National Amelia Earhart Day
Courage“Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.The soul that knows it not, knows no releaseFrom little things;Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hearThe sound of wings.How can Life grant us boon of living, compensateFor dull grey ugliness and pregnant hateUnless we dareThe soul's dominion? Each time we make a choice, we payWith courage to behold the restless day,And count it fair.”—Amelia Earhart, c. 1928,as quoted in Amelia: My Courageous Sister, p. 74by Muriel Earhart Morrissey and Carol L. Osborne (1987)Amelia Mary Earhart is known for many things, most notably (obviously) her mysterious disappearance over a remote, equatorial part of the Pacific Ocean in 1937. Since her initial promotion to celebrity status by her soon-to-be husband, George Putnam (yeah, grandson and namesake of that Putnam), Amelia has captured the imaginations of millions. Sadly, much of that imagination has focused on her disappearance and death, to the detriment of celebrating her life. And y’all know I’m a sucker for a mystery—I get it—but still… we’re missing out on the best parts of her story.Born on July 24th, 1897 in Atchison, Kansas, Amelia was the eldest of two living children; she and her younger sister, Grace Muriel—nicknamed “Pidge” and later went only by Muriel—were adventurous kids. Raised a bit unconventionally—their mother reportedly being uninterested in raising “nice little girls”—the Earhart girls, in knickerbockers, climbed trees and collected worms and otherwise found ways to get dirt under their nails and grass stains on their clothes. When she was 7, Amelia, along with Muriel, their uncle, and a kid from the neighborhood built a ramp and (rickety) track inspired by a rollercoaster she’d seen at the St. Louis World’s Fair. They attached it to the roof of the family tool shed and greased the tracks with lard—Amelia took the first turn and she walked away from that first …flight with a torn dress and a bruised lip, exclaiming to her sister, “Oh, Pidge, it’s just like flying!” Their mother demanded it be destroyed.
1963 United States Post Office Department postage stamp, image is in the public domain
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Their parents’ tumultuous relationship, owing in no small part to their father’s alcoholism, meant that Amelia and Muriel spent much of their childhoods and teen years bouncing around the Midwest with stints in Iowa and Minnesota, in addition to their time in Kansas. Later, once their parents separated, they moved with their mother to Chicago, where Amelia searched for the high school with the best science program; she graduated from Hyde Park High School in Chicago in 1916. She spent one semester in junior college, dropping out after visiting Muriel in Toronto over Christmas break; after seeing wounded soldiers returning from the battlefields of WWI during her visit to Toronto, she decided to stay, go through Red Cross training to become a nurse’s aide, and began work as a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment at Spadina Military Hospital. It was while listening to the stories of returning pilots that Earhart’s interest in flying was truly sparked.
Original photo by Brent Connelly
The influenza pandemic of 1918 struck Toronto while Earhart was working at Spadina, where she became a patient when she fell ill with the flu, which caused her to develop pneumonia and maxillary sinusitis. The latter ended up a chronic issue that impacted her flying, often appearing on the runway with a bandage on her cheek hiding a drainage tube. During her year-long convalescence, Earhart studies mechanics, read poetry, and learn to play the banjo. Around the end of her convalescence, she went with a friend to the Canada National Exhibition in Toronto and attended an air show. To best see the show, they watched from an isolated field where a pilot dove at them several times to see them scamper but Amelia held her ground:
Original photo by Calvin Tatum
At the end of that year, having left the medical program at Columbia University and rejoined her reunited parents in California, Earhart went in the air for the first time. She and her father went to an “aerial meet” at Long Beach’s Daugherty Field; she asked her father to inquire about passenger flights and flying lessons and he booked her a flight—10 minutes for $10 (and those are 1920 dollars, today it would be a 10 minute flight for $152.55. Hell, that’ll get me round trip flights to my sister’s and back on Southwest.)—with Frank Hawks: “By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground I knew I had to fly.”
Frank Hawks not only earned fame as a racing pilot but also as part of the 3-man team that performed the first in-air refueling. *A possibly pedantic note on the video: the video says that Hawks and Daugherty were not military pilots and they weren’t, at the time. Both Hawks and Daugherty had been flight instructors in the military, Hawks for the Army and Daugherty for the Army Reserves.
Earhart worked a number of odd jobs—truck driving, stenography, photography—to save money for flying lessons with Neta Snook, a groundbreaking aviatrix in her own right who held several “firsts” among female pilots. Snook took Earhart up for her first lesson on January 3, 1921. Six months later, on her 25th birthday, Amelia bought—against Snook’s advice and with her mother’s and Muriel’s financial support—a yellow Kinner Airster that she nicknamed “The Canary.” In December of 1921, Earhart passed the qualifications for an international pilot’s license, though, for some reason or another, she didn’t receive her license until May, 1923 but that didn’t keep her out of the air. In October 1922, Earhart set the first of her many records—highest altitude for a female pilot—at an air circus at Los Angeles’ Rogers Air Field with her parents and sister in attendanceFollowing her parents’ divorce in 1924, she drove her mother on a meandering transcontinental trip that saw them settle in Boston. Unable to afford tuition to continue studying at Columbia, Amelia found work in Boston, first as a teacher and then—and this is my very favorite thing about her—as a social worker. And a damned good one: she was considered “one of the most promising social workers of her generation.” Hired on at Denison House—Boston’s oldest settlement house, Earhart worked primarily with immigrants, many of whom “were struggling under new anti-immigration policies… The quota law, as it was informally known, broke up families, preventing wives and children who were from the undesired lands from joining husbands and fathers in America.” She taught English to Syrian and Chinese men and women, she helped organize clubs for women, drove sick kids to the hospital, and taught girls to play basketball and to fence. Eventually, she moved to Denison House to be available at all hours—a decision that culminated in the dissolution of her tenuous engagement at the time to Sam Chapman who held firm ideas about where wives belonged (hint: it wasn’t at work), which Amelia knew she could not abide.
unknown author/photographer, photo is in the public domain
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Even as she threw herself into social work, Amelia’s interest in flying was never far from her mind. She joined and, eventually, became vice president of the Boston chapter of the American Aeronautical Society. She wrote a regular column for Cosmopolitan where she discussed her thoughts about aviation and encouraged women to become pilots. She managed to merge her two passions, aviation and social work: in one notable case, she went as far as borrowing a plane and dropping advertisements for a Denison House benefit out of the cockpit as she flew over Boston. As she became a local celebrity and gained a bigger voice in local and aviation communities, she started laying the ground work for establishing organizations for women pilots: those efforts came to fruition in the form of The Ninety-Nines—she was elected to be and served as the organization’s first president in 1931—which is still going strong today, nearly 100 years later.Of course, it was while she was working at Denison House that she received the phone call from Captain H.H. Railey inviting her to become the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean by plane. She would make that flight as a passenger aboard a plane named “Friendship.” Four years later—after flying herself back and forth across the country and giving lectures and writing a book and getting married (and, y’all, this letter to GP on the day of their wedding, boss-level)—on May 20, 1932, she crossed the Atlantic again, this time as a pilot and flying solo. Of course, from then on, she’d break numerous records for solo flights, give more lectures, become friends with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, fly competitively, speak out about women’s rights, and just generally be the “First Lady of the Air.” That’s not to say there weren’t other aviatrixes breaking records and taking names—there were plenty—but she was “the right kind of girl” (read: first and foremost, white—even if she’d still been alive, Bessie Coleman was not going to get that phone call), a good publicist, and was media savvy. And, I don’t say that to diminish her accomplishments because they were many and they were outstanding; she just had some big things going in her favor.
Original photo is in the public domain.
Her skills and courage in the cockpit are certainly worth celebrating. She knew the risks of flight, of being someone who pushed the boundaries of what is possible and she had the gumption to leap for it anyway—it’s that joyful, hopeful, courageous, recklessness that continues to capture our imaginations. But the way she touched people’s lives in that military hospital, with her books, while she was at Denison House, while on her lecture tours, while writing for Cosmo is every bit as much worth celebrating. Her sense of justice and fairness, her artistic sensibilities, her boundless curiosity, and her belief that we—as a society—could be better, more equitable are just as important and very much go hand-in-hand with the joyful, hopeful, courageous, recklessness.
