Chapter VI: Part TWO: The World of Flight (1)

1. _Wealth and Independence_

The accident of sex made Amelia Earhart front-page news. After her arrival in New York, she received thousands of letters, telegrams, and invitations. They grew in piles about her feet. Some of the letters hailed her as a “gallant pioneer”; others called her a “foolhardy nitwit.” Those that began, “The presence of your company” had to be accepted or refused.

Thirty-two cities asked the three fliers to visit them. Overnight Amelia became the native daughter of Boston, Kansas City, Chicago, Des Moines, Los Angeles, but she still claimed the place where she was born, Atchison, Kansas, as her native city. Taking the advice of Hilton Railey, GP, and others, the heroes of the hour decided to accept the invitations of New York, Boston, and Chicago.

The receptions were wild, frantic, tumultuous. The American people gave the fliers the same thunderous acclaim they had given Charles Lindbergh one year before. The two men and their woman passenger were showered with ticker tape and torn telephone books, and they were given the keys to each city in turn.

The festivities over, Amelia sought to retire into peaceful seclusion, but she soon realized that she had become, undeniably and perhaps irrevocably, a public figure. Opportunities were offered to her which could not be ignored. G. P. Putnam presented her with a contract to publish her account of the historic flight, manufacturers wanted her to endorse their products, and an offer for the syndicated rights to her story promised her $10,000. Amelia quietly made her decisions, and within a few months she had earned more than $50,000.

Never had she even dreamed of making so much money. She was now financially independent, and this new freedom meant that she could act and do exactly as she pleased. Yet the new wealth plagued Amelia’s conscience. If, as she painfully realized, she did not deserve the fame for having crossed the Atlantic, how could she accept the fortune that came with it?

New feelings of guilt compounded with the old. She would have to regain her self-respect by someday flying solo across the Atlantic, or die in the attempt. She could not live with the nickname “Lady Lindy” for simply having been a passenger; she, too, would have to be a “lone eagle.”

For the writing of her book Amelia accepted the hospitality of George Palmer Putnam and his wife at their home in Rye, New York. There, with the solicitous guidance of her publisher, AE studied her log of the flight and her many notes; then, slowly and carefully, she began to join one word to another. The job of writing, she discovered, took much longer than she had planned, much longer than the actual time of the flight, which was twenty hours and forty minutes. She dedicated the book, aptly called _20 Hrs., 40 Min._, to her hostess, Dorothy Binney Putnam.

Amelia had often been warned about GP; mutual friends had told her that he would not hesitate to divorce his wife if he thought AE would capitulate to his charms. But in 1928 Amelia did not seem particularly interested in any man, although she had become the center of a triangle of men that included GP, Hilton Railey, and Samuel Chapman.

Samuel Chapman, according to some sources, was supposed to have been her fiancé, even at the time of the _Friendship_ flight; yet such a commitment was denied by her, most emphatically, when she was approached on the subject by a reporter in Boston. “No,” she said to him, “I am not going to announce my engagement. I have seen Samuel Chapman since I have been here, but I have seen a great many other people also.” GP, who had been acting as a buffer between AE and the press, clearly indicated that the subject was closed.

Pressed further about plans to get married at any time, Amelia announced: “You never can tell what I will do. If I was sure of the man, I might get married tomorrow. I am very sudden, you know, and make up my mind in a second.”

Despite this comment, many years before AE had decided that marriage for her would never be an escape. Even in her teens she had observed that too many girls used it for a storm cellar, that, afraid to meet life head on, they ran from their first real problems to hide behind a husband.

Amelia had assumed an attitude of almost imperial independence; about men and a possible husband she was never sudden. It was not until three years later, and then with considerable reluctance, that she became Mrs. George Palmer Putnam. She had learned to go it alone, without any reliance upon any man. She had become, in spite of appearances to the contrary, a “loner.”

Hilton Railey, her discoverer and manager, had developed a deep and abiding affection for Amelia, and in spite of tentative signs of encouragement from her when they were in England and returning home on the _President Roosevelt_, he was still deeply in love with his first wife and had every intention of remaining that way. Over the years that followed, there continued between them a strong friendship, and it was Railey who was the first to speak seriously to Amelia about GP.

It was just before he discontinued his connection with her as her unpaid manager. During Amelia’s welcome in the harbor of New York, Commander Byrd had asked Railey for his help in financing the forthcoming expedition to the Antarctic as soon as he could break away from the _Friendship_ celebrations. A few days later, in Amelia’s hotel room in New York, Captain Railey jotted down on a piece of paper the one word “brushfire,” and gave it to AE. He told her to consider it as a code word and to use it whenever she needed help in warding off George Palmer Putnam. Amelia grinned, took the paper, folded it, and put it in her purse. She never found the need to use it.

While she had been writing _20 Hrs., 40 Min._, AE was approached for many new endorsements. The one she remembered and talked about the most, because it was the funniest, was the offer to sponsor canned rabbit; the “stunt” was to have _her_ picture on the can. A promotion which she did agree to, however, was one to help finance Commander Byrd’s next expedition. Although she was a non-smoker, Amelia signed a statement for a cigarette advertisement.

For her endorsement she received $1,500, which she immediately gave to Byrd. It was a gesture of good will that Commander Byrd deeply appreciated; later he presented her with copy number two of the limited edition of his book, _Skyward_.

While Amelia was correcting proofs of her book, Lady Heath’s Avro Avian was finally delivered. AE kept the plane at the nearby polo field of the Westchester Biltmore Country Club in Rye. She was eager to test it out. Hastily she finished making her corrections and gave the proofs to GP.

The Avian was everything she wanted in a plane. It was small, light, maneuverable, and fast; it reminded her of her first airplane, the yellow Kinner Canary which she had owned in California, except that the Avian had two open cockpits in tandem. Amelia walked across the soft, firm grass to where the plane was parked. She lowered the panel from the left side of the rear cockpit, and holding her plain black dress against her legs, she climbed in. She buckled a white helmet under her chin and adjusted the goggles at her forehead.

She started the engine and watched for the instruments to respond while it idled, carefully checking the oil and fuel temperature and pressure and engine revolutions per minute--rpm’s. She fingered the strands of pearls about her neck and waited for the engine to warm up.

AE curled her long, tapering fingers about the stick and worked the ailerons and the elevator. She taxied down to the edge of the field, carefully easing on and off first the left then the right brake as she zigzagged across the close-cropped grass. She turned into the wind, held both brakes hard, pulled the stick all the way back into her middle, then revved up the motor to check out the magnetoes. She reached up and turned the switch: the rpm’s dropped within the minimum for first the left then the right, and finally held for both magnetoes. Amelia smiled in satisfaction.

With her left hand she slowly advanced the throttle. The prop blasted back hard and loud. Faster and faster the plane moved down the turf, and she eased the throttle ahead as far as it would go. She held the stick forward, bringing up the tail, then forced the plane to stay on the ground until it fought to get into the air. She pulled back on the stick. The plane clattered noisily off the ground. Amelia grinned. This little craft soared into the air quicker than the sandpiper she had owned in California.

Clearing the way ahead, she made climbing turns to gain altitude. At 10,000 feet she looked down, then out to the left and right and to the back and front. The sky was clear for acrobatics.

Stalls, spins, loops, rolls, Immelmanns: she skillfully commanded the plane through each maneuver. She slipped and climbed and dived swinging and dancing the Avian along the reaches of the sunlit sky. The plane handled perfectly. After an hour of skylarking over the polo field she felt that she and the plane were ready for a long flight, one perhaps to California and the National Air Races.

Amelia knew that she needed much more experience in the air before she could consider herself a qualified pilot. The cross-country trip, she finally decided, should season her for all kinds of flying--over large cities, plains, and mountains. Although she had never made such a flight before, her preparations, considering the distances involved, were happy-go-lucky and without design. She bought navigation maps and made her flight plan: she would fly over railroads, rivers, and big cities whenever possible; once she arrived in the Far West and the Rockies, she would then determine what to do. Summarily she announced her plans to the Putnams, thanked them for their hospitality, and was off.

2. _Vagabond of the Air_

Once in the air and on her way 3,000 miles to the west, she surveyed the land below. It was a quilted patchwork of green and brown, and woven through it, now the thick and now the thin threads of light and dark rivers and tributaries. Even the mighty Hudson and the Palisades had seemed from 8,000 feet but the thickest thread and the deepest brown.

This was release from little things. Flat-topped beetled automobiles, toy houses, clustered beads of cities: such was the Lilliputian world of men. Cruising along over New York and New Jersey into Pennsylvania, she knew that she would have to do right by the little Avian. Lady Heath had flown it back and forth between London and Cape Town for a record 12,000 miles; now AE would have to add to that record some 6,000 miles of the United States.

She spread her map across her knees and noted the penciled circle in western Pennsylvania that marked Rogers Field in Pittsburgh, her first stop. She began her letdown from cruising altitude. The airport, she observed, had a grass runway.

Amelia dropped down for a closer look. She dragged the field, hoping to spot rocks, or holes, or ditches. The way seemed clear. She tipped up one wing in a tight turn and came around for a landing. She reduced throttle and glided in to what looked like the best part of the field. The plane started to settle; AE chopped the throttle, pulling back hard on the stick. At that moment the landing gear hit a shallow ditch hidden in the grass. The Avian swung up and over, the propeller cracked and splintered, the tail thumped to the ground. Amelia hung upside down on the safety belt. Calmly she felt along the instrument panel and cut the switch. She was unhurt.

The headlines in the morning papers, however, told a different story: “AMELIA EARHART NEAR DEATH IN CRASH.” AE read the front page, was irritated and mad. The accident of sex again. If the pilot had been a man, nothing would have been said about it, especially if he had walked away from his plane unharmed. Amelia folded the paper and slapped it against her leg. Why couldn’t they leave her alone? All this emotionalism about women fliers, as if a female neck were more important than a male neck.

Amelia went to the phone and called New York. Another plane, twin sister to the Avian, would be ferried in, so that parts from it could be used to repair her plane. The following day four mechanics worked around the clock for a day and a half until the Avian was repaired.

Dayton, Terre Haute, St. Louis, Muskogee followed in uneventful succession. Then came the towns that were small and displayed no signs on barns or roofs to tell her where she was. Not recognizing any of the landmarks and flying by at 100 miles an hour, AE noted that one small town seemed like any other. She checked her map, then scrutinized the terrain under her wing. It was no use. Each town was just another checkerboard of streets and roofs, trees and fields, railroads and highways. Frankly, she admitted to herself, she did not know where she was.

Her confusion mounted as she flew west, but at last she found an airport which, she was happy to discover, was in Fort Worth. She now decided to stay on course. Once off the ground, however, the light plane hit bumpy weather. It lurched and climbed and dived; and to Amelia’s constant annoyance, her map kept slipping from her lap. Flying the plane with one hand, she found with the other a safety pin in her handbag. She picked the map up from the floor and clumsily pinned it to her dress.

AE fought her plane through the updrafts and downdrafts. She scanned the instrument panel, then noticed that the gas-gauge needle was leaning toward empty. She reached up to pump fuel from the reserve tank to the gravity tank. During the refueling the pin loosened from her dress, a gust of wind swept into the cockpit, and the map started to blow against the side of the fuselage. Amelia let go of the stick and grabbed for the map. The plane angled into a sharp dive. Quickly taking the stick again, she pulled back too hard; the Avian went into a steep climb. The map, flapping against and over the side, whipped out of the cockpit. Amelia grumbled. Now she could not possibly determine where she was. She held her last known course, south of west, and kept on flying. She hoped that something would turn up.

Finally, to the north, she noticed a highway. It was busy with cars crawling into the slanting sun. Amelia turned the plane and followed the road, her only guide across the state; when it ended, abruptly and with disheartening finality, she was completely without bearings. The sun sank behind the mountains in the west, leaving a swath of purple haze along the length of the horizon. It began to get dark too fast for her to establish any orientation with the ground. Amelia decided that she would have to find a place to land--soon.

Ahead in the dusk she noticed some houses grouped about a solitary oil derrick. She hoped that they would yield to a small town nearby. She throttled back and eased the plane down into a shallow dive, then circled low, looking for possible places to land. There were none, and her heart sank as she thought of running out of fuel and having to make a forced landing. Then, flying over the town, her spirits revived as she considered an alternative, at once brilliant and desperate. The main street, which was blessedly empty of traffic, was long enough and wide enough to accommodate her plane. With decision born of necessity, she swung the Avian into a low, wide turn and came around, nose down, over the trees that marked the end of Main Street. Because of the high altitude of the land, the plane came in fast, but Amelia dropped the tail smartly, held the nose up straight, and stalled expertly onto the dirt road. A grin creased wide across her face as she rolled through the center of the town. She was, she soon discovered, in Hobbs, New Mexico.

The people of the town turned out in force to see who the sudden and unconventional visitor was. They were not only surprised to see a plane parked in the middle of Main Street, but aghast to find a woman seated at the controls. And when the woman flier took off her helmet and goggles, they were shocked at her appearance. The sun had burned a red outline on her face, and when Amelia looked out to greet her welcoming committee, she looked exactly like a wide-eyed owl.

Amelia climbed out of the plane and asked some of the men to help her fold the wings and park the Avian off to the side of the street. Then, as if in ironic commentary on the way she looked, she walked to the Owl Café for something to eat. She made a dinner of breakfast--fried eggs, bread and butter, and milk.

After a night of cool and refreshing sleep in the high altitude, Amelia rose early the next morning in the hope of getting off at dawn. Again she planned to negotiate reliable Main Street. Down she rolled over the dirt road for the take-off. Then the left tire blew out. AE chopped the throttle and cut the switch. She shook her head, then grinned. It seemed that her troubles would never stop. The nosing over in Pittsburgh, the loss of the map, the emergency landing in town, and now a flat tire. She laughed at her new predicament.

While the tire was being patched, Amelia went back to the Owl Café and had the same breakfast of the night before. When she climbed back into the cockpit, she felt that the repaired tire was getting soft. The men who had done the job assured her that she was in error. Convinced but still suspicious, she took off once more down the street and happily into the air.

She had been told in Hobbs that if she flew to the southeast, she would find in about a hundred miles either a river to the right or a railroad with a highway to the left. Or was it a railroad to the left and a highway to the right? Which one, they had carefully explained to her in town, depended on whether she was more west than east or more east than west. As it had often happened when she became lost in her car and had asked for the way to a certain highway or town, she didn’t pay close attention to the directions. Now she wasn’t sure which was which and what was what. She looked down for guidance from the rivers that coursed through the land, but they snaked such a confusion of meanderings that she did not know which one to follow.

Late that morning she found a railroad that led her back to Texas and into Pecos. Remembering that she might have one bad tire, she circled to land. She set the Avian down gingerly. The left wheel plopped and wobbled; the tire was flat! Fortunately the plane was light and rolled clumsily, but safely, to a stop. Amelia sat in the cockpit, looking enigmatically straight ahead. Someone asked her if there was anything wrong. She looked up and smiled, then shook her head. How could she tell anyone that she had been trying to understand an inscrutable fate?

While the tire was again repaired, Amelia had lunch with the Rotary Club. That afternoon she started for El Paso, her original destination of the day before.

Tire trouble now became engine trouble. At 4,000 feet the motor coughed, then sputtered, and finally stopped. In quick reflex action, Amelia jammed the stick forward and brought the plane into gliding turns. She looked for a place to make a forced landing. Noticing a small clearing among mesquite bushes and salt hills, she nosed the plane in and landed.

She now wondered if she weren’t having a contest of wills with some higher power who was trying to keep her earth-bound, or if she weren’t being tested to see if she had yet the skill and courage to meet and overcome any danger for the privilege of continuing to fly. She liked the second possibility better. She much preferred a challenge, for the joy that lay on the other side of conquest was far superior to any she had ever known.

Fortunately, AE had landed near a road. Cars began to gather almost at once; men and women came running to the scene of her emergency landing. The men, Amelia felt, she could handle in such a situation; but the women, with their shaking heads and fluttering moments of undue concern, she dreaded.

The plane had to be towed back to Pecos, where new engine parts could be ordered from El Paso. Slowly, at a mere ten miles an hour, the Avro retraced its course, cruelly on the ground, back to the Texas city of its morning take-off. It was late and dark that night before the plane was parked behind a garage, there to await repairs.

It took three days before the parts could come the 187 miles from El Paso and before the engine trouble could be located and repaired. Amelia was impatient to be off across the mountains to the West Coast. Thankfully she arrived in Los Angeles in time to see the start of the National Air Races and to visit friends she had not seen since her early days of learning to fly in California.

On the way home across Utah, she again had to make a dead-stick landing because of engine failure. She landed in a plowed field, and again nosed over and escaped unhurt. As in Pittsburgh, as in New Mexico and Texas, she rose to fly anew, like the phoenix from its ashes. With skill and courage she had once more conquered her adversary, the challenge.

The challenge, she had often reflected upon her luck in flying, had been with her from the very beginning, and she had always, sometimes through the workings of a mysterious fate, won out.

3. _The Kinner Canary_

In 1922, when she was twenty-four years old and the owner of her first plane, a yellow Kinner Canary, she had tried for her first record. She decided that the ceiling of the Kinner should be tested, and asked an official from the California Aero Club to seal the plane’s barograph--a revolving cylinder for recording altitude. The little three-cylinder Lawrence engine took the plane to 14,000 feet, and a new altitude record before the 60-horse-power quit. The fault, AE learned when she landed, had not been with the motor but with the spark control lever. It had become disconnected during the test run.

Undismayed, Amelia tried again for a higher altitude a few days later. She hoped this time that everything would work smoothly. The Canary climbed quickly and easily to 10,000 feet, but ran into a layer of thick clouds. At 11,000 feet she hit a driving wall of sleet, and at 12,000 feet she looked into a blinding blanket of fog.

AE now did a very stupid thing, she later confessed, one that should have cost her her life. It was a miracle that she survived the experience. Rattled because she could not tell her position without instruments and because she had no outside landmarks for check points, she did the first thing that came into her mind: she pulled the stick back and kicked the plane into a spin. She spun, down and around, winding the Kinner through the overcast until she broke out of it at 3,000 feet. Seeing the ground at last, Amelia straightened out of the spin and pulled the plane out of its headlong dive.

After she landed, she nonchalantly climbed out of her plane and started to walk away. She snapped off her helmet and shook her close-cropped head. From the edge of the tarmac one of the old-time pilots rushed over to her. He cussed her out roundly.

“Suppose there had been fog all the way to the ground?” he shouted at her, flailing his arms. “You would have screwed yourself into the ground.”

“I guess I would have,” Amelia said, refusing to be alarmed. She held her head high, turned, and walked cockily away from any further discussion about the incident. She had set a new record of 14,000 feet a few days before, and that was good enough for her.

Luck had been with her before in other accidents, the kind she liked to call the “blowout” variety in flying. Once in her early instruction with Neta Snook, her first instructor, the motor of the Canuck cut out shortly after take-off. Neta nosed the plane down for an emergency landing and glided into a nearby cabbage patch. For Amelia the crisis had produced a slow passage of time, time enough for her to reach over and calmly cut the switch before the plane hit the ground. The propeller and landing gear were smashed, but the women fliers walked away from the crash unharmed.

Another time, on a solo flight, she had to make an unexpected landing in a field drenched with rain. The wheels had stuck in the mud, and the plane up ended and nosed over. Unhurt, Amelia hung upside down from the safety belt.

In yet another emergency landing she had hit dried weeds more than six feet high. The plane flipped over so suddenly and with such force that Amelia broke away from the safety belt and went flying out of the cockpit. Again she had walked away from her aircraft without a scratch.

4. _Aviation Editor_

By the autumn of 1928, after Amelia had returned to New York and concluded her first cross-country flight, she had survived seven crack-ups in as many years of flying. But she looked back upon the solo trip with great satisfaction: it was the first time a woman had made a transcontinental flight, alone, east to west, and west to east.

The press had closely followed her adventures across the country and when she was resettled in New York, she was flooded with business offers of all kinds, many of them having nothing to do with aviation. Simply because she was a news figure, she had the opportunity to join many advertising agencies and to take part in other enterprises for which she had no qualifications.

She had at least two offers to write for the magazines: one was from _McCall’s_; the other from _Cosmopolitan_. Because AE had endorsed a cigarette advertisement, _McCall’s_ reluctantly withdrew its contract; the magazine did not at that time carry any advertising for cigarettes, and apparently did not approve of women smoking. Ray Long, president and editor of Hearst’s _Cosmopolitan_, wanted Amelia to join his staff as aviation editor. Amelia did not deliberate for very long. Realizing the opportunity she would have to reach many readers because of the enormous circulation of the magazine and the rare chance she was getting to write every month about what she knew and liked best, she accepted. She had now established herself permanently with her one great love--aviation.

Working for _Cosmopolitan_, Amelia divided her time equally between writing articles and answering letters. Letters poured in from everywhere and from everyone. Men, women, boys, girls; teachers, mechanics, laborers; inventor, realtor, office boy: all had questions and problems they wanted answered and solved. Some said:

“Do you know the name of a good school of aviation?”

“Why is the monoplane faster than the biplane?”

“I have quarreled with my boy friend and have decided to take up
aviation. Please tell me how.”

“Do you know Colonel Lindbergh?”

“I want to fly, but my mother won’t let me.”

Many of the letters AE answered in the magazine. She cautioned the young girl who had quarreled with her boy friend and advised her against taking up flying: no one should take up flying with what appeared to be thoughts of suicide! She cajoled a youngster and told him to bide his time; the day would come when he could start flying lessons without parental approval. Yes, she did know Colonel Lindbergh and his wife, but she had not yet had the opportunity to know them well.

AE enjoyed the queries from her readers, but one complaint from the younger ones made her chafe with irritation: restraining parents. “Why not _now_?” she would say to the mother who refused to let her daughter fly until she was sixteen, and she continued to ask it of any parent who had established an arbitrary age somewhere in the future.

She began the _Cosmopolitan_ articles with the November, 1928, issue. They continued somewhat erratically until one year later. Amelia sat at her typewriter and pounded out her thoughts and feelings about flying. Her own sex was often her target for the month: “Try Flying Yourself,” “Here Is How Fannie Hurst Could Learn to Fly,” “Is It Safe for You to Fly?” “Shall You Let Your Daughter Fly?” “Why Are Women Afraid to Fly?”

In the same issues other counterpointing writers sounded their convictions: “I Don’t Want to Be a Mother,” “I Wish I Were a Man,” “Could You be a Platonic Friend?” “Clinging Vine? Ha!” “I Have My Rights, Too.”

This was only part of the exciting 1920’s in America. The postwar period of the disillusioned lost generation, the new place of women in society, the Freudian explanations for behavior, prohibition, the automobile, the worship of speed, the idolization of heroes: out of such an era Amelia Earhart came and conquered.

“I Want You to Meet a Real American Girl,” wrote O. O. McIntyre in an enthusiastic introduction of AE to his _Cosmopolitan_ readers. In a day when young women went from “gin-guzzling to calculated harlotry, here,” he said, was a “wistful slip of a girl” who would be a “highly moral reaction from the inflamed tendencies and appetites which have aroused so much alarm. Amelia,” he concluded, “has become a symbol of a new womanhood--a symbol, I predict, that will be emulously patterned after by thousands of young girls in their quest for the Ideal.”

Every woman’s goal at the time was the slender, boyish figure, the flattened breasts, the close-cropped boyish bob, the long, youthful waist. In Amelia every woman found her image, cleanly liberated in the speed of solo record-breaking flight. Here was a woman who could satisfy in an acceptable way the cravings of any woman blocked at home, of any housewife chained to a husband, home, and children.

She was a product of her times and a reaction to them, too caught up in them to realize they were driving her to impossible achievement. For the present, however, she was having a gloriously good time doing what she wanted to do for “the fun of it.” And what she was doing was well within her capabilities.

In the spring of 1929 Amelia sold the little Avro Avian and purchased a used Lockheed Vega--a high-wing monoplane with Whirlwind engine. She itched to test it out. California beckoned again, not for a visit this time, but for the chance to enter a race.

5. _The First Women’s Air Derby_

In August the first Women’s Air Derby was held. Amelia left New York and joined the field of nineteen planes in Santa Monica. This was the kind of competition she liked. A women’s transcontinental air race had never been held before. It was something brand-new for fliers, judges, committees, those in charge of every point.

Early on the morning of the eighteenth, AE rolled her Vega onto the field and turned into a double row of planes. To her left and right the planes gleamed under a clear California sky. The lighter planes, six of them, took their positions in front of her. Amelia counted: hers was one of thirteen heavier planes lined up in the rear rank.

The starter dropped his flag. At one-minute intervals the planes roared into take-off. Part of the National Air Races, the women’s event would terminate eight days later at Cleveland, Ohio. Certain stops had to be made each day, and no one could fly at night.

As Amelia had done, women from all over the country flocked to take part. Wealthy women, sportswomen, businesswomen, wives, mothers; all were young; many of them pretty. Some came with old planes, others with new; some flew stock planes, others racers. All carried a few canned goods, enough food for three days in case of a forced landing in the desert.

From Santa Monica the women headed for the first stop at San Bernardino. All made it, Amelia learned, except one. Mary Elizabeth von Mack, flying one of the heavier planes, had found the landing field overcrowded and turned back to land at Montbello.

The next day, according to plan, the last woman in from the day before was the first off the ground. This prevented any lagging behind. One by one the women fliers headed toward the San Bernardino Mountains.

Following in turn, AE slipped through Cajon Pass and headed across the desert to Yuma, Arizona. Coming into the Yuma airport, Amelia crashed into a sandbank and damaged a propeller. She escaped unhurt. The other women, seeing what had happened to AE’s Vega, voted to stay three hours instead of an hour and a half, until the propeller was fixed.

Amelia loved this kind of sportsmanship. It saved time for her, she reflected, because her flying time was supposed to be counted from the starting time, regardless of repair time. Off they flew to Phoenix, where they would stay for the night.

For all the women the event promised adventure, for many danger, for a few disaster. Claire Fahy, of Los Angeles, withdrew because someone had been tampering with her motor. Marvel Crosson, from San Diego and holder of the women’s altitude record, was the only fatality. She was killed when she jumped from her disabled plane and her parachute failed to open.

One of them, her plane out of gas, went down in the sagebrush and cactus of the desert; another turned back because of engine trouble; one had to wait for a damaged landing gear to be repaired; another had wrestled with a whirlwind. Amelia, less fortunate than most because of the broken propeller, nevertheless thanked her luck that she had survived yet another crash, her seventh since she first started flying.

The days clicked by. The third day they remained overnight in Douglas, Arizona; the fourth, in El Paso, Texas. Everywhere they landed, the women, worn out with weariness, would find hundreds of autograph hunters and souvenir seekers waiting for them. The crowds thronged to Amelia’s plane more than to the others. AE despaired to hear that some of the other women had pencils punched through the fabric of their planes by the inquisitive. Her friend Blanche Noyes had discovered fire in her cockpit because of a carelessly thrown cigarette, and was forced to make an emergency landing.

At many of the fields there was no place to rest, no more than a table to sit on. At other airports there were banquets to be rushed to and back from. On the good days AE was happy to find luncheons served at the field and hotels to go to for the night. Many fields provided soap and water, clean towels, cold cream, powder, combs.

At the luncheons and dinners Amelia chuckled at some of the names the speakers used for the women fliers: “sweethearts of the air,” “flying flappers,” “angels,” “sunburned derbyists.” All they wanted to be called, AE insisted in vain, were “fliers,” and, if necessary, “women fliers.”

The press called the race “Lipstick Derby,” “Petticoat Derby,” “Powder Puff Derby.” The last one stuck and has continued to the present time.

At El Paso, the fourth stop, the women waited for a storm to pass, rather than risk some of them not having enough fuel to fly around it; for the next leg, to Fort Worth, was the longest and most hazardous--600 miles, much of it over mountains.

At Pecos they stopped for food and fuel. All the planes landed safely except one. Florence Barnes, wife of a San Morino minister, misjudged her landing roll, overran the runway, and crashed into an automobile. She was rescued, unharmed, from the wreck.

On the night of the fifth day they stayed in Wichita, Kansas; of the sixth, in St. Louis. When they landed in Columbus, Ohio, the last stop before Cleveland, sixteen of the original nineteen had made it.

The morning of the eighth day broke clear. Amelia and Ruth Nichols, her friend from Rye, had been running neck and neck during the entire race. AE had landed just two minutes ahead of Ruth at Columbus and looked forward to the last lap to Cleveland. It would be nip and tuck between them all the way. The girls started their engines and waited for the signal to move out in interval.

Ruth Nichols, poised at the far end of the runway, gunned her motor for take-off. Just as she broke from the ground, the right wing dipped, then hit a tractor parked at the edge of the runway. Amelia blanched. Ruth’s plane struck the ground, flipped over three times, and stopped in a shrieking scrape along the pavement.

AE stopped her engine, climbed out of the Vega, and ran toward the crash. Ruth Nichols was not hurt, but the wings and landing gear of her plane were smashed beyond immediate repair. The private race between the two friends was over.

Louise Thaden of Pittsburgh won the race. Gladys O’Donnell, the mother of two children, from Long Beach, came in second. AE, just nosing out Blanche Noyes, was third. In the light-plane class, Phoebe Omlie was the winner.

6. _Developing Air Lines_

The race had whetted Amelia’s competitive appetite, although the event, generally, had annoyed her because of the unnecessary excitement and trouble which the women fliers had caused. She would have preferred a straight and simple race, one in which she could have competed, without fanfare, with men. This last possibility was out of the question for the time being; she turned, therefore, to establishing some speed records of her own. The Vega had yet to prove its mettle at full throttle.

In November of that same year AE set the new speed record for women over a one-mile distance; and a few months later she established the international speed record for women over a 100-kilometer course.

In her fever of activity, Amelia now turned from competitive flying and magazine writing to developing air lines. With a characteristic burst of initial energy, she plunged into first one then another aspect of air-line operation, first with one organization then with another. But, as with nursing and medicine, and as at Columbia when she was too impatient to follow a prescribed course of study, she soon tired of the new activities. There was no occupation on the ground that could hold her interest for long.

Her destiny, she knew, lay in the air; but she would have to continue getting more and more flying time before she could finally break the ties with mundane pursuits. Working for an air line at least offered chances to fly, even if it meant paying for the privilege by trying to sell aviation to stubborn women.

Mothers and wives, Amelia was to complain later, were the great stumbling blocks in her attempt to convince the American public that flying was safe. It seemed that sons and daughters and husbands were willing to take to the air, but a matriarchal opposition barred the way. As she had used her arguments writing for _Cosmopolitan_, so now AE used them again in speaking tours for the cause of aviation in general, and for Transcontinental Air Transport, the air line she represented, in particular.

Amelia flew from point to point on the Ludington Line of TAT and delivered her talks to women’s groups. Often her mother would go along with her. AE would point to her mother seated at the speaker’s table and indicate her proof: if mother and daughter could fly together, the air was as safe for any woman and her family as the highway and the railroad. Gradually women began to be sold.

Working on TAT with Amelia were two young men, Paul Collins and Gene Vidal. They had many progressive ideas about the running of an air line and were anxious to put them into operation in their own business. They took AE into the new organization with them as a vice-president.

As she had before, Amelia worked primarily with the women passengers, finding them, quieting them, convincing them. Again she made many lecture tours. She always began her speeches by asking for a show of hands from those who had flown. The career women invariably won out over their less daring sisters from a college group or a women’s club.

Difficulties of all kinds were encountered in the running of the line. Irate customers, usually women, complained to Amelia about cabin temperatures that were either too high or too low. Would the plane please stop bumping? Did they have to fly into air pockets? One passenger insisted that she would not pay extra for her thirteen pieces of luggage; after all, the trains did not set any silly limits at thirty pounds. A woman bought a ticket for herself and what she said was a small lap dog: Amelia insisted that the woman sit in the same seat with the lap dog, which, it turned out, was the size of a small pony. At another time the same seat was sold to two different people. Frequently passengers were grounded by the weather and had to be turned over to the railroads.

Amelia soon fidgeted with an unrest to try something else. The right to fly at no cost on the air line was too expensive for her energies when she had to pay for the privilege with so many irritations on the ground. If she could fly _and_ earn money at the same time, she could then build up her hours in the air and yet realize enough funds, finally, to back her contemplated solo across the Atlantic. The dual opportunity came in the form of the newest experiment in aviation, the autogiro.

For AE, the forerunner of the helicopter was a challenge to her flying skill. In 1931, to the surprise of everyone, she learned how to fly one in just a few hours, and a couple of days later she took it to 18,415 feet and set a new altitude record for autogiros. Because of the publicity she had gained from the flight, Amelia was approached by the Beech-Nut Packing Company to fly an autogiro across the country as a promotion stunt for the chewing gum. She readily agreed: the venture, although commercial, was the answer to her desire for flying time and money.

Beginning in May of 1931, and for the next two months, Amelia flew back and forth from New York to California, advertising the name of Beech-Nut painted on the side of her plane.

The cross-country flight, although unusual in some respects, was even more unusual in another. Three months earlier AE had quietly slipped away with GP, who had divorced his wife, and married him in Connecticut. And now by leaving on a “business trip,” Amelia had put the marital shoe on the other foot, that of the male, and had left her mate waiting for her at home.

For a long time AE had felt that marriage was a cage; but GP, who had begun his campaign early after the _Friendship_ flight, had finally overcome her continued reluctance. He convinced her that the cage could be attractive if the door to it were left unlocked and open.

The marriage was marked by an interesting public reversal of roles. Not unlike an anxious woman who has been left behind, George waited for Amelia to finish her new adventure in the air. He worried about her. She had already sustained one accident in Texas, and had complained about the accounts of it in the press as much as any righteously indignant male.

“A fatal accident to a woman pilot,” she wrote, “is not a greater disaster than one to a man of equal worth. Feminine fliers have never subscribed to the super-sentimental valuation placed upon their necks. I am sure they feel they can endure their share of misfortune, whatever it be, as quietly as men.”

When Amelia was heading back East on her trip, GP went to Detroit to meet her. She had been scheduled to appear at the State Fair Grounds, where she was going to give a demonstration flight with the autogiro. Waiting for her, George stood on the outside of a circle which had been marked off for AE to land in. Close by stands had been erected, and from them long support wires had been stretched and staked into the ground. GP talked with a group of people who had gathered.

“Here she comes!” someone shouted, pointing over GP’s shoulder.

George Putnam turned his head and saw the giro, whirling and clattering above the treetops. Assured that everything was as it should be, he resumed his conversation.

Then he heard a loud crash. GP spun around. The giro lay broken in a cloud of smoke, the rotor blades cracked and splintered, the landing gear smashed.

He ran toward the wreck. Ignoring the ground beneath him, he struck one of the support wires. He flew up, over, and down, and hit the ground flat on his back.

Amelia emerged from the accident without injury. When she saw her husband sprawled on the ground, and apparently hurt, she ran to him. She saw that he was winded but otherwise, it seemed, in good condition.

“So flying _is_ the safest, after all!” she teased him. “If you had been with me, you wouldn’t have been hurt.”

GP turned to get up. His face creased in pain.

He had cracked three of his ribs.

7. _George Palmer Putnam_

George Palmer Putnam II was a man of many accomplishments. Because of his highly active and extroverted nature, people either liked him or disliked him. No one who knew him felt an apathetic indifference toward him.

Newspaperman, mayor, publisher, explorer, author, promoter, manager, publicity man extraordinary, he was tall, good-looking, aggressively masculine, brilliantly informed, and he married some of the most charming women of his day. (GP’s four wives were Dorothy Binney, Amelia Earhart, Jean Marie Cosigny, and Margaret Haviland.) In appearance he was deceptive: he looked like an intellectual, a scholar, a college professor, perhaps because of the rimless glasses that he wore; yet he was very much the man of action, the man of constant activity in many fields at the same time.

“Lens louse,” photographers later dubbed him, as he managed to get into picture after picture with Amelia. He loved the limelight and as much publicity for himself as he could manage, yet he would do many charitable things for people which he would absolutely forbid them to mention. “The meanest,” some called him; others said, “The kindest.”

Born in 1887 into a family of wealth and position, George Putnam was a gentleman, a _gentle_ man, yet was capable of an irritability easily aroused by what he considered stupidity in others. He was capable with the right provocation of changing from a person of charm and grace into one of explosive anger and violent fury.

In his lifetime GP wrote ten books in his spare time. He could produce a book “with his left hand,” while with his right he went about his daily business of publishing and promoting. His books reflected his many interests: four on travel, four biographies, and two novels. With the eye of a close observer he recorded a perceptive understanding of the land and the people of Central America, the Oregon country, the Arctic, and Death Valley. His ability to see through the deceptive surface and into the reality of his own life and the lives of others produced the biographies of Salomon August Andrée, the gallant Swedish aeronaut; of Amelia Earhart, his famous wife; of Captain Bob Bartlett, “the mariner of the north”; and _Wide Margins_, the story of his own life. Combining his knowledge of people and places, he wrote the novels _Duration_, about an older man and his son, who are both involved in World War II, and _Hickory Shirt_, which is laid in the Death Valley of 1850.

Frequently charming, kind, generous--anything but the tough guy he wanted people to believe he was--George Palmer Putnam would rather be hanged than have anyone discover he was soft behind the hard shell. Typically, he was ever quick to respond to distress in others.

Blanche Noyes, a famous woman flier, who is now chief of the Air Marking Staff, National Aviation Agency, remembers the George Putnam who didn’t want to be found out. She writes:

The thing that I shall always remember of “G.P.” was my first
public appearance after my husband’s death, when I was mistress of
ceremonies in New York at a large luncheon, at which time I was
to introduce these celebrities without benefit of notes. However,
this time I felt a little shaky and asked “G.P.” to write my
introductions for me, which he did, but swore me to secrecy. It was
quite annoying, after the luncheon, to have two people come up and
thank me for the lovely things I said about them, but each said
that the only thing that spoiled the luncheon was the fact that
they sat next to “G.P.,” the man they disliked intensely. I wanted
to tell them that all the flattering things I had said about them
were “G.P.’s” thoughts and words, not mine, but he had sworn me to
secrecy. Someday I am going to tell them how wrong they were in
their thoughts of this grand person....

Grand indeed. When Mrs. Noyes’ husband Dewey was killed in 1935, AE had insisted that Blanche come with her and GP from New York to the West Coast and stay with them as long as she could at their home near Toluca Lake, California. From time to time on the trip Amelia would see Blanche crying in the back seat. Husband and wife up front would whisper; then they would detour off the main highway, sometimes to see a rodeo, to see a friend whom they thought Blanche might enjoy, or to spend the night at some interesting historical spot. AE was like that, and so was GP.

When George was a boy, his father, Bishop, and his two uncles, Irving and Haven, were the publishing firm of G. P. Putnam’s Sons. In their time, George Palmer, the founder, and George Haven, his successor, were the deans of American publishing. Authors on the Putnam list were famous; they are now required reading in any course in American literature: Washington Irving, James Russell Lowell, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Cullen Bryant, Francis Parkman.

GPP II at the time when his father and uncles were running the firm had little interest in the classics of literature, either British or American. He was having a marvelous time growing up.

Like the elder Putnams, GP went to Harvard, but he soon transferred to the University of California at Berkeley; then, like Francis Parkman before him in the 1840’s, he went to the wilds of Oregon. The road was mud, ruts, potholes, and bumps; but up and beyond, as far as his eyes could see, was the most magnificent scenery he had ever seen. Rolling hills to the east, the Cascades on the west, California’s valleys to the south, and rock-rimmed ruggedness all the way to the Columbia River to the north.

Twenty-three years old, and with three hundred dollars in his pockets, GP settled in the valley of the Deschutes River at Bend. He was soon elected mayor of the town. The previous incumbent had died; he had fallen out of a second-story window of a bawdy house and landed on his head. GP had needed the job, for he had prevailed upon a young lady in Connecticut to come out to Oregon and marry him. Dorothy Binney came northwest, and became his bride in October, 1911.