Amelia Earhart (3 page)

That Christmas Amelia and Muriel decided to attend a
Twelfth Night dance at the church Amy had joined. The two girls decorated the living room and agreed that they would invite the two boys who were expected to escort them home to come in for cocoa and cookies after the dance. Fathers were expected to bring their daughters to the party and Edwin had promised to do so, but he came home too late and very drunk. Amelia pulled down the holiday decorations, tore up the paper Christmas
napkins, and threw out the marshmallows already in the cups, then stormed up the stairs to her room. She sat in bed reading until she heard the boys walk past the house, then turned out the light and put her head down on the pillow.

The flare-up at Christmas was Amelia’s last. If there was to be no help from others she would manage on her own. In March of 1914 she wrote to one of her friends in Atchison, “
Of course I’m going to B.M. [Bryn Mawr] if I have to drive a grocery wagon to accumulate the cash.”

In the winter of 1915 Amelia learned about poverty firsthand, a lesson she would never forget. Half the rooms in the Fairmont Street house were closed off to save fuel. She and Muriel walked in the bitter Minnesota cold to save carfare. Edwin was hit by a car and medical bills added to Amy’s worries. Amelia made Easter outfits for herself and Muriel, old blouses trimmed with new ribbon and skirts from silk curtains stored in the attic. Thread, ribbons, and buttons were bought with $3.40 earned by selling empty bottles she and Muriel found in the cellar. That fall, when Edwin heard about a job with the Burlington Railroad in Springfield, Missouri, he moved his family without any confirmation from the company. There was no permanent job, only a temporary one. They lived in a dingy boarding house for a month before Edwin gave up and went to Kansas City to live with his sister. Amy left for
Chicago with
Amelia and Muriel to stay with friends while she looked for rooms. She found some near the University of Chicago, the living room to be shared with two other women. Amelia enrolled in Hyde Park High School.

In the yearbook Amelia, no longer “Meelie” or “Millie,” was now “A. E.—the girl in brown who walks alone.” Her favorite color was brown, and she did remain aloof from her classmates, but not by choice. She was spurned because she had alienated most of her classmates. She attempted to have an incompetent English teacher who was deaf and rumored to be an aunt of the corrupt mayor removed from her post. The woman did not teach at all, but only sat at her desk and left her pupils to do whatever they wished during the daily fifty-minute lesson. A. E. drew up a petition demanding a change of instructor and asked her classmates to sign it. They not only refused, but tore it up, preferring their daily gratuitous recreational period. Disgusted, A. E. convinced the librarian that she had been assigned a paper that required her to spend every English
period in the library and did not return to class for the entire semester. The incident was a striking example of her stubborn adherence to principle, one that would surface repeatedly in later years.

When she graduated, she refused to attend commencement exercises and instead left immediately with Amy and Muriel to meet Edwin in Kansas City. He had discovered that Amy’s brother, Mark, trustee for her portion of the estate, had already lost fifteen thousand dollars of it in ill-chosen investments. Amy contested the will and, when Amelia Otis’s physician testified that she was incompetent at its signing, the court ruled against continuance of the trust. Once in possession of her capital, Amy made Amelia and Muriel the first recipients of this bonanza. By September of 1916 Amelia was enrolled in the Ogontz School at Rydal, Pennsylvania, and Muriel entered St. Margaret’s College, a Canadian preparatory school in Toronto. While the Earhart girls might never again be wrapped in the cozy blanket of social and economic security they knew as children in Atchison, they were to be reinstated in the society familiar to their mother—for as long as the money might last.

Amelia was ecstatic. By then an enthusiastic scholar of both arts and sciences, she would be given the first-rate education she wanted. Leaving home was an adventure, not a threat, because there had been no real home for her for seven years. They were crucial years, from thirteen to nineteen, in which she had learned that to depend on those she loved could be disappointing, to confide too much in others might lead to humiliation, and to expect her standards of achievement or honesty to be shared by her peers was naïve. Along with Amy’s money came an inheritance of determination and a strict sense of honor. Edwin’s gifts of wit, intelligence, and imagination were also hers. The round-faced little girl of eleven, in the crisp, white, high-collared dress, long blonde hair tied back by a huge bow, that uninhibited, outspoken child from Atchison, had grown up. In her place was a tall, very slender young woman who moved with the grace of a dancer and spoke softly, almost hesitantly, with a deliberate thoughtfulness. The haunting gray eyes remained unchanged. They were the eyes of a maverick.

I
n the fall of 1916 Amelia Earhart traveled by train from Kansas to Pennsylvania across a nation on the brink of entering a world war, a country beset by struggle between advocates and opponents of neutrality, universal sufferage, prohibition, “trust-busting,” and organized labor. The “new girl” from Kansas arrived on the morning of October 3 at Ogontz School, then a few miles north of Philadelphia on what is now a campus of the Pennsylvania State University. Enrolling girls for elementary grades through what would now be junior college, Ogontz was owned and managed by one woman,
Abby Sutherland.

Abby Sutherland did not record her first impression of Amelia but the new student promptly dispatched hers of the headmistress to Amy Earhart. Dr. Sutherland (the degree was an honorary one from Temple University) was “come up from the depths,” Amelia wrote. “A hard cold woman.” A few weeks later Amelia changed her mind. “She is a very brilliant woman, very impressive as she is taller than I.” (At five feet, eight inches, Amelia was a tall woman for her generation.) Attending a Philadelphia Symphony concert with Miss Sutherland and four other students, Amelia thought her “so charming that I can’t feel my first impression was correct altho I have watched her closely. She has had many
chances at matrimony because she is brilliant but she passes them all by. She has read very widely and has very good ideas about a lot of things.”

There were elements of truth in both Amelia’s positive and negative assessments. Miss
Sutherland was a strong-willed disciplinarian who had worked her way through normal school by teaching before she went to Radcliffe, where she was in the same class as Gertrude Stein and Helen Keller. Not brilliant but well read, she had a remarkable memory, quoting page after page of material on a given subject of discussion. She was a formidable person, literally as well as figuratively, and although her faculty had been exposed to her charm, which they admitted existed, they had also been subjected to imperious demands and unnecessary
meddling in their work.

If Amelia was not intimidated by Miss Sutherland, most of her classmates were. One recalled, “
We treated her like a queen. She looked like a queen. She was a big woman, very attractive and you never turned your back on her. When you left a room, you’d go up to her and you would bow and then you would bow out in a backward position.”

At Ogontz there were no idle hands to do the devil’s work, not under the regime established by Miss Sutherland. On weekdays Amelia rose at seven, participated in group prayer, and did setting-up exercises before breakfast at eight, which was followed by a walk until nine when classes began. After classes, which ended at two, she played hockey, basketball, or tennis until four, then went to study hall until five-thirty when she was allowed an hour in which to dress for dinner. Dinner was followed by more prayers, spelling lessons, and instruction in French or German. On Saturdays prayers and lectures occupied her until noon and two hours of exercise after lunch preceded more study until four o’clock. Sundays brought more prayers and another lecture. Saturday and Monday nights were free.

Although Ogontz was primarily an institution that prepared its students for further higher education, it also provided lessons in correct social behavior. Amelia described “a drawing room evening” in a letter to Amy: “Miss Pughsey’s evening they call it. She has us walk bow sit stand shake hands etc. etc.… the funniest thing was sitting. She put a little chair out in the middle of this huge room and we all aimed at it and tried to
clammer
[sic] on it gracefully. It was a scream. One of the girls landed with her legs crossed, on the extreme edge. I got on but not with noticeable
grace as there was no comment made.” A decade later these lessons would serve her well at state dinners and receptions given by royalty.

At nineteen, Amelia was older than most of the students at Ogontz. With the exception of girls whose fathers were Army or Navy officers, many came from affluent American families, along with a few from Latin America or Europe. Lacking both the financial resources and stable family life enjoyed by the majority of her fellow students, Amelia showed none of the effects of previous poverty, her father’s alcoholism, or the rift between her parents. After the first term, Miss Sutherland reported to Amy that her daughter’s “charm of manner has made a warm place for herself in the hearts of schoolmates and teachers.”

Among her new friends was a former student, Leonora Hassinger, who was visiting the school. “They are of a very fine family, the Hassingers of Birmingham. They come from New Orleans and Leonora is going to make her debut this winter altho she has been presented in Birmingham … she leaves tomorrow with her father for New York.… I may be able to go and visit her for one night at the Waldorf.”

It is difficult to determine if Amelia had social ambitions or was only telling Amy what her mother wanted to hear. Ambitious or not, she faced the realities that Amy tried to avoid. At six hundred dollars a term, school fees left Amelia with very little for recreation or clothing, a fact she accepted cheerfully, hastening to reassure Amy that these needs could be met. “I can wear an old suit with a little alteration so it will be more reasonable. I hate to spend money for things I never will need or want. I bot a pair of Leonora’s black high-heeled slippers. They fit me and I needed some.… She had only worn them since Wednesday a week ago.” In another letter she told her mother, “Dearie, I don’t need spring clothes so don’t worry about sending me money.… I know you all need things more than I.”

Her only reproach to Amy came over what she considered her mother’s unnecessary correspondence with Miss Sutherland regarding Amelia’s welfare. Addressing Amy as “Dear Hen,” she wrote that
letters “go thru the whole faculty and come to me and I just shrivel. I am not overdoing and all that is needed to bouncing health is plenty to eat and happiness. Consider me bursting, please.”

In the summer of 1917 Amelia went back to Kansas City to join her parents and then to a camp in Michigan. Edwin accompanied her as far as Chicago. In spite of the anger and humiliation she had suffered from his
drinking bouts, Amelia still loved him deeply. “Poppy was such a lamb last night I came near coming back with him,” she wrote to Amy.

Any thought of returning to Kansas City was immediately dismissed on her arrival at
Camp Grey, a few miles south of Holland, Michigan, on the Kalamazoo River. When Amy suggested that Muriel and a cousin join her there, Amelia protested vigorously. She liked being on her own, although she did not use this freedom to misbehave.

Amy did not need to worry about her daughter’s conduct, either in speech or action on matters relating to sex. Amelia was a typical Victorian-born, shy, upperclass prude. Even to her mother she did not call menstruation by its proper name but alluded to “a tendency to be as quiet as possible which came upon me in Chicago—much to my joy as I can go swimming in a day or two for the rest of the time.”

At the camp, for the first time in her life she met young men who were not neighbors or cousins and she seemed to enjoy it. There was Gordon Pollack, a twenty-three-year-old photographer whose father had been one of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Rider staff and who was going to join the aviation corps. He took a series of portraits of her. There was another young man who was “very nice and sensitive and almost brilliant.” He left camp before Amelia but suggested he return for a weekend to see her. By that time Amelia’s friend Sarah Tredwell and Sarah’s mother, who had been their chaperon, had returned to Chicago. Amelia wrote to Amy that she too would leave because “without Sarah I should not feel quite comfortable—it seeming as tho I might possibly be waiting for him and doing it purposely.”

Guarding her purse as well as her reputation, she continued to account for every penny spent, as if she already knew that Amy had no more financial sense than Edwin and was living off capital that could not last forever. The train ticket from Chicago to the camp was $3.91, her board, $9.80 a week.

When she returned to Ogontz in the fall she was elected vice-president of the class and composed its motto, “
Honor is the foundation of courage.” One of five members of the board for the new honors system created by Miss Sutherland that year, Amelia clashed with the headmistress after the latter demanded the board include faculty members. It took courage to defy Miss Sutherland. At least one teacher, Elizabeth Vining, later tutor to the children of Japanese emperor Hirohito, resigned, unable to endure her autocratic ways. Others thought her
cruel and discourteous.
Amelia won that battle and was soon engaged in another when the headmistress attempted to place a number of her favorite students on the board. Amelia maintained that the board was elected by a vote of the school, for which, “
I nearly had my head taken off when I told her the essence of true leadership was to have the girls behind you.”

The true leader also crossed swords with a number of her classmates who objected to Miss Sutherland’s banishing of sororities. When the sororities continued to meet secretly, Amelia protested. She was willing to fight Miss Sutherland’s rules openly but refused to cheat. Although the matter proved to be a tempest in a teapot, Amelia was momentarily out of favor, feeling she had “lost all my friends or a good many for jumping on them so—as very few people understand what I mean when I go at length into the subtleties of moral codes.” Very few people ever would.