Amelia Earhart (33 page)

Eleanor sent her a telegram asking, “Amelia, why didn’t you raid the icebox? I do.” The Victorian-raised, Ogontz-educated Amelia was very upset. She wired back that she had
never
said any such thing, only that she hadn’t been able to eat any meal except breakfast at the White House because of previous engagements, probably a white lie because Eleanor herself later recalled that she “
fed everyone for a time on the same menus that had been worked out for people on relief during the depression.”

On the road again, Amelia did a second lecture tour, in New England. After her speech to the Vermont legislature a woman who heard her wrote to Amy, “
We all thought Lindbergh was a marvel but our ‘Amelia’ has shown the world what a woman can do.” The writer, like most American women at the time, could identify with a woman who combined the stuff of dreams with the demands of reality. The comely, daring adventurer was also a married woman and “a perfect lady.”

Never one to let Amelia rest on previous laurels, G. P. was already making arrangements for another long-distance flight. This time Amelia would fly nonstop from
Mexico City to Newark. A week after the plans were announced (on a Saturday for the Sunday newspapers), William Lear, the inventor of a
radio homing compass, announced (also on a Saturday) that Amelia would test his compass on her Mexican flight. In return for “testing” the device, Amelia was hired as one of FDR’s “
dollar-a-year experts” by her old friend, Air Commerce director Gene Vidal.

To raise money for the flight Putnam persuaded Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas to approve the overprinting in Spanish on a Mexican twenty-cent airmail stamp the message, “Amelia Earhart Good-Will Flight Mexico, 1935.”
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Of the 780 overprinted, 480 would go to the Universal Postal Union. Amelia, G. P. said, would carry fifty
autographed covers, cancelled first in Los Angeles, then again in Mexico City. At Mexico City she would take on thirty-five more, also autographed, and at Newark all eighty-five would be cancelled.

Amelia had carried cacheted mail before. In 1929 when she was copilot of the first amphibian passenger-service
flight from Detroit to Cleveland, the mail was cacheted in Cleveland with “Amelia Earhart Special Pilot.” On both her Atlantic and Pacific solo flights she had carried fifty covers, autographed and numbered.

In Los Angeles, where the Vega was fitted with extra fuel tanks, Clarence Williams
charted a course for Amelia, using Rand McNally maps of the United States and Mexico for an overview and transferring intermediate positions to state maps of both countries. Amelia was supposed to calculate her position along the way from compass readings and time elapsed with the aid of tables Williams made, showing distances covered at various speeds. She also had a two-way radio-telephone but frequently complained about the inconvenience of the
trailing antenna, which she had to let out after
takeoff from a reel under the pilot’s seat and rewind again before landing. It was her principal aid to navigation because she did not know how to use a telegraph-radio, nor how to take sightings for celestial navigation. The Lear homing compass worked only within the borders of the United States, so for much of the way she would have to depend on the radio-telephone or dead-reckoning with Williams’s charts, the least reliable of all means of navigation.

She took off from Burbank on April 19, a Friday night, at 9:55. G. P.’s plan was for her to reach Mexico City on a Saturday afternoon in time for a story in the Easter Sunday papers. He had already done this for three of Amelia’s previous long-distance flights, all of which began on Friday and appeared in Sunday papers—the 1932 Atlantic flight, her 1933 transcontinental crossing, and her 1935 Honolulu-Oakland flight.

Amelia discarded Williams’s flight plan just before takeoff when adverse weather conditions were reported on the route. Instead she decided to fly south along the coast until she was parallel to Mexico City, then turn east to her destination. It was almost noon of the following day before she turned inland and she knew at once that she was off-course. “I suddenly realized there was a railroad beneath me,” she wrote, “which had no business being where it was if I were where I ought to be.”

She was already using a hand pump to restore failing gasoline pressure when “an insect, or probably some infinitesimal speck of dirt, lodged” in her eye. Forced to land, she brought the Vega down on an empty lake bed outside Nopala, sixty miles from Mexico City and one hundred miles
off her course. Villagers, “and at least fifty cowboys” who gathered around the plane knew who she was and pointed her in the right direction. A half hour later she took off again, arriving in Mexico City where G. P. was waiting at the field with the foreign minister, Portes Gil, and a dozen other notables.

Her arrival was like that in Oakland with ten thousand spectators breaking through a cordon of soldiers and rushing toward the plane, but she managed to cut the engine before anyone was injured. The tumultuous welcome was followed by eight days of nonstop festivities in her honor while she tried to prepare for the flight to
Newark.

The first and most threatening problem would be raising her fuel-heavy Vega off the ground at an altitude of seven thousand feet. G. P. persuaded the chief of the Mexican air force, Roberto Fierro, to have a three-mile-long runway built for her on the bed of Lake Texcoco.
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Mexican soldiers with picks and shovels did the work while
Putnam returned to New York to telephone weather reports back to Amelia and arrange for her arrival at Newark.

Delayed by bad weather, Amelia did not leave until the morning of May 8, when she sent word to fill the tanks of the Vega, which had been moved from the Pan American hangar to the improvised runway. Fears and doubts never kept her awake. She went back to sleep for two hours, ate breakfast at the hotel, and drove to the runway.

Dawn was just breaking when she closed the cockpit cover and waved for
takeoff. The three-ton plane was loaded with 472 gallons of high octane fuel, a potential Molotov cocktail if she were to deviate from the course marked by white flags on the runway or fail to gain enough airspeed before the end of it. She did neither. Engines wide open, the Vega roared down the narrow path marked by the white flags and rose slowly up and over the snowcapped mountains enclosing the makeshift field.

The route Amelia chose was as dangerous as the takeoff. To reach New Orleans she could either fly around the
Gulf of Mexico or over it. Before she left Los Angeles she told Wiley Post she could save an hour by crossing the Gulf. When Post said, “Don’t do it, it’s too dangerous,” he had made the choice for her. If the great Wiley Post thought it too
dangerous,
then she would have to prove she could do it. She did, maintaining an altitude of ten thousand feet for most of the twenty-one hundred miles over water, then headed north for the last thousand to
Newark.

Gene
Vidal was waiting for her at Hoover Airport in Washington.
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When she flew over he radioed, “You’ve done a splendid job, so come down.” She answered, “Thanks for the invitation. I’m going through.”

That night at Newark a crowd of three thousand swarmed past police onto the floodlit field as the
Vega rolled to a stop. Police cars, sirens blaring, inched through the throng while other officers formed a cordon around the bare-headed, smiling woman emerging from the cockpit. One of two policemen attempting to escort her to safety took her right arm and the second, her left leg, and, she said, “
the arm holder started to go one way while he who clasped my leg set out in the opposite direction.” Dragged along by this animated “torture rack” Amelia was met halfway by G. P., who had already lost his temper, shouting that compared to this crowd “the lowliest peons of Mexico were more civilized.” Amelia, who had always loathed the touch of strangers, kept right on smiling.

Eight hours later the “legitimate returns” G. P. sought for Amelia began to pour in. Publicity came first. Photographers were taking her picture while she was still eating breakfast. By midday she had been interviewed by reporters, attended an informal reception at City Hall, and eaten lunch with her friends and fellow directors of National Airways, Paul Collins and Sam Solomon. At the Newark airport where the Vega was parked in a Standard Oil hangar, one thousand persons came to see it before the end of that day.

Vidal sent her an official
message praising her “complete knowledge of aircraft operation and cross-country navigation.” He exaggerated. Her courage was far greater than either her knowledge of aircraft or of navigation. Two other friends, Helen and Ogden Reid, sent a personal telegram and ran an
editorial in the
Herald Tribune
stating that Amelia had demonstrated “how closely dignity stems from modesty and courtesy from a warm heart. The country could not have a better ambassador-at-large.”

Amelia was back at the Newark Airport five days later to christen the new
Douglas Dolphin amphibian plane (and dowse herself with
champagne while the newsreel cameras rolled and Frank Hawks doubled up with laughter). Twenty-four hours later she was in Chicago to receive a medal from the Italian government during a
conference of two thousand women’s club presidents and program chairmen—two thousand potential subscribers to an Earhart lecture.

Preaching her gospel of air travel, she made a convert of Helen Reid after both women received honorary degrees at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. Until then Reid had been a frightened passenger who also worried about her amateur-pilot son, Whitelaw. On the way back from Atlanta she sat with Amelia, then wired Whitelaw, a junior at Yale, “
Skies fine between Atlanta and New York.… Perfectly competent to do blind flying. Love. Mother.”

While Amelia was almost universally admired, G. P. was not. To describe him his critics used adjectives like overbearing, snobbish, fast-talking, scheming, and acquisitive. The press homed in on the
stamp deal that paid for the flight. Of the 300 stamps remaining after 480 went to the Universal Postal Union, G. P. was said to have purchased 240. Some were on covers. The Gimbels’ department store claimed, “by dint of great effort,” it had secured three of the 35 autographed covers brought from Mexico, priced at $175 each when Byrd’s covers from the South Pole sold for 90 cents. The three covers were sold by Putnam to Jacques Minkus of Gimbel Brothers. Irate stamp collectors wanted to know why Putnam was permitted to control most of the 300.
Newsweek
magazine claimed that 24 went to six Mexican philatelic associations, 35 to the Mexico City post office, one to President Roosevelt, and the rest were G. P.’s.
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G. P. insisted there was nothing wrong with the stamp deal.
Newsweek
countered by calling three other of his financing schemes greedy, verging on dishonest: the autogiro tours for Beech-Nut, the rumored financing of the Hawaiian flight in exchange for publicity against sugar quotas, and a radio campaign by the Mexican government to promote tourism that coincided with Amelia’s flight. The magazine claimed that while G. P. was in Mexico he proposed an even more ambitious tourism campaign for a price at which one Mexican official gasped, “
There isn’t that much money in Mexico!”

Undaunted by his critics Putnam scheduled a ten-day round of personal appearances for Amelia, starting on May 30 when she became the first woman referee at the Memorial Day race in
Indianapolis—the twenty-third “
Indy 500.” He also booked her for a lecture in Indianapolis the night before the race and another in Muncie the night after. The next day President Elliott of Purdue announced that Amelia had accepted an
appointment at the university as a consultant on careers for women and that same day, June 1,
Forum
magazine was on the stands with an article by G. P. entitled, “
A Flyer’s Husband.”

Forty-eight hours later Amelia made her first
parachute jump—off a 115-foot training tower in Propertown, New Jersey. In a
note to Gene Vidal, who also jumped, G. P. reported: “In case you missed the
Tribune
, it was on the front page and first page of the second section. All the papers are correspondingly good. All four newsreels, I think, will carry a yarn.… Publicitywise [sic] it was just about 10 percent success—far better than I dared expect.” In most of the photographs Amelia looks faintly embarrassed.

To conclude the publicity blitz Amelia went to Atchison, Kansas, on June 7, the guest of honor at the Kansas Editorial Association’s convention. The hometown heroine rode in a mile-long parade on a flower-decked airplane float and that night spoke at Memorial Hall where she was introduced by Gov.
Alfred M. “Alf” Landon. (Landon was the Republican candidate for president the following year, losing to FDR by a landslide.)

Mary Brashay, who looked after
Uncle Theo, reported to Amy that there were twenty-five thousand people watching the parade and hundreds were turned away from the hall after every seat had been taken. She wrote: “Theodore was sure proud of the turnout. I dress [sic] him up and he looked real nice. Amelia came up on Saturday afternoon … to see Theodore. He was so tickled to see her.”

Amelia seemed a veritable goddess to many of her young Atchison admirers. Twelve-year-old
Louise Bode, who brought roses for her to the Challises’ home where Amelia was staying, wrote to Amy that “Miss Earhart was so gracious as to shake hands with me.” Luanna Hartsock was too shy to introduce herself but told Amy, “I think she is the most famous, most greatest, most pleasantest, most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”

Late Saturday afternoon a family friend, Balie Waggener, took
Amelia and
G. P. to the Kansas City Airport to catch a plane for St. Louis where she had left the Vega. Although they sat at a table in the back of the airport restaurant, “
the kids found her there,” Waggener said. “She treated the children wonderfully and was just as sweet about giving each of them her autograph.” If G. P. was at the table he had learned to be more patient with young fans than Amelia’s friend, Marian Stabler, remembered him at a
New Jersey school. There he had shooed them away, saying, “Now, come on children, if you want Miss Earhart’s signature, write to her office.”
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