Chapter VIII: Part TWO: The World of Flight (3)

Toward dawn the exhaust manifold began to vibrate badly. Then the stinging odor of gasoline filled the cockpit. The gasoline gauges of the reserve wing tanks leaked drops of fuel on the floor by her feet. Her eyes and nostrils smarted from the strong smell. From about her neck Amelia brought her kerchief to her eyes and wiped away the tears.

Daylight finally dawned. Through the dim light Amelia found herself between two layers of clouds. Her eyes burned from the ordeal of the night and she rubbed them briskly with her hand. She fidgeted in her seat trying to relieve the stiffness and soreness. She rubbed her back against the back of the seat, and pressed her feet against the rudder pedals in an effort to stretch her legs. Below, the cloud layer began to break and clear. Amelia dropped down to examine the whitecaps; from the spray of the waves she hoped to determine the direction of the wind. She decided it was from the northwest.

Out on the leading edge of the wings she noticed ice. It had not yet melted from the heat of the morning sun. She climbed a little higher, but ran into another cloud bank. Suddenly she broke into the clear; the clouds were now below her, closely packed in clear white and looking like fields of snow she had once seen in New England. The upper layer of clouds began to thin out, and through an opening came the morning sun, blinding bright against the white snow of the clouds below.

Amelia reached into the pocket of her shirt, under the leather jacket, and took out a pair of dark glasses. Through the darkness of the glasses the light was still too bright. She nosed the Vega down through the lower layer, hoping to find some shade near the water.

Ten hours of the long flight had passed. She reached for the thermos bottle of hot soup. Pressing the stick firmly between her knees, she gulped down the hot liquid food. It was her first meal since the take-off from Harbor Grace. Amelia checked the fuel gauges: 120 gallons left. Since take-off the Vega had burned 300 gallons.

Amelia looked out across the water for passing ships. None were within sight. The sunshine and low-hanging clouds persisted. Preferring the shade, she continued to fly close to the water.

She looked out far ahead. In the distance a thin line of black stretched across the horizon. Was it landfall or a front of black clouds? She had been deceived before. Then a dark object moved out from the black line. It had to be a ship; whether a fishing vessel or tanker, it was too soon to tell.

The vibration of the exhaust manifold became severe. Amelia saw that the cracked weld had melted and grown larger from the exhaust flames during the night. The engine would probably not last much longer. Paris as a destination, she now decided, was out of the question. She would have to come down on the first available piece of land.

Gently applying right rudder and stick, she banked into a turn, leveled off, and held a new compass course of ninety degrees. By flying due east she intended to hit the tip of the black line on the horizon, the tip of what she hoped was Ireland.

Doc Kimball in New York had told her she might find bad weather south of her course during the flight. The fact of last night’s experience now convinced her she must be south of course, especially if the wind had been long from the northwest.

The line on the horizon grew in contour. It was definitely a coast line, and probably Ireland. By maintaining her course she would hit it, not at the tip as planned, but exactly in the middle.

The coast came into full view below. Amelia screamed in delight; she had made her landfall. Exultant, she turned and headed down a long spine of mountains. Crowded against the peaks and knobs were thunderstorm clouds, growing and spreading up and out.

Knowing that she could not depend on the broken altimeter and realizing that she did not know the country, Amelia turned north to where the weather seemed better. She did not want to churn through billowing clouds whose roots were mountain peaks.

The new course proved a wise one. Ahead she saw a railroad, the blessed “iron compass” which in any country could bring a pilot home to a city and perhaps to an airport. Dutifully, Amelia followed the double track. The worst of the flight, she knew, was over.

Happily she tried to stretch in the narrow seat. She felt like that Greek traveler Odysseus whom she had read about at school in Philadelphia--again, she mused, _another_ male hero. He had triumphed over that sea-god who had tried to drown him--and so had she, over whatever it was that had knocked out her tachometer and altimeter, and had tried to drown her in the Atlantic.

Dead ahead on course what appeared to be a large city began to take shape. Once over it, Amelia circled in wide, swinging loops, looking for a landing field. There was none. But out beyond the city she saw grazing pastures, neat, green, and trim. One of them would have to do.

She brought the Vega down low over a pasture dotted with cows. She made several passes, checking carefully for any obstacles to a landing. The cattle, frightened by the sound of the plane, scampered in all directions. She reduced throttle and began her letdown. She brought the nose up slowly. The meadow sloped upward. The tail skid hit, then the wheels. The Vega rolled to a quick stop at the top of the slope.

Amelia shut off the switch and locked the brakes. She was weary and tired but at the same time exhilarated and wide awake.

It was 1:45 P.M. Saturday, May 21. She had flown for fifteen hours and eighteen minutes.

13. _A Real Heroine_

It was not until after she had climbed up through the hatchway that Amelia noticed a cottage at the edge of the meadow. Flying over and making her passes she had not seen it.

A man came running out from the cottage. When he reached the plane, breathless, Amelia said to him, “I’m from America.”

It took awhile for the farmer to understand: a woman, from America, flying the Atlantic, all alone? He shook his head in disbelief.

As they walked to his cottage, Amelia learned that she had landed in Culmore, Ulster, near Londonderry, the city she had circled. There was no mistaking that she was in Ireland: the accent of the farmer, and his name, Patrick Gallagher, were sufficient proof. Amelia asked to be taken to the nearest telephone.

Gallagher commandeered a neighbor’s car and drove her to The Elms, the home of Mrs. Francis McClure, five miles down the road. Amelia put through her call.

“I did it!” she said to GP in New York; then she told him about the altimeter, and the tachometer, and the gas leak, and the broken manifold.

George Putnam thanked God that she had made it safely.

Amelia then returned with Gallagher to his home. He asked her if she were tired, if she wanted to sleep.

“I haven’t slept since Friday morning,” she told him. “But I don’t feel the least bit fatigued.”

She slept until the next day.

Amelia Earhart had become what she was in the eyes of her public--the great American woman flier. She had regained her self-respect; she was no longer what she considered a “phony heroine.” The eighteen tons of ticker tape and torn telephone books that had greeted Lindbergh five years before in New York could now scatter down on her. She had paid her debt. She was now ready to play the part of a true heroine. A smooth lyrical grace, the romantic quest of old, and the chivalric spirit of adventure had now combined in the boyishly slender figure of--this time--a woman. Like the lone eagle who preceded her, Amelia acted with ease, modest self-effacement, and exemplary good manners, becoming a good-will ambassador for America.

On Sunday, May 22, Amelia left Londonderry for London in a plane provided by Paramount News. Cables and telegrams had already reached her. “We do congratulate you,” said the Lindberghs. “Your flight is a splendid success.” Lady Astor wired to her: “Come to us, and I will lend you a nightgown.” The one message Amelia would never forget was in the cable from her cleaner, Phil Cooper, in Rye. “Congratulations!” it said. “I knew you’d do it. I never lost a customer.”

At the airport in London AE was met by Ambassador Mellon. They were driven through the cheering crowds to sanctuary at the embassy. Not having brought any clothes other than those she flew in, Amelia was eager to change out of the jodhpurs and sports shirt into something feminine. After a long night’s sleep at the embassy, AE, in dress, coat, shoes, hat, gloves, and purse borrowed from Mrs. Mellon, went forth to shop at Selfridge’s and to sign her name with a diamond-pointed pencil on the plate-glass window that served as the Selfridge autograph album for celebrities.

The British conferred upon her an award that had been given to only one non-British subject before. Norman Selfridge, who had AE’s Lockheed Vega on display at his store and who was its official custodian for the time being, flew Amelia to Brooklands. Here she received the Certificate of Honorary Membership of the British Guild of Air Pilots and Navigators.

Luncheons, dinners, receptions, more awards and decorations followed. Amid all the fanfare Amelia said, “I realize this flight has meant nothing to aviation.” The remark went unnoticed; the press continued in notes of triumphant praise--except for one discordant chord sounded by M. E. Tracey in the New York _World-Telegram_: “Amelia Earhart has given us a magnificent display of useless courage.... The interest in such performances is one great weakness of the present age.”

Amelia retained her composure. “If science advances,” she said, “and aviation progresses, and international good will is promoted because of my flight, no one will be more delighted than I--or more surprised.”

For millions of people in America, however, Amelia’s solo flight across the Atlantic was not a display of “useless courage,” nor was it a “tremendous trifle.” Here was a feminine successor to the long list of heroes whom Americans had idolized and adored. Amelia took her place with Lindbergh in aviation, in the glittering gallery that included Bobby Jones in golf, Babe Ruth in baseball, Bill Tilden in tennis, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney in boxing. In an age of heroes, a heroine was most welcome.

To help manage the avalanche of invitations that had engulfed her, Amelia sent for her husband. GP sailed on the _Olympic_; when he arrived in Cherbourg, Amelia was there to meet him on board the _Evadne_, the yacht of C. R. Fairey. GP scrambled up the ladder. AE stood in the doorway, grinning in the morning sun.

“Hi!” she said to her husband, as if he had just come home from work. Man and wife joined arms and went into breakfast with the others.

She told him about her visit with the Prince of Wales. She had a private audience with him in his library at St. James’s Palace. He had pinned a dark pink rose on her blue suit, and escorted her back to her car. The prince was a pilot, but they would never let him fly solo.

“We just talked shop,” Amelia said. “That is, we did a little ground flying. I told the prince all about my flight. He was most warm in his congratulations.”

Of his guest the prince had been quoted as saying: “She is just as charming as I had expected.”

On they went to Paris. The French people were most excited by her visit, and the French Senate extended an official reception. Gallic wit glittered, turning on a pretty compliment from the modest American flier.

“But after all, m’ssieurs,” Amelia concluded her little speech before the Senate, “it is far more difficult to make good laws than it is to fly the Atlantic.”

“Ah, madame,” crackled the president, “when you fly the ocean, what you do is a danger only to yourself, while the laws we make are a danger to so many.”

At the American embassy in Paris Amelia was awarded the Cross of Knight of the Legion of Honor. “Five years ago,” M. Painlevé said at the ceremony in the drawing room, “I had the pleasure to decorate Colonel Lindbergh after his remarkable flight. And now I have the honor to bestow this cross upon the colonel’s charming image.”

Rome followed. The Italian Government invited the couple to a gathering of fliers who had flown the Atlantic. For the Italians Amelia’s sex was a problem. A woman simply did not set aviation records; she stayed home and had babies. Amelia was a kind of curiosity whom they could not understand.

From Rome they went to Brussels. King Albert and his queen received them at their summer home in Laehen. Amelia loved the easy affability of the king and his dainty wife. They lunched, talked about flying, and took snapshots of one another. For Amelia there was yet another decoration, the Cross of the Chevalier of the Order of Leopold.

On June 15 they sailed for home. Aboard the _Ile de France_ AE rested for the ordeal ahead in New York. When she arrived, the city clasped her to its breast: she was their heroine, and thousands cheered her as they had Lindbergh.

The climax of all receptions came on June 21, 1932, when AE had the gold medal of the National Geographic Society presented to her by President Herbert Hoover. In contrast to the warmth of the royal reception in Brussels, the atmosphere of the dinner at the White House was formal and cold.

After dinner they removed to Constitution Hall for the actual ceremony. The President rose to a respectful silence and made his address.

It is a great pleasure to come here and share in your honoring of
Mrs. Amelia Earhart Putnam. She has shown a splendid courage and
skill in flying alone across the Atlantic Ocean.... She has been
modest and good-humored.

All these things combine to place her in spirit with the great
pioneering women to whom every generation of Americans has looked
up, with admiration for their firmness of will, their strength of
character, and their cheerful spirit of comradeship in the work of
the world....

Her success has not been won by the selfish pursuit of a purely
personal ambition, but as part of a career generously animated by
a wish to help others to share in the rich opportunities of life,
and by a wish also to enlarge those opportunities by expanding the
powers of women as well as men to their ever-widening limits.

Mrs. Putnam has made all mankind her debtor by her demonstration
of new possibilities of the human spirit and the human will in
overcoming barriers of space and the restrictions of Nature upon
the radius of human activity.

[The President turned to Amelia] The nation is proud that an
American woman should be the first woman in history to fly an
airplane alone across the Atlantic Ocean. As their spokesman [he
moved to Amelia now standing beside him] I take pride and pleasure
in conferring this rarely bestowed medal of the National Geographic
Society upon Mrs. Amelia Earhart Putnam.

Amelia took her place behind the microphone. She spoke calmly in a low, well-modulated voice. “I think,” she said, reaffirming the position she had often taken, “that the appreciation for the deed is out of proportion to the deed itself.... I shall be happy if my small exploit has drawn attention to the fact that women, too, are flying.”

Later, at a less formal occasion, Mrs. Hoover added her personal opinion to what her husband had said in his prepared statement. “I often think,” the President’s wife said, “that if a girl was to fly across the Atlantic alone and so, in a sense, represent America before the world, how nice it is that it was such a person as Miss Earhart. She is poised, well bred, lovely to look at, and so intelligent and sincere.”

It was not until the Roosevelts came to Washington, however, that Amelia became a close friend of the White House. AE gave Eleanor Roosevelt her first experience in night flying, both women taking to the air in evening clothes. The first lady of the nation and the first lady of flight became fast friends. At one time Mrs. Roosevelt decided to take flying lessons from AE, and even went so far as to get her student pilot permit. But the President strenuously objected to the idea of his wife becoming a pilot, and the matter was finally dropped.

After her solo flight, Amelia could count enough awards and decorations to fill a display cabinet, but she cherished one above all. In tribute to her accomplishment the Congress of the United States presented her with the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Not content to rest on her Atlantic laurels, AE now turned to more challenges, some in the air and some on the ground. The Pacific Ocean, Mexico and its gulf, the transcontinental speed record: each in turn presented the unexpected in life that could indeed become the inevitable.

14. _Solo from Hawaii to California_

On July 24, 1934, Amelia Earhart was thirty-six years old. Mature, confident, and poised, she spent the summer of that year working in her flower garden, swimming and boating at Rye beach, entertaining a wide variety of guests. To all appearances she was calm, radiant, self-assured; yet within, the unrest of old began again.

On a day, happy yet disconsolate in the bittersweet of autumn, Amelia walked about the grounds at Rye, under the great oaks and through the paths. Underfoot the dead leaves crunched and crackled; above, bare branches hung in the crisp air, the remaining leaves hanging on, tenacious and unwilling to surrender to the wind, which was relentless in its sudden swirling gusts.

AE hooked the fur neckpiece closer to her neck, drove her hands deep into the pockets of her tweed coat, and looked down at the dust that had gathered on her flat brown walking shoes. She walked up the flagstone steps to the side door that opened on the patio, then raised her head and looked up over the tops of the trees. Across the clear blue of the sky she watched afternoon clouds scud by. Her eyelids flicked quickly over her gray-blue eyes. With a sudden jerk at the door handle, she swung inside the house.

Early that evening she showered briskly and put on gold crepe pajamas. She sat before the fireplace and read the evening paper, waiting for GP to come home.

It was six thirty when he came through the front door. AE looked up at him; she had rehearsed all afternoon what she was going to say to him; it couldn’t wait.

“I want to fly the Pacific,” she said. “Soon.”

GP stood inside the doorway, leaning against the arch. With a forefinger he pushed his glasses up along the bridge of his nose. “You mean from San Francisco to Honolulu?” he asked.

“No. The other way. It’s easier to hit a continent than an island.” She fingered the topaz link at the cuff of her long pajama sleeve.

George put his brief case and hat on the hallway table. “When do you want to do it?”

“Fairly soon. But only when I’m ready--and the ship.”

It was not long afterward that the Putnams moved to the West Coast, not so much to be closer to the Pacific Ocean, but so that AE could be near the center of the aviation industry in California.

By December plane and pilot were ready. Paul Mantz, Amelia’s good friend and a crack pilot, acted as her technical adviser. He was her Bernt Balchen on the West Coast. On December 22 AE and her husband and Paul Mantz and his wife left Los Angeles aboard the S. S. _Lurline_ of the Matson Line, bound for Honolulu. Lashed to the aft tennis deck of the ship was a new Lockheed Vega. The old one had been sold to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia for more than eight thousand dollars. The new plane, like the old, was painted a vivid red for quick recognition in the event it should go down on a flight.

When the ship docked five days later, Amelia, as soon as she descended the gangway, was surrounded by newsmen. “Would she be the first woman to fly from Hawaii to the mainland?” they asked.

Amelia bent her head to accept the lei placed about her neck by a pretty native girl. Never one to divulge her plans to the press, AE replied affably yet distantly: “I thought I would do some flying over the Hawaiian Islands.”

Not satisfied with that answer, a reporter pressed his point. “If you fly to the California coast,” he asked, “will Mantz fly with you?”

Amelia grinned, then broke into a rare, broad gap-toothed smile. “If I fly to the coast,” she replied, “I will not take a cat along.”

For two weeks she waited in Honolulu for the right weather conditions and for the sign from Paul Mantz that the plane and engine were in top condition for the Pacific crossing. The Vega had been taken to the Navy’s Wheeler Field.

Amelia made one public appearance, at the University of Hawaii, where she spoke on “Flying for Fun.” Before the speech, word of the flight had leaked out, and there had been criticism of her from the press; a newspaper had said that her radio equipment was inadequate for the long flight to California.

The night of January 2 Amelia stood at the podium in Farrington Hall, telling students and faculty about her fun in flying. In the audience sat GP, listening attentively. His wife, he thought, had responded beautifully to his coaching: she had become a first-rate public speaker. A young man came down the aisle and handed George a note. GP unfolded it and read: Paul Mantz, at the moment flying above the islands at 12,000 feet in AE’s plane, had reached radio stations up and down the mainland, and inland as far as Arizona. The Vega’s radios could send and receive, GP concluded, not the mere 300 miles leveled at Amelia in the criticism from the press, but 3,000 miles. GP sent the note up to his wife.

AE read the note aloud and grinned. She looked up at her audience. “I realize”--she spoke in a solemn tone--“that I have made a serious mistake.” The audience bent forward to hear the rest. Amelia’s mouth curled up in a half-smile. “I was born a mere _woman_,” she said quickly, “instead of a man.” The audience roared in delight.

While they were in Honolulu the Putnams and Mantzes stayed at the home of Chris Holmes in Waikiki. Early on the morning of January 11 GP and Paul Mantz went to Wheeler Field. Amelia stayed behind and ate a slow, leisurely breakfast, then went outside for a sun bath.

Toward noon a light rain began to fall, and Amelia scurried inside. By the time George returned for lunch, the rain had developed into a heavy tropical downpour. AE stood at the window; disgusted with the sudden change in weather, she watched wanly as the thick raindrops slid against the panes and outside splashed on the palm leaves and streaked to the ground. It did not seem that she would take off today.

“I don’t think it looks very good yet,” she said. Then hoping that the rain might slacken and make it possible for her to get off later, she added: “Do you mind if I take a nap?”

At 3:30 P.M. GP checked with the Navy weather officer. The forecast predicted good weather along the projected course of the flight if Amelia could get off before more bad weather moved in from the west.

George went into the bedroom and awakened his wife. After hearing about the predicted weather, Amelia decided she would try it. She put on her brown flying suit and went to the window. The rain had stopped.

At four thirty they drove out to the field to the concrete apron where the Vega was parked. Paul Mantz and Ernie Tissot, the mechanic, stood by the plane. They told her everything was ready. AE clambered up to the wing and down into the narrow cockpit.

She settled her one hundred twenty pounds onto the cushion of the seat, reached up over her head, and pulled the hatch shut. She started the engine and let it idle while she checked the dials for fuel and oil temperature and pressure. The pistons worked smoothly and evenly: she quickened to their steady rhythm. It was four forty-five.

Amelia signaled to Ernie Tissot standing by the wing. He ran under and removed the chocks from the wheels. AE waved from the cockpit to GP and Mantz on the apron.

She moved the throttle forward and taxied to the edge of the field. She swung the nose around and pointed the plane up between the two rows of flags that had been planted along either side of the unpaved runway. The Vega stood ready.

Paul Mantz dashed to the rear of the plane and removed a thick clod of mud and grass from the tail skid.

Amelia calmly appraised the scene outside. About two hundred people, it seemed, had gathered to watch her attempted take-off. She could see that many of them, particularly Wheeler personnel, were armed with fire extinguishers. The women had handkerchiefs in their hands: Amelia hoped she wouldn’t have to bring them to tears with a crash. The ground underfoot was wet and soggy from the rain. The wind sock hung limp; the prevailing northeast wind had not only failed to prevail, it was dead.

Down the runway she fixed her eyes at a point along the marker flags where she would chop throttle and jam on the brakes if she could not lift the plane off the ground. Beyond that point and the end of the 6,000 feet of runway she saw the fields of sugar cane, and diagonally across from them, into the distance, the mountain peaks cushioned in low-hanging clouds.

Out of the corner of her eye, to the left and down the field, she caught a glimpse of three fire engines and an ambulance. With everybody so pessimistic, she decided, the least she could do was try.

She opened the throttle and held the brakes hard. The plane shook and vibrated against the prop wash, blasting back against wings, fuselage, and tail. She released the brakes. The Vega started forward, slow, sluggish, heavy with the extra fuel tanks.

She could see Ernie Tissot running alongside the wing: his feet squashing in the mud, a dead cigarette drooping from his lips, his eyes flashing fear in a dead-white face. “Cheer up, Ernie!” she wanted to call to him over the noise of the motor. “It will soon be over.”

Paul Mantz stood along the side, next to one of the marker flags. “Get that tail up,” he shouted. “_Get that tail up!_”

The plane strained against the sucking mud and then began to roll, now faster, through the mud. Amelia saw the flags flapping in a wind, but it was just the opposite of what she needed; it was a tail wind. She felt the tail come up, then the plane getting lighter. Suddenly the wheels hit a bump. The Vega jumped into the air, then began to settle toward the ground. Amelia jammed the throttle full forward. The engine caught the added power, and the plane lifted slowly into the air. AE grinned. She had made it.

She climbed to 5,000 feet, swung to the right, and headed out to Honolulu and Diamond Head. She had left behind 2,000 feet of unused runway.

“If I do not do a good job,” she had written to GP, just in case, “it will not be because the plane and motor are not excellent, nor because women cannot fly.”

The letter need not have been written. The women with handkerchiefs at the ready would not have to use them. Ernie Tissot could scrape the mud from his shoes, regain his color, and light a fresh cigarette.

Amelia dipped her wings over Honolulu. Below she could see people--they looked like ants--going home to supper. At 5:00 P.M. she crossed Makapupu Point, the last of the island outposts. Out under the wing and to the right the long sloping side of Molokai glittered through a blue haze. Clouds began to gather.

She climbed to 6,000 feet, well above the clouds; from on top they looked fluffy, like mashed potatoes, and the dark sea under them like gravy.

She rolled out her radio antenna and unhooked the hand mike. “Everything O.K.,” she reported in. She adjusted her earphones, then turned the dial of the radio beside her to station KGU in Honolulu, and listened to the music.

The music stopped, and an announcer broke in. “We are interrupting our musical program with an important news flash,” he said. “Amelia Earhart has just taken off on an attempted flight to Oakland.”

“_You’re telling me!_” Amelia shouted out loud in the cockpit.

The announcer continued: “Mr. Putnam will try to communicate with his wife.” GP broke in loud and clear. “AE,” he said, “the noise of your motor interferes with your broadcast. Will you please try to speak a little louder so we can hear you?”

Amelia was thrilled to hear his voice; it seemed as if he were sitting next to her in the plane. She reported in again, louder, and George was satisfied. It was the first time they had spoken together ground to plane. The darkness outside had enveloped the Vega.

But above and below and around her the night became a night of stars. They clustered about her; she felt that she could reach out and pluck them as they rose from the sea and hung outside the cockpit. She had never seen such large stars, and now the moon slipped out from behind the clouds. The contrast of the starlight and the moonlight and the white clouds against the black sea struck her as no other night scene had before.

In the thousands of miles of ocean she had flown over before this, she had seen little of the ocean below. She had sped over clouds, fretted between layers of them, or plowed through thunderstorms, for hours on end. And ships she had seen only near land.

Now the night was bright and she reveled in its beauty. She spread her map on her knee and checked for the positions of ships out of Honolulu, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The ships on or near her course had agreed to keep their searchlights on for her. She looked at her clock: it was nearing midnight.

Off the right wing and below, against the black sea, shone a pink light. It had to be a searchlight from a ship. Amelia snapped on her landing lights, flashing them three times. Then she flicked the toggle three more times. She turned her radio dial, trying to tune in on station KFI in Los Angeles. A spattering buckshot of radio code hit her ears. She realized it was the ship, trying to submit a signal to her. Then from the ship’s lights came a rapid flicking on and off. They were answering her earlier signal from her landing lights. She checked her map again: on course, 900 miles out; the ship was--it had to be--the _Maliko_, from the Matson Line.

Below, clouds now joined, knitted, and closed over the ocean. Ahead, the stars grew misty, dim, and distant. There was blackness everywhere, and dead ahead on course--rain.

Like pins, fine raindrops hit the windshield and spread in long, wet needles down the glass. Amelia squeaked open the cockpit window and breathed deeply of the cool wet air. The rain squalls continued for the next two hours.

Suddenly she realized that she was hungry and thirsty. She reached into the little cupboard she had prepared in the right wing. There, neatly stored against hunger, were water, tomato juice, sweet chocolate, malted-milk tablets, a thermos bottle of hot chocolate, and a picnic lunch. She decided on the hot chocolate. She unscrewed the top of the thermos, pulled out the cork stopper, and poured out a cupful. In short, quick sips, she drank the hot, sweet chocolate liquid. Its warmth spread through her and she felt good.

She set the empty cup down in the cupboard; then, changing hands on the stick, she rubbed and kneaded the muscles of her thighs and calves. They were stiff and tired. She could not look upon her legs for long without feeling a deep sense of thankfulness, for they invariably called up the image of those amputees she had seen in Toronto during the war. The experience had changed the course of her life.

15. _Nurse’s Aide in Toronto_

She had been nineteen at the time. It was in 1917, during the Christmas vacation of her senior year at Ogontz, the Philadelphia finishing school, when Amelia and her mother went to visit sister Muriel, who was attending St. Margaret’s in Toronto.

On one blustering morning, a few days before Christmas, Amelia went shopping. She pulled the collar of her long, warm coat close to her neck and buried her chin in the fur against the cold. She bent into the icy wind whipping in from Lake Ontario and slowly pressed her way down the street. Late shoppers bustled in and out of the stores and up and down the sidewalk.

Toward her came four one-legged soldiers with crutches, thumping and swinging up the pavement, and grimly pressing their shoulders against the wooden supports. The sight of one of the veterans in particular greatly disturbed Amelia. He was younger than the others and he caught her eye as they went by. He had smiled at her with difficulty and in his face was the look of incredulous bewilderment, as if he had suffered his loss too soon to realize what had happened to him. Amelia tried not to stare at his empty khaki pants leg which had been folded and pinned to his hip. She forced a smile in return for his, and then looked the other way as her eyes welled up with tears.

For her, war had been simply a matter of parades and brass bands and men in uniform. She had been unaware that Canada had been at war for four years. Like so many other Americans, especially women, she really didn’t know what war was like. The crippled soldiers made her feel guilty and ashamed. She decided she must do something to help.

That night she had a long talk with her mother. “I want to stay in Toronto,” she told her, “and help in the hospitals. It’s useless for me to go back to school.”

Mrs. Earhart tried to dissuade her daughter. “But you’re graduating this year, Melia,” the mother said. “You should graduate from school before you do anything.”

“I don’t care,” she answered. “I want to help. A diploma doesn’t mean anything; but what you do does. I’m old enough to know what I want to do, and I want to do something useful in this world.”

The mother had met this stubbornness before, when as a child Amelia had wanted such things as a flat-bellied sled, a football, a baseball bat. Mrs. Earhart relented: her daughter was of an age to make her own decisions, even if they did seem somewhat impulsive. She would have to learn for herself, now, and discover the consequences of her own acts.

Amelia started training under the Canadian Red Cross and soon qualified as a nurse’s aide. Her first assignment was to Spadina Military Hospital, a converted college building. With characteristic energy in meeting a new challenge, she scrubbed floors, made beds, and carried trays of food. She worked from seven in the morning until seven at night, with two hours off in the afternoon.

“Sister,” the patients would call to the slender girl in the white coif and the white starched uniform, “please rub my back.” Sister Earhart would rub backs--some of them lovely ones, she frankly admitted. “Sister, please bring some ice cream today instead of rice pudding.” Sister Amelia, remembering the rice puddings that came back untouched, bearing little crosses with the epitaph _R.I.P._, matched pennies with the help in the kitchen. With her winnings she bought ice cream for her patients.

Although Amelia found much satisfaction in her work as a nurse’s aide, there was another activity that attracted her as no other had. At first she had looked simply out of curiosity, but now she would go out to the edge of the city to Armor Heights whenever she had time off. She had become fascinated by the training planes and the way they took off and landed. She had seen and talked with some of the young beginning pilots at the hospital; they had crashed their planes through some mishap or other, and some of them had barely escaped death. Yet they were of unqualified good humor: they laughed and joked with one another about their accidents, and spoke gruesomely yet smilingly about an ambulance as a “meat wagon.” They were blasé and devil-may-care, and such an attitude toward life and death, so kindred to her own, intrigued her.

She wanted to know more about these young men and their business of flying. Despite their surface merriment, she wondered what it was that made them fly, even in the face of death. Certainly they realized the danger involved; if so, she reasoned to herself, there must be something beyond the danger that somehow lured the pilots into the air. She would have to find out for herself what it was.

Soon she ventured closer to the airport and the operations shack where she could watch the young men. They were Canadian, Scotch, Irish, American. She talked with some of those she had seen at the hospital either as patients or as visitors. She loved to watch their descriptions of various maneuvers; “hangar flying,” they called it. They simulated with their hands the best way to execute a loop, or a barrel roll, or a lazy-eight. Their enthusiasm fired her with an irrepressible urge to go up.

She begged one after another of the pilots for a ride to see what it was like. Just a take-off and a landing, and she was willing to pay. “Sorry,” they would say. “Regulations absolutely forbid giving civilians any rides.” Certainly not a woman. “Even the general’s wife couldn’t go up,” one of them said. “And she can do just about anything she wants.”

The pilots laughed at the expense of the general’s wife. Amelia, turning away in disappointment, kicked her toe into the packed snow. A plane with skis turned off the ramp and taxied out to the field; the blast from its propeller flung back a sheet of snow that stung Amelia full in the face. She raised her arm against further lashing, and walked away toward the side of a building.

Here, she thought, was a challenge she would like to meet. She watched the pilots put on their big padded helmets and adjust their goggles. The men smeared grease on their faces to prevent freezing in the biting cold of the Canadian sky. Someday she would get her chance to fly in an airplane, and maybe fly one herself. She wanted to be the master of one of those planes and make it obey her will like a horse, a winged horse, and send it roaring through the sky. Amelia was a lone and disconsolate figure as she nurtured her private dreams and left the eager pilots and their planes to their man’s world of flight. She headed back to the city and to woman’s work at the hospital.

AE was still working as a nurse’s aide at the time of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, and at the time of the great Toronto Exposition a few months later.

Amelia and a friend joined the crowds that pressed through the fairgrounds to see the displays and exhibits. AE wanted especially to see a highly advertised added attraction: a demonstration of stunt flying by one of the returned aces of the war.

As the time drew near for the air acrobatics, the two companions settled themselves in the middle of a clearing. Suddenly they heard the plane. Shading their eyes against the afternoon sun, they looked up.

The plane was black against the sky, then red as it turned and the wings and fuselage caught the sun. The little plane twisted and turned and rolled; then it looped and spun down to the right. As the plane swooped down close to the ground, the crowd broke and ran like frightened deer.

The friend grabbed Amelia’s arm; she wanted to get out of the field, fast. Amelia stood her ground. The companion fled for safety.

Nose down and motor roaring, the plane hurtled headlong in a steep dive toward the lone girl in the middle of the clearing.

Amelia gripped her hips, spread her feet and planted them defiantly on the ground. No plane and pilot were going to scare her. She had seen them pull out of dives many times before. Certainly this pilot was no fool, and he seemed to have the plane fully under control.

The plane, a bare 200 feet from the ground, roared out of its dive, wings and struts shaking, and climbed in a tight half-loop back into the sky; now on its back, the plane kicked over in a half roll, then sped away, a disappearing speck on the horizon.

Amelia hadn’t moved an inch. And because she had faced it in that moment of danger, the plane had said something to her--something thrilling and buoyant and exhilarating. There was now no question that someday she, too, would fly. And it didn’t matter if she was a woman. Someday she would get her chance.

16. _Back Home Again_

Amelia shook her head and rubbed her eyes. After staring at her instruments and following them during the night, she looked forward to the dawn. She had missed it on the Atlantic solo because of the clouds. There was still time, she knew, before light could crack through the darkness of the eastern horizon. Like a window with the panes painted black, it was closed shut.

She felt warm and cozy in the small cockpit. She yawned. Easily she held the stick between her legs and thighs, then reached her arms high and stretched, working her long fingers open and shut. She took the stick again with her right hand, brought her feet up from the rudders, then pressing her heels on the floor, she sat up and down in quick, short jumps.

Resettled on the cushion of the seat, she scanned her instruments, then looked out. To the right, a thin line of light lay on the dark horizon. She looked up through the hatch: the stars were gone. Slowly, well to the right of course, the top arc of the sun appeared. Amelia was puzzled: she should be flying into the sun. She wondered if she weren’t heading for Alaska. She quickly checked her maps and charts, then the compass before her on the left. Everything was as it should be. Obviously, then, the sun was wrong and she was right.

From the compartment in the left wing, where she kept her small tools, an extra flashlight, spare batteries, and other odds and ends, she took out her sunglasses and hooked them behind her ears. She wanted to be ready for the full brilliance of the morning sun.

Through the dark glasses she saw below her a solid overcast of clouds. They looked like the stiffly-beaten whites of eggs, and they made her think of breakfast. She reached into the cupboard in the right wing and pulled out a hard-boiled egg from the picnic lunch.

While she nibbled on the egg, she looked at one of the three chronometers she had set in Honolulu, the one for indicating lapsed time. She had been flying for fifteen hours, and according to her time and distance figures, she should be somewhere near San Francisco--if there had been no head winds during the night. Below, the ocean was blanketed in overcast.

The fog over the water began to break up. Through one of the holes she hoped to see signs of land, but she saw only water, blue in the morning sun, ruffled, and flecked with white. Then through another larger hole, she caught sight of a ship; from 8,000 feet it looked like a toy boat. Down through the opening Amelia plunged, and pulled out at 200 feet to investigate. She circled the ship several times, and discovered it was the _President Pierce_. The wake from the ship, which stretched for a mile, was exactly on her compass course. AE followed the foam as if it were a beam.

She tried to make radio contact with the ship, but was unsuccessful. She then tried radio station KPO in San Francisco and this time established contact. She asked for the position of _President Pierce_ and was told that the ship was 300 miles out from San Francisco. Amelia checked her map and grinned: that was exactly where the ship was supposed to be. Settling back in her seat, AE cruised at 1,500 feet and made straight for the coast.

She strained her eyes for sight of land. The clouds overhead played tricks on her: their shadows on the water looked exactly like islands. Amelia now wondered if real land would look like cloud shadows.

She climbed to 1,800 feet. Dead ahead on course she saw an undulating outline of what she hoped were the coastal hills of northern California. As she approached, they were unmistakable. She looked up for the tops, then noticed a valley between them. She added throttle and nosed over the hills. Squinting ahead as far as she could see, she saw at last the familiar notch of land and water that could only be San Francisco Bay. Directly below, San Mateo rolled into view.

In the next six minutes she crossed over the bay, then sighted Oakland, and finally the airport. She had made it back home. Elated with her victory, she felt a new tide of energy surge within her, flooding out the ache and soreness of tired muscles. As she had done so many times before at Oakland, she made her approach and landed.

As she started to taxi from the end of the runway, she noticed great crowds waiting at the ramp. Then the barriers broke and thousands of people ran toward her plane. Amelia chopped the throttle, cut the engine switch, and locked her brakes. She opened the hatch and stood on the seat, and as she shook her mop of hair from out of her helmet, a deafening roar assailed her ears.

Amelia climbed down from the Vega and dropped to the ground. Her knees felt weak; her face, as if it were drained. “I feel swell,” she said, stroking her hair with a quick sweep of the hand. She held a stray lock between her fingers. “I always look this way,” she explained. “I’m a little tired--you will have to excuse me.” She was driven away in a waiting car.

17. _Solo from California to Mexico_

For the next few weeks after the Pacific flight Amelia rested at her home near Toluca Lake and luxuriated in the warm California sun. She spread a blanket on the wide lawn and took sun baths. She stretched her long, straight legs over the soft wool of the blanket, closed her eyes against the glare of the sun; then, as if she were preparing maps and charts for a long flight, she surveyed her past accomplishments and her future plans.

The _Friendship_ flight and its sudden catapulting to fame of an unknown social worker. The year before that when she had read in the Boston newspapers about Charles Lindbergh and his sensational solo conquest of the Atlantic: how she had thrilled to his victory. The “Lady Lindy” tag the press had given her because she looked like him: how it made for difficulty in trying to be herself and making her own flights. The Atlantic solo: she had to do it to deserve the fame that the _Friendship_ flight had heaped upon her. The hop from Hawaii was free and clear: it involved no debt that had to be paid. And so would the rest of her flying be. Women could fly as well as men; she had proved it and would prove it. Then when she reached forty, that fortieth year which followed July 24 in 1937, she would quit--give up long-distance flying and retire to short jaunts for pleasure. Each thought had unfolded before her scrutiny, like new stretches of countryside beneath the wing of her Vega. Amelia turned over on the blanket and tanned her back. She was not yet thirty-seven.

Not for long after the Pacific flight, therefore, did she stay on the ground or remain confined in her attractive California cage. The year 1935 became one for record-making and record-breaking. On April 19 she flew 1,700 miles from Burbank, California, to Mexico City; then on May 8, from Mexico City to Newark, New Jersey. The first flight she made because of an invitation from the president of Mexico; the second, because Wiley Post told her not to do it.

One day when AE and Wiley Post were discussing flying in general, Amelia told the veteran pilot about her plans to fly from Mexico to New York. He asked her what route she intended to take. She told him she would go as the crow flies--in as straight a line as possible.

Wiley Post strode across the room to a globe on the table. He turned it until he found Mexico, then measured the distance to New York between his thumb and little finger. He raised his head.

“You are cutting across the Gulf then?” he asked. The white patch over his eye caught the light from the window.

“Yes, sir!” Amelia answered. There was no doubt in her voice.

“That’s about seven hundred miles,” he said. “Almost half an Atlantic.” He looked at her directly, his large round face serious and questioning. “How much time do you lose if you go around by the shore?”

“About an hour. Maybe a little more.” She fingered the long string of pearls about her neck. Her voice was low and soft.

“Amelia, don’t do it,” Wiley Post said. “It’s too dangerous.”

AE was incredulous. Did Wiley Post, who had braved every hazard in flying, think such a simple flight as this one was too dangerous? She could not wait to be on her way.

It was not the first or the last time that she disregarded professional advice.

Shortly before midnight on the nineteenth of April she soared into the California moonlight, heading south and east. The light from the full moon was soft; it gently gilded the rolling hills and marked as with a large diffused flashlight the course to the Gulf of California. In the moisture of the night air the Wasp motor purred: the rhythm of the pistons was smooth and even.

The moonlight, which had been a guide, now played tricks on the earth below. A white haze had moved in from the coast and covered the shore line and the stretches of desert. In the light it was difficult to tell the one from the other. Amelia strained her eyes, looking for telltale signs to help her navigate. Now she caught the light on the rolling breakers, then a black shadow on the scalloped sand, but the short glimpses were not enough for pilotage.

She scanned the instrument panel. Her eyes stopped short at the dials on the lower right. The hand of the oil-temperature gauge pointed beyond the red quadrant. The engine was burning hot. Amelia reduced throttle, then readjusted the propeller at another setting. Neither helped. The Wasp continued to overheat.

She pulled out her flashlight, flicked it on, and checked her maps. According to time and distance, Mazatlán, on the Mexican coast, should be directly below. Gently she applied left stick and rudder, leveled her wings, and headed east. Mexico City should be 600 miles away. She stared directly before her and slightly to the left at her compass: it had rolled into the new heading.

Left and right under her wings the mountains of Central Mexico sloped upward into high tables. She found the towns of Tepic and Guadalajara. She hoped she would not wander from her course: unknown winds had a way of keeping a plane from making its track.

The Vega, cruising at 10,000 feet and at an indicated air speed of 150 mph, sped over the mountains and plains. Amelia caught sight of a railroad below. A railroad? It should not be there. She wondered where she might be.