Amelia Earhart (5 page)

Muriel, who was home for the summer from Smith, thought Sam an ideal suitor. “At Christmas he brought her a leather-bound set of [Joseph] Conrad. It pleased her very much and was a measure of the man.” However, Muriel also observed that he would be a traditional husband, expecting Amelia to become a housewife and mother. There is no doubt that Amelia was very fond of Sam
Chapman. She continued to see him for the next seven years, in Los Angeles and later in Boston.

If Amelia’s fear of being “tied down” was the first deterrent to the match, an event of Christmas Day 1920 proved the ultimate one. On that day Edwin took her to the official opening of Earl Dougherty’s new airfield in Long Beach at the corner of Willow Street and American Avenue (now Long Beach Avenue). Billed as a Winter Air Tournament and backed by the Aeronautical Club of Southern California, the show included races, aerobatics, and wing walking, all done by
military personnel. For all of her secret feminist beliefs, she was too timid to inquire about lessons for fear that a woman wanting to fly would be considered hilarious, or so she claimed. In an era when emancipated women were widely regarded as freaks, subject to public ridicule, Amelia zealously guarded her privacy, even from family and friends. However, for a deeply desired goal, she could be both determined and shrewd. Her solution to the problem was to ask her father to inquire about the cost of lessons. It was a prudent approach, one that answered her question and might even make Edwin an unwitting suppor
ter of her learning to fly.

Three days later he accompanied her to Rogers Field, an open space off Wilshire Boulevard in the then-suburbs of Los Angeles, and bought
her a ticket for a ride. The pilot was Frank Hawks, who would later become nationally known for setting speed records. “As soon as we left the ground,” Amelia said “I knew I myself had to fly.” That same evening the twenty-three-year-old college dropout could no longer keep it a secret. “ ‘I think I’d like to fly,’ I told my family casually that evening, knowing full well I’d die if I didn’t.”

I
n 1921 Amelia Earhart was one of several thousand Americans who wanted to fly. Most were men, some already aviators, veterans of world war aerial combat. While a fortunate few remained in the armed forces, the majority were discharged when the military not only divested itself of surplus aviators but also of airplanes, sold for from three hundred to five hundred dollars. To release grounded aviators and cheap airplanes simultaneously was like throwing iron shavings at magnets. A nucleus of veterans with surplus airplanes was rapidly augmented by young admirers who became students, then partners of their teachers. The task of advancing aviation was left to them, for neither the government with its power nor private business with its capital viewed aviation as a practical means of transport.

While the public may have agreed with that assessment, a large segment of the same public was fascinated by the novelty of flight. A small number was willing to pay five dollars per person for a ten-minute flight to see “what it was like,” and many more preferred to watch from the ground while the airborne risked their lives. During a decade of “barnstorming” and air circuses, pilots moved their worn, patched planes from the outskirts of one town to the next, renting farmers’ fields as bases for a day or two and coaxing the curious into cockpits for a brief, often risky, ride. For paying viewers, pilots in their fragile craft of wood, linen, and
wire staged mock aerial fights, skimmed upside down twenty-five feet off the ground, and ascended high into the sky for breathtaking dives, spins, and stalls. Their partners—some of them women—wingwalked, hung from struts, and took freefall parachute jumps. In Miami, one pilot flew into a vacant lot between two buildings one hundred feet apart, a strip of openended land that went back from the street for six hundred feet. His wife, who operated an aerial sightseeing service, sold tickets from a soapbox on the street. These
barnstormers and stunters, along with military and airmail pilots, were the true believers in the future of aviation.

A number headed for Southern California where the mild climate diminished the single greatest threat to flight—bad weather. Attracted to the area by that same climate was a second group of visionaries, the moviemakers. The two groups shared more than a mutual interest in a beneficent climate. Their members were capital-poor gamblers in two high-risk, infant industries, men whose characteristics were similar and whose interests often converged.
Cecil B. De Mille, who would make millions in the film industry, was also a pilot. Too old in 1917 for wartime flight training, he hired a pilot to teach him. When the Army still refused his services, he founded the Mercury Airline, bought a Junkers JL-6 that young Lt. Eddie Rickenbacker delivered to him in 1921, and attempted to schedule flights between San Diego and San Francisco. He lost money but never his interest in aviation. Charlie Chaplin’s stepbrother, Sydney, was the founder of an aircraft company at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. With ex-Army pilot Emory Rogers, Chaplin ran a regular service between Wilmington and Catalina Island, which also failed. Rogers bought Chaplin out, and it was at Rogers Field that Amelia took her
first airplane ride with Frank Hawks on that December day in 1920.

On the first Monday of January in 1921, Amelia Mary Earhart appeared at Kinner Field accompanied by her father, who found the owner of the field, Winfield B. Kinner, working in the hangar. Bert Kinner, former streetcar motorman, farm machinery mechanic and Cadillac dealer from Magnolia, Minnesota, had come to Los Angeles five years before and opened an auto repair shop in which he built custom-made sports car bodies for Model-T Fords. A mechanical wizard with an eighth-grade education, Kinner built an airplane in 1919. When he finished it, he taught himself how to fly, then bought a field at the corner of Long Beach Boulevard and Tweedy Avenue, in a semirural area of cabbage patches, avocado fields, and palm trees. Facilities at the Kinner Aircraft and Motor
Corporation consisted of a single hangar with living quarters at the back, a hamburger stand, and a gas and repair station set along the edge of the unpaved, scruffy field.

Bert told Amelia to talk to his field manager, twenty-four-year-old Neta Snook, while he had a few words with Edwin Earhart. Neta, who had just finished a tiring day of flying sightseers over the bay, was walking in from her plane, an old Canuck that she had rebuilt in her father’s workshop back in Ames, Iowa. “More silly people with silly questions,” she thought, as she watched the tall, slim woman with long, golden braids wrapped around her head approach. The woman wore a brown suit with a silk scarf at the neck and white gloves. She looked like the elegant young women who went to the Frances Shimer Academy in Mount Carroll, Illinois. She spoke like one, too. “
I want to fly,” she told Neta, “and I understand you take students. My parents aren’t in accord with my ambitions, but might reconsider if they found another woman in the business.” Amelia was less than candid.
She
wanted to learn from a woman. Neta agreed to teach Amelia for one dollar a minute. Amelia said she would pay with Liberty Bonds. The first lesson was scheduled for the following day.

A third person who saw Amelia and her father at the field that day was
Cora Brusse Kinner, Bert’s thirty-five-year-old wife, who had stepped out of the house at the back of the hangar. Cora watched the Earharts, her hazel eyes scanning the young woman’s white gloves, then the man’s stiff-collared shirt and frock coat. A very odd couple for Kinner Field, Cora thought, where men wore oil-stained slacks or coveralls and Neta, the only other woman there, was covered from neck to ankle by greasy brown overalls, her hair tucked under a flying helmet, her hands grimy from tinkering with engines. Cora continued to watch the two visitors until they left Neta and walked toward the boulevard.

On the way home Edwin Earhart told Amelia he thought Bert Kinner was a “
visionary and not too practical, but intelligent.” For highly intelligent but far more impractical Edwin to make this assessment was ironic. When Bert Kinner had a vision, he pursued it until he realized it, no matter how difficult. He wanted to make some money for Cora and the children and he wasn’t above hustling a few innocents to do it, but the primary goal was to create something new, something that worked. This restless man, fingers constantly running through black, wiry hair, piercing dark brown eyes intent on the job at hand, was the man farmers in
Minnesota called “
the kid who could fix anything.” To those who helped him, he was kind and generous. He saw nothing odd in a woman like Neta using his field for her Canuck. She knew planes. She pumped gas and fixed shocks. She earned her keep. Amelia Earhart couldn’t have found a better place to learn to
fly.

The next day Amelia, wearing riding breeches, laced boots, and a well-tailored jacket, met Neta at the field. She had taken the streetcar to the end of the line and walked the three miles to the field, a journey she would repeat time after time over the next two years. Under her arm was a book on aeronautics from the library. Neta, one of the first women to graduate from the Glenn Curtiss School for aviators,
regarded it with approval. After a few minutes of explanation, Neta told her pupil to get in the front cockpit of her dual-controlled Canuck, a Canadian version of the JN-4 (or “Jenny”), a World War I army trainer.
Its top speed was sixty miles an hour, its landing speed forty, the OX-5 engine’s horsepower ninety.

During her first lesson Amelia learned how to taxi. By February she had logged four hours in the air and Neta called her “a natural.” “There wasn’t much for me to do. She just seemed to take over and do it, although she did have a tendency to bank more steeply than I did, and a great many times I had to shove the nose down because she held it too high.”

The “natural” had another inclination Neta found worrying, one she would have expected if she had known the little girl who “belly-slammed” down that icy hill in Atchison. To land at Kinner Field it was necessary to clear two lines of high tension wires, eight feet apart, running along the side of Long Beach Boulevard. Amelia “would have gone between them if I didn’t watch her all the time,” Neta claimed.

Only a year Amelia’s senior, Neta, who kept a firm hand on the dual controls and a stern eye on her adventurous pupil, was soon a friend and frequent guest at the Earharts’. Amelia liked her because she was a pleasant, intelligent contemporary, but the strongest bond was Neta’s interest in aviation. Amelia had no time for idle conversation. Discussions were meant to raise and answer questions on matters of substance. When they failed to do so, she lost interest. At the airfield, where they cooked and shared meals with pilots and mechanics, Amelia “never wanted to dally long at what she called ‘frivolous doings’ if the weather was right for flying.”
If the weather was not right, she left the group and sat with her back against the hangar wall, reading a library book. While she read, Neta’s Great Dane, Camber, a lumbering animal, coat covered with adobe dust, lay across her outstretched legs, waiting for the hand he knew would reach out after turning a page and scratch his ears.

Neta taught Amelia how to drive. Waving a twenty-dollar bill at her one day, Amelia announced, “This is the day I learn how to drive a car.… You rent it, because you have a license, then I’ll drive it.” The rented 1921 Model T Ford was not an easy car to drive. There were three foot pedals, one a planetary shift with high, medium, and low gears, depending on how near the floor boards it was pushed, a second for reverse, and a third for braking. On the dashboard were two hand levers, one for spark and throttle, and the second, a choke. Each time she stalled the car Amelia had to get out and crank it. Several hours later she was driving, with flair if not skill, missing the driveway when she returned it to the rental agency and ascending by way of the curb.

Both young women enjoyed the company of men. Neta’s constant escort was William Southern. In addition to Sam Chapman, Amelia went out with other men, some who were friends of Southern’s. On one occasion they were caught in a rainstorm two hundred miles from Los Angeles on their way back from the Tehachapi mountains where the two men had an interest in a mining claim. Although a separate cabin was offered the women, Amelia refused to spend the night.

If she seemed excessively prudish on that night, she surprised Neta on another when a black limousine pulled up in front of Neta’s house in Huntington Park. Amelia was in the back, “sitting ramrod straight” beside an old man who wore a bowler hat and held a gold-headed cane. His legs were covered by a travel rug. Amelia introduced him as Powell Ramsdell, adding that he shared her interest in early Californian history. After Ramsdell left, she explained to Neta they had met when she helped his driver find some books on the subject in the library. Ramsdell offered her a ride home. “I took six books which were heavy, and with five blocks to walk, I thought I might as well.… He looked harmless.”

Ramsdell’s car began to appear frequently at Kinner Field. Cora Kinner, always blunt and staunchly respectable, disapproved of what seemed to her Amelia’s thoughtless acceptance of the old man’s attentions. Nor did Neta escape judgment. “
He’d come out there every morning
in his Cadillac. He was a sick guy. An old guy. Those girls got hold of him because he had lots of money to spend.… Those girls really took advantage.… I didn’t like that.”

Cora may have misjudged Amelia, who enjoyed the company of older men. Father figures would continue to appear in her life for she had never lost her deep love for Edwin, no matter what his faults. When younger, more attractive men asked her out she refused those who failed to interest her. She told Neta it was dishonest to let them spend their money on her for theater tickets or dinner. Nor did she think an escort was always an advantage. With her newly acquired knowledge of California’s history and a smattering of Spanish, she wanted to explore what Neta thought were “out-of-the-way,” dangerous areas of Los Angeles, areas her friend insisted necessitated the protection of male companions.