Amelia Earhart (6 page)

Neta frequently stayed overnight at the Earharts’, sharing Amelia’s room where they talked late into the night, covering the wide range of interests held by two typical, young, college-educated women. Topics included religion, philosophy, literature, music, films, clothing styles, and men. On one of those nights Neta asked Amelia what she thought of William Southern. After her customary pause and with a smile she said, “
I think he has the mating instinct. His eyes … oh, his eyes are magnificently sullen. Are you sure you’re ready to give up your career?” When Neta asked her why she thought that would be necessary, she replied, “Because you will. He’s the kind who will insist on being boss.”

Amelia’s warning to Neta, like the one she had given her friend Louise a year before at Columbia, was not a conventional one. The new postwar “freedom” of American women was one of frivolity and sexuality. Skirts were shorter, cheeks rouged, corsets discarded. The Charleston replaced the waltz and “petting parties” were gaining acceptance, taking place on the new American sofa—the back seat of an automobile. But the liberation was one for men, making women more desirable as playmates or mates. While the Twentieth Amendment had given women the vote the previous year, census takers listed housewives as having “no occupation,” and the “nonoccupation” of housewife was the primary goal of the vast majority of American women. Women who did not marry were referred to as “old maids.” Many of the better educated worked as school teachers, librarians, or unpaid helpers in the households of their parents or married relatives. Those who achieved the status of college professors,
doctors, or lawyers, however honored in their professional roles, were also “old maids” socially.

Already in her mid-twenties, past the age when most women married, Amelia ignored the prevailing opinion of single women. Instead, she added notes and clippings to her
scrapbook. No profession or business was singled out. Her interest was clearly in the fact that no matter what had been accomplished, a woman had done it. She included the following:

However great Amelia’s admiration for career women and her aversion to home, hearth, husband, and children, she kept both well concealed. Except with Neta, she did not share her views on the potential of women in what was essentially a man’s world. Her behavior was that of a conventional, well-bred young woman. She dressed with care and style, so much so that Waldo Waterman, one of the pilots who knew her at Kinner Field, remarked that while Neta wore coveralls and a helmet, “
Amelia was usually dressed in jodphurs, or riding breeches and boots, yet looked thoroughly feminine, with a loose shirtwaist and tousled hair.”

Another admirer was Winfield Kinner, Jr., an eleven-year-old schoolboy. However, neither her good looks nor penchant for daring but often poorly executed landings were what interested him. Initially it was her contortionist’s skills, demonstrated to him by placing the entire palms of both hands on the ground without bending her knees. He was also impressed by what seemed to him considerable stoicism on the day she
removed a small bandage from her cheek to show his mother the tiny tube used to drain the
chronic abcess of the antrum which continued to plague her. For the most part Amelia was approved of by both men and women at the one place she most wanted to be—
Kinner Field.

She began to cut her long, honey-blonde hair, inch by inch, probably because she disliked doing anything that attracted too much attention if it could be avoided. She also bought a leather coat.
^*
The first time she wore it the men at the airfield exchanged remarks about the “dude aviator.” The next time they saw it, it was wrinkled and
oil-stained. The stains were easy to make, the wrinkles created by sleeping in it. Dressing as she did was not just youthful play-acting but evidence of her unerring instinct for making a physical statement of who and what she was. She was a woman
and
an aviator. The bobbed hair was thick and curly (with the aid of a curling iron), the jacket under the leather coat beautifully tailored and worn with a white silk blouse, a colorful scarf knotted at the neck.

By the time Muriel came home in the summer of 1921, Amelia was one of the airfield crowd, “
regarded by many people as slightly crazy.” She was invited to join them and did. “
We shellacked the canvas wings, replaced struts … and when there was enough gasoline … took turns cruising over the bay and north a few miles along Malibu Beach.”

After only two and a half hours of instruction in Neta’s Canuck, Amelia had decided “
life was incomplete unless I owned my own plane.” The plane she wanted was one built by Bert Kinner. Originally a single-seater, it was cracked up in a test flight and rebuilt as a dual control ship to be used as a trainer. As usual, Amelia’s problem was money. Already working as a clerk at the telephone company and one day a week at her father’s office, she completed a course in commercial photography at the University of California and went into partnership with another young woman, Jean Bandreth. When the venture proved unprofitable, she bought an old Moreland truck and contracted to haul gravel for a construction company. Her father, who had taken her to her first air show, treated her to her first ride, and accompanied her to Kinner Field to arrange for lessons, had lost his initial enthusiasm and refused to help her buy the plane. It was Amy Earhart who came to the rescue, after a considerable delay that annoyed Cora Kinner. Bert had already agreed to let Amelia
have his small, rebuilt plane in exchange for his right to it as a demonstrator while he waited for Amy to pay up. Cora wryly observed that Amy had “too much money with a string around her sock, and Bert couldn’t get her to take it out.” The sock was finally opened on July 24, 1922, Amelia’s twenty-fifth birthday. Cora said that Amy only paid on condition that Amelia “
give up that truck and act like a lady.”

The little plane, which Bert Kinner called the Airster, did not meet with Neta’s approval, nor that of the other pilots who frequented the field. Neta said its seventeen-foot wing span made it “fly like a leaf in the air,” that it lacked stability and was inclined to ground-loop if landed in a cross wind. She also noted that the third cylinder of its
three-cylinder engine clogged frequently, dangerously reducing its already minimal sixty horsepower. Neta’s advice was ignored by Amelia who had the plane painted yellow and named it the
Canary
. Bert’s demonstration rights were again exchanged for hangar space and mechanical repairs and Neta volunteered to teach Amelia “
all over again,” giving her four more hours of instruction without charge.

There were
accidents. Cora Kinner witnessed one. “
Amelia set her little Kinner
Canary
down in my cabbage patch, but she walked away from it. She used to scare me to death.” In another mishap Neta was with her. They had taken the Airster to the Goodyear Field, six miles from Kinner’s, to see the huge, new Cloudster, designed by Donald W. Douglas, whose World Cruisers, flown by U.S. Army Service pilots, would circle the globe in 1924. On the return flight to Kinner Field, the
Canary
’s third cylinder failed immediately after takeoff. When Amelia tried to pull up over a grove of eucalyptus trees, the plane stalled and crashed into the trees, breaking the undercarriage and propeller. Neta crawled out of the wreckage and looked back to see if Amelia had been injured. She was standing by the plane, grinning and powdering her nose. They must look nice, she told Neta, when the reporters arrived.

The accidents may have upset her more than she admitted. When Neta told her she was ready to solo, she procrastinated. The same woman who had wanted to fly between two high tension wires eight feet apart and who “
scared” Cora Kinner “to death,” said she wanted more training. But solo she did. There is no official record of it but it was before December 15, 1921, not quite a year after her first lesson, because on that date she took and passed her trials for a National Aeronautic Association
license.

The solo flight that preceded these trials had been a shaky one. “In taking off for the first time alone,” she wrote, “one of the shock absorbers broke, causing the wing to sag just as I was leaving the ground. I didn’t know just what had happened, but I did know something was wrong and wondered what I had done. The mental agony of starting the plane had just been gone through and I was suddenly faced with the agony of stopping it.” After repairs were made she took off again, only to make “
a thoroughly rotten landing.”

Two days after her NAA trials she flew in an exhibition at the Sierra Airdrome in Pasadena. The official program listed the tenth event as the “
Pacific Coast Ladies Derby, An Exhibition by Miss Amelia Earhart in her Kinner Airster and Miss Aloyfia [sic] McKlintock in her Laird Swallow.” Coming in for a landing the same troublesome spark plug that had failed before did it again. “
Luckily I was over the field.… Otherwise I might have made my landing in a treetop.”

In spite of joking about looking nice for the reporters after the crash at Goodyear Field, Amelia did not like exhibition flying. “The moment I flew up the field I began to feel like a clown, although happily there were two of us females to divide the honors and odium.” What the retiring, often secretive Amelia really wanted was to be alone and aloft, flying for her own pleasure. But publicity provided airplanes and the money needed to maintain them and she took what she could get.

In May of 1922 Bert Kinner put out a flyer advertising the Airster. Headed “A Lady’s Plane as Well as a Man’s—read what Miss Earhart has to say after flying a K
INNER
A
IRSTER
two years,” a letter from Amelia followed:

Scrupulously honest in other matters, Amelia stretched the truth for that Airster, and for a newer one she hoped to get from Kinner. She did not mention the fact that the third cylinder was too often “beyond her expectations.” Her claim that she had owned the Airster for two years was a false one. The letter was dated May 20, 1922, a time when she was still at Columbia University. It would be six months before her first airplane ride
as a passenger, and when she wrote the letter her mother had not yet completed paying for the plane.

Three months later, on August 8, 1922, a Los Angeles newspaper ran a story along with a two-column picture of her in leather coat and goggles, headed “Air Student-Aviatrix to ‘Drop In’ for Study”:

The story is a typical tabloid fabrication of that era but there is no record of Amelia’s objecting to it.

The same month the story appeared, Amelia changed instructors. Neta Snook’s flying career ended as Amelia had predicted it would. Married to William Southern and expecting her first child, Neta sold her Canuck and turned her student over to John G. “Monte” Montijo, proprietor of a flying school across the road from Kinner’s, on Long Beach Boulevard. The arrangement was a good one for Amelia. Pleased to have a woman teacher when she was a beginner, she was ready for aerobatic instruction from an expert. Monte Montijo was a former Army flier, barnstormer, and stuntman for Goldwyn Studios, a sturdy, broad-shouldered man with a handsome sun-bronzed face, his dark eyes beneath arched eyebrows commanding attention. One of the best pilots in the region and, like most, barely making a living, he flew for a local oil man, gave lessons to students and, to augment these meager earnings, ran a restaurant with his wife, Alta.

Amelia was an eager, attentive student. After seven hours of lessons, she soloed for him. “
She handled the ship like a veteran,” he said, “and made a perfect takeoff and landing.” When she took more lessons in advanced aeronavigation and aerobatics, “after each flight she wanted to know what the mechanical action of each movement was and she showed a keen interest in motors.”

Her confidence greatly enhanced by Monte’s training, Amelia set her
first flying record on October 22, 1922, at an air meet at Rogers Field. Edwin brought Muriel, who had dropped out of Smith College and was teaching at Huntington Beach, but neither of them knew what Amelia intended to do. She had asked a representative of the Aero Club of Southern California to seal a barograph in her Airster. In an open cockpit, with no oxygen supply, on her second attempt she climbed to fourteen thousand feet through fog and sleet before the Airster’s motor began to falter. Fearing a stall, she kicked the little plane into a tailspin, bringing it out only after she dropped beneath the fog line at three thousand feet. When one of the older pilots asked her what she thought might have happened if the fog had reached ground level she was embarrassed, but not enough to regret making the record, which was acknowledged by the Aero Club.