Amelia Earhart (4 page)

Her rigid code of ethics may have temporarily bewildered or annoyed her classmates but her mischievous wit charmed them. On one evening when she was seated at Miss Sutherland’s dinner table, looking the image of wide-eyed innocence, she asked the puritanical headmistress if she would please explain the meaning of
Oscar Wilde’s novel,
The Picture of Dorian Grey
.

The public Amelia, known at Ogontz as “Meelie” or “Butterball,” was a recognized leader, wit, and scholar. The private Amelia remained “A. E.—the girl in brown who walks alone.” She was not interested in the future most Ogontz girls assumed would be theirs—presentation to society followed by marriage. A clue to her thoughts lay in the scrapbook of newspaper clippings she kept in her desk:

Under the last item Amelia wrote, “
Good girl, Helen!” The maverick had become a feminist, albeit a closet one.

For the Christmas holidays of 1917 Amelia went to Toronto to join
Muriel, a student at St. Margaret’s
College, and her peregrinating mother who was already there, staying at the
St. Regis Hotel. Although the United States had entered the First World War the previous spring and Amelia had knitted sweaters and socks for the Red Cross at Ogontz, she saw her first war-wounded in Toronto. She was walking with Muriel on King Street when four young men on crutches, all of them amputees, passed them. Amelia looked in a store window until they had moved down the block, then turned to watch them. A week later she told her mother, “
I’m not going back to graduate. I’m needed here. I’ve been taking instructions all this past week and I’m going to be a V.A.D. [nurse’s aide].”

The decision was not surprising to those who knew her best. She had always acted on her beliefs. Her decisions were precipitate, made without consultation and, once made, acted upon. She knew help was needed. In the preceding nine months Canadian military hospitals had had to increase their capacity from 2,500 beds to more than 12,000. By April Amelia was posted to Spadina Military Hospital at the head of Spadina Avenue, not far from what is now the lower campus of the University of Toronto. Its 233 beds were occupied by soldiers with “
ailments of the chest”—poison gas burns, shrapnel in the lungs, and tuberculosis.

The previous October she had sat for a graduation picture at Ogontz, in cap and gown, the cap partially covering her long, honey-blonde hair, her arresting eyes staring boldly into the camera lens. Six months later, in a second photograph taken on the balcony of Spadina Hospital, her slight figure was hidden in a long, shapeless uniform dress and a large kerchief covered her hair. Her face was thinner; the bone structure revealed the
face of a mature woman.

The hospital, an imposing Victorian structure that had formerly been the Knox Theological College and more recently a barracks, was surrounded by streets lined with three-story houses and shops in a neighborhood reminiscent of nineteenth-century Europe. In this building, through whose open windows drifted the clang of milk tins at the nearby City Dairy Company and the clatter of street cars, Amelia was “
on duty from seven in the morning until seven at night.… I spent a great deal of time in the diet kitchen and later in the dispensary, because I knew a little chemistry. Probably the fact that I could be trusted not to drink up the medical supply of whiskey counted more than the chemistry.”

A teetotaler like Amelia was badly needed. The Canadian Army Medical Corps had just taken over management from civilians who, influenced
by an indulgent public and press, had permitted a continuous flow of liquor to the thirsty patients.

In spite of the long hours on duty Amelia found time for the half-hour walk or ride on the streetcar to Muriel’s school on Bloor Street. She saw some ice hockey games, played tennis, and rode horses rented from a stable. After Amelia conquered one fiery steed called “Dynamite” with an artful mix of carrots, sugar lumps, and a firm hand on the reins, the stable owner invited her to ride without charge. During one of those rides, she and Muriel were invited by three Royal Canadian Air Force
pilots to come to the military airfield at Armour Heights to see the planes fly. Although she was not permitted to ride in them, Amelia returned to watch. She also went to an air show at the Canadian National Exposition grounds, where she stood her ground when a bored pilot began to “buzz” the spectators, making them run from the field. She knew it was dangerous but was fascinated by “the
mingled fear and pleasure” she felt.

Most of her time was spent at the hospital, where her patients included men who had fought at Vimy Ridge and in the water-filled trenches of Passchendale. In her letters she concealed the distress she felt. In one to her father she wrote that she was working in the laboratory, keeping records, staining slides and doing “all kinds of tests on myself.” She worked, she said, from nine to 4:45 at the lab, then in the diet kitchen to get out the evening meal. “
I have Sunday morning off,” she told him, “and cultivate the church habit I have had installed into me from youth up.”

A year later she discussed the “church habit” in a letter to her mother, who suspected Amelia was no longer a devout Episcopalian. Amelia said that although she was frequently disillusioned by the uncharitable behavior of clergy and parishioners, “
Don’t think for an instant I would ever become an atheist … nor lose faith in the Church’s teachings as a whole.” The “whole” she spoke of was already becoming very unconventional for an Episcopalian. Fifteen years after that letter to Amy, when she was asked for her concept of God by Atlanta reporter Alice Renton Jennings, she said, “
I think of God as a symbol for good—thinking good, identifying good in everybody and everything. This God I think of is not an abstraction, but a vitalizing, universal force, eternally present, and at all times available.”

She needed all of this force to comfort her on November 11, 1918, when the Armistice was signed and the residents of Toronto took to the
streets to celebrate. Flags flew everywhere while whistles blew and cheering, crying mobs circled bonfires in the streets. But
Amelia, who counted as the cost of victory the battered bodies and twisted minds of her patients, didn’t hear “
a serious word of thanksgiving in all that hullabaloo.” The feminist had become a pacifist.

Although she continued to work through the winter of 1918-19, during a worldwide influenza epidemic that claimed more lives than the war, by late January she was bedridden with
a serious sinus infection. Without antibiotics, opening and drainage of the sinus cavities was the only treatment available. These “washings out,” as she called them, were agonizing and only partially effective, leaving her a semi-invalid.

In February she left Toronto for Northampton, Massachusetts, to join Muriel who was taking preparatory courses for entrance to Smith College in the fall. That same year an American woman, Laura Brownell, became the first female pilot to be licensed by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, and two Englishmen, Capt. John Alcock and Lt. A. W. Brown, made the first nonstop transatlantic flight. But Amelia seemed to have lost interest in airplanes and taken up two new pastimes. She bought a banjo and enrolled in an auto mechanics course. Muriel marveled over “
the incongruity of the two activities … she was always so; artistic and impractical on the one hand and scientific and practical on the other.”

For the summer Amy Earhart, who had left Edwin again, rented a cottage at
Lake George, New York, a popular vacation spot for the well-to-do. There Amelia met their neighbors, Walter and Clara Stabler, and son Frank, who introduced her to other young people in their early twenties. Postwar sparks of “flaming youth” were spreading across the nation, foreshadowing the advent of mini-skirted “flappers” with bobbed hair who danced the Charleston and Shimmy and drank gin in speakeasies before hopping a train for the divorce courts of Reno. The flames failed to reach Lake George. Often incited by Amelia, her friends opted for innocent pranks, “kidnappings,” and thefts of canoe oars and Victrola handles.

In mid-August Frank Stabler’s twenty-three-year-old sister, Marian, arrived from New York City where she had been studying art at summer school. She first met Amelia, about whom her family had been writing letters all summer, aboard a lake side-wheeler, “a tall, very slim girl in a blue suit.… I was conscious of eyes wide apart, which seemed to be
taking uncritical notes, a small nose, a wide mouth, slow Western speech, a serious expression. She was still very pale from the previous winter’s illness, with circles under her eyes. Her hair was gold, wrapped around a small, well-shaped head and she wore no makeup.… She was an unusual combination of boyish straight-forwardness and a strangely poetic beauty which did not depend upon regularity of feature or perfection of bodily structure.”

Later, Marian observed that Amelia’s tennis game was good, her swimming competent, and her body that of a contortionist. She was able to “balance on her hands with her knees thrown up close to her chest” and “to curl all of her five feet, eight inches within the area of a sofa cushion with nothing hanging over the edges, and take a nap of indefinite length with no apparent discomfort.”

After Marian’s arrival, the earlier games of summer were abandoned for evenings in front of an open fire, reading poetry, popping corn, “talking nonsense,” and composing parodies of popular songs. Amelia told Marian she had decided to enter Columbia University as a premedical student; in addition to a full program at Columbia, she planned to audit other courses at Teacher’s College and Barnard, among these what she termed “a luxury course” in French literature.

That fall she found a room in a house with other students on Morningside Drive in New York City, and lived comfortably, if frugally, on an allowance from her mother. Her laboratory hours took most evenings, but on Thursdays she went to the Stablers’ apartment for dinner, often followed by an evening with Marian at a concert heard from the steps of the second balcony of Carnegie Hall for a fifty-cent, standing-room ticket. On Sundays, for as long as the ferry at Dyckman Street could break through the ice, they crossed the Hudson River and hiked in the Palisades.

As their friendship developed, Marian noticed that Amelia was frequently exhausted, her face pale and drawn, dark circles under her eyes. Admonitions on the subject were ignored by Amelia. No matter how heavy her workload, she did whatever interested her. She discovered and explored hidden underground passageways that connected a number of university buildings; she climbed a stairway leading to the top of the library dome more than once for a view of New York at sunset. On one February morning she left a note on Marian’s door. “I thot of the accompanying as I reached the second step in front of the library.”
The “accompanying” was a graceful, skillfully rhymed translation of a French poem.

In addition to Marian, Amelia made another friend, Louise de Schweinitz, a history graduate of Smith College in 1918, taking science courses in preparation for entering medical school at Johns Hopkins. When she told Amelia she was considering marrying a fellow student, Daniel Darrow, but also wanted to get her medical degree, Amelia said she thought it wrong for Louise to give up
her
career while her fiancé went on with his. There were worse things, after all, than never getting married. “One of the worst would be being married to a man who tied you down,” she said. “I’m not sold on marriage at all for myself. Of course, I’m not in love with anybody—yet.”

Louise, who admired Amelia’s “vivid personality” and was to be a lifelong friend, gave her ideas serious consideration. But she did marry Daniel and also finished medical school. Amelia, who offered advice to Louise on the pursuit of her vocation, had no idea what her own might be. At the close of the school year she was drifting again on a sea of doubt when Edwin Earhart, who had won his battle with alcoholism, asked both Amelia and her mother to join him in Los Angeles where he was practicing law.
Amy, still in New England, needed surgery that she had elected to have done in Boston. Amelia countered with a suggestion that the operation be performed in Los Angeles so that both she and Muriel could spend the summer there looking after their mother.

To Muriel she wrote, “I’ll see what I can do to keep Mother and Dad together until you finish college, Pidge, but after that I’m going to come back here and live my own life.”

What that life might be she still did not know. Meanwhile, family duty provided a temporary goal. At twenty-three she assumed the role of the sensible member of an unstable family, although she may actually have been an immature, uncertain offspring returning to her parents for comfort and assurance. For whatever reason, she left Columbia for Los Angeles in May and moved into the large house on Fourth Street occupied by Amy, Edwin, and three young male
boarders. Although Edwin was working again, the depletion of Amy’s inheritance money and Muriel’s continued attendance at Smith required the income from the boarders.

One of the young men was Samuel Chapman, a tall, dark engineer
from New England, a Tufts College graduate who soon became Amelia’s suitor. They played tennis, went to the theater, and spent evenings at home discussing literature. They also went to at least one meeting of the Industrial Workers of the World, known as the “Wobblies,” the most radical of American labor unions. Although Amelia had told Amy she thought the Episcopal Church’s membership and clergy “narrow,” she was looking for what many present-day Christians call “social and economic justice.” She wanted to hear what the I.W.W. proposed. If she remembered that her Grandfather Otis’s cousin, Harrison Gray Otis, former editor of the
Los Angeles Times
, was killed in an I.W.W. bombing, it didn’t deter her from attending. The meeting was raided by police, but Amelia and Sam escaped arrest.