should say....”

In the middle of that afternoon in April, 1928, AE was called to the telephone.

“I’m too busy to answer just now,” she said. “Tell whoever it is to call back later.”

“But he says it’s important.”

Unwillingly Amelia went to the telephone and picked up the receiver.

“Hello,” the voice said at the other end. “My name is Railey, Captain Hilton Railey.”

“Yes, Captain Railey?” She could not place the name.

“I wonder if I could speak to you on a very important matter?” His voice was low and strong.

“What could that be?” Amelia answered matter-of-factly.

“You are interested in flying, are you not?”

“Yes, sir!” Her interest quickened.

“Would you like to do something for the cause of aviation?”

“That sounds like a big order.”

“Well, would you?” There was a challenge in Railey’s inflection.

Amelia twisted the long string of beads that hung from her neck. “Yes!” she said.

“It might be hazardous.”

Captain Railey refused to tell over the telephone the exact nature of the risk involved, and asked Miss Earhart to call at his office at 80 Federal Street in downtown Boston.

Amelia asked him for references; she wanted to make sure that this was not somebody’s hoax. Railey gave First Army Headquarters and the name of Commander Byrd. She was satisfied for the moment. As an added precaution, Amelia asked Marion Perkins, the head worker at Denison House, to accompany her to Railey’s office as chaperone and adviser.

Late that afternoon, nearly bursting with curiosity, AE drove her “yellow peril” faster than usual. She was annoyed at having to trail even one car through the narrow streets of the city. Miss Perkins, rigid stolidity beside her, cautioned against speeding with matronly authority.

The Kissel parked, Amelia tucked her hair under the rarely worn cloche hat and hurried to Railey’s office, but only at the pace which Marion Perkins’ decorum allowed.

Upon meeting Captain Railey, the two women discovered that he was a civilian who had been a captain in the Army during the war. He was now the president of a public-relations firm with offices in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He numbered among his clients such aviation notables as Richard Byrd, Clarence Chamberlin, Sir Hubert Wilkins, Lincoln Ellsworth, and Ruth Nichols.

A dark-haired, handsome man, Hilton Railey seated the two women off to the side of his desk. He was pleased with the appearance of the humble social worker, who, he had learned, had a private pilot’s license, and had logged more than five hundred solo hours. What he liked above all was her striking resemblance to the greatest of American heroes--Charles Lindbergh. Here before him, if his eyes were not deceiving him, was a “Lady Lindy.” Like Lindbergh, she was shy and modest. She didn’t know it, but she had been discovered.

“Miss Earhart,” Railey asked, “have you ever heard of Mrs. Frederick Guest?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” Amelia answered. She sat on the edge of the chair, her back straight, her legs pressed firmly together.

“A short time ago, Mrs. Guest bought a trimotored Fokker from Commander Byrd. She wanted to be the first woman to fly the Atlantic.” Railey looked for initial stirring from the girl. “However, although she is courageous, she is also a mother, and her children have talked her out of it.”

Marion Perkins, suspicious as a protective aunt, unbending as a ramrod, eyed Railey coldly.

Guessing the direction of the interview, Amelia warmed to the thought crossing her mind. She eased back in the chair. “That’s too bad for her,” she said.

Hilton Railey gave the young woman a hard look; then he stole a glance at her long, straight legs. AE blushed. “Miss Earhart,” he continued, “Mrs. Guest still wants a woman to be a passenger on that flight. Would you like to be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic?”

Amelia flushed in excitement. Despite the hazard involved, she reasoned, this was a rare opportunity. There were no more than a dozen women in the country with flying licenses, and that seemed to be one of the requirements. Perhaps her chances were good. She made up her mind.

“Yes, sir,” she said finally, “I certainly would.”

Captain Railey rose to shake her hand. He was delighted that he had found such a charming candidate. “You will have to go to New York with me,” he told her, “to meet the backers of the flight. Other women fliers are being considered, too.” He paused, then added, “By the way, Miss Earhart, has anyone ever told you that you look like Lindbergh?”

In New York, plans for the flight were being completed. George Palmer Putnam had been commissioned by Mrs. Guest to find a woman flier to take her place. He had called everyone he knew who could possibly find a likely candidate.

It had been the intention of the Honorable Mrs. Frederick Guest of London, formerly Amy Phipps of Pittsburgh, to do for English-American relations what Charles Lindbergh had done for French-American relations.

Among the several women who had already been considered for the flight was Ruth Nichols of Rye, New York, who became a famous woman flier. In her career she paced AE all the way.

Waiting in New York to interview AE was an all-male jury. It was composed of George Palmer Putnam, the publisher; David T. Layman, Jr., Mrs. Guest’s attorney; and a brother of Mrs. Guest, John S. Phipps.

Amelia had never seen such a stern-looking group. After Captain Railey introduced her to each of them in turn, they began to question her. Was she willing to fly the Atlantic? Would she release them from responsibility in the event of disaster? What was her education? How strong was she? How willing? What flying experience did she have? What would she do after the flight? Was she prepared not to be paid, although the two men in the flight would be?

The demure Boston social worker survived the examination. Recalling the experience, Amelia said later: “I found myself in a curious situation. If they did not like me at all or found me wanting in too many respects, I would be deprived of the trip. If they liked me too well, they might be loath to drown me. It was, therefore, necessary for me to maintain an attitude of impenetrable mediocrity. Apparently I did, because I was chosen.”

Impenetrable mediocrity to the contrary, the committee discovered in the girl much of what they were looking for. She was tall and slender and boyish-looking. She was humble and soft-spoken. The men could not help but agree with Railey: she did indeed look and act like Charles Lindbergh.

Amelia was thrilled because she had been selected for the flight. With unbounded enthusiasm she followed the preparations. It had been decided to make the take-off from Boston Harbor, for if news of the project should leak out to the press, then everyone could say that Boston’s own Commander Byrd was preparing another Arctic expedition and that the plane was his.

By the time AE returned to Denison House much had already been done. Acting for Mrs. Guest, Commander Byrd had picked the pilot. He was Wilmer L. “Bill” Stultz, who in turn could make his choice of mechanics. Stultz decided on Lou “Slim” Gordon, who was working in Monroe, Louisiana.

In the event of an emergency, Byrd had also chosen an alternate pilot, Lou Gower. Stultz, however, an exceptional pilot, never had to be replaced, although there were times when he might have been.

The plane, named the _Friendship_ by Mrs. Guest, was brought to a hangar in East Boston to undergo alterations. Because of the risks involved in a long over-water flight and the ever-present possibility of having to make a forced landing, it was decided to replace the wheels of the Fokker with pontoons. For added range, two large gas tanks, which could hold 900 extra gallons of gasoline, were fitted to the forward bulkheads in the cabin of the plane. As an extra precaution, new flight instruments and radio equipment were installed. The work done, Stultz and Gordon took the plane up for many test flights before they pronounced it ready.

The press never discovered what was afoot. According to the agreement, everyone connected with the flight kept quiet about it. Amelia did not tell even her family, who were living in nearby Medford. She did, however, tell Samuel Chapman, a good friend, who was in turn supposed to tell her family after the take-off.

Little is known about Samuel Chapman. He was a lawyer who worked in the Boston office of the Edison Company. According to some reports, Amelia met him in Los Angeles when she was first learning to fly. Some claimed that Amelia was engaged to him.

If there was an engagement, something happened before, during, or after the _Friendship_ flight to break it. After the flight, whenever Amelia was asked about Chapman, she was vague and elusive. She would say that she didn’t know where he was, that she hadn’t seen him, that she didn’t plan to see him. She managed to be as secretive about Samuel Chapman as she had been about the _Friendship_ preparations.

By the middle of May, 1928, the plane was declared ready by Stultz and Gordon. Weather information was gathered, coordinated, and plotted. Reports came in from ships at sea to the Weather Bureau; British reports were digested and cabled to New York. Dr. James H. Kimball, the great friend of fliers, collected, studied, and advised from his New York office of the United States Weather Bureau. Weather became the great obstacle.

Three weeks of waiting for the right weather drew nerves taut. Because she was so well known about the local airports, Amelia avoided East Boston and the hangar. She and George Palmer Putnam (known to everyone as GP) often visited with the Byrds on Brimmer Street, looking over the vast preparations for the commander’s forthcoming expedition to the Antarctic.

On good days Amelia and either Hilton Railey or GP would take long drives into the country in the yellow Kissel. Each night they would eat at a different restaurant specializing in foreign dishes, and after dinner they would attend one of Boston’s legitimate theaters.

Bill Stultz and Slim Gordon stayed at the Copley-Plaza where they shared a room. Stultz, the man of action, the rare combination of great pilot, navigator, instrument flier, and radio operator, grew more restless with the passing days. A somber melancholy began to creep into his waiting hours. He turned to brandy to relieve his boredom and anxiety. His daily intoxication became an acute concern to Amelia, Putnam, and Railey. Gordon, himself sick with ptomaine poisoning, nevertheless knew and insisted that everything would change for the better for both of them if they ever could get out of Boston and into the air.

Spirits dampened during the long, gray days. When the weather was favorable in Boston, the mid-Atlantic was forbidding; when the mid-Atlantic was favorable, Boston was shrouded in fog; when the Atlantic and Boston favorably agreed, the harbor offered only a peaceful calm that made it impossible for the heavy plane to take off.

Amelia wrote what she called “Popping off Letters.” One for her father in Los Angeles, and one for her mother in Medford; the one was gay and stoically resigned, the other was serious and somewhat grim. The letter to her father read:

May 20, 1928

Dearest Dad:

Hooray for the last grand adventure! I wish I had won, but it was
worth while anyway. You know that. I have no faith we’ll meet
anywhere again, but I wish we might.

Anyway, good-by and good luck to you.

Affectionately, your doter,

Mill.

To her mother she wrote: “Even though I have lost, the adventure was worth while. Our family tends to be too secure. My life has really been very happy, and I didn’t mind contemplating its end in the midst of it.”

Toward the end of May everything seemed ready. But two attempted take-offs were unsuccessful. Too little wind and too much fog mutinied against human will and seabound craft.

At three thirty in the morning of still another day the group left the Copley-Plaza and entered the gray of still another dawn. Once more sandwiches had been made, thermos bottles filled with coffee and cocoa, gear readied and packed. Again they climbed into waiting cars and drove through the wet deserted streets to T Wharf and clambered aboard the tugboat _Sadie Ross_. They chugged once more out to the Jeffrey Yacht Club in East Boston, and out to the anchored plane. The _Friendship_ seemed a desultory bird, its golden wings and red body bubbled over with morning dew. It was Sunday, the third of June.

The fog was not too thick. The wind was reasonably right, blowing in from the southeast and churning up waves that pounded the pontoons and splashed over the outboard motors.

There were no good-bys; there had been too many before. Slim Gordon took the tarpaulin covers off the three motors. Bill checked the radio and the cockpit instruments. Slim, jumping from pontoon to pontoon, cranked the motors, and then climbed into the copilot’s seat.

The plane started to taxi out of the harbor. Amelia stood between the two large tanks in the cabin and glued her eyes on the air-speed indicator. Lou Gower crouched in the aft end of the plane, hoping the added weight of his body would help bring up the nose of the plane for take-off. The attempt failed.

A five-gallon can of gasoline was cast overboard, but that did not help. The plane was still too heavy. Lou Gower had hoped to go as far as Newfoundland, but realizing the inevitable, he gathered his gear and signaled for a boat from the tug. He wished the crew good luck and left the plane.

The _Friendship_ taxied again down the harbor, propellers whirring in the spray, pontoons cutting the whitecaps. The tug trailed the plane in the churning wake of foam.

Inside the Fokker Amelia watched the air-speed needle while they tried for the take-off. The hand on the instrument moved slowly--to thirty, to forty, then beyond the necessary fifty to fifty-five, and finally to sixty. The three motors roared and snarled and strained. The pontoons rose on the steps, then quickly lifted from the sea. At last they were off.

Amelia glanced at her watch; it was 6:30 A.M. She looked out the window in the side door. Boston and the tugs and fishing boats began to disappear in the fog as the plane climbed to cruising altitude. The sun broke over the rim of the harbor. They were on their way straight up the New England coast, bound for Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.

As official recorder for the flight, AE pulled out her stenographer’s pad that served as a logbook. She sat on a water can and wrote:

96 miles out (1 hour). 7:30. 2,500 ft. Bill shows me on the map
that we are near Cash’s Ledge. We cannot see anything (if there is
anything to see), as the haze makes visibility poor. The sun is
blinding in the cockpit and will be, for a couple of hours. Bill is
crouching in the hatchway taking sights.

One hour and fifteen minutes later they sighted Nova Scotia and Fear Island. The plane dropped to 2,000 feet for a closer look. The haze had lessened. White gulls flew over the clustered houses on the green land and headed out over the waves rocking a lone dory on the shore. A rocky ledge ruffled the edge of the island. Pubnico Harbor was directly below. The _Friendship_, motors humming sweetly, had averaged 114 mph since it left Boston.

Amelia changed her seat to a gas can and looked down through the hatchway. A green dappled shore came into view. The plane raced fast-scudding clouds and churned through the reappearing haze. Bored with nothing more to see, AE now lay on the floor of the fuselage and pulled up the fur collar of her oversized leather flying suit. She felt snug and warm. Beside her along the bulkhead the gas cans squeaked against the heavy tie ropes. “Having a squeaking good time,” Amelia said to herself, and remembered those other squeaking good times she once had in Atchison, Kansas.

2. _Girlhood in Kansas_

Grandfather Otis stood in front of the fireplace in the long living room of his home. He clasped his hands behind his back and rocked back and forth, his black, square-toed, handmade shoes squeaking on the hard wood floor. He was a big, thick-chested man, and even in retirement he was still every inch the judge he had been before his two granddaughters were born.

His wife Amelia sat in the rocking chair, darning a black knee stocking. The chair creaked as it rocked, keeping involuntary time with the heel-and-toe swaying of the thick black shoes.

Two little girls, their daughter Amy’s only children, sat on the stiff horsehair sofa and exchanged knowing looks. The older girl, Amelia, who was named after her grandmother, bent over and whispered into her sister Muriel’s ear. “A squeaking good time!” They giggled. They wished they had shoes that squeaked, too.

The girls loved their grandfather because he often entertained them with stories about his early days in Kansas. Judge Otis had been one of the first settlers of Atchison. Shortly after the Civil War, when he graduated from the University of Michigan, he came by overland stage from Kalamazoo to Chicago, took a flatboat to St. Louis, then went up the Missouri River and debarked at Atchison to make his home. He built a large two-story brick-and-frame house on a site overlooking the river, and added a big barn and woodshed. The work completed, he sent for his bride, who had been staying with her Quaker family in Philadelphia.

Amelia Otis found the country nearly savage. The railroad tracks going into Atchison were lined with buffalo bones, and the so-called “friendly” Indians scared her half to death. They were too friendly. Whenever she went shopping in town, the curious Indians fingered her dress and poked into her shopping basket. Grandfather Otis chuckled when he told this story about his wife, for she would always remind him that she had preferred the civilization of Philadelphia and the society of Friends.

The Earhart girls enjoyed their grandfather but he never replaced their father, who, it seemed, was always away on a business trip. One of Amelia’s earliest memories of her childhood was waiting for her father to come home for the weekend, to see what presents he would bring and, best of all, to play with him during the day and to listen to his stories at night. He had bought them a baseball and bat and also a basketball, and had shown them how to play with them, despite the protests of some of the neighborhood mothers.

At bedtime for the girls, instead of sending them upstairs to their room, he would sit in the straight-backed chair by the fireplace, cross the long legs of his slender frame, and tell them stories of his family and boyhood.

Edwin S. Earhart had been born a few miles from Atchison, the youngest of twelve children. His father David and his mother Mary had labored many long hours on the tough Kansas sod, only to encounter crop failure, drought, dust storms, and grasshopper plagues. David Earhart had been a missionary minister for the Lutheran Church, and though he had traveled sometimes sixty miles to preach a sermon, his congregation had never numbered more than twenty. During the great drought of 1860 his family would have starved if David had not received two gifts of money, totaling $250. Thereafter, to insure some income, however small, David became a schoolteacher. Eventually he was named as one of the regents of the state college at Lawrence. Certainly the greatest figure in the Earhart family was David’s uncle, John Earhart, who had been a private in General Washington’s army and was killed in the battle of Germantown. All twelve children were proud of Uncle John, a hero.

Edwin Earhart received his law degree from the University of Kansas in 1895 and the same year married Amy Otis. He worked for the railroad as a claims agent and his job kept him from home and family for days, often weeks, at a time. Grandfather Otis, then a judge of the district court, had often advised his son-in-law to open up a law office in Atchison, but Edwin was stubborn. He liked the claims work and he liked to travel.

Amelia M. Earhart was born July 24, 1898, at the Otis home in Atchison, where her parents were living at the time. Since her father’s job with the railroad kept him moving from place to place as he settled claims or went to Topeka to plead a case before the Supreme Court, and her mother often accompanied him on the longer trips to Iowa and Illinois, Amelia and her sister Muriel spent most of their childhood living with the Otises.

As a child, Amelia was an irrepressible tomboy. “I was a horrid little girl,” she said about staying with her grandparents, “and I do not see how they put up with me, even part time.” A harsh judgment upon herself, but she did cause her mother and grandmother many moments of fret and anxiety about her unorthodox behavior.

3. _Halifax and Trepassey_

AE grinned as she lay on the cabin floor of the _Friendship_, thinking that this flight across the Atlantic was perhaps the most unorthodox happening in any girl’s life; then, as Bill Stultz throttled back and nosed the plane into a steep glide, she awoke quickly from her reverie, grabbing at the tie ropes with both hands so that she wouldn’t slide forward. They were going down through the thick fog that had developed, for a closer look at check points on the coast. The plane leveled off at 500 feet. Land was to the left through a clearing in the fog.

It was Halifax Harbor, halfway to Trepassey, the Atlantic take-off point, and halfway up the Nova Scotia coast line. Bill circled the harbor twice and slipped expertly down to a landing. The natives swarmed to the shore, and some of them climbed into dories to form a welcoming party. The fog had proved too thick for the fliers, much too thick for visual navigation.

Bill and Slim went ashore to get weather reports. Amelia, meanwhile, remained in the cabin and ate an orange, one of several carefully provided by GP. Mournful sounds of a foghorn punctuated the stillness on the water. A light wind sprang up, and AE hoped that it would help the take-off from the harbor.

Stultz and Gordon returned with discouraging news of rain and clouds for the rest of the flight to Trepassey. Nevertheless, because they had lost an hour by the change in time, they decided to try to make it. Slim cranked up, then discovered a broken primer. They still wanted to go. They took off at 2:30 P.M., but in vain.

It was a hopeless task to try to navigate along the coast. The rain and the fog were too thick and heavy. Disappointed, they turned around and went back to Halifax. They did not want to run the risk of blind flying.

At the Dartmouth Hotel in Halifax difficulties with the press began. Publicity about the flight was now inescapable, for it had been announced in the Boston newspapers that the aviators were on their way to cross the Atlantic. The three fliers found no chance to take much-needed rest.

At midnight two reporters and a cameraman were still trying to talk Bill and Slim into posing for a picture, and at five thirty the next morning the newsmen were waiting when the three travelers came down for breakfast. Before, during, and after the meal interviews and pictures were requested and begged. More reporters and cameramen awaited them at the dock. The fliers had to wait until 100 gallons of gas, which had been ordered two hours earlier, were brought by tug out to the plane and poured into the tanks.

At 9:45 A.M. they took off from a calm sea. Visibility was good and they cruised at 2,000 feet. The sharp rocks and ledges shone dark and bright along the coast beneath the left wing. The 200 miles of fog predicted the night before never materialized, but a thin haze did. At eleven forty-five they were off Cape Canso, the Atlantic tip of Nova Scotia.

Amelia and Slim, happy at the smooth progress of the flight, dived into the sandwiches prepared by the Copley-Plaza. AE munched hungrily and moved over to the side window. She wrinkled her brow as she looked over the scalloped sea. Between bites Slim smiled at the strange sight of Amelia in the oversized flying suit which she had borrowed from Army Major Woolley in Boston.

At 12:15 P.M. they cruised at 3,200 feet at 100 mph. A thick bank of fog rolled in from the Atlantic on the right. At twelve fifty they sighted Newfoundland; at two fifty, Saint Mary’s Bay. Curling masses of fog began to form over the warm earth below. Trepassey, their destination, came into view far below; it looked like an open beak of land. Bill glided and circled down, and landed the Fokker smoothly.

While the plane taxied, Amelia crawled into the cockpit to take pictures of the reception committee. A dozen small boats had come out and were circling the plane, each trying to claim the distinction of being the first to rope the plane and secure it to a mooring.

Slim Gordon had gone out to one of the pontoons. He waved an arm and screamed warnings in vain above the noise of the motors: one of the welcomers threw a rope and nearly knocked him into the water. Stultz at the controls cursed, worried lest the boats get too close to the propellers and entangle a rope in them.

It was impossible to get the idea across that the plane could get to its mooring under its own power, until a Paramount cameraman caught the idea and cleared the way through the boats. Amelia joyfully snapped pictures of the marine rodeo. She had an entertaining half-hour.

The stop at Trepassey became a nightmare of delay and frustration. Day after day angry winds churned the bay, making it impossible to load gasoline into the tanks. For fifteen days, from the fifth of June, sea and wind, together and separately, conspired to test the patience of the fliers. On June 7 they tried three times to take off and failed. A pontoon sprung a leak and an oil tank cracked. Slim patiently repaired both. The fret of anticipation grew worse by the hour.

At Devereux House, where they stayed, the travelers sought diversion by playing rummy and chopping wood, reading telegrams and scanning maps and weather reports, hiking and fishing. The local food became a topic of conversation. Slim, fearful that he would come down with another case of ptomaine poisoning, dieted mainly on candy bars, and soon exhausted the entire stock of the little neighborhood store. Amelia and Bill braved canned rabbit and boiled lamb, and the inevitable vegetables of potatoes, turnips, and cabbage. The austerity of the land forced a simple fare, but the warmth and friendliness of the Devereux family and the many visitors contrasted with the cruelty of the land and climate.

Apparently untroubled and indefatigable, Bill Stultz would get up before the others in the morning and go eeling, trouting, or exploring; at night he would pick out tunes on the guitar to entertain the others. Job-like, they all tried to ignore the smothering fog, the howling winds, and the hurtling sea, but the strain was telling in wrinkles of concern on all their faces. To dull the sharpened edge of his anxiety, Bill took to drinking heavily. His melancholy had returned. AE was worried about it; Slim, evidently, was unconcerned, knowing that Bill would stop drinking once he was back in the air, as he had in Boston.

On June 12 they tried desperately for four hours to take off, but the heaviness of the receding tide sprayed and silenced the outboard motors. The plane seemed heavy and unwieldy. Every item of unnecessary equipment was unloaded--camera, coats, bags, cushions--but still the salt spray continued to kill the motors. They were too discouraged to speak.

The next day they arose at six o’clock. They unloaded 300 pounds of fuel and tried for take-off, but the left motor cut out. More days of waiting plagued them until the motor was repaired, but one reassuring message had reached them. The _Southern Cross_, a trimotored Fokker, like the _Friendship_ except for pontoons, had crossed the Pacific from San Francisco.

Back at the Devereux home, they decided to do something about their clothes. Amelia, who had only the clothes she was wearing, bought a green-checked Mother Hubbard for ninety cents and a pair of tan hose, then borrowed a pair of shoes, a skirt, and a slip, so that she could wash everything from the skin out. Bill and Slim felt the same crawling need for cleanliness. They borrowed clothes, and had their suits cleaned and pressed and their shirts laundered. Bill splurged and bought a new tie and new Trepassey socks.

Finally, a slight break in the weather came on Sunday morning, June 17. At eleven o’clock, after three tries in a heavy sea, the take-off was successful. Bill Stultz, unfortunately, had to be all but carried on the plane by Amelia and Gordon, but again he called upon hidden reserves of airmanship, as in Boston, and piloted the _Friendship_ as if nothing had ever happened.

Amelia worried lest there would be a recurrence of drinking during the long over-water flight. Her fears were intensified when she found a bottle hidden in the rear of the plane. She debated the discovery for a few moments, but soon acted: she dropped the bottle into the ocean. As it happened, her concern was unfounded. Stultz never came back to look for his stimulant; flying, it appeared, was for him stimulant enough.

The _Friendship_ wobbled through the fog, one engine still spluttering from the sea spray on take-off, climbed to 3,000 feet, and leveled off to cruise for a while. More wisps of fog flitted by. Bill nosed the plane higher, out of the fog, but into a sudden snowstorm. Lighter by 2,000 pounds, because of the excess baggage and fuel that had been removed at Trepassey, three tons of aircraft now flew through the air, shaking violently in the buffeting of the storm.

Bill pointed the nose down; the motors roared wide open. At 3,000 feet they bucked a head wind and a lashing rain; the plane bumped and lurched in the downdrafts and updrafts. The air speed was steady at 106 mph. Suddenly a clear sky, sun shining, and blue sea broke as far as Amelia could see; then, ominously, mountainous peaks of clouds towered dead ahead. The plane upended and hurtled headlong in a steep dive. Amelia braced herself against the forward bulkhead and waited for the plane to right itself.

4. _Atchison Tomboy_

How often before had she known the same sensation, long before she had ever seen or learned how to fly an airplane. Like the day she decided to build a roller coaster out behind her grandfather’s woodshed. With her sister Muriel and her cousins Katherine and Lucy Challiss to help her, Amelia had nailed some cross boards to two long planks for the runway, then tacked some old roller-skate wheels to a wide board for the coaster. The girls lifted the crude runway and leaned it against the top of the shed, while Amelia climbed up a ladder to the roof. The coaster was handed up to her, and as she knelt with the board between her hands, she felt a shiver along the middle of her back. She wondered for a moment if she could make it down the steep incline. The first time she tried, she flipped over when the coaster reached the ground, and her sister and cousins screamed. Amelia cautioned them against making too much noise, then insisted that she would try it again after the boards were made longer. On the second attempt she shot from the end of the incline onto the ground, right side up and unharmed.

The next day when Grandmother Otis discovered the roughly built roller coaster she disapproved strongly. Young girls just didn’t do those things. They stayed at home and sewed and learned how to cook. “Why,” Grandmother Otis used to say to Amelia and Muriel, “the most strenuous thing I ever did as a girl was to roll a hoop in the public square.”

Despite Grandmother’s remark, the girls would scamper hand in hand through the paths from the bluff down to the river where they would search the caves for arrowheads and play Pioneers and Indians. One day when they had returned from such an adventure, Mrs. Earhart looked at her daughters’ dirty pinafores and decided they needed costumes more in keeping with their play. Amy Otis bought for her girls some new gym suits. The neighborhood was shocked. Amelia and Muriel were delighted: now they could climb on the back of the cow in the barn, or play baseball and basketball, and never worry about tearing their dresses.

Amelia and Muriel attended the College Preparatory School in Atchison. Of her days at grammar school Amelia wrote later: “Like many horrid children, I loved school, though I never qualified as teacher’s pet. Perhaps the fact that I was exceedingly fond of reading made me endurable. With a large library to browse in, I spent many hours not bothering anyone after I once learned to read.” But there was some difficulty with her mathematics teacher, Sarah Walton, who had insisted that Amelia put down all the steps she went through to arrive at her answers if she expected to win honor prizes at the end of the term. Amelia didn’t care about the honors: she knew she could work the problems in her head, and it was a waste of time to put the steps down on paper.

Early in her life Amelia revealed a mind that was inventive, original, and stubborn. She was bright and inquisitive about everything. Her parents encouraged her interest in books and took turns reading aloud from Scott, Dickens, George Eliot, and Thackeray. The reading habit became ingrained, and later, when Amelia and Muriel helped in the housework, instead of both of them doing it together, one would read while the other worked. One of Mr. Earhart’s favorite games with his girls was to spring words on them which they had to define without running to a dictionary.

Edwin Earhart, much like Lincoln in stern appearance and with gentle and pervasive humor, was unusually open-minded about his girls and what they wanted to do. He did not think he should keep his daughters in school at all costs. Sometimes he took Amelia and Muriel with him on his trips for the railroad--to Kansas City, Des Moines, St. Paul, Chicago--thinking the visits as educational as classes in school. He also took the girls along whenever he went on a fishing jaunt. For such things as a lunar eclipse he would let them stay up late at night. And Amelia never forgot the one occasion in 1910 when she saw Halley’s comet.

“Anything unusual is educational,” Amy Earhart said, supporting her husband’s views. And the girls, dressed in their dark-blue flannel suits and their “shocking” full-pleated bloomers, collected the unusual and did the unusual. They added toads and spiders and chameleons to the collection of Indian arrowheads. They cooked and baked at the oven outside, and Amelia, forever the experimenter, once tried to make the manna she read about in the story of Moses. She was convinced that it was a cross between a popover and angel-food cake. Whenever she was asked why she wanted to do such things, her answer was always the same: “Because I want to!” The reply may have been unsatisfactory, but she used it all her life--for her ungirl-like interest in house painting, working metal, taking mechanical gadgets apart and putting them together again, and flying an airplane around the world. These were the things she wanted to do.

But nothing was more enjoyable than the new flat sleds with steel runners that Mr. Earhart bought the girls for Christmas, 1905, when Amelia was a round-faced, towheaded girl of seven. As soon as she heard that the hill nearby was covered with snow, she rushed out to try her new sled--a “belly whopper,” she called it. When Amelia and Muriel reached the slope, the other neighborhood girls were sitting on their old-style upright sleds with wooden runners. Amelia noted that her sled was much more practical; it was a sled you could steer this way and that. She made a running start and thumped onto the sled. Down the steep slope of the hill she swooped, blinking, her wet eyes whipped by the icy wind, feeling the cold rush into her nostrils. Suddenly a junkman’s cart labored out of a side street at the bottom of the hill. Amelia shouted to the driver, but he did not hear. The horse, plodding carefully across the icy patches on the road, had blinders on and could not see her. It was impossible for Amelia to stop and too dangerous for her to go off the side of the road into the ditch. With presence of mind born of necessity, she coasted on straight, then carefully guided the sled by the steering bar up front, and shot through the underside of the horse, between his front and back legs. The tomboy way to sled had saved her life.

Despite the disapproval of his mother-in-law, Mr. Earhart continued to give his girls what they wanted to play with, and they wanted to play with footballs, baseballs, and basketballs.

Amelia loved strenuous games and she tried them all. She rebelled at the idea that they were not proper exercise for girls. That made her nearly as mad as some of the stories she read: the heroes were always boys. “Exercise of all kinds gave me intense pleasure,” she said later in her life, after she had become an accomplished equestrienne. “I might have been more skillful and graceful if I had learned the correct form in athletics. I could not get any instruction, so I just played and acquired a lot of bad habits.” She had always wanted to ride a horse, and she would climb onto the back of any nag that stopped in front of her house for a delivery. The most fun was riding the heavy-footed sorrel that pulled the butcher’s wagon. He bucked with devilish determination for no reason at all, and Amelia was often unseated.

Her favorite horse was a neighbor’s mare named Nellie. Nellie’s owner kept her in a small, hot, confining shed near the Otis property. Whenever Nellie, tormented by flies, would kick her heels at the sides of the shed, her owner would beat her with a buggy whip. Amelia hated the neighbor for his cruelty, and often tried to calm the horse with cubes of sugar before Nellie’s clattering and banging aroused her master.

One day, in the summer of 1906, Amelia and Muriel watched the neighbor saddle and mount Nellie. The girls glared as the rider reined his horse in tight. They followed horse and rider as they moved into the street. Suddenly Nellie reared and bucked high into the air. The owner shouted, cursed, and beat the animal with his riding crop. Nellie reared again and bucked higher. The owner tumbled off and fell to the ground in a wild heap. Nellie galloped off to the end of the driveway, then raced to the foot of the street, to the narrow bridge over a little stream. The horse was cornered and bewildered. In defiance she jumped over the railing of the bridge into the rocky stream below. The next day the broken body of the horse was found near the milldam a mile below the bridge.

It was an experience Amelia never forgot, and in later years she loved to read Vachel Lindsay’s poem, “The Bronco That Would Not Be Broken of Dancing.” It always reminded her of Nellie.

Amelia greatly admired spirited animals, and perhaps even as a young girl she learned something of her own nature from them. There was much of the untamed and the unrestrained in herself and she resented what she considered unnecessary restrictions.

In 1907 her family moved to Des Moines, Iowa, and she saw her first airplane. She remembered the exact day she saw the plane; it was at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, on July 24, her ninth birthday.

Amelia and Muriel were enjoying the merry-go-round and the pony rides, but Mr. Earhart was impatient to see the airplane, which, it had been advertised, was going to give a demonstration flight. Ever since he had read about Wilbur and Orville Wright, who only four years ago had flown successfully from the sand dunes at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Edwin Earhart had wanted to see a plane, especially see one fly. But his daughters wanted another pony ride, and after that he had to buy them some paper hats. Mr. Earhart obliged, but only after they promised him they would go directly to the flying field.

Later, Amelia remembered looking beyond the fence to the airplane. She thought it was an ugly thing of rusty wire and wood. It had two wings, one above the other, and between the wings at the center a man sat with goggles over his eyes and with his feet on a crossbar. Just behind the man was a motor with a big wooden propeller. The tail looked like a large box kite. An assistant spun the propeller. The motor sputtered. Slowly the plane rolled over the ground on its small wheels; then it moved faster. All of a sudden it rose into the air.

A woman who was standing beside Amelia took her arm and said, “Look, dear. It flies!” But Amelia was more interested in the ridiculous paper hat she was wearing, which looked like an inverted peach basket and had cost fifteen cents.

5. _Over the Atlantic_

AE shook her head and looked out the small square window in the side door of the _Friendship_. She wondered what the implications were of her nine-year-old disinterest in that early airplane. Certainly now, as she had for many years, she hated hats and loved airplanes. Why the exact opposite in attraction repulsion, why the substitution in meaningful symbols, why the clean and clear-cut reversal? She did not trouble herself for the answers; she took out her log and made some quick entries:

140 mph. 3,600 feet. Mist and fog, white from the afternoon sun
churn in the props. 4:15 P.M. It is cold in the cabin and colder
outside. Bill Stultz has picked up XHY _Rexmore_, a British ship,
which gives him a bearing--48 North, 39 West, 20:45 GMT. The HXY
has promised to give New York the _Friendship_’s position.

Amelia knelt beside the chart table, drinking in the color from the sun splashing on the mist, fog, and clouds. Cloud peaks tinted pink from the setting sun towered in the distance; their hollows were gray and black. The mist on the arc of the props combined with the sun into three bright rainbows. The pink exhausts from the three motors matched the pink of the cloud peaks. The plane sank in the fog to 4,000 feet. They were 1,096 miles out from Trepassey.

It was night. Cloud, mist, and fog combined. Ten o’clock. Amelia tried to write in the dark by using the thumb of her left hand as the starting point of a line. The words were uneven on the logbook but distinct:

How marvelous is a machine and the mind that made it. I am
thoroughly occidental in this worship. Bill sits up alone. Every
muscle and nerve alert. Many hours to go. Marvelous also. I’ve
driven all day and night and know what staying alert means.

Bill climbed to get over the fog and roughness. Five thousand feet. There was another mountain of fog to climb. Six thousand feet. The north star was reflected in the wing tip. Three fifteen A.M. More mountains of fog had to be scaled. Bill gave the plane all she had. Nine thousand feet. Ten thousand feet. Since Trepassey the _Friendship_ had been in the air thirteen hours and fifteen minutes, despite the four-hour advance in clock time. Periodically, Slim Gordon focused a flashlight on the compass so Bill could take a reading.

Stultz had to fly his plane now completely by instruments. He decided to go down through the fog. He began slowly, then more quickly, down to 5,000 feet. Amelia’s ears hurt from the rapid descent. Water streamed on the windows. The left motor started to cough, then the other two. Bill opened the throttles wide, trying to clear the cylinders.

Three thousand feet. The left motor still sputtered. Slim took over the controls, while Bill came back to try the radio. It was dead. Everlasting clouds were everywhere. It began to get lighter as the day dawned. The plane came down through an opening in the clouds. Everything in the cabin slid forward, Amelia with it. She thumped against the forward bulkhead. That sensation again. She grinned, then smiled broadly. The story of her life could be given in forward slides. The roller coaster, the belly whopper, the Columbia dome. It seemed that she had always been coming down from altitude, after seeking the highest point of woodshed, street, or building and exulting to the thrill of quick descent.

6. _Premed at Columbia_

Amelia studied hard and long at Columbia. She had enrolled in the fall of 1919, when she was twenty-one, as a premedical student. After having been a nurses aide in Toronto during the war, she decided to try medicine as a possible profession. She took all the courses ending in “ology,” and chemistry and physics; and she treated herself to a luxury course in French literature.

Marian Stabler, a close friend at the time, was amazed at the number of credit hours that AE was carrying. “This course she was taking,” Miss Stabler writes, “was really a three-man job, with the full quota at Barnard, and listening courses elsewhere. Apparently Columbia and Barnard didn’t compare notes, as she wouldn’t have been permitted to carry a load like that if anyone had known. She could only manage it because there was little homework or preparation in the science courses.”

But Amelia found time to give free rein to her exploratory nature. As she had adventured into the caves along the shores of the Missouri River below the Otis house, so now she had to investigate every nook of the underground passageways at Columbia. She would go down the steps to the basement of Hamilton Hall, enter through a heavy door, follow the maze of steam pipes wherever they led, and, happily surprised, come out at Schermerhorn Hall on the other side of the campus.

One Thursday evening at about eight o’clock in the summer of 1920 Amelia, seeking unusual diversion on the one night off she allowed herself during the week, decided to climb to the top of the Columbia library dome. Somehow she had managed to borrow the key that would admit her up the winding stairs.

Impatient to be off, she ran up the long, wide steps in front of Low Library. She brushed past the bronze statue of Alma Mater and puffed up more steps to the library door.

Once inside, she walked past the check-out desk and around to the northwest flight of stairs. She climbed the steps to the fourth floor, and came out on one side of the rotunda. There before her on the north parapet were the more than life-size statues of Euripides, Demosthenes, Sophocles, and Augustus Caesar. She turned to the door and unlocked it.

She took the steps of the spiral staircase two at a time. She pushed open the door and entered onto the narrow walkway at the base of the dome. Gripping the railing that went around the top, she took a deep breath. The view was marvelous, but not so good as it could be at the very top. She now crawled on her hands and knees up the smooth rounded arches to the peak.

Sitting there and looking out over the city which was veiled in the half light of dusk, she felt a warm excitement spread through her body; then suddenly coupled to the warmth, as she caught sight of Alma Mater far below, a quick chill pierced the base of her spine. She grinned: this same mixture of feelings had gripped her before. She had them as a girl when she first tried the roller coaster and when she had coasted down the hill on the belly whopper and nearly hit the junkman’s horse. And in Toronto, when she thrilled to the sight of the pilots taking off in the snow and was suddenly seized with fear. It was a question of which feeling would overcome the other.

As before, she waited for the warmth to overtake the chill; then calmly she drank in the view of New York at night as lights turned on against the enveloping darkness. To the left on Amsterdam Avenue was an angel perched against the sky on the highest point of the cathedral of St. John the Divine. Trumpet raised, the angel sounded a flourish of unheard celestial music to unhearing earthly ears below.

To the right, Broadway stretched downtown into the night as far as she could see. She swung around on the peak and looked up the Hudson to the dock at 125th Street. The ferry was on its way across to New Jersey.

The ferry made her think of Sundays when she liked to ride across the river and go for hikes along the Palisades. It was as much fun as Atchison had been. Now Atchison was all over. Grandfather and Grandmother Otis had died and the property had been sold. Amelia’s father and mother were now living in California; they had been urging her to come out there so they could be together. Mr. Earhart had left the railroad and gone into private practice, first in Kansas where he was eventually raised to a judgeship, and now in Los Angeles where with a partner he had opened a law office. “Dear Parallelepipedon,” her father’s last letter had begun. Perhaps the big word for a solid of six sides was both a description and a prediction. In later life she looked on herself as having been successively student, nurse, teacher, social worker, clothes designer, and ultimately flier.

She would like to see California, she mused. Columbia had been interesting, but she didn’t feel that she really wanted to be a doctor, after all. She had liked the courses as such, and the lab work. And she had enjoyed feeding orange juice to the white mice and dissecting the cockroaches. But visions of the practical application of medicine, the actual dressing of wounds and the sewing of stitches, sickened her.

For a few more minutes she sat on the top of the dome and breathed deeply of the clear night air. Then she slid down to the walkway, opened the door, and clattered down the metal spiral staircase.